Not-So-Mini Essay | Magic Lanterns, by Nicolas Pillai | Introduction

 

Introduction

Part 1: The Frontier

Part 2: The City

Part 3: The Automobile

Part 4: The Bedroom

Written by Nicolas Pillai, Illustrations by JH

  

The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.
Don DeLillo

You’re sitting in the dark, surrounded by strangers.  For two hours, you and your companions are subjected to a series of stimuli designed to induce common responses.  Your bodies tense as you feel fear; they relax as you laugh. You are aroused, elated, involved.

Then the lights come up and you find you’ve got a lap full of popcorn.

Going to the cinema has always seemed a perverse occupation to me. Perhaps it’s because I never went as a child. Or perhaps it’s because when I was a child I was taught never to stare. Never mind that they’re fictional, there’s something weird about obsessively ogling people who can’t look back at you. And yet I’ve spent a good proportion of my adult life watching and rewatching films. Our reality is enriched, and significantly affected, by the worlds we observe onscreen.

When moving pictures were first exhibited, the public’s excitement over the new technology drew the concern of moralists. This was an art form that reframed reality, not posed but captured. A commonly repeated, and possibly apocryphal, story is that the first cinema-goers panicked when shown a train approaching the screen. True or not, it speaks to that thrill engendered by cinema: that it can extend beyond its frame, enveloping us in its fictional space.

In Panorama du Gran Canal vu d’un Bateau (1896), we see the moving camera being invented. Shot for the Lumiere Brothers by Alexandre Promio, the film consists of just one simple forty-second shot of movement down a Venetian canal. By placing his tripod in a gondola, Promio redefined movement in film. The camera was no longer static – now when the train rushed toward the screen, the camera hopped aboard.

Promio’s camera moves from left to right, taking in the facades of houses on the canal. Another gondola comes into frame from the right, crossing the field of vision and giving a sense of contrasting movement. We are assured of a world going on beyond the parameters of the image. Unlike its contemporaries, the film is less about pointing the camera at a subject and more about articulating that subject’s relation to the surrounding world.

We fall under a spell when we’re at the pictures. Entranced by the dance of light and shadow, our bodies confined, we open our minds to virtual worlds. In this series of short essays, I want to think about how we interact with the spaces created by film. So please turn off your mobiles. The lights are going down.

As Tony Curtis used to say, I’ll see you after the main feature.

Quote | Mini Essay | Novelty, by Sarah Fraser

It is not only old and early impressions that deceive us; the charms of novelty have the same power
Balise Pascal (1632-1662)

Novelty is an old-fashioned and worthless concept used by tricksters and charlatans to defraud the public. No thing is new and nothing surprises the all knowing unconscious.
 
The feeling of novelty, of freshness and difference, comes because we are reminded of what we have forgotten. Our experiential filters grow tighter with age, at once deepening our understanding yet also limiting the breadth of our senses. The baby is born with the equipment and ability to speak all languages. Nothing is novel to the baby. Within minutes we begin the lifelong process of adapting to our predominant culture. When the adult English speaker tries to learn Xhosa they are convinced this African tribe has a tongue and palate designed to form the distinctive clicks and tones. The English baby has been forced to unlearn what is possible and be constrained to a societal norm.

We need to know what is normal, yet we desire novelty, that which is different, perhaps outside the norm, something abnormal. The paradox is we want the comfort of what we think we know, yet also the experience of what we think is new. 

To be sold a novelty is to be tricked into the purchase or belief in something worthless or trivial. The holiday novelty, the snowdust globe of the Eiffel Tower on the windowsill in the office, serves as a reminder of a sensual event. We’ve been tricked into allowing the memory of touch and smell, and taste and sound, to be replaced by a toy.

The novelist is also a conscious manipulator of a submissive reader. The seduction and promise of the imagination, where any combination of character and plot can be twisted and presented as new, leads readers to believe in what is not real.

The designer, the author and the painter, in their quest to produce something novel, elevate themselves onto a moral pedestal. The pursuit of novelty is the pursuit of power. The politician knows how to place a constraint, a rule, an edict of legislation on the population, and then, in a generous gesture, remove this so the unwitting receivers perceive something new, different and perhaps better.

