About freddie

writer, migrant, work in progress

person

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From Tank Person to

Person, transitioning, stillI

Standing up to power

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I became one with

The tank, then we dissolved, gone—

Person can return.

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Omm

from conversations with my friend

Yu Yan Yip

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The photo is of a rare and wondrous Inchan tree, over 200 years old, in Thailand, which bears two different types of fruit, the In and the Chan, at alternating times each year. In a similar way, one person may develop two different, alternating kinds of being, at alternating times, while remaining the same, consistent person.

This poem is part of a series inspired by the experience of Yu Yan Yip, previously known as Tank Man, who has been on the run and transitioning for many years.

The previous poems in the series are:

– Tank Man

– Tank Person

Photo of the Inchan Tree by Freddie Oomkens taken at Kanchanaburi, Thailand, in 2022

new year’s eve—oudejaarsavond 2022

driving home for new
year blue but hopeful for the years
gone past and yet to come—
******
skyline, trees, headlights
smudged on night’s smeared-up palette
wiping all away
*******
in the wash and wake
of darkness blinded, dimmed by light
while morning’s stirring

*******

*******

*******

31 December 2021

haiku and photo by freddie omm

autumn blaze away (and next year be a blast)

cold november mist

dissolving trees in fields of

smudged, frozen furrows

*

there I go dissolving back into my past

*

dim sky shrinks to specks

of spattered grey, behind which,

rumours of daylight

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lurk, blacked-out memories

of blue, spillage of cold sun

flown, fleeting ashes

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half-forgotten burned-out futures (some flames could be relit perhaps at last)

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a breeze to kindle

sparks of pale years’ sunken fire—

blaze up this autumn

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O autumn please just blaze away (and next year be a blast)

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Freddie Omm

December 2022


tank person


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Called a man, then, I

Changed, fluid, freely flowing. Now

I am Tank Person.

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Omm

from conversations with my friend

Yu Yan Yip

 

photo by freddie

Shall I Compare You

This new sonnet riffs off Shakespeare’s 18th:

…for all those whose love is so fresh and strong it can seem unreal, here’s a sonnet for each and every one of us – Happy New Year!

Shall I compare thee you to a summer’s day… something you’re not?—

To me, you are living poetry

(Not some wordy simulation that can’t be)

And you’re the very essence of what’s hot—

Though similes like darling buds may grow

The sense of us, approximating us,

You’re as unique, incomparable

As our love will always be—deep, unfathomable:

And aren’t all of us much more than sensually defined

Both as couples, and as twinned lone souls (sometimes of one mind)?

Then, in the lives to come, more darling buds shall grow

To blossom free, just like the two of us:

Our loves as indescribable as real

(Although this near perfection sometimes seems unreal).

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Freddie Omm

January 2021

ventura beach revisited

                      Freddie in Ventura

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those amber sunsets

never set but hung in mind

resplendent always

*

many years before

this beach and all that’s on it

were now, were mine

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time was not what it

now is nor is becoming

each moment stayed whole

*

the waves held me fast

while the wind blew permanence

over solid sand

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gulls sat in the sky

as if transfixed or painted

by a maker’s hand

*

 

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a kid on a beach

– in the timeless space of life –

that kid’s always now

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freddie omm

ventura, september 2019

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The first of my haiku chains about Ventura beach was published here in December 2014: on ventura beach. I wrote this new one and took the photo while revisiting the beach last week. Here’s a shorter edit of the poem on Instagram.

comets

we don’t honour time

enough sometimes we forget

each moment’s passing

*

life’s woke in a dream –

desires’ dissolving seasons –

delusional days

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sprung on by mad gods

our fantasies in the flesh

dissipating time

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narcoticised nights

splinter in breaking trance beats

time’s passing fancies

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like comets’ bright tails

outgassing in orbital

periods of coma

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millennial hours

centuries past in seconds

lit by mortal suns

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we wake in our beds

making lifetimes’ catwalk love

cosmic comedy

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ethereal hopes

brighten our dreams like comets

blazing through black night

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omm

still


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Decades pass by, while

Moment of eternity

Stands still, like a tank.

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Omm

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Photos of tank in Ukraine taken by Dmitri Bukhantsov in February 2022 and added, with thanks to Dmitri, to this post later.


there’s something wrong with… (V)

#haiku by freddie omm; photo by saltanat zhursinbek

there’s something wrong with.. (IV)

#haiku by freddie, pic by david clode via unsplash

there’s something wrong with… (III)

#haiku by freddie, photo by charles via unsplash

there’s something wrong with… (II)

#haiku, photo by freddie

freddie omm’s Sicilian Haiku, illustrated by lucy henshall, will be published by Mad Bear Books this summer.

there’s something wrong with…

#haiku

Freddie Omm”s Sicilian Haiku will be published this summer by Mad Bear Books.

