Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. Well actually in this section Nicholas Reid writes whatever he damned well pleases.
DICHTUNG UND SELBSTBEFRIEDIGUNG
I knew a man (I
really did) who knew a man
who wrote a novel about yet another man
who wrote a novel about yet another man
and the first
man didn’t like the novel
the second man
wrote about the third man
and the first
man wrote a poem about
the second man,
although he didn’t use his name,
and often
confused him with the third man.
And when he was told
off about this
the first man
tried some fancy footwork
and pretended he
wasn’t attacking the second man
(even though the
second man was a colleague
of the first
man, and was very crook at the time
the first man
wrote his poem)
but was just
attacking the sentimentality
of the second
man’s story, and besides,
talented poets
aren’t held to the same
standards of
behaviour as lesser beings
And, fuck me, in
his poem the first man
made sure he
used the word “fuck”
a number of
times to really show
he wasn’t
sentimental. “Fuckety-fuckety-fuckety”
he went, adding
a gratuitous “cunt”
to confirm his
wondrous literary skill;
and doctoral
students said how ingeniously
he had thus shown
the meaninglessness of war,
which was kind
of odd because the second man
had actually
been to war but the first man hadn’t.
And the first man said how patronising
the second man was to the fictional, working class
third man, which again was kind of odd, given that
the first man made a career out of being patronising.
And the first man said how patronising
the second man was to the fictional, working class
third man, which again was kind of odd, given that
the first man made a career out of being patronising.
Anyway the first
man didn’t like being criticised
and wrote pompous
letters comparing his poem to
MacFlecknoe and the
satires of Pope. (A bit like one of
the first man’s
acolytes comparing himself
to Dante
Alighieri – big ideas some people
have of themselves.)
And really it all seemed
a tant-ie from a
man who didn’t like people
other than
certified agnostics and lapsed Anglicans
in his place of
work, and especially didn’t like
the second man
because he didn’t fall
into these
categories and because (unlike the first man)
he actually got
on well with his students,
and didn’t talk
about “MY POETRY” when he was
supposed to be
lecturing on other things.
It’s all so long
ago now, and perhaps you
can thank me for
being an unreliable narrator
of all this and
showing that I understand
postmodernism
(even if the latest pundits say
we are now
post-postmodern). But one thing
I am certain of –
a gratuitous insult at the end
of a poem proves
nothing. It would be as puerile
and unwarranted as if I were to say that at his age,
in throwing this Billingsgate, the first man was expressing
a primal fear that after all his fuck and cunt bluster,
and unwarranted as if I were to say that at his age,
in throwing this Billingsgate, the first man was expressing
a primal fear that after all his fuck and cunt bluster,
he was now
really mortified by
a small one.
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