Novelty without conscience is immoral. To be novel is to scam. Every hoax preys on what has been forgotten.  Novelty, true novelty, is the sleight of hand of the trickster.

By Sarah Fraser

Bitch | Mini Essay | A Cog In The Wheel by Thomas Sullivan

“The greedy man never knows what he’s done.” Neil Young (from the song Natural Beauty)

You open the email and see a photo of two young women. Dark skinned and smiling, dressed in vibrant yellow and orange shirts. Colorful handmade beads ring their necks while their ears support heavy turquoise rings. They are beautiful and pastoral, standing gaily in a dry African forest under a clear blue sky, the setting devoid of modern structures. They are not trying to appear happy, they just are happy.

But they are threatened by a global company that wants to mine for some metal hidden under their land. Buried metals needed (or, more accurately, desired) to build modern things. The mining will destroy the quality of the water which they use to farm.

You visit the website of the mining company and hunt around for an official photo of the CEO. You find it at the bottom of the “About Us” section. All blemishes have been powdered away and the man is attempting to appear cool, calm, and content. But he has two chins under a deeply creased face and, despite the Yeun Lui tricks, his tired and vacant eyes suggest a person living under the crushing weight of a massive to-do list -- year end reports, stock prices, tax avoidance schemes, meetings, annual retreats with strategy sessions and team building exercises. His personal life is no doubt similarly complex – houses, wives, ex-wives, cars, vacation plans, private schools, ever-expanding retirement funds. His world is a responsible one structured around satisfying requirements.

Except, of course, the requirements of the people in the African forest who need only clean water and clean air to grow their food and be happy.

You sit back and realize that the simple people in the world always get swallowed by the complex ones to satisfy a bevy of endless needs that can never be fully met. The greedy man, it seems, never knows what he’s done. Then you shut off your metal-laden computer and think about all the things you need to get done today.

by Thomas Sullivan

Thomas Sullivan’s writing has appeared in Word Riot and 3AM Magazine, among others. He is the author of Life In The Slow Lane, a comic memoir about teaching drivers education. For information on this title, please visit his author website at  Thomassullivanhumor.com.

FINKPOINT | MINI ESSAY | BEFORE I SELF-DESTRUCT, BY DANIEL NEOFETOU

‘I would never want a book’s autograph’: a choice nugget of wisdom from Kanye West, whose new film Runaway is further evidence that the self-confessed bibliophilistine would do well to eschew all semantic content from his art. This along with the manner in which he often ruins his incredibly evocative music – which would otherwise mark him as Dilla’s natural successor – with naively ignorant lyricism which, in its – broadly speaking – content’s  eschewing of braggadocio, comes off as introspection by someone who’s never really thought much.


The best way I can describe Runaway is as a hip-hopera made by Matthew Barney, only without all that artist’s tiresomely intricate and convoluted symbolism. The only ulterior meaning which has been ‘implanted’ within Runaway is an achingly trite message about how unpleasant it is to be ‘different’ in a world of crushing conformism (anachronistically delivered by a man perched on one of the highest rungs of market capitalism’s upper echelons, an irony surely lost on Kanye himself). However, similarly to the way in which the apparently politically conscious works by his alleged (by Wikipedia) influence Picasso are best appreciated on an aesthetic basis (an appreciation which, when one gets acquainted with the Frankfurt School, in fact proves far more subversive), it’s far more fulfilling to ignore what Runaway might possibly be supposed to mean and enjoy it for however it might affect.


Unlike other recent forays into filmmaking by hip-hop stars, for example R Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet (enjoyable on strictly wink-wink-nudge-nudge grounds) or 50 Cent’s Before I Self Destruct (straight-up embarrassing), Runaway is a genuinely glorious piece of work. It features elegant sequence upon elegant sequence of breathtaking spectacle-for-spectacle equally symptomatic of the music industry’s commodity fetishism (and let’s not take tired recourse to the pretence that such an attitude is exclusively native to those music genres labelled – with a substantive dollop of underhand racism – ‘urban’) as Soulja Boy smothering his face in bills before digging into a bowl of diamonds for breakfast in the promo for Get My Swag On, yet unlike such moments of scarcely-aware self-parody, almost every frame of Runaway shimmers with an autotelic beauty.