Van Gogh’s First Literary Appearance Discovered

starry night, by van gogh, 1889

starry night, vincent van gogh, 1889

Van Gogh is often seen as the epitome of the tortured artist – misunderstood, rejected in his lifetime, and only slowly building up a posthumous reputation after his early, self-inflicted death.

This supposed obscurity has been shown to be a myth before. But that legendary image still clings to Van Gogh, helping to make him one of the world’s most popular, iconic artists.

vincent van gogh

vincent van gogh

Now Dutch journalist Sander Brink has unearthed the first mention of Van Gogh in a piece of fiction. It throws up some fascinating insights and surprises.

Because Van Gogh’s first appearance is startlingly early – 1903, in a novel called De Winkeljuffrouw uit Oiseau d’Or – Chapeaux pour dames et enfants. (translation: “The Shopgirl in Oiseau d’Or – hats for ladies and children”)

The novelist, Cornélie Noordwal, far from being some kind of avant-garde writer at the cutting edge of modern art, was a hugely popular writer of mainstream (arguably middlebrow) bestsellers, romances and childrens’ books.

Van Gogh’s fleeting mention in De Winkeljuffrouw will thus have formed the first exposure thousands of readers ever had to the artist…

cornélie noordwal, turn of the century blockbuster writer

cornélie noordwal, dutch blockbuster writer in the 1890s and 1900s

What interests me first is the relative standings of Van Gogh and Noordwal.

In 1903, Noordwal was a famous, rich, successful writer (albeit one many critics despised), whereas Van Gogh, thirteen years dead, was only just beginning his phoenix-like rise from obscurity.

In the 110 years since, of course, their positions have radically reversed. Like most middlebrow blockbusters of bygone ages, Noordwal, for all her merits, has lapsed into relative obscurity, while Van Gogh has become the elemental incarnation of genius, whose works sell for hundreds of millions.

The second thing which interests me is the nature of Van Gogh’s fictional début. Because he is sketched in terms remarkably close to his alienated, self-dramatising self-image (as expressed in his own letters), which has driven another core aspect of the Van Gogh myth.

In the novel, Jan, a poet, is writing to Nora, his beloved, and he mentions Van Gogh as being similar to her:

Of course you won’t know who that was. He was a man who was nothing but soul, like you, and his life was violently troubled by it; he painted and drew things, considered laughable and insane by laymen, and yet showed himself more of an artist than a mass of famous painters who create impeccable landscapes and  pictures.

(translation, by Freddie Oomkens, from the Dutch quoted in Sander Bink’s piece of 3rd July 2013)

The third interesting thing is that this figure of Van Gogh already seems fairly close to being a stock character, a Romantic literary archetype of a sort popular in the period. Think of the Les poètes maudites (1884), or D.H. Lawrence, or Leonard Bast in Howards End (1910), or a host of others.

It may sound fanciful, but it is almost as if literature, by means of this dainty little novel, were co-opting Van Gogh to join this gallery of characters whose noble sensitivity ejects them from society…

The final interesting thing, one which also intrigues Sander Bink, is the part played by letter-writing in this story.

Van Gogh’s letters had been published well before 1903 – indeed Albert Aurier’s famously influential article about him (Les Isolés, published in 1890) was heavily influenced by Van Gogh’s letters.  Noordwal, who lived in Paris (she died there in 1928), may well have read the article, which appeared in Mercure de France, a magazine popular among lovers of modern art, as well as extracts of the letters which appeared in Holland and France throughout the 1890s.

All in all, a fascinating insight into how consistently, and from its earliest days, Van Gogh’s iconic international image was shaped by literature, as shown in his very first (so far!) fictional entrance.

Jackals and Arabs

This little parable, like a fairy story, is utterly unlike most people’s idea of Kafka, reading like an enigmatic tale for children:

Jackals and Arabs

a place where jackals and arabs might meet

a place where jackals and arabs might meet

Reading this story to his daughters – and seeing their delighted reaction – inspired Matthue Roth to create My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs, which is published this week.

The idea is long overdue – for almost a century, Kafka has been imprisoned in a Kafkaesque prison not of his own making.

It’s high time someone set him free.

translating keyserling

eduard von keyserling’s masterpiece of literary impressionism, waves (wellen), has never been translated into english before.

it is now being attempted over on oomkenscom

the bay of puck on the baltic sea, setting of keyserling's "waves".

the bay of puck on the baltic sea, setting of keyserling’s “waves”.

