What on earth is going on?

Two things happened today which freaked me out a bit. The first thing was finding a small metal ball-bearing apparently left randomly on a shelf in my section of the bookshop, next to a copy of Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde. This probably seems like a fairly quotidian thing to have happen, but it seems a bit perturbing if you know what the last book I read was.

The other slightly odd thing that happened was that my Blackberry apparently only detected that it had a memory card in it tonight when I went to take a photo of myself demonstrating the size to which a hole in one of my socks had grown:

The weird thing is, I've taken photos on the thing before, and it's always just saved them to the device memory, not a media card. I didn't even know there was a bloody media card in the thing in the first place. So - what the hell happened? Was the card always there, and did the thing just fail to detect it 'til now? Or did somebody sneak into the staff room, break into my bag, and install one? And if it's the latter - couldn't you have installed one with more than 1 gig of memory on it, man? That'll hardly be room for anything.

I suppose it must have been there all along, which is both a shame and a blessing. A shame because if I'd known I had a memory card all along I'd have downloaded the 7digital app, a blessing because if I had done I would have bankrupted myself buying Florence and the Machine tracks by now. Indeed do many things come to pass.

The Human Rights Celebration Gig

This gig isn't about me performing. I'm doing one poem and that's it. It's about giving the audience an opportunity to write something, themed around this prompt:

'I'm afraid to say...'

and that's it. The idea is that in some societies people are afraid to say things because of government repression, but in our society many other kinds of repression are in play. The idea of the piece is to give people a safe space to say things they would say, but they're afraid of reprisals from bigoted, ignorant people.

Over the course of the day, we'll be asking people to write down what they're afraid to say, and stick it to a wall in Newcastle Central Library. At the end of the day I'll take down these notes, collate them, and work them into a poem we'll publish on the web (and elsewhere, if possible).

I'd like to give people who follow me on the net a chance to be part of this too. Imagine you're completing that sentence: 'I'm afraid to say...' followed by what you fear to say. Even if it's 'nothing'. (I would love it if it was nothing, and can think of at least one person who'd give that as her answer). Then, once you've decided how you'd complete that sentence, either reply in the comments below or tweet me at @adamfishpoet on Twitter with the result. If you tweet me, add the hasthtag #imafraidtosay to make sure I see what you're getting at, and also the hashtag #anon if you'd like not to be credited for the final published version of the piece. If you add your line in the comments, mark it either 'anonymous' or 'creditted' as desired.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to people taking part. Updates here soon on how this gig goes, and then we begin the countdown to the next gig which, as much as I fear it, has to come some time. See you soon.

Speak Fear

Don't worry that I haven't said too much about the Human Rights Celebration Gig at Newcastle Library on Saturday (it's at 3pm, by the way, if anyone wants to come). Work is happening on it, a few things have changed, even since the Baynham Test post the other day, and I'm now a lot more confident that It'll go better than originally planned. One of the things that excites me about this thing is that there's very little performing involved in it. I will have a video of one piece on before I perform, I will do one number myself, then I have a little presentation to give (with accompanying Powerpoint slides - oh yes!) explaining the point of the thing, and then - it's over to the audience. It's their gig, not mine. They'll make it or break it, and I hope to god they make it, because I want to give whoever turns up a chance to speak their fears, to feel brave, even for a moment, in the hope that that bravery might be something they then carry with them elsewhere in their lives.

And part of that is because, at this point in my life, I'm absolutely goddam terrified. And the thing that I'm terrified of is my next gig. I don't know when that is yet, and in a way part of me doesn't want to know, and part of me wants to delay it indefinitely for exactly that reason. Go on hiatus. Leave the scene.

Those of you who read this blog and are aware of my previous work will have observed that the stuff I've been posting on here recently has taken a slightly different turn. I'm not playing to the gallery anymore; I'm not doing funny poems about Meat Loaf and rhyme-heavy freestyle-derived numbers that show off my performance chops. I'm trying to be real. I'm trying to write something true about myself and the way I see the world. Something that doesn't depend on audience approval, or indeed the provocation of audience disapproval: something I can stand by and say this is me, this is how I see it and let the chips fall where they may. This is the whole reason I pulled the plug on publishing All Haste is from the Devil back in July, and, as much as that decision hurt a lot of good people and made me look like a ridiculous primadonna, I'm more certain than ever that it was the right one, because forcing myself to be real, to get back to a writing process that's about describing what I experience in the most honest way I can, has resulted in poems that I can be proud of. You've seen some of them on this blog. But here's the thing: you haven't seen the half of it.

There are things I've written recently, good, well-crafted poems I've spent a lot of time on, which ripped out my heart and stamped it to a smear. Poems the writing of which literally left me in a crying heap on the floor of my room. And I am afraid to read these poems in public, afraid to submit them for publication, because as good as they are (and I believe them to be among the best I've ever written), I know that to put these things out there will change my world in ways I'm not prepared for. I'll go further: I'm afraid that putting these things out there could break me, and that if they do, there's nothing that'll put me back together.