The film sent me digging around for an undergrad essay I wrote on Godard, wherein I drew upon a quote from Vinzenz Hediger in comparing the 20th Century French master’s work to Hollywood trailers. Godard’s films, writes Hediger, ‘deconstruct mainstream cinema...by resembling mainstream trailers rather than by not resembling mainstream films,’ and similarly Runaway has little in common with the sprawling Oscar-baiting epics it intimates, but instead seems akin to their advertisements (here the oft-voiced complaint that ‘they put all the good bits in the trailer’ springs to mind). It is a continuation of mainstream cinema, to again quote Hediger on Godard, ‘by its own means’ and I do not think that it is too farfetched to say that it precursors the natural conclusion of the monolithic industry’s aesthetic. On reflection, perhaps the title of 50 Cent’s film would have been more suitable.


By Daniel Neofetou


(AN APPROPRIATE TITLE, DEAR READER. I FEEL MY DAYS ARE NUMBERED. FINKPOINTLESS.)

Type | Mini Essay | Just what is on our mind?, by Nima Seifi

“Life itself is a quotation," Jorges Luis Borges once said. It is important to note that the source of the quote is a collection of Jean Baudrillard’s fragments and sketches entitled Cool Memories. I only know this because I read about it online – the quote may have featured elsewhere, in which case, replace the details of the above where necessary.

If you type the quote into Google, it churns out over 300,000 results, ranging from online quote repositories, to the titles of blogs and social media site profiles. Borges’ digital immortality is an excellent example of his knack for pulling off elaborate meta-textual pranks, and this is probably despite him being unaware of the quote having been published – he was just one of those types who got things right without even trying.

What it also illustrates is how human experience is linked by one (dubiously attributed) quote. We might not be aware of it as we go about our daily business, but that shared consciousness – that shared process of thought – is somewhat reassuring and deserves attention.    

Somebody once said that “every single human articulation is a quote” – well, they must have, right? And they did, sort of. “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation,” said Oscar Wilde, which is the same, give or take the whole quote. Either way, we’re on about the same thing. 

The first word we speak has to be acquired. I’ve been informed by several reliable sources that my first word was in German. It was actually more of an essay; in fact, it was an entire chapter, word-by-word, from Heidegger’s Being and Time. On that note, has anybody ever heard of a newborn arriving into the world with a speech prepared? It’s the least they could do given circumstances. But no, because a) babies are lazy and b) we have to spend our lives borrowing everything, only for it then to be taken and mishandled by somebody else.

Quotations – i.e. phrases used by well-read people in debates – are distinct from daily speech because, for some reason, quotations become dislocated from their original historical conditions and float about as a reminder of a (likely famous) person’s unique insight. Whether it is written or oral is irrelevant – what’s important is the disconnection.

Technological innovations haven’t changed the nature of the quotation; they’ve just made it easier for people to access the database. Generations of brilliant observations and thoughts are potentially at the fingertips of person with a laptop and wireless connection. Online dictionaries invariably provide a “quote of the day” and anybody who owns a Smartphone can download an application that does the same.

The Internet has also given us the ability to curate our borrowed wisdom and display it to everybody else. On Facebook, the “favourite quotes” section is effectively an exhibition of the quotes people have curated from sites like wikiquote. My private collection includes spectacular quotes from Deleuze, Levi Strauss, Umberto Eco, and a metropolitan police spokesperson coming to terms with the theft of Jonathan Franzen’s glasses at the launch of his book – a cross section of my life over the past few months, all within 600 pixels. Now that’s what I call economizing. 