 

 

The Great Gatsby (the novel) Flayed

Great Gatsby movie poster

Hilarious debunking, by Kathryn Schulz, of The Great Gatsby.

If I don’t agree wholly, it’s because I think the novel’s iconic stature is deserved. In persuading us of its greatness, its shortness helps, too – allowing readers to supply a lot of the thematic power Fitzgerald merely sketches in.

Having said that, Schulz does land some telling punches – “third person sanctimonious” is good as the narrative voice Fitzgerald gave Nick in Gatsby – and this was something which someone just had to say roundabout now, with the umpteenth (well, fifth) Hollywood treatment  hitting the screens.

Schulz: Why I Despise The Great Gatsby — Vulture.

4 years’ prison for stabbing sister in Swedish ‘honour killing’ case

swedish honour killing victim

Her brother was only 16 when he stabbed her more than 100 times, in April 2012.

She’d returned to Sweden a year before, fleeing an arranged marriage in Iraq.

Knowing the possible consequences of her brother’s concern for the family “honour”, she always slept with a knife under her pillow.

Local authorities, terrified of upsetting sensitivities, ignored repeated warnings from the anti-honour-killing group Tank.

The boy duly killed his sister. Originally sentenced to eight years, that sentence has been halved in light of his age at the time of his crime.

 

Court slashes sentence in ‘honour killing’ case – The Local.

david foster wallace on planet trillaphon

david foster wallace–lavishly admired depressive and novelist who killed himself eight years ago–is the subject of three new books now reviewed by thomas meaney, who concludes, in a mixed metaphor of baroque exuberance, that:

to be the master distiller of the times for a generation is no small feat. It requires a willingness to dirty your hands in the culture to a point at which most novelists would flinch. It means being willing to swallow boredom whole.

wallace’s greed for drugs was, apparently, as epic as the taste for tedium meaney ascribes to him, but neither could numb his life-consuming depressions.

he poured his preoccupations with modern life’s minutiae into knowing post-modernist prose, intellectually flashy, emotionally absent.

his reverential treatment of items which used to be thought unworthy of such (TV pre-eminent among them) is getting tired and dated today, but his books are beautifully emblematic of his time.

David Foster Wallace on Planet Trillaphon | TLS.


she lifts her veil: a vision – three rondelets

 

I was in the Musée d’Orsay last week and took this picture of a striking sculpture by Barrias (Nature Revealing Herself to Science).

(From this angle her limpid marble eyes have a disconcertingly full, yet vacant look, brimming compassion yet somehow indifferent – although that may be a fanciful not to say pretentious notion…)

Coincidentally, I have been working on a poem called She Lifts Her Veil.

It consists of three rondelets – a charming medieval French lyric form.

The subject of the poem isn’t medieval exactly nor is it really about the grand Victorian personification of Nature Unveiling Herself to Science. It’s more about modern men and women and how they see each other:

 

she lifts her veil –
a vision: blank, dilating eyes,
she lifts her veil.

you breathe, the smell of her inhale,
flushed lips mouth fire – as flames chastise
brazen flashing immodesties –
she lifts her veil:

*

they see her face –
fragrant and nude, beyond the pale:
they see her face

itching to put her in her place –
frustration makes them bluster, flail,
so helpless – lewd and sexed and frail –
they see her face:

*

she drops her veil
lets it float, fall, fade where it lies…
she drops her veil

to speak her peace – a piece of tale
embodies what she prophesies,
when in the mirror of our eyes
she drops her veil.


freddie omm, spring 2012

My Novel "Honour" Published

My best-selling thriller “Honour,” published by Mad Bear Books, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon stores worldwide:

(USA AmazonUK Amazon)

Paperbacks are also available from Barnes & Noble and CreateSpace e-store: Honor (USA edition) –  Honour (UK edition).

Shocking, darkly funny, edgily post-feminist, “Honour” is about men who kill for honour, the girls who “drive them to it,” – and love in an age which consumes it…

the enemy within

Paul Berman, in the New Republic, reviews Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea.

It is a disturbing book showing how Islam is being corrupted by an aggressive and intolerant ideology.

The late Abdurrahman Wahid, once President of Indonesia, described radical Islamist political and terrorism as the product of an “extreme and perverse ideology.”

This ideology, as Berman notes, contrasts with

other, more tolerant and traditional currents of thought within Islam, more compatible with modern liberal ideas—such as the peaceable Sufism endorsed by Wahid, together with sundry humanist currents that descend from Islam’s medieval Golden Age.

Yet it is the radical Islamists who are making the political running in Islamic societies worldwide.