And I'm afraid most of all because - and here, really, is the thing - they want to be read. They want to be published. The next time I send work out for publication, these poems will be among it. The next time I perform, these poems will be the stuff I read.

And that's what scares me. That's what wakes me in the middle of the night, what makes me stop and sit back on my haunches on an afternoon walk, what makes me think a million times a day about announcing that Saturday's gig will be my last one. Because I don't know if I can face the gig after that.

Because: after I invite Saturday's audience to find the strength to speak their fears, I have to find the strength to speak my own.

On Looking Back Into the Mosh Pit

Off to a party tonight and may not be in easy reach of a computer for a couple of days because I'm off to another party the next day - I am so rock 'n' roll. So to tide you over, here's the poetry video I've been working on over the last couple of days.

The Baynham Test

I've been working on the text bit of the interactive poetry session I'm going to do for the Human Rights Day gig at Newcastle Library on the 12th of December. This is really weird because I thought there wouldn't be a lot of writing and me talking, and so far the combined intro, links etc comes to three pages. I'll be trimming, that's for sure. But one of the things I've been thinking about, one of the challenges, is this: how do we keep an event in which we invite people to collaborate and write a poem based on the idea of saying that which they're afraid to say, and stop it descending into an 'I'm afraid to say I hate the Muzzies but I can't because of political correctness gawn maaaaaad' hate-fest?

And then it occurred to me that you can't fake fear. Here's part of the text I've written up for the presentation bit, addressing this issue, and proposing an idea of how we can assess the risk-value of peoples' free speech:

There’s an idea, widespread in this country, that defending the rights of minorities to live without fear is bullying and a curtailment of free speech. And that’s crap. It’s a lie perpetuated by liars who have a vested interest in keeping it going to sell newspapers, and that’s it. First of all, from the earliest time free speech and free expression were recognised as rights it has always been understood that they don’t include the right to make life hell for vulnerable minorities, or to spread hatred and prejudice. And for another, how often do you see the same boring people droning on about ‘political correctness’ and how it tries to silence them, week in, week out? If there really was a group trying to silence them, don’t you think they’d, well, be silent? It’s a crock and most people know it. Don’t believe what you read in the Mail or the Sun: only 19% of people trust those papers, and with good reason.

I propose a test we can use, on ourselves and anyone who pretends to be standing up for free speech: let’s call it the Ian Baynham test, because he’s the example I’m going to use. When he challenged three thugs about the homophobic abuse they were spouting, he knew he was taking a genuine risk, that the situation could turn violent and he could get hurt. In that situation he would have genuinely, emotionally, felt afraid. He would shake and feel the blood draining from his bodily core to his extremities as his fight-or-flight reflex kicked in. Now, when Richard Littlejohn sits in his mansion in Florida and writes another nonsense column about political correctness, or when Tony Horne says in that hilarious way of his that ‘we’re not allowed to say ‘gypsy’ anymore’, do you think they feel like that? Do you think they feel that they run a genuine risk in what they’re saying? No. That’s the test. Fear is an emotion. It can’t be faked. So – what real things, things which actually exist, try to frighten us out of expressing ourselves?

I’ll give you an example from my own experience. As some of you may have worked out, I’m not exactly the most macho guy going. An alpha male is not me. And because of this I fear taking the bus late at night, because I know there are people who object to the way I express myself in terms of my appearance and body language, and there’s a risk that these people might beat me up. And that, genuinely, makes me feel afraid. I’m vulnerable in that situation. I feel that tightness in the stomach, that lightening in the head, that urge to run away. And that’s how I know that’s a genuine fear, not one I’ve made up.

What things make you afraid to speak up, readers?

Theology Geek Humour

Thanks to Mitch Benn for writing this brilliant paragraph, quite possibly the funniest thing I've read in months:

As is often the case with sequels, The New Testament was not as universally well received as its predecessor with many staunch fans of the original refusing to accept it as part of the “canon” and preferring to ignore it completely (see also Highlander II: The Quickening).

Comparing the first major schism of the Abrahamic religions to the reaction of Highlander fans to that film's dire sequel is a stroke of genius, which reminds me I should try to make time to listen to more episodes of The Now Show.

The Worst Thing?

You know what the worst thing about being a writer is? The absolute worst thing? Worse than the conflict between the need for constant praise and the violent desire to run screaming away from the world; worse than the nights staying up past three in the morning with a pad and a pen and raging insomnia because you're trying to say something and you know you haven't got it quite right just yet, but if you stay up just a little longer and change this little bit here then you might have something that works; worse than the fact that it's almost certainly a one-way ticket to a lifetime of grinding poverty and total dissatisfaction? Worse than that?

It's the fact that occassionally you read something, or hear something, in which someone really pours out their heart, exposes themselves in ways you'd never think they'd dare, rips off a layer of their skin and shows you the fresh fucking blood and muscle beneath...

...and part of you, a horrible, mercenary, assassin-hearted little part of you, is clocking all the mistakes, all the little ways it's not quite right and thinking: 'yeah. I could top this, easy.'

I'm a writer. I hate myself. Sometimes, these facts aren't unrelated.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to have a shower.