What does this portend? Is there now no excuse for people who are unable to furnish a conversation with a dazzling insight from what is routinely a dead white man? No. Do we run the risk of invalidating the very notion of the quotation, i.e. if everything is a quotation then there are no quotations? There is probably a quote about it somewhere, check brainyquote.com. Is being noticeably more clever than everybody else a genuine possibility in this day and age? Probably not, but then it’s the taking part that counts.

It is too easy to debunk this stuff, as merely being a sort of intellectual accessorizing that should be avoided. What is occurring is an immaculate realization of the way people have always shared and given texture to experience – quotations. It began with the oral tradition, evolving into print and now through to the digital age – quotations guarantee the survival of human experience. Aside from football, X Factor and Shakespeare, that’s all we have going for us as a species. 

By Nima Seifi

Jazz | Mini Essay | Merrie Melodies by Nicolas Pillai

“There’s nothing to say about the music. Don’t write about the music. The music speaks for itself.” Miles Davis to music critic Ralph J. Gleason.

The performance of jazz is often characterized as humourless, an exercise in, at worst, superiority, at best, virtuosity. Or, to quote the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah band, the limits of jazz are “delicious hot, disgusting cold”.

Of course, those limits have been hotly debated since its emergence. The word itself has been the subject of much criticism, with Duke Ellington deploring its seediness and Charles Mingus kicking against its association with “the whole back-of-the-bus bit”. Jazz musicians (or at least, wise jazz musicians) are often leery about pinning down what it is that they do. When asked what jazz was, Fats Waller is said to have replied, “Lady, if you have to ask, forget it.” In answer to the same question, Louis Armstrong gnomically growled, “Jazz is what I play for a living.”

The representation of jazz often insists upon a divide between performers and audience, as though the latter is excluded from the moment of improvisation. Equally, those seeking to politicize jazz can run the risk of simplifying the dialogue between musician and listener. These are the squares who deplore Armstrong’s clowning as Uncle Tom-ism.

Certainly, Hollywood has propagated a lot of unhelpful stereotypes. If we are to believe ‘Blues in the Night’ (1941, Anatole Litvak) or ‘Young Man with a Horn’ (1950, Michael Curtiz, retitled ‘Young Man of Music’ by nervous British distributors), white jazz musicians spend most of their time masochistically fretting about not being black. Black jazz musicians generally mentor, drink, and die.

None of this ever gets close to the joyous exploration that, for me, exemplifies jazz as a musical form, what Whitney Balliett called “the sound of surprise.”

The generosity with which moments such as these are discovered and shared is eloquently conveyed in Gjon Mili’s documentary footage of jazz performance. In particular, look at the beginning of the short film entitled ‘Improvisation’ (1950), a collaborative work with Norman Granz. One of its great pleasures is the opportunity it affords us to observe musicians listening to each other.

In one shot, the venerable tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins essays a solo as Charlie Parker sits and watches. It is a collision of two worlds - swing, and its descendant, bebop. As Hawkins blows a particularly felicitous phrase, Parker smiles off-screen to a fellow musician and nods his head appreciatively toward Hawkins. It’s a wonderful visual record of spontaneous response, of Parker being surprised and amused and impressed all at the same time. It’s as though he’s asking, “Did you dig that too?”

There’s a whole other essay in the inherent self-parody of jazz slang. Here, it’s enough to note that, yes, we do dig Hawk, and we also dig Bird digging Hawk. Like Charlie Parker, we smile, because jazz needn’t always be about laughin’ to keep from cryin’.

Nicolas Pillai

Hollywood | Mini-Essay | On the Inherent Decay within Conservative Social Systems, by George Ttoouli

When we approached the intimidatingly talented George Ttoouli for a Mini Essay, he gave us this. Anyone who knows George will not be surprised that this is not really an 'essay', or indeed 'mini'. It is bloody worth a read though... as is his collection of poetry and his excellent new Magazine, Polarity. 


I was in the park feeding Alka-Seltzers to pigeons when my mobile phone rang. It was an 0800 number I didn't recognise. 


"Hello, Patrick speaking," I said. 


"Hello sir, is that Mr Geoffrey Malik?"


"Yes it is," I replied. 


