Words on Wednesday: Prescient Poets

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion,
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave and eats a bread it does not harvest.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle.

Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.

Kahlil Gibran, The Garden of the Prophet

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.

Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.

Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.

Pity the nation - oh, pity the peope who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.

My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, after Kahlil Gibran

Jane Frere

Words on Wednesday: Thali Katori

Thali Katori
An Anthology of Scottish and South Asian Poetry
Edited by Bashabi Fraser and Alan Riach
Luath Press, 2017
ISBN 9781912147090

I like a random poetry discovery as you may well know. Well, this one fell into my lap last week just as I most needed it. I've been struggling to read anything longer than a paragraph recently; exhaustion, child care, lack of motivation, other concerns, world weariness, etc.

So, this literary "feast of many flavours" was a much appreciated find. Here are just a wee sample.

Tessa Ransford (1938-2015)

The dhobi's dog

The dhobi's dog will return from riverbank in the sun
to the house, but not lie down; to and fro he'll trot
panting, semi-wild, hither and thither recalled,
never petted, fondled, either hot or cold.
Does he belong? To whom? Dhobi-ji send him home,
Bibi-ji won't give him room. Such is my lot.

Born and reared in India, comforted by ayah
on some cool verandah of lofty bungalow
with charpai and dgchi, decander and serahi,
enervated, dusty, the whining mosquito,
black ants and red, hug fans overhead:
when all was done and said, the British had to go.

In Scotland I froze: hands, feet, nose,
in thick uneasy clothes at dour boarding school:
a wind-resistant, dismal, stern, redoubtable,
grey-stone-wall life exemplified by rule;
embarrassed to embrace, weep, laugh, kiss:
was I of this race? from such a gene pool?

I lived in Pakistan, land of the Mussulman,
governed by the Koran. I learned Punjabi,
dressed in shalwar, travelled to Lahore,
joined in zabur, lived on dal-chapatti:
but didn't my passport say 'British, born Bombay'
however long my stay in Sialkot or Karachi?

I like the way I speak, the voice my thoughts make,
yet Scottish folk are quick to think me English.
I've lived here (sixty) years (Anderson forebears
and Glasgow Macalisters - that's buksheesh!)
Still my language finds no place, no ethnic dress or face:
I plead my special case and thus I finish.

Irfan Merchant

Address Tae Chicken Tikka Masala

Fair fa' the nations favourite dish
fulfilling everybody's wish,
great chieftain, O so very Scottish,
the spice o life;
ye came, and conquered the English,
tae cure thestrife.

Born in Glasgow's Shish Mahal
during Thatcher's iron rule,
your origins stretch to the Mughals
but when they tried
the chicken tikka, the locals
found it too dry.

The chef wad think tae open up
a can o' Campbell's tomato soup,
add chilli, colouring with pap-
-rika for zest;
and then O what a glorious sup,
simply the best.

As Scots we want the hottest thing
on the menu, a dish with zing:
haggis disnae mak us sing -
we're globalised;
it's the mince an tatties o Tony Singh
brings tears tae eyes.

Noo we export tae India
oor national dish, making it clear
that Scotland is a warld leader
in aa the airts;
fir chicken tikka masala
ye've won oor hairts.

Lord Ganesh, tae please the Scots
remember whit they want is lots
o sauce and spices, very hot,
but dinnae worry;
Ah've got the answer in ma pot -
gie then a curry.

Shampa Ray

Red Moss

Are you land or water?
You welcome me,
spongy wetland, burnt red
rain-fed mosses stacked
discreetly under heather.
I've gone this way before,

looked out at lochs,
Grand Canyon, a mile deep,
gardens that no longer hang
but are hung into the earth.
I have seen you, cast
my thought-hook elsewhere.

But today it is your
peaty reticence, the silence
of your insects, the lure
of no purchase, that wants me.
Your open-heart surgery landscape
will unravel me enough.

I want your compressed
witness, your tidy files, the human
and inhuman in your dark seams.
What was and is, together,
not reduced like the curlew's cry
but deep as Bible layers.

You do it with such flair,
skip over the ten thousand years.
You are the story I would walk on,
slip through as fish or toad,
come clean to fill your sky
full of bright sentences.

Bashabi and Alan

Games Day: Championship Manager 01/02

I'm having to talk about this here because otherwise I will drive JJ and my friends and colleagues up the wall about it, which is incidentally the main motivation behind this blog anyway.

That is, to have a space where I can 'talk out' ideas and concerns that would become an irritation in other ways. So, if in reading this you find your eyes glazing over, have no fear as this is typically the reaction I get when boring people about my activities and interest in the Championship Manager series of computer games. So, after that exciting introduction, let me now talk about...