They wage a campaign of violence and intimidation whose most high-profile events were gruesome – the hacking to death of Vincent van Gogh on an Amsterdam street, the murder of Salman Rushdie’s Japanese translator.

But less high profile victims (Christians in Egypt, Somalia and Algeria, for example) abound, and the campaign’s success is partly the silence in which less spectacular events pass us by:

Incidents in which artistic or intellectual presentations have been cancelled without any accompanying violence or arrests have become fairly common: the sandblasting by the Dutch police of a mural in Amsterdam protesting the murder of van Gogh; the removal of artwork from London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 2006; the cancellation of a display at the Tate Gallery; the cancellation in Geneva in 1993 of a production of Voltaire’s play Fanaticism: or Mahomet the Prophet (followed, a dozen years later, by a minor riot when Voltaire’s play did receive a French production); the quiet removal of artworks from display by the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2010 (though I wonder how Marshall and Shea would judge the Met’s ambitious new wing of Islamic art); the removal in 2009 of the Danish cartoons from a scholarly Yale University Press book about the Danish cartoons; the cancellation in 2009 of a German mystery novel about Muslim honor killings; the flight underground of a threatened cartoonist, Molly Norris, of the Seattle Weekly; the decision by eight hundred newspapers in the United States not to run a syndicated cartoon by Wiley Miller. And so on.

 Meanwhile, campaigns against “hate speech” and “Islamophobia” proliferate, often based on quaint paranoia about Western intentions:

 The doctrine postulates a conspiracy theory, according to which Crusaders and Zionists have been plotting to annihilate Islam for many hundreds of years—in the case of the Zionists, ever since the Medina controversies of the seventh century.

 The legal systems of the West have been instrumentalized to silence Islamism’s critics. Geert Wilders in Holland and Mark Steyn in Canada are well-known Western victims of these bizarre and shameful prosecutions, but many more are from Muslim backgrounds:

 the Anglican bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, who converted to Christianity; the brave and morally precise Italian-Egyptian journalist Magdi Allam, who also converted (at the hands of the pope, no less, such that his middle name is now Cristiano); the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Holland, until she left Holland; Necla Kelek, a German feminist from Turkey; Ekin Deligöz, a German Green politician from Turkey; Souad Sbai, the head of Italy’s Association of Moroccan Women, and too many others to list.

 Finally, perhaps most fatally, the campaign is leading to self-censorship of a kind which cannot bear even to acknowledge itself – a literally self-effacing cowardice.

umberto eco flayed for anti-semitism

in daniel johnson’s hatchet job in standpoint, umberto eco is accused of flirting with anti-semitism.

johnson says eco tries to pass off a chesterton quote as his own (When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing: they believe in anything) – a moot point, given chesterton himself didn’t actually write it…

johnson has no time for eco:

His novels are case studies in postmodernism, which elides all categories of truth, beauty, morality and politics into an esoteric game.

the article’s payoff:

The doubts sown by the book fall on fertile soil, for ours is a culture that long ago lost its bearings, thanks to the prestige of postmodernists such as Umberto Eco. He stands for the intellectuals of the 21st century who, like those of the last century, commit trahison des clercs by flirting with anti-Semitism when their duty is to take a clear stand against it.

if postmodernism truly is nothing more than a futile, meaningless game, it seems harsh to accuse it and its practitioners of fanning the flames of anti-semitism.

poetic parataxis

robert moore’s article in n+1 explores the e-book from its inception in 1971 to future adumbrations, including interactive texts and those which rearrange themselves anew with every reading.

impressive and involving as a lot of these are, the future of linear text and storytelling is still (- i think, and i think robert moore thinks so too -) bright.

as moore puts it: Writing is a miraculous technology all its own—a code that, when input through the optic nerve, induces structured, coherent hallucinations.

blurbs, blaps and blovers – one hell of a ride

article by alan levinovitz (in the millions) looks at the history of the blurb from roman times to now.

the template was set by erasmus of rotterdam’s puff for his friend and fellow humanist thomas more:

“All the learned unanimously subscribe to my opinion, and esteem even more highly than I the divine wit of this man…”

george orwell excoriated blurbs, describing them as:

 “disgusting tripe,” quoting a particularly odious example from the Sunday Times:

“If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.”

the ubiquity of blurbs by generous writers like (say) salman rushdie makes some readers wonder about their sincerity.

even so, a blurb from a famous writer for a new one must increase sales, otherwise no one would bother.

our epic birdsong (haiku)

online utterance

a perpetual orphic stream –

our epic birdsong:

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the greatest human

works and thoughts, our dearest dreams,

will end in a tweet.

