GNAWING

Marx and the Mouse

Karl Marx used to write at night. It’s well known. There’s a reason why so many authors write in the nocturnal hours. It’s because there aren’t enough hours in the day. However, if you close the door, as they say, the night could last forever. He’d sit there at his desk, quill in hand, page in front of him, cigar in the ashtray, bottle of port within reach, and do battle with his foe, that succubus feeding off the degradation and misery of man, the ghoul of capitalism, for hours on end upon end. Sometimes there would be a plate of food next to him lovingly prepared by Jenny depending on he behaved that week and the household finances. Often there wouldn’t be.
  O! Prometheus am I, he would cry, this work, this albatross, these buzzards, this never ending peck at my gut, how I am afflicted with it. All his life his the ultramundane shadow of his father’s death to liver cancer shaded Marx’s life. All for what! He’d resume, For trying to enlighten the enslaved! For suggesting there was something other than the dark! For telling Sisyphus to toss aside his accursed boulder! He would despair. I must be the loneliest genius in the world, he would lament. And all geniuses are lonely. He imagined himself Lear, the fool offering him a nuncle to go in place of the crown of his intellect. Tears would fill his eyes. Yes, the loneliest genius in the world. 
  But then, one night; HARK! A sound. Something other than the noise of the scratching of a nib on paper pervaded the desolate chamber. Who could this be, he thought, and, before realising the words forming on his mouth, called out, Papa? Instantly he realised his error and blushed. What a blush. The blush of a great man. If men could die from blushing surely he should have perished. However, more pressing thoughts entered his mind. Perhaps it was an old adversary, some bourgeois intellectual, an agent of mediocrity, whom he’d publicly humiliated, come to taint the work. He sat guarded. No, he thought. The creature, either daemon or mortal, did not sound malevolent. Quite the contrary. It sounded scared. Carefully he traced the sound to its source. Oh look. There it was. A little mouse had found its way into his study. Company. His loneliness lifted. Now how to coax his new comrade- nay, his new friend- to his side. Ah! he exclaimed, once again Lear, this time locked up in jail, abandoned, but now not alone, and he quoted the play aloud, a little melted cheese should do’t. And he put down his plate of scraps beside his chair. The mouse; all eyes, ears, trepidation and fur; approached and nibbled. However, he scurried away before they had chance to get properly acquainted.
  Marx, feigning an air of whimsy, told Engels about this the next day.
  Why Marx, chuckled Engels, it’s not cheese that mice love, it’s chocolate.
  Quite the little decadents, scowled Marx. Yes, quite the little decadents!
  As he made this proclamation Marx wondered where he could pick up a bar of dairy milk on the way home. But how shall I ever be able to attain it, he wondered. Why! By hook or by crook! However else? 

Pentagrams In Snow- Monday 11th

Dear Friends,

Next Monday is the first Pentagrams In The Snow of they year. To mark the occasion there will be a set from Bohman Brothers amidst our cast or regulars and others.

As usual, it is at The Lamb on Holloway Road, from 7.30p.m.

Hopefully see a few of you there.

With warmth,

Sam

December Pentagrams: the light will bend

I hear a tear in the radio static
and see it and melt electric 
into the fibers of your blue, blue dress

starlight peppering the water
in the kitchen sink



------

Friends,
It's the second Monday of the month and with it come Pentagrams In Snow, where we shall tread the boards softly perchance to dream a little dream and maybe drink a little drink or two..

Monday, 9th of December
7.30 onward
The Lamb on Holloway Rd

Pentagrams 14: a dance to the end of the shore

Friends,

Pentagrams 14. I'll be reading Poppy & The Rain. I don't know exactly the others will be reading.There might be a couple more portraits from The Sorrow & The Pity Made Flesh (/this is what you get when you mess with love). Come down.


Monday,  8th of October
7.30 p.m. 
The Lamb on Holloway Road

Pentagrams 12: Lemonade

Dear friends,

It's Pentgrams' brithday. At least I think its it's birthday, but it might be the eleventh one. I could look it up in a moment, but I find online archiving unnerving. It's too quick for one thing. It's holographic system of documentation is too at odds with my conception of reality. It values speed over time. Well, I like time, it's one of the things I'm made of (increasingly so (as it goes by)). I distrust speed: the amount of dumb and regrettable things I've done through not taking a little time, lemme tell ya.. No, friends, let's just agree on treating it as its birthday. For it we shall be having celebratory readings which shall be characteristic. To get in to the spirit of things I shall be exhibiting a few works from The Sorrow & The Pity Manifest In Flesh: Portraits by Samuel Kastin.

