ARCHIVE "Teeth of… Barbed Wire?
Critical, Radical, and Topical eg: How will we run from those who would sink their teeth into us? A dog, or a horse certainly… but I have never yet been chased by barbed wire desiring to sink its teeth into me. Or I dont think so. It is a frightening prospect.
I was last chased by a teeth-sinking dog in Italy 2 years ago. I was bicycling along a quiet country lane in the narrow flat land between sea and mountains north of Via Reggio. It is a contested and constricted territory (part of Liguria) in which the main north south arteries, railways, motorways, and other roads - and pilgrimage routes – have to fit themselves between the fingers of foothills extending into the narrow plain, and the competing multi-use coastal margin of beach resorts, homes, apartments, businesses and commercial properties (including the Carrara marble yards). Set among this sculptural patchwork is some prime agricultural land, and it was along a small road between flat fields, orchards, green houses, farmhouses and small villages that I was wandering on a hired bicycle one early late summer evening. Dawdling on the pedles, the lane ran straight, and then a corner at right angles in front of a farm house, to be followed by another turn so it could resume its idyllic way past more cultivated areas of vegetables and fruit trees. Loud barking came from the farmhouse as I went round the second corner, and I turned my head to see a large yellow dog running towards me at speed, which, jumping up behind the rear wheel of the bicycle, bit me in the bum. I protested angrily, stopped and waved my arms in case the dog wanted to have a second go. However, the farmer emerged to call in the dog, clearly a much-loved family pet it returned wagging to be hugged by two children, and inadequate words were exchanged between the farmer and I not approximating to either of our mother tongues or likely internal thoughts.
I have also been chased by a horse in a field which bit me on the back of my coat collar, but never to this day chased by barbed wire. However, the link tells us that the American patent for barbed wire was awarded in 1874: the ‘winner’, Joseph Glidden of the Barb Fence Company, was a Midwest acquaintance of Uncle Scrooge – McDuck – Gugga Daddy (GD), or Tio Amaretto as we also referred to him from his pioneering days on the pampas of Argentina. GD was helping driving cattle between the summer and winter pastures, but in the lawless range wars which broke out after the barb wire came in between those seeking to enclose and those wanting the great plains left open, he knew his roaming days were over, especially when the State of Texas decreed cutting wire a felony in 1884.
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CATASTROPHE GAMES - "We have all been groomed"
A footnote: on the BBC (Radio 4) over the weekend, a news magazine programme concerning the current perfect storm of child abuse, groping and feminism (you know who). Only a woman could have made the remark – "The whole country has been groomed", she repeated. Sex . Work. War. How true I thought her wisecrack was/is.
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TONITE AT THE COLISEUM – The End of Man?
Another footnote on literary failure: men being doomed because they are " essentially confused, hidebound creatures, in search of certainties that the modern world has left behind". Unlike Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing or Angela Carter (say)? In search of certainties? Yes? Err… No?
But except Hilary Mantel - ‘Our ‘ilary’ provides all the certainties the Booker Prize judges are looking for. Topical stuff.
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OLD MEN TRAVELLING – Phone Booth Conversation
Radical viewpoint: "Englishness is where difference begins, where the exotic starts"*.
! Do not adjust your hearing aid, or mouthpiece, you heard it right the first time !
I am quoting from a reported conversation betwen two men in their sixties – "It’d be good for you to lose some weight. Take the English leap. Get out of the Frenchified muddle you’ve been in for so long. Be lighter, more fun. Become English. Or Irish. Take the leap my friend."
The man speaking so unequivocally goes on to give the example of phone boxes/booths – "It’s not just the English ones are prettier, but they offer a comfortable and better designed space in which to relate to one another verbally, unlike the French ones, which are strange and designed for the outrageously pedantic aesthetics of silence."
OK it is a fiction being imagined by two men who both happen to consider Barcelona their home, and the truth is that these days most of the pretty red English phone boxes have been ripped out. Still instead of detournement , why not try – "a light English leap, to land on the other side, start thinking about something else, to turn around, to move."
*from Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas (2010)
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