James Patterson Swallowed My Goldfish… And the Bowl With It!

a goldfish
james patterson

Rumours about James Patterson and his voracious appetites take on increasingly bizarre forms.

Patterson shifts more books than anyone on the planet (14 million copies in 2009, says the NYT).

His books straddle the thriller, YA and romance markets.

With his co-authors, he publishes 9 or more new titles a year.

If he didn’t invent this “studio” approach (it’s reminiscent of Rembrandt, Van Dyck, et al) he certainly practices it more successfully than anybody else..

But he always wants more:

When sales figures showed that he and John Grisham were running nearly neck and neck on the East Coast but that Grisham had a big lead out West, Patterson set his second thriller series, “The Women’s Murder Club,” about a group of women who solve murder mysteries, in San Francisco. (quoted from NYT article)

 When he heard that he was a key player on five of Hachette’s six imprints, he asked which one he was missing. Told it was the religious imprint, he said, “I can do that.”

Patterson’s aggressive branding and marketing supports books which millions happily devour. And he gives back, too, with his ReadKiddoRead platform to encourage literacy among the young.

Combining his unquenchable hunger for success with his intolerance of others’, however, it can surely only be a question of time before the headline James Patterson Swallowed My Goldfish – And the Bowl With It! appears.

Because Patterson doesn’t want to be the biggest fish in the bowl. He wants to ingest the whole bowl – gravel and plastic props included – into his insatiable maw!

postmodernism is dead

Edward Docx says Postmodernism is Dead – in this article in Prospect.

Appropriate that the announcement should come via an exhibition, at the V & A no less.

Docx gives his definition of Postmodernism and says its death is heralded by

three ideas, of specificity, of values and of authenticity, (which) are at odds with postmodernism. We are entering a new age. Let’s call it the Age of Authenticism and see how we get on.

“Authenticism” (to me) sounds rather too worthy but it’s a persuasive line for all that.

Although I sometimes wonder whether there isn’t as much of value in the concept of Trash as Authenticity. Put another way, what, au fond, is more authentic than trash?

But maybe those are post-postmodern questions?

lovelife mutations

life is a ghostwritten script
a half-heard whispered soundtrack
of cues and quotes we’ve ripped
from old remastered notes, unverified facts…

                    *

life is an unwritten message –
never sent, unborn, undead,
relating a world without age
where words merely babble, only read

                    *

to alter their sense
and scatter random clues which give
us relics of self, and change the tense –
a poem of birth to live.

                    *

and we retrace our poems of birth
alive in love in every time
and every breath
whose heartbeat pumps our rhyme –

                    *

our poetry mutates
us and those who heed
our words in altered states
wake love out of need.

                                freddie
                                june 2011

darkness fades: equinox (villanelle)

saturn at equinox

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when darkness fades, and dawn lights up your eyes,
deep in the morning silence we make love –
melt in the dream of a day as night dies.

i come to life in your love, and realize
you’re the sun-cusped girl i’ve always dreamed of
when darkness fades, and dawn lights up your eyes.

you turn me on each waking hour, sunrise
to sunrise, all radiating love –
melt in the dream of a day as night dies,

as earth tilts, night and day merge, and we rise
at the equinox – emotion’s axes move
when darkness fades, and dawn lights up your eyes.

spectral in the shadows, dark matter flies
while we explore each arc of our subsolar love –
melt in the dream of a day as night dies.

we find ourselves – feverish fantasies,
bodies in ethereal motion, orbiting love
when darkness fades, and dawn lights up your eyes –
melt in the dream of a day as night dies.

                                                                         freddie

who knew when they loved how to love?

this is the third and final part of this triptych of easter poems.

i mean to illustrate them with a tasteful and beautiful picture of easter eggs.

who knew when they loved how to love?
wasn’t love being the same as the loved
one – one – one could never disentangle?

and being apart, wasn’t it not like life
at all, unwhole, the atom split in two,
something alone no one could do?

so was this whole undoing then a way to become whole
when they loved – but who knew how to love?

                            *

who knew when they lost how to lose?
wasn’t losing it all the only way to find your
self: self – selflessness being everything to have

in nothing, and to gain by giving it all
away for a kiss of the air
and find our heartlove beating everywhere –

we love and feel our lives a universe
which when we lose, who knows what we lost?