Championship Manager 01/02

Championship Manager 01/02 (henceforth CM0102) is possibly my favourite computer game of all time. I might love the Baldur's Gate series (and will talk about those games in connection with my RPG past some other time, possibly if I replay the games) and the Fallout games (they became something totally different since Bethesda took over, but New Vegas is a great game) but I sincerely think that I've spent more hours playing CM0102 than any other game.

A brief look at screenshots of the game shouldn't fill you will much/any excitement, unless you are thrilled by a good spreadsheet (and why not?), but therein belies the hook of the game. It's not the flashy graphics or exciting and different gameplay that gets you, all of these things can become usual and then passé reasonably quickly after all, but it's the core structure of the game that speaks to me and apparently many others. That is, the joy of organising!

I mean, I am a Librarian, with a background in academic philosophy, so this really shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone, but I find a great pleasure in organising a 'perfect' team of players and the tactics of the team. Obviously, this is never quite realised as there's always something going wrong and something to win. Much like football itself, it's never truly 'over' and permanently 'won'.

The benefit of this game rather isn't it's completeness, but rather the gaps that require imagination to fill. Unlike later versions that have 2D and 3D representations of the live game, this version is only text highlights and although there are images, they are rather a collection of stock backgrounds rather than individual specific portraits or actual locations and so forth. These people and places are all 'described' in the brief abstract way that the game uses, with special events being rare and not allowing a great deal of interaction with. Again, this is something that later versions alter, with newer games having endless press briefings and interviews, as well as player management and more realistic world football developments.

Although these changes would, you'd assume, make the game more engaging, instead for me it makes the game seem more a slog and constant 'clicking through' of meaningless menus. Certainly having seen people play FM19 (the latest Football Manager game) this is how they seem to find these additions. CM0102 allows you to play through entire seasons in a few evenings.

So the choice lies whether you prefer story or detail, minutiae or narrative, whether football itself represents a social story or a strategic competition.

Now this last point might simply be me stretching a metaphor beyond breaking point (it is) but there is still something in that I believe. Namely how we differently interact with games, with art, with life. There isn't a right way, but we seemingly allow more space for personal differences in how we attach ourselves (how we care-for) to these games than we do the more 'important' things like politics. That is, "oh you like X? That's interesting, I like Y which is different from X, but I can see why you'd like it" or "oh you like X? That's interesting, I like Y which is different from X, tell me why you like it as I do not." These sorts of conversations are more likely when talking about games and almost impossible when discussing politics online. Although, perhaps the more vital component is the latter, 'online', than the subject itself (although I contend that this plays a significant part also, as it holds an implicit assumption about the 'value' of the subject).

Do I now tell you about some of my games? How I took Gornik Zabrze from mid-table obscurity in the Polish league (with a maximum of 5 non-Polish players per team) to becoming Champions of Europe within four years? How I took tiny Hoffenheim from the German Regionals to becoming the dominant force in Germany and Europe, a 'career' game that has run for over ten in-game years, and has also seen me parachute into the EPL to save a relegation threatened Chelsea? How I took Welsh minnows Swansea from the bottom of Division 3 into the EPL with superstars such as Roy Keane, Zidane, and Patrick Kluivert playing for them before an in-game bug caused the entire game to be lost? These are just my most recent games.

Maybe some other time... But I think that, like describing one's dreams to another, that they are never quite as interested for *you* as they were for *me*. Perhaps instead a few screenshots of some OMG moments from those games...

Czech Republic v Paraguay World Cup 2010 Final

It's hard to think of anything less likely

Apart from this perhaps

An abstract Poem in 5 words and 3 images entitled, 'Acceptable Political Discourse'

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Quotes Worth Saving (28): Auster on Writing About the Dead

These lines by Paul Auster have stung me especially painfully, mainly because I have written my own unkind words about my dad as well incomprehensible words about a much missed friend. It wounds me, because that's all of this ever really was, vanity, looking again at yourself when you should be looking at the other, at the world, but I continue to plumb the depths of introspection like the coward I am.

"Children have a tendency either to depreciate or to exalt their parents, and to a good son his father is always the best of fathers, quite apart from any objective reason there may be for admiring him." (Proust)

I realize now that I must have been a bad son. Or if not precisely bad, then at least a disappointment, a source of confusion and sadness...

...

The Rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction. I understand now that each fact is nullified by the next fact, that each thought engenders an equal and opposite thought. Impossible to say anything without reservation: he was good, or he was bad; he was this, or he was that. All of them are true. At times I have the feeling that I am writing about three or four different men, each one distinct, each one a contradiction of all others. Fragments. Or the anecdote as a form of knowledge.

Yes.

...

For the past two weeks, these lines from Maurice Blanchot echoing in my head: "One thing must be understood: I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it."

To begin with death. To work my way back into life, and then, finally, to return to death.

Or else: the vanity of trying to say anything about anyone.

Paul Auster
The Invention of Solitude, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man'
Faber and Faber, 1982: London
ISBN 9780571154142