"Hello," the woman said, after a pause, which could have been due to the distance, "this is Sureisha calling from British Gas. I'm calling to ask you about our services-"


I cut her off. "British Gas is a major supplier of energy to homes in Britain, with a several billion pound turnover," I replied.


She carried on, "As a former customer of British Gas, are you aware of how our services could save you money on your home bills?" she asked.


"I've never been a customer of British Gas."


"Our records show-"


"Listen, Suretta, what are you wearing?"


She hung up just as the first of the pigeons began fluttering and falling over and coughing without letting out air in that stupid way of theirs. I watched the froth building up around its beak, as it tried to right itself. That's the trouble with this world, I thought to myself, but I wasn't really sure why. I knew it was the right thing to think. 


Then I thought about calling my mother, but that would have been impossible. Instead I called my local councillor; he was always good about these things, the bloody Liberal. 


"Hello, Councillor John, I'm calling to complain about something terrible I saw in the park today."


"Oh, hello, is that Patrick again? Sorry we were cut off last call, usual signal problems. Look, I'm in the middle of something..." The limp bastard was probably in the middle of some amputee prostitution racket. 


"John, you're my elected representative for this city and this is really important." I stressed ‘really important’ by punching the air, but it made my bandages chafe against the scars. "Today, while walking home from the doctor's surgery I saw a drunnk - a vagrant! - feeding Alka-Seltzers to pigeons in the park. This is your ward and I want to know what you're going to do about it."


"That's terrible, Patrick, really awful-"


"All well and good, Councillor John, but now I'm standing in a pile of bloody feathers and white foamy bones!" I liked that. White foamy bones. "I thought you were supposed to be making this city a better place for children to live in! They're all over the park!" I realised I hadn't specified whether I meant the children, or the pigeons.


"Now, Patrick, there's no need to shout. They're only pigeons, after all-"


"Only pigeons? What if that drunk - that vagrant! - starts feeding ground up glass and sherbert to children on the roundabouts, then following them into the bathrooms to watch them vomit blood? This is an interconnected web of decay I'm talking about! I want to know what you're going to do about it."


"Yes well, it does sound like something the RSPB ought to-"


"RSPB? What about the NSPCC, or a Special Police Unit? This is one step away from total social disorder. You know how the cycle of abuse perpetuates damage in-"


He tried to cut over me with, "I'm well aware of your views on-"


But I kept talking: "-the social order, by creating a downward spiral of violence in family units and while we stand for a social norm that demands a model of stable two-point-fours and married heterosexual couples, the social mechanisms for establishing that model have a feeble immune system for protecting the model from paedophilia and vagrancy and similar viruses. The pressure to adopt rigorously structured social systems will always leave gaps in the wherein malcontents, child-molesters and deviants - deviants according to the system, of course, not to their own warped versions of reality - will find no room to manoeuvre in a legal fashion, leading to social unrest, outbursts that have no place in the model's utopian ambitions."


He hung up.


"Ultimately, if you abuse a child, that child will go on into a life of drugs and delinquency, struggling, even with the best of support and care, to maintain any semblance of normality. The majority of those people are statistically likely to either become abusers, thereby perpetuating the cycle, or they will find themselves drawn into abusive relationships, which ultimately will lead to them suffering further abuse, and even having families, watching their own children being abused, I mean, when is it going to stop? What exactly are you doing to break the silence? Calling up a charity on the phone and saying, 'We've got a problem, would you mind taking care of it?' That's a great help! I know, why don't we just give everyone guns and tell them to deal with their own problems? Today it's pigeons, and let's face it, they are only rats with wings, ultimately, probably carrying more diseases than your average drop-out, but what's it going to be tomorrow? And who are you going to rely on to solve these issues? You think I should intervene? Should I beat up this drunk? Should I rally a mob and get them to beat up the homeless bastard?"


I was running out of energy.


"We need an alternative system which can allow for the rehabilitation of victims of this subsystem in a humane fashion, without violence! Yet all the examples from political activity and media representations on the television point us towards using violence as the only solution for counteracting such evils. To quote Hari Seldon, 'Violence is the first resort of the ignorant, and the last resort of the incompetent.' Why should we stand for ignorance and incompetence among the tribes that rule us? Give me an alternative!"