                            *

who knew when they lived how to live?
or be the one that wasn’t just alone to
live: live – live recording loops unending

till the next verse overwrites us?
to be reborn’s to think those other unbecoming lives we had were fakes
being we alone have now got what it takes –

maybe another life to be the ones
who knew when they lived how to live?

freddie
easter 2011

othertime

othertime

i dreamed a dream of life, and lived it in my sleep
and when i woke i saw through a ghost’s eyes:

a scrawling world of vacant cemeteries,
queasy seas of memory, reflections deep,
and muffled beyond purple coral banks, skies
unfathomable as eternity…

… i thought it was the vanished i could see –
void significant nothings, truth-packed lies,
unrisen suns, eclipsed in tenseless space.

for i was a poet of when
and now and then
saw written in your face
love stuff that words forgot to write –

while palpitating in our hearts tonight
are words in blood which leave no other trace
but of another self, another place
whose vanishings recur, but always out of sight.

                            *

we live a poem of when, but otherwhere
and othertime – like ivy spread on vines –
creep through our veins: chance, undeciphered signs,
runes and symptoms of things which are not there.

like shadows in a maze of moonshine
we black out, eyeless and pale in the night –
but when cold dawn dissolves us, hold on tight
together, two syllables that overspilled the line.

being alive at all
even hearing quite another call
is being blessed
in incomprehension, in difference;
and inner reflections on our innocence
are inattentive to our interest –

all to the good – beyond reason and rhyme
we live a poem of when, that otherwhere and othertime.

                                                                            freddie
                                                                            easter 2011

happy snaps – easter haiku

i snap happiness
and in an easter egg-hunt
i happen on it.

       *

i happen on it
like an egg under a bush
in springtime hatches.

       *

snip-snap-happy now
a shutter on opening
floats in reflections.

       *

float on in a flood
sun seasoned petals swirling
butterfly wings past.

       *

i happen on you
no matter what the season
springs of happiness.

                                       freddie
                                      easter 2011

the vase of soissons

skim, scan and scroll

nicholas carr, in the shallows, says the internet saps creativity.

by altering neuroplastic highways in our brains, it erodes our memories: thanks to google, we don’t have to remember anything anymore.

it is a sinister form of cortical re-mapping.

for, if creation is combining cognitive fluidity with intuitions and memory, a dependence on surfing is bad for it.

carr’s book is well reviewed by jim holt in the london review of books.

Bunny de Neude

bunny de neude is a burlesque artiste in the thriller i’m writing.

by coincidence, there’s a square in utrecht called de neude, on which stands this statue, thinker on a rock, by barry flanagan.

it is a cross between rodin’s thinker and bugs bunny.

Bunny de Neude (Thinker on a Rock) by Barry Flanagan

the cold lady drops by to warm herself at the fire

i’ve loved les tres riches heures du duc de berry, by the limbourg brothers (in dutch: de gebroeders van limburg) since i was a kid.

here’s february:

verbosphere

(this is the first poem i wrote on my bebook)

verbosphere

can’t feel – no sound, no birds
here in the verbosphere
there are no stars
(except as four-letter words)
nothing rough nor nothing blue
no knives to hack you scars
no coldnesses of words untrue
uncut the story clear
(we are all a missing clue).
but what could be more dear
when we is me and me is you
than this silent verbosphere?

the wisdom of old folk sayings (1)

angel, by melozzo da farli, c. 1480

“… be satisfied with your Lot.”

 a highly unfashionable, heretical notion in our age of aspirational discontent.

(and yet, one would do well to ponder what one’s Lot was…)

i’ve recast the line for a cult-leader character of mine:

“… take your Lot lightly.”

in line with g.k.chesterton’s curiously new-agey:

“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

(which, in turn, was given a spin by our current pope, benedict: “Die Engel können fliegen, weil sie sich leicht nehmen.”)

chesterton was brilliant with that idea of lightness and not taking oneself seriously:

“For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”

past lost love (procrastination)

i have been tinkering with the poem, past lost lies, i put on this blog last week.

i remember when i started writing it, it was with the intention of writing a sonnet

(and maybe it is fanciful but as i posted it, it did seem truncated – the truncation however, being somewhat apt to the subject, didnt jar too much in my head.)

but now having tinkered, it is duly a sonnet, and completes a procrastinated teenage impulse, a true embodiment of what it is about…

here’s the text:

past lost love (procrastination)

… i have spent my life procrastinating
each hour postponing the next, so sad

to be without the love i want so bad
as my past lost lies, insinuating…

a sense of wantonness into my head,
her warmth between my sheets –

                                       – i remember
fucking and kissing in cold november…
the smell and feel of her fresh in my bed

and she so unexplored, driving me mad
with lust to be once again without lust

to lose her, let her go in timeless trust,
the best i had, or ever dreamed i had…

… but you today are all that time postponed
and past lost love deferred but not disowned…

              freddie omm

particles of light

this review (god’s equations?) by john leslie of new books by roger penrose and stephen hawking/leonard mlodinow, deals with penrose’s theory of cosmic cycles:

 “…infinite time doesn’t look infinite to photons, “particles of light” without mass (more technically, without “rest-mass”). To a photon, traversing an infinite distance seems to take no time at all. Particles possessing mass are tiny “clocks”. The photon isn’t. It doesn’t “tick”. And, immense ages after all black holes have evaporated entirely through the process discovered by Hawking, the universe may contain nothing that could act as a clock. Particles possessing mass may one and all have become massless very, very gradually. Well, in Einstein’s world clocks are crucial to measuring distances. If eventually there were no clocks, just any distance could readily be traversed. Not only could the universe stop getting older and older; it could actually lose its vastness. This would allow things to carry over smoothly into a new Bang.”

leslie also discusses hawking and mlodinow’s ideas about the many-branched universe:

All branches are equally real, for despite appearances superpositions never collapse. They instead grow to include whomever observes them; any observer develops seemingly incompatible properties. In a complex sense, the observer splits or branches. Well, scientists in the “quantum cosmology” community mostly accept this. However, they would typically reject the book’s idea that all branching depends on observations. Suppose your double, your “other half” with seemingly incompatible properties, inhabits a universe-branch where a cat is alive. In your branch a double of the cat is dead. Looking to see which branch you inhabited needn’t, most of them would say, be what killed that cat.
The book’s ideas about creating the past render matters worse. “Observations you make on a system in the present affect its past.” This is proved, the authors say, by “delayed choice experiments” where any question to be asked experimentally is decided at a late moment. Yet couldn’t you instead claim that past events merely looked as if they’d taken particular forms, or else that they took them, but only in a universe-branch into which the experimental decision helped to place you? Either way, nothing ever reacts to a choice which hasn’t yet been made.

in limiting our consideration only to dimensions which are known, however, we must all be missing a few tricks (not that i think theories should be built on unknown dimensions…).

past lost lies

past lost lies, by f.k.omm

it’s an old poem i wrote back in the day.

it is an octet and goes like this:

. . . i have spent my day procrastinating
each hour postponing the next, so sad
to be without the love i want so bad
as my past lost lies, insinuating
each one into my soul, driving me mad
with lust to be once again without lust
to lose you, let you go with timeless trust,
the best i had, or ever dreamed i had . . .

twisted algorithms – amazon

books, by ian britton

this article by onnesha royschoudhuri sets out a familiar tale about amazon’s aggressive marketing of books as if they were cans of soup.

twisted algorithms recommending “books you might like” lead you to books whose publishers have paid for the privilege, it isn’t based on previous purchase or personal interest alone.

publishers who don’t play along and give amazon the discounts it demands are delisted or have their books’ “buy buttons” removed.

it is a depressing, predicable tale of market dominance and the arrogance it spawns.

although happily for consumers, writers and publishers, of course, such arrogance tends to lead to its own destruction.

link to the full article on the boston review.

narrative – the story of our selves

page from prelim draft of “the dark gospel”, by f.k.omm

*

**

*

our selves are narratives written out of (or into) our experience.

each self is a story, or a series of stories.

neuroscientist michael gazzaniga writes: These narratives of our past behaviour seep into our awareness and give us an autobiography .

this is not quite joan didion’s classic “we tell each other stories in order to live” line – it is less causal, less contentiously debatable, and more scientific:

the left hemisphere’s language areas draw on information in memory  (amygdalo-hippocampal circuits, dorsolateral prefrontal cortices) and planning regions (orbitofrontal cortices).

damage to these regions disrupts narration, leading to such things as unbounded narration (our narratives are unconstrained by reality) and denarration (we are unable to generate any narratives, external or internal).

john bickle and sean keating suggest the narrative self is written by “our little inner voice”. they specualte that as traditional narratives are joined by digital ones, our sense of self may see a corresponding change:

Digital technologies… are producing narratives that stray from this classic structure. New communicative interfaces allow for novel narrative interactions and constructions. Multi-user domains (MUDs), massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), hypertext and cybertext all loosen traditional narrative structure. Digital narratives, in their extremes, are co-creations of the authors, users and media. Multiple entry points into continuously developing narratives are available, often for multiple co-constructors.

even so, they concede that “Unbounded digital narratives, unconstrained by familiar temporal, causal ordering, seem psychologically implausible as sources for enduring, communicating selves.”

and yet, “the self as a story on social media” – where millions of people are both writing their own narrative selves, while being concurrently influenced and reshaped by other narratives – is a self that is fundamentally different to the selves that were possible before the digital age.

having said that, the kinds of narrative selves thus created do not necessarily deviate from pre-digital story arcs, of course. our urges, motivations, personal growth, dreams, conflicts, ideals, resolutions and melodramas still exist as before.

