Beard of the Month

If I ever started my own magazine. It'd be called Beard Monthly. This has been so widely discussed that people I don't know have already started sending me candidates for "Beard of the Month". Here is my favourite.

A story

Notes from Underground Review

Я человек больной... Я злой человек. Непривлекательный я человек.


First published in Art and Soul Magazine 2006

In Dostoyevsky’s most popular novel, Crime and Punishment, the anti-hero Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawn-broker for his own selfish gain lead by his Übermensch-esque philosophy and a hunger to extricate himself from his impoverished surroundings. The vivid detail and chillingly accurate psychological potrait of a killer shocked an 1860s audience and secured Dostoyevsky’s fame worldwide. But the much over-looked prelude to Crime and Punishment, "Notes from Underground" premiers the character of the embittered, out-cast intellectual that would later become Raskolnikov as well as marking Dostoyevsky’s transition from semi-autobiographist and Gogol inspired novelist, to a mature writer of timeless literature in his own right.

Notes from Underground is a darkly comic novella, it follows the unamed main character (often refered to as the Underground Man) firstly through his own cynical life philosophy, and then through a serious of annecdotes (The Story of the Falling Sleet), which explain what lead him to take this unpleasant and bitter worldview, what he calls living his life "Underground".

An Underground Man is intelligent, but out of touch with his animal instincts; he would rather write a withering short story about his enemies than barge past them on the street when he is annoyed. The polar opposite of the Underground man is the "Spontaneous Man of Action", who when faced with a problem, charges at it head first like a bull. The Underground Man’s struggle to decide which role is better peppers much of the first half of the book, but a reading of the second half makes it quite clear who generally comes out on top.

Like Dostoyevsky’s short tale, "A Nasty Story", where the main character gets blind drunk at a wedding party and ends up sleeping in the bridal bed, Notes from Underground is filled with embarrasing and cringeworthy moments that make the reader’s toes curl. Although the main character is an anti-hero, you grow to sympathise with him as he decends deeper and deeper underground and into his own negative mindset.

Notes from Underground is a masterpiece in outsider literature which in Jessie Coulson’s colourful translation seems just as cogent today as the day it was written. Unlike some of Dostoyevsky’s other novels, not a single word is wasted, every end is tied up, and every idea explained. It is the first modern Russian novel, the first piece of existentialist philosophy, it is a sobering fable for any would-be melodramatic tortured artist and most of all, it is simply a brilliant book.

A Quiz

1) Would you like to do a quiz?

Not really

2) Oh...alright then

Busking

First published in Art and Soul magazine 2006

In Sean Locke’s cult radio series, "15 Minutes of Misery", the character of Honest Alf is often heard humming a well-known tune, cursing himself, then phoning up the Performing Rights Society to let them know he owes them several pence worth of royalties. I’m sure no one is really this honest, and luckily the Performing Rights Society will probably not force you to write out a cheque for 42p for singing "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" in the shower this morning, but attitudes and laws towards live music are becoming more and more uptight. If you’re wondering why some of the pubs in Peterborough have lost their live or even recorded music, it’s probably due to more expensive music licensing.

I was lucky enough to leave this all behind for a few weeks recently and, with a few other Peterborough musicians and music lovers, visit the southern Spanish city of Granada which has a thriving arts and music scene. We stayed in the caves of Sacremento, just outside of the town along with musicians from all over the world.

We’d spend the evenings playing music by the fire or reading by candle-light in the gypsy caves, which were pock-marked by the wasps that woke us up every morning. On getting up, we’d often be greeted with the sight of other artistically-minded troglodytes fashioning digeridoos from the cacti that grew locally. We’d make our way down to the labyrinth of the city below and spend the cooler parts of the day busking. The local police were known to be somewhat temperamental; they would pass us most days smiling, but we were told stories of people who were told that busking wasn’t allowed and had their instruments confiscated with a several hundred euro return fee.

Over here, the busking laws are a shade more lax, though they vary from city to city. In Peterborough, no licence is needed to take music to the streets, though there are a few simple ground rules if you intend to busk. The most important being that you must not busk on private property.

Busking isn’t just confined to the over-vociferous and under-talented you-hum-it-i’ll-play-it penny botherers that often line the streets at the time when a headache already seems to be coming on, it is a verifiable art form that adds colour and culture to a city, and when done properly, can brighten up someone’s day.

What do Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Rod Stewart, Joan Baez and Eric Clapton have in common? Apart from some very questionable haircuts, they all started their careers as buskers. Other unlikely street performers include Beck, Coldplay, comedian Bob Hope and flamenco intrumentalists of the moment, Rodrigo y Gabriela.

There are some strange attitudes to buskers, one of the most common seems to be that busking is a type of begging, that all buskers are homeless. Another image of the busker is the Dick Van-Dyke styled one man band, cymbals strapped to the inside of the knees, out of tune guitar in hand, and not much upstairs. These stereotypes are both out of touch and unrealistic, just take a short trip to Cambridge and you will see student bands filling the central square with small audiences and a wide range of musical styles being played down the cobbled streets. And here in Peterborough over the past year, we’ve had Paraguayan harpists, Guitar and harmony bands, Violinists, Gypsy jazz bands, Accordionists, and flute and cello duos.