Oh, and make no qualms about it, there will be cakes & ale..

SK

Monday the 10th of September 
7.30 p.m. 
The Lamb on Holloway Road

Pentagrams 11: Portraits

An event: Monday 13th, 7.30p.m., The Lamb on Holloway Rd 

'I'm no art critic, but I know what I hate. This I don't hate.'
Monty Burns to Marge Simpson regarding her portrait of him

Dear Friends,
Pentagrams In Snow 11 shall be taking place on Monday the 13th. For it we have created a linguistic gallery of portraits with words by writers of my choosing. It should make for a worthwhile evening. For my part I have been working on a couple of pieces that should hopefully have a fragile beauty that some may find difficult, but that anyone who has a heart will understand. We'll see..

And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what it really is, that is not
Superficial but a visible core, then there is
No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
You will stay on, restive, serene in
Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning
But which holds something of both in pure
Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything.
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=32944)


https://bullgoosesamuel.blogspot.com/2014/03/under-skin.html

 The Ripples In The Water When It Rains Look A Lot Like The Rings In A Tree Stump

When a man is tired of Venice, he is tired of death

-Sian Tamsk

I allowed myself to take one photo in Venice. The city is horrendously over photographed and it cheapens it. I feel sorry for it in the same way I feel sorry for Marilyn Monroe.

    Jazz In Venice, 2018

You can see why it works so well as a backdrop to Don’t Look Now. When one is lost it compels his sense of it. It could never be accused of a place where one goes to, as the mind and body lot like to say, to find one’s center; there isn’t one. Even when you think you have got to grips with the town, come to a familiar place, you turn the corner and find yourself walking through an alley you’ve never seen before, that you’re sure has just appeared manifestly from some neverland, but has of course been there the whole time. Much like how one memory leads to another which leads to another, and so forth, until you’re so far removed from the original memory that you can’t for the life of you remember what it was. You find yourself in an endpoint you have no conception of, and you’ve only yourself to blame, and even he isn’t all that culpable. The map of Venice does not look dissimilar from a diagram of a brain. You’d have to be incredibly literal-minded to be able to make any sense out of the map. To walk its streets, as has been remarked before, feels like a dream.

  As with anything of the mind, you begin to question whether it is real. There you are amidst all these buildings, and all this history, and it’s difficult to fathom how any of it came to be. Surely it can’t be serious. Surely it cannot be. If it is conceivable, it is my shortcoming that I cannot get much further than it might be.

  All the while the sea flows indifferently by through the canals.

  Something about the city is conducive to sickness. To mourning too, though those things are hardly mutually exclusive. That is why it is such a good place to convalesce. There’s something about the sound of it in the afterhours. Water takes on a different persona in the nighttime. Then there’s the mist. It nearly hides everything. However, it stops short of that and allows you to see through it. Rather than hide it, it coats it in a mystery. That thing that connects us all as much open space connects the universe. That connects as much as a looking glass when we look at it the same time. It contains reflections, Brodsky writes of the water, among them my own. All mirrors look the same, though not to different eyes.

  You cannot walk over one of the many bridges without contemplating jumping in and pay a schoolboy homage to Ophelia. A friend of mine tells me that on his stay here he should have like to have held a gun to his skull and relieved it of its tormented contents. Just like Hemingway. There’s probably not a suicide that hasn’t been done. What could be more derivative than death?

Inevitably you find me in a bar. The girl next to me has ordered another Spritz. Campari, I’m pleased to say. I order another beer. I’m going to let the day be whatever it becomes. Like water … (if only this town was a little bit cheaper).

Notes

·         Though the walk ways are filled with little doggies, I have yet to see one cat. Have they all been put in a sack and thrown into the canal in an act of mass felicide? Like Joyce’s Copenhagen, are there no cats of Venice? Or, are they simply confined to the apartment? Either way, the seagulls flood the square cawing out an obscene parody of a cat wailing. They hurl sneering contempt on the whiskered adversaries with relish. Presumably kitty sits somewhere plotting a revenge more exacting than Shylock’s. Like him they may come to find their spoils come to the privy coffer of the state. It always does around here.

·         More significant than the absence of cats is the absence of cars. This is an obvious point to make but you don’t realise how profound it is until you are once again surrounded by all those fucking wheels. (As I write this a gondola sails past with a long haired gondolier teaching his young buttercup blonde daughter how to use the paddle, (are there any female gondoliers?))