defining the self may still be a matter of projecting our experience onto “classic” narrative templates.

but perhaps digital intercourse and storytelling do create new storylines and templates. certainly there will be a greater drive to simplicity in the stories that become widely popular.

and this may be true of broader narratives, too – the ones about groups of people, not just individuals, but shared identities, or regions, countries and the planet – the purpose of (and our place in) the universe, even.

link to bickle and keating’s article in new scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/11/storytelling-20-when-new-narratives-meet-old-brains.html

ampullae of lorenzini

in my new book, the dark gospel, the main character has the skill of psionic projection.

l
lorenzini pores on snout of tiger shark (pic by albert kok)

this has set me thinking about electroreceptivity, a related function channelled (in sharks and other elasmobranchs) through the ampullae of lorenzini.

The ampullae of Lorenzini are complicated and extensive specialized skin sense organs characteristic of sharks and rays…electroreceptive units in sharks. They are jelly-filled canals found on the head of the animal which form a system of sense organs, each of which receives stimuli from the outside environment through the dermis and epidermis. Each canal ends in groups of small bulges lined by the sensory epithelium. A small bundle of afferent nerve fibers innervates each ampullae; there are no efferent fibers (Murray, 1974). The ampullae are mostly clustered into groups. Electroreceptors enable the elasmobranchs to search and locate prey and navigate through the earth’s ocean and seas. Electroreception allows these animals to sense the presence of their victims long before the victims have the chance to see their predators. This awesome advantage has made these animals into one of the most threatening predators on earth.

(faramarr samie, “electroreception in elasmobranchs”, full article here: http://wrt-intertext.syr.edu/ii2/samie.html)

beer good for babies

beer

thanks to http://owni.eu via sandie zand.

lilith

lilith, by john collier

lilith was created at the same time and from the same earth as adam, according to 13th century rabbi isaac ben jacob ha-kohen.

she left adam to find herself, mating with the archangel samael.

to stop lilith and samael’s demonic children lilin taking over the world, god castrated samael.

today she is often associated with demonoid lore and with the kabbalah.

the dark gospel, by f.k.omm

i am in the middle of writing an alternative opening for my thriller, the dark gospel.

lex, the hero of the book, has recurring dreams which come true, and this opening describes one of them at the moment of becoming so…

i’m rather down on prologuey type openings usually – it can spoil unity and flow – so i may yet discard it.

as i am interweaving past and present throughout the book, though, it may work better than usual.

burning books, silencing words on campus in the usa

an article about speech codes and hate speech and the notion, quite established nowadays, that

to be really tolerant, to be really multicultural, you… suppress hateful, mean, cruel, discriminatory thoughts and speech. To ensure civility you… suppress harsh or hurtful speech…

‘I always like to put the Buddhist argument for freedom of speech’, says Lukianoff. ‘Buddhists believe life is pain and they have a point. You do someone a tremendous disservice if you teach them that pain in life is a distortion of life. Because as soon as you start seeing hurtful things as being aberrations rather than part of normal human existence, then you start to see robust debate and disagreement as a distortion of the human experience rather than a part of the human experience…

Lukianoff says we have to move away from the idea that ‘words are like bullets’, that speech is a form of physical assault, and recognise that being argued with, even vociferously, is not the same as being beaten up. However, he says, ‘maybe words should wound. What’s so bad about that? The fact that words can hurt feelings, the fact that they carry emotional charges, is all the more reason for protecting them from censorship. Because the whole point of free speech is to have deep, meaningful, robust debates. We have to have deadly serious discussions about deadly serious things – and we can’t do that if everyone is listening out for potentially offensive words rather than thinking about and responding to the ideas being expressed.’

link to the full article in spiked:
 http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9905/

be…

mr wind reminds me there was once a calvin klein be, too!

a long time ago

lady with lapdog – beret vs toque

rereading lady with lapdog again (in translation) i was struck by the brilliant omniscience of chekhov’s narrative, and then enraged by the inconsistency in the translations of the lady’s hatgear.

in constance garnett’s translation it is a béret, in david magarshack’s penguin translation it is a toque.

berets are fairly ordinary working class items; toques are much more glam – napoleon replaced crowns on family crests with a nicely codified system of toques:

a Napoleonic Duke used a toque with 7 ostrich feathers and 3 lambrequins, a Count a toque with five feathers and two lambrequins, a Baron three feathers and one lambrequin, a Knight only one ostrich feather. (wikipedia)

i wonder what made constance prefer the beret over the toque?

be… by f.k.omm

my new novel is

be…
by f.k.omm