Abfahrt Von Gedanken...Going Up...Bad Fries And Fremdenfeindlichkeit

THE WOODS ARE BURNING! Yes. And if I don’t at least try and regurgitate this filth onto something civilised, like a keyboard, it’s just going to ferment in my brain until I start foaming at the mouth and somebody gets shivved. Probably me. I’ve got a maggot in my brain for each hour of sleep that I lost last night, a monstrous debacle of jet clouds, turbulence and cold, empty hotel rooms. Frankfurt airport is Hell. No questions asked.


I should probably get some sleep, but this needs must raus. I’ve still got that weird, out of town feeling, driving like an asshole, pushing the car up to over one hundred on the drive into town, and watching other people being watched in traffic. Someone grinded past playing Lady Ga Ga – no one plays that out of their own free will, I thought, and gave the poor girl a poor sympathetic grimace. But what the hell was I doing? Where the hell was I? Goddamn these useless tangents.

Let’s start from the beginning, that would be the most rational place to commence. My diary notes are hazy at best, barely spilling over a single page of A5 but the few scraps I can salvage from it will have to do:

It’s not a binge if it doesn’t give you cardiac arrest, and then, scrawled into the corner, The Mountains....Jonny’s in America.

I’d left town on a high and was dreading the possibility that sometime, sometime soon, I would crash down suddenly and unexpectedly, in a most inconvenient place, such as up the mountain, or something, Yes, I’m afraid of Americans, I’m afraid of the worst...

But time out of town seemed almost synonymous with recuperation and the opportunity, greatly overdue, after all this forgetfulness and arrogance and gnashing of teeth, to finally just chill the fuck out. Enough shaking. There is good beer in Austria, and good people, and they know it. There were no malicious sideways glances or glares as we exited the Terminal at Graz, no pallid veils of tolerance. Those would come later, when we met the other countries. It was hot in the city and I was sweating like a pig, but that was OK.

(The author, bemused, sleep deprived, pissing away the time before climate change fear-mongering)

The others were friendly – and then some. We rolled up to a hotel in Judenberg, considerably more salubrious than the hellholes pasted over tourism leaflets in the airport, and the staff had faces made from real skin. No fakes grins and thick clumps of foundation to hide the xenophobic turmoil of their brains. Excellent good. Hours later, perhaps many hours, I strike up a conversation with one of the employees at the bar and the ice breaks easily thanks for a few somewhat endearing grammatical errors on my part. Austrian German was tougher than it looked, and the host on the plane had taken to my attempts at all kindly. But this was different – I was instantly adopted as her little pet, something to stroke and coo at when the job got dull as hell. It suited me fine, as did the extra beer and cigarettes.

Heavens forfend – twenty minutes of frantic typing and all I produce is mush. The relevant content, you couldn’t stretch it over the eye of a needle. Very poor indeed. The cider can is getting low and my keyboard’s groaning with the strain.

NB: My companion for the week has been HS Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 and there is a lurking fears in the sleep deprived fibres of my brain that, sub-consciously, this will into some pathetic, sick, contrived work of pseudo-plagiarism. Hideous. But words are words and I’m out of brain cells.

John Donne: The Lusty Misogynist?

I’ve got an exam on this nightmare angel of linguistic deviance, so I might as well try to kill one bird with two stones (or rather, merge two hemispheres with one compass) and spew out some kind of commentary on his identity as a woman-hating sleazy bastard. I guess I'm also, rather conveniently, spreading venom about Conservative politicians. Anywayy, the twentieth century vision of Donne, outside of Eliot’s opinion, certainly seems to be one of unaffected scorn towards metaphysical poet and ‘massive priest’ John Donne. This is, of course, understandable because feminism has become saturated into not only popular culture but also a healthy dose of post-modernist (whatever the hell that is) works, and so any derogatory comment levelled against females is, according to the masses, an implicitly misogynistic comment.

There is more than a germ of truth in that last sentence, regardless of whether one attacks Donne as a feminist, a historicist, or a fellow misogynist. Lines in his poetry such as ‘nowhere lives a woman true and fair,’ or ‘Hope not for mind in woman, at their best, sweetness and wit they are, mummy possessed,’ stand as potent ammunition for anyone who wants to brand the ‘M’ word onto Donne’s pious forehead. However, I would imagine that the same people who count Donne in this dubious circle of writers also include Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis and of course Ernest Hemingway. I haven’t got a god-damned clue if Amis is a woman-hater, I still haven’t got around to reading Money, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s regarded in this way due to the presentation of females in his novels.