The sun was sloping off the sky; I'd only killed a few pigeons today. The war is infinite, their numbers multiply beyond the bounds of their food supply. I had to get to their nests. This had to be stopped at the nest.


By George Ttoouli

Tradition | Mini Essay | Deadfall Revisited, by Kyle Hemmings

You can’t buy money with happiness. Michael Caine in Deadfall

Just what constitutes a cult film is not exactly clear. What is generally agreed upon is that cult classics retain a very loyal subculture of fans Many are considered cult films because they deal with controversial topics or fall outside of standard narrative and/or cinematic conventions. Harold and Maude or The Big Lebowski are  examples. Another variety is the It’s-so-bad-that’s-it’s-good kind. Mommie Dearest and Plan 9 from Outer Space are examples of the latter.

My nomination for new cult classic—Deadfall (1968), directed by Bryan Forbes—falls somewhere between the previous two categories.

The movie is based on a novel by the once prolific  thriller writer, Desmond Corey. The plotline contains all the seeds for controversy. Jewel thief extraordinaire, Henry Clarke, (played by Michael Caine in his early Harry Palmer days), goes to incredible lengths to get close to his victims, even going so far as becoming an alcoholic and getting admitted into a Spanish sanatorium. There he is recruited by a visitor named Fé (played by the lovely Italian actress, Giovanna Ralli) to collude upon more heists with her and her much older husband (played by Eric Portman). Predictably enough, Henry falls in love with Fé and unwittingly becomes entrapped in a diabolical triad. He learns that Richard (Portman) is an ex-Nazi and homosexual. But the real shocker is what he learns about Fé. I won’t divulge the secret, but suffice it to say that Henry’s physical deadfall mirrors his descent into a world of moral decay among the affluent and beautiful.

The film seems to have more flaws than qualities to recommend it. First, the recommendations.  The music score by John Barry is hypnotic and brilliant. In fact, Barry himself makes an appearance in the film, conducting an orchestra while Henry and Richard perform the heist. And the same lady who sang Goldfinger, the Whitney Houston of her day, Shirley Bassey, sings the theme song: My Love Has Two Faces. The photography, shot in Spain, is gorgeous and compliments the romance between Henry and Fé as well as underscoring by irony-- the ensuing tragedy. Also,  Caine turns in another fine performance and Ralli is stunning to watch.

The flaws. Forbes uses too many close-ups that over dramatize. The pacing is off. The romance between Henry and Fé is rushed. The heist itself, while exciting, is too incredible to be believed. And the film sags somewhat after the first heist.

So why am I nominating this film to cult status?

I love this film not despite its flaws but because of them. I remember the late sixties and being naïve enough to believe that romance is not incompatible with sultry sex. I remember the idealism of a generation that  is captured in the film’s meandering conversations, those concerning love and philosophy. But most of all, I remember a time when I could be shocked, when my ideals crashed against the hard wall called reality.

By Kyle Hemmings

Destruction | Mini Essay | Call For Submissions

1589, from L. compendium "a shortening, saving," lit. "that which is weighed together," from L. compendere "to weigh together," from com- "together" + pendere "to weigh".

1590s, essay from M.Fr. essai "trial, attempt, essay," from L.L. exagium "a weighing, weight," from L. exigere "test," from ex- "out" + agere apparently meaning here "to weigh."

Mini Essays; crumbs of arcana – knowledge few possess – flashed as insight in 500 words or less.


Now we have a few Mini Essays in the can/barrel that you can treat like fish (Omar Khayyam) and shoot/read, we thought it was time to say - so....'It's your turn to have a go'. That's exactly what's happening now - a call for submissions. To submit simply send your 500 words or less, quote, title and name to submissions@silkwormsink.com

James Harringman
Editor

Second Person | Mini Essay | Half-Laughter, by Phil Brown

“Contact with other people does not lead to art; it leads to conversation.” Robert Bly

The literary scene is increasingly becoming a MMORPG. The different meanings of the word ‘profile’ are blurring into each other and bandwidths are bursting with banter suspended as cold clusters of zeroes and ones. This is why, for all its occasional tedium and demand for us to travel to obscure, out-of-the-way little venues, the live-reading system is by far the best way of instantly engaging with the writing ‘community’.