But at times like these when all forms of live music are under threat, perhaps the days of the street musician are numbered, perhaps the much loved London busker hot-spot Covent Garden will soon be devoid of string quartets, djembe players and all other musicians, and perhaps Honest Alfs will soon be made of us all. Let’s hope not.

The Genius of John Clare

First published in Art and Soul Magazine 2006

In May this year, I was kindly asked to play at Dorchester Folk Festival. It was a lovely gig to play, especially after the previous days gig on Clapham Common was virtually deserted due to what seemed at the time like monsoon weather.

After the Dorchester gig, I was told I was staying with a man named Alistair Chisholm who turned out to be the local town crier. He answered the door to me in full town crying attire complete with cuffs, bell, cravat and a large tricorn hat with what appeared to be an ostrich feather protruding from one side. Welcoming me into his home, he made me a strong cup of tea before going to walk the dog.

On finding myself alone, my first instinct after noticing the newspaper clippings of Alistair’s recent nude town crying stint at Studland naturist beach to "maximise the exposure of Dorchester", was to look at the bookshelf that covered a whole wall in his livingroom.

I soon noticed that strangely, the majority of the books seemed to be written on the subject of Thomas Hardy. Books of his poetry, biographies, collections of photographs and paintings, short stories and novels. It probably should’ve taken me less time to realise that this was probably because I was staying right in the heart of Thomas Hardy country (or possibly just in the house of a very big fan).

It seems quite strange to me that a poet seems unwittingly espoused to the area in which he or she lived, a link probably vehemently encouraged by the tourist board. Reading Hardy’s beautiful handwriting and the intoxicating twisting rhythms of his poems such as "During Wind and Rain" which inspired music by Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughn Williams and Gustav Holst, I felt a tinge of jealousy that the most our part of the world can hope to be called is "John Clare country".

At first glance, John Clare doesn’t seem to have much to offer; his best known poem "I Am" appears to be the solipsist whinging of a self-pitying loner, he is often seen as a country simpleton with an unhealthy obsession with gypsies, fields and flowers. Much as Wordsworth was publicly slated by Lord Byron for what he saw as a wishy-washy penchant for all that is nice and pretty ("What will any reader out of the nursery say to such namby-pamby?"), Clare is often seen as being nothing but a commentator on all that is dull and clichéd about the English countryside.

Granted, Clare had a talent for writing poetry about nature, and given any beginners guide to John Clare, it is very likely that you’ll be greeted with poems solely about meadows, maidens and skylarks, but he had a whole bredth of talent which far exceeded his label as simply a "Peasant Poet". When reading the poetry of John Clare, you are struck with many conflicting ideas, as Clare was in his own personal life; it is stark and lonely yet strangely comforting, it has a classical elegance but is also brushed by everyday imperfection and crudity.

Clare was removed from school at the age of seven to tend sheep and geese. The preceding difficulty in his grasping the rules of English grammar and questionable spelling proficiency didn’t hinder his early ventures into poetry. He used them to his advantage, using the vocabulary of the farmyard and his own spellings (lady-cow instead of ladybird and frit instead of frightened) and made up his own rules for grammar. "Grammar in learning", he said, "is like tyranny in government – confound the bitch, i’ll never be her slave!". But it was more than these grammatical idiosyncracies that marked out Clare as a special and highly original poet.

Clare had a gift for describing the scenes of the countryside, in the language used by those that saw it most. Unlike a lot of the Romantic poets who wrote in praise of wildlife before him, he had a real understanding of nature.

Clare suffered from mental illness for most of the latter part of his life. He was extremely depressed and his behaviour became more and more erratic, at one point he interupted a performance of Shakespeare’s (someone who in an interview he later claimed to be) The Merchant of Venice, shouting abuse at the character of Shylock. He was admitted to two different mental hospitals, the latter being Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (now St Andrew’s hospital) which he escaped from in 1841 and walked the 80 miles home to Northborough, through Werrington over 4 days. The days spent in hospital were some of the saddest of Clare’s life, although it was when he wrote arguably some of his best poetry. He died at the age of 75 in 1864. His body was carried from Northampton to his Helpston home by train (ironically the only rail journey he ever took).

Sometimes it’s best to remember that when bearing the stress of modern life, or when overcome by the harshness of the city, with the gutteral mating calls of the out of place 4x4s, the concrete mountains and the hordes of workers on their 20 minute lunch breaks, that the perfect remedy is appreciation of, or even a short trip to the English countryside. And when turning on the television to be greeted with the site of "Sex-change hospital" or "Celebrity Love Island" or hearing the dire cacophany of Peter Andre’s comback single, then likewise remember that the antidote is sitting down and reading John Clare. Perhaps it’s more than time for someone to elect themselves as town crier and start preaching the news of our local poet genius.

Alistair Chisholm BBC article
John Clare Poetry online

The Antidote