However, most readers who bring up these rather dubious comments that Donne has made –and apparently if you think those are offensive, wait until you get an eyeful of his letters – will of course neglect statements which imply the complete opposite if misogynistic impulses. There is a pervasive theme of spiritual equality in Donne’s work – the sexual union is a spiritual union – and both the female and male entities are equal participants. Take The Good Morrow – ‘my face in thine eye, mine in thine appears’ weaves the image of two lovers equally fixated upon each other. Likewise, ,Donne’s statement in The Fever, that her sickness will burn out fast because ‘much corruption needful is to fuel a fever long’ contradicts somewhat the bitter epithet of Twicknam Garden that ‘alas, hearts do not appear in eyes, Nor can you judge what woman thinks by her tears, than by her shadow what she wears .’ It’s also an exaltation of purity in woman that contrasts violently with his smug assertion in an early Song that ‘nowhere lives a woman true and fair.’ People seem to neglect the fact that Donne, to a certain extent, has steeped most of these poems in imagination – although scholars are hell-bent on proving otherwise – and therefore the opinions expressed within them are not necessarily supposed to correspond with each other. Nobody thinks that the internal monologues of Browning belong to the same character- so why think the same about Donne’s poetry?

The second reason to suspect Donne’s identity as a misogynist is the fact that everybody was a misogynist during the 17th Century, just like everybody was terrified of going to the Hell in the 16th and everybody wanted to burn witches in the 15th. We don’t brand Conrad as a racist –ok some people do – so we shouldn’t blame Donne for being a product of his environment. By the same token, the entire artistic community was possessed by the theme of female infidelity and mindless fucking. We see it everywhere else, but we only reprimand Donne for it.


There are all kinds of reasons to hate Donne – he was deeply religious, his poetry was shamelessly egotistic, he, to paraphrase Ben Johnson, ‘deserved hanging for not keeping accent’ and perhaps most frustratingly of all he weaved insane threads of deviant logic to come to fucking weird-ass conclusions – twisted ‘iron pokers to true love-knots’ indeed. Oh man, I’m exhausted. I think I left some cider in my wardrobe – Big Time...

Just Married: Fear and Politics

    It’s a damn shame that every Tory newspaper hates Nick Clegg’s guts, because it seems that he’s just about the only one of those jittery, nervous, randomly smiling freak shows to stand his grounds on any of policies- even the ones that throw the navel gazing middle class into a semi-passionate furore.

   This Liberal Leader has become the subject of nasty, insane, down and dirty newspaper abuse as of recently, nodding in particular to the lower classy-wannabe the Daily Mail, which recently published the somewhat hilarious title: Nick Clegg Makes Nazi Slur! What exactly was this nasty slur, I wonder? The Daily Mail didn’t seem to know – they simple ran his rather pedestrian and harmless quote on the front page and then waffled on about the loss of lives and so on in the second world war, spurting out half baked globs of patriotism all over its dirt cheap paper. Thank you, Daily Mail, for a once again inspiring, astute and totally accurate piece of journalism. Truly top drawer.

   Elsewhere, the Torygraph has been trying and failing to spread some out of date rumours and a couple of half hearted smear campaigns about Nick Clegg but, alas, no one really seems to be taking the bait. (Except of course the morons that actually buy these papers, but these poor fools are unlikely to get round to voting in the first place anyway)

   The low, low level to which these Tory papers will stoop in order to garner a handful of fearful votes from their trembling and anxious readers is almost as depressing as the sheer ease at which Clegg has essentially captured the hearts of the population. Everyone loves him to bits. Of course, one can easily see why he would have endured fifteen minutes of fame after those two rather sterling political debates on TV, especially as he actually bothered to look into the camera, i.e. at the country, but surely this doesn’t merit exalting him as the new Winston Churchill? This damn election seems to have turned into a rat race for the spin doctors – the first to link their figurehead to a man of charisma and characters from the last century or so wins. Just think of that ghastly idea the Conservatives had, trying to make subtle links between Barack Obama and David Cameron, the horror. Vote for Change? More like plagiarism.

   Nonetheless, it looks like the more that Brown and Cameron tear wildly at Clegg’s coat tails as he ascends up into never before explored areas of British politics, like the moral high ground, that it’s more and more likely he’ll be dragged back down into petty squabbling, false promises, and perhaps even the odd expense scandal. After all, this country really does love a good expense scandal now and then.