Dubiouser and Dubiouser...?

Ahem... well, the dubious poetry came out rather fucked up, didn't it? The formatting went weird, and I have no idea why... nor any inclination to sort it out right now.

It's 4:30 in the morning and besides, it's not a new poem so I've gone off it long ago. To quote the Dude himself: "Fuck it."

I will leave it to the deities that control such things and leave the mess in place, claiming psychedelic inspiration for the unintentional desecration of my uptight Petrarchanism...

~ Om Mane Padme Hum ~

Dubious Poetry, Anyone?

Here's a poem I wrote as an exercise, not having done such a thing in years. It's a Petrarchan sonnet on the subject of my first experience under LSD... and, yes, it's very bad indeed!

Lysergic Sonnet

Back when the Mondays were the Stones and the Roses were the Beatles and I gave a shit,
me and Heidi, backlit by MTV, each placed a square of blotter on our tongues and felt
that special imaginary bitterness, waited the breathless wait, an hour until I said It
isn't working, then oh, fuck – blurring, expanding, pleasure shivers, a melt

ing wave of laughter – spinal column vibrating, all six senses on fire – the world
malleable, strange, brand new – the commencement of ego-death – the lesser
subsumed by the greater – a fat Buddha in flight, we watched his white wings unfurl
ing in beatific dissolution – pulsing, now – Albert Hoffmann Vs. Mad Professor

throbbing in the walls – lost in thought, word, wallpaper – pattern of music in my
pores morphing into breathing rhythm, hallucinating rhythm – Primal Scream
exhorting come together – a nexus, perfect alignment, an explosion of utter clarity
minutes impersonating hours imitating eternity in a split-second flash – a dream

that never ended but burnt off like mist in the soft pink sunrise – we ended
up waving goodbye in the rosy radiance – wordless, happy, united, boundaries transcended.

(Dedicated to Heidi Rocke - hey babe, you out there?)

Clamp: The One I Love

I bought this for Plaxy for Christmas, but I think I liked it more than she did...

It's actually by half of Clamp, written by Nanase Ohkawa with cute, ultra-girly art by Mick Nekoi – the look is kind of a hybrid of Clamp-style cool and old-school shojo. The book is a slender collection of twelve seven-page stories on the theme of love, each based around a single word (my favourites were “Aitai”, I miss you, and “Kirei”, pretty) and accompanied by a short essay.

It's a more satisfying read than the size and format perhaps imply, and because each story is so like a natural little train of thought (a feeling reinforced by the brief, amusing essays) the overall impression amounts to more than you'd expect. The stories are highly personal and rather literary in flavour – like a lot of manga shorts, they're more impressionistic than an artsy Western comic would dare to be, and the content is very ordinary and universal – not quite what we expect from the creators of Magic Knight Rayearth!

A fun, unusual shojo manga that's well worth checking, especially if you've never ready any romantically-inclined comics before.

Gosho Aoyama: Case Closed 2 & 3

The first book was cool, but Aoyama's really starting to hit his stride in these books as the plots become more concentrated and the blend of genres sometimes leans more toward mystery than comedy.

Having previously been transformed into a first-grader, our hero Jimmy Kudo/Conan Edogawa is now faced with an almost Chandleresque tangle involving a billion-yen heist and a seemingly unrelated missing person, a haunted house mystery and a classic plot combo – a locked room murder on a liner ship!

This time out Conan's got some more cool gadgets to help him out (including electroschockin' sneakers and super-elasto-braces!) and in one case he goes adventuring with his new friends from grade school, but it's his deductive powers which really get the workout this time. I also like the fact that the people around him are starting to get suspicious now rather than five volumes down the line, and the fact that the case-by-case structure works rather well with the soap-operatic aspects of the manga and the continuing storyline of Conan wanting to be Jimmy again.

Aoyama's art is as cool and funny as ever, and the plots are light and fun but still satisfying mini-mysteries way above and beyond anything you'll find on Murder She Wrote... basically, I can't wait for the next book!

Takeshi Konomi: Prince of Tennis #11

This was a curiosity buy which only served to further pique my curiosity, but it's certainly more involving and entertaining than I expected from a manga about a bunch of youth playing tennis... rather squeaky-clean youth, too, although apparently some (gasp!) underage cigarette smoking was airbrushed out to protect America's young from the evils of... um... well, pseudo-reality, because it looks like only the nasty kid smoked anyway! Oh well.

The art is bold and dramatic, the characters well-designed and obviously strong enough to carry the series between tension-fraught tournaments... although this book's all tension-fraught tournament, so there wasn't a lot of character stuff going on.

Overall, I liked it, but I'd probably only pick up more if it landed in the bargain bin again – although I'm curious, is it the dramatic tennis or the character drama which made this so popular in Japan?

A storyless paragraph...

It surprised me when it appeared silently, unannounced, one spring morning, and it annoyed me when, by noon the next day, I realized it wasn't going anywhere. It was purple, approximately star-shaped, made of translucent stuff through which bright indigo veins and a pulsing crimson heart were indistinctly visible, and in the centre on each side, one huge eye, the size of my head, just a big white and a perfect ink-black pupil, smooth as oil, forever dilating and contracting to stimuli unseen by such weak eyes as mine. It made no sound but I could hear it singing in my head, always. It moved around me at will, moved by its whims. If I was in a small room or traversing a narrow way, it hung back two feet above my right shoulder like my conscience. If I was walking a hill or settling to sleep or in a crowded place, it would rise some ten feet into the air and hover directly above me. Then again, when I was alone with it, it would often float before my face, and I would gaze into its eye, for hours on end sometimes, numbed by its overwhelming presence, its painful inscrutability. I had thought, before it came, that I knew what it was to be alone. I now find myself an unwilling student, learning day by day that there is no limit that can bound loneliness.

Truman Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany's

At slightly less than a hundred pages long, Breakfast at Tiffany's, rather like its subject Holly Golightly, falls into the “small but perfectly formed” category.

The feel of 1940s New York is captured with crystalline clarity, but this is all about character – an achingly precise portrait of Holly and the neighbour, admirer and unnamed narrator whose strange non-relationship with her is the heart of the story.

The reader simply sits back and observes what feels like the radomly-remembered details of messy, complex lives and emotions unfolding with deceptive simplicity... until the end, when the scheme of the work reveals itself and the author's careful, subtle design becomes apparent.

It's a brilliant little novel, neat and near perfect with economy and grace to spare, and Capote's writing has a lightness of touch and a swift-flowing readability which conceals deep currents of meaning and emotion.

These traits were also evident in the three short stories which round out the slim volume, of which my favourite was “House of Flowers” – beautifully written in a cool, quick style – though both “A Diamond Guitar” and “A Christmas Memory” are excellent.