Whilst the internet has been incredibly good at bringing together a variety of disparate specialist-interest communities, poetry included, it will never replace that feeling of sharing a glass of wine with a stranger at a book launch and discovering that you both have a W.D. Snodgrass book in your bag. Whilst a poet may be able to deliver the most assured and postured polemics imaginable in the e-world, it will never replace the feeling of hair-on-end electricity of a confidently delivered poem to a captivated audience – I am thinking specifically here of the Catalan poet, Joan Margarit who reads with such musicality that the so-called ‘language barrier’ is hurdled without hesitation.

However, whilst I can easily recall for you the thirteen times that a poet has left me awestruck and desperate to buy their oeuvre on the strength of a live reading, they are sadly not what sticks in my head when I think of the dangerous ‘poetry + microphone’ equation. To me, poetry gigs are defined by what Michael Hamburger referred to as the ‘titter of recognition’. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then go to a theatre and watch one of Shakespeare’s comedies and listen to the audience. You hear that little smug muttering sound? That’s bourgeoisie for ‘I get the joke because I’m clever’.

I’m no saint in this, we’ve all done it. As a poet, I’ve deliberately chosen to read poems that will elicit a giggle. As an audience member, I’ve grunted my smarmy appreciation for the occasional reference to a book that I like to say I’ve read. As an English teacher, I know all too well the deathly fear of a silent room – it seems counterintuitive.

This is, of course, only natural. In the same way that a horror-film or a comedy will show you footage of its audience as part of its advertising campaign, poets and their audiences are only able to gauge the reception of a piece through an established lingua franca of laughs, groans, sighs and hums.

For all my apprehensions over the actual performance-aspect of some of these events however, I’ve got to know two or three of my favourite people having met them for the first time at poetry readings; you will find these events populated by some of the most ambitious, amiable, conscientious and enthusiastic people you could ever hope to meet. With that in mind, I’m sure that the pretentious half-laughter is a small price to pay.

By Phil Brown

Issue 1 | Mini Essay | Three Creations of Omar Khayyam, by John Clegg

But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it… James Merrill

It’s a nice trick to get famous in two diametrically opposed fields, especially when the fame is as weird as Omar Khayyam’s, who isn’t primarily remembered for his work in mathematics – where his achievements are undisputed – but rather for his poetry, which he may never have written. The first references to him as an author of quatrains occur about 50 years after his death, and the earliest collections of his poems (compiled about 200 years after his death) are full of misattributions and doubtful attributions. A core of 16 or so quatrains appears to be the work of a single author from the proper time period, and maybe this is some or all of the real Khayyam, but maybe it’s someone else. In any case it’s the best kernel we have.

The first creation of Omar began sometime not long after he died. He had a reputation for unorthodoxy, perhaps undeserved; his philosophical treatises argue from a mystical Sufi perspective. After his death, anonymous verses which edged on blasphemy were attributed to him (in the same way as anonymous witticisms are often attributed to Oscar Wilde, or a huge body of existing proverbs was attributed to King Solomon). As these attributions piled up, the burgeoning reputation of Khayyam drew more and more material into its orbit (incidentally, Khayyam had described a heliocentric solar system decades before Copernicus). By 1600, collections of Khayyam’s poetry contained as many as 1000 quatrains. Omar was suddenly enormous and important; 16 quatrains, perhaps the work of an afternoon, had exploded into an oeuvre.

But the second creation of Omar is the more well-known. Borges described it best, with his usual technique of turning all literary history into a Borges story: ‘A miracle happens: from the fortuitous conjunction of a Persian astronomer who condescends to write poetry, and an eccentric Englishman who peruses Oriental and Hispanic books, perhaps without completely understanding them, emerges an extraordinary poet who does not resemble either of them.’ One effect of this was a smoothing out; as befits an anthology containing hundreds of authors, the original Rubaiyat didn’t hang together in any way. Fitzgerald added a narrative and, perhaps more importantly, a tone: not an artificial exoticism but a distinct London idiom, one of the reasons for his poem’s enduring popularity. (‘O, take the Cash in Hand and waive the Rest.’)

Over the next century came another creation: a wave of re-translations, correcting Fitzgerald’s egregious errors, sometimes presented as definitive (in the case of Robert Graves, with the backing of a forged manuscript and some phony scholarship), other times presented as additional (in the case of Frank Kuppner, say, whose version is for my money the best recent Rubaiyat). Sixteen short poems had become a thousand, which had become one long poem in a different language, which had become thirty-odd long poems from different authors. Working backwards it reminds me of the opening credits to the BBC’s adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: a series of Russian dolls climaxing in a doll without a face, and finally emptiness. As a mathematician, Khayyam’s greatest innovation was [x], the algebraic symbol for an unknown quantity.

By John Clegg

Issue 1 | Introduction | Brave New World

Week 1 | Issue 1 | Contents

Tuesday | Poetry | C-words

Wednesday | Fiction | First Lines 

Thursday | Music | Music As Reading, an introduction to

Friday | Chapbook | Calendar, by John Bowman

Saturday | Mixtape | Berry Men

Sunday | Mini Essay | Three Creations of Omar Khayyam, by John Clegg

Silkworms Ink

A map of the internet circa 2003 showing the connections between different internet routers, from the Opte Project
 

Renownedly, the blogosphere has fertile soil; things fizz within and its surface is relentlessly broken up and out by the new. It is a network – a thing to join, or not. And joining in is not an act of participation; more, being part. And then, once you are integrated, you may realize what you have done.

In a recent lecture, Nickolas Christakis explained his findings on the influence of networks on our behavior – how those around us define us – like a ripple in fabric where each stitch goes with the flow. He demonstrated, through a study of body mass, the tendency of obesity to cluster. The study- as a graph- is a line of diminishing rectangles, with height representing the increase in probability of one's obesity, given that a social contact is obese. The largest, leftmost rectangle represents a 45% increase in your risk of becoming obese if your friends are obese. Increasing the degrees of separation, if only your friends' friends are obese, then your chances of becoming obese are 25% higher, friends of friends of friends – 10%. It is only until friends of friends of friends of friends that there is no longer a relationship between your body size and that of the network at large.

Of course, the principle is by no means limited to belt length. Layer upon layer of networks operate at the levels of our lives – smoking, drinking, hobbies and even emotions can be mapped out and the patches of shared feeling and action visualised. Collective existences are formed – and the network is what dictates its properties. Christakis uses the analogy of carbon in both coal and diamond. Both materials are constructs of carbon – it is not the individual components that dictate the final form but instead the arrangement of the network.

It is a strange way of seeing the world, as a place of group thinking and domino trails. However, it does present an opportunity –  a chance to sneeze good things in your face.

So Silkworms Ink has stepped up its game. We have three new editors.

Poetry Editor - Phil Brown
Fiction Editor - Jon Ware
Music Editor - Sam Kinchin-Smith

We even have a schedule and a weekly theme.

Monday – Introduction – James Harringman – A letter from the editor on the week’s theme.
Tuesday – Poetry Article – Phil Brown
Wednesday – Fiction Article – Jon Ware
Thursday – Music Article – Sam Kinchin-Smith
Friday – Chapbook – If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Friday’s business will be as usual – a weekly chapbook sized dose of poetry or prose from some the best writers around.
Saturday – Mixtape – Keep your ears peeled; these are going to be awesome. I won’t spoil the surprise with details now.
Sunday – Mini Essay – Something new.  Interested in submitting? Click here for details.

This week's theme is 'Issue 1's'. And so it starts.

Lastly, Bob (Dylan) if you are reading this - Happy Birthday


James Harringman
Editor