Monday 24 February 2014

Phew! What a scorcher


"Pollen alerts begin 2 weeks earlier than normal," it says in the paper. "Mosquitoes have already been sighted," the report continues.

Yesterday I was in the Vienna Prater, a huge green space with a fairground complex and known to cinema buffs for the haunting zither music of Anton Karas and the meeting of Harry Lime and Holly Martins on the ferris wheel in the Orson Wells' film of Graham Greene's hurriedly written novel The Third Man.


The temperature on the thermometer in the shade at the nearby Vienna Cricket and Tennis Club showed 18 C.


To cap it all I saw my first drone. I pointed my camera, hoped for the best, and managed to get 
a reasonable shot of it!


More on the drone at Bard on the Run 

Saturday 22 February 2014

Yellow Dogs



 - Yellow Dogs is my second attempt at collage -
 the first was posted on the blog on 17th Feb '14 
under the title 
Sunday Papers (Sonntagszeitungen) 



Friday 21 February 2014

The Last Days of Mankind - an exhibition from Deborah Sengl at The Essl Museum


"We all share the guilt of war: soldiers who murder, or the propagandist press, or the civilians who do not resist, or those who spread and repeat opinions . . ." - Karl Kraus


The year 2014 is the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of The Great War as it is known by some and World War I as it is known by others. It was a savage war in which more than 17 million people perished, and many millions were wounded including both my grandfathers. 

A vast army of disabled persons quickly appeared on the streets of European cities. These unfortunates included the limbless, the blinded, the shellshocked, and the gassed. 

And it's worth remembering that there were millions of horses in mankind's service who were  also brutalized. Such is our humanity. 

And we should recall also the spivs and the conmen and the opportunists; thieves who made fortunes exploiting others misfortunes. Like the rats in the trenches they too flourished.

And we humans are also the rats. We are the gullible human rats. 

Aroused by propaganda succeeding generations march behind the same paid piper whistling the same old tunes, at the behest of the Great Rat who pays the piper, from one bloody conflict to the next. 

We could step off the old spin-wheel in our gilded cage if we sat down thought about it. 

But for now I want to know the reasons why we are bent on killing each other?  I want to know why we accept as reasons for war the cavalier falsehoods of so many our leaders: 

The enemy has weapons of mass destruction.
We're here to help you. Is that an oil well over there? 
We're only here to look for some criminals. 
We're not stealing your land we're just redrawing the maps.
etc., etc., etc. 

And so I'm reading Karl Kraus's play Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind) which I purchased at the Essl Museum in Vienna where the Austrian artist Deborah Sengl's exhibition Die letzten Tage der Menscheit can be visited until 25th May 2014. 

Sengl gave Kraus's protagonists the status of rats. At the bottom of this post you will see the rats. Or at least a small selection of my photographs of them. In all there are more than 200 rats in the exhibition. And more than 40 scenes. 

And you might correctly guess, from my purchase of Kraus's book, the rats gave me plenty of food for thought. And that's what I want to pass on via this blog; that people should get in the habit of thinking for themselves instead of always following the crowd. 

Looking on the internet for details of a film (or a movie) of this important book of Kraus's I was more than disappointed. Presumably the film industry has another agenda.

Last but not least many thanks to the German publisher Suhrkamp for keeping the flame alive: 

Die letzten Tage der Menschheit 
Suhrkamp 
ISBN 978-3-518-45715-3 

Speaking of The Last Days of Mankind Deborah Sengl who has spent the past year on her special exhibition for the Essl Museum says: "The work (Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind) may be a century old, but for me it is still up to date. We may not have a war in the immediate vicinity, but war is still so strongly present in us as it was then, if not more so." 

Deborah Sengl's rats can speak for themselves - 












www.deborahsengl.com/ 


Thursday 20 February 2014

Clocking-in






Earlier today I visited one of my favourite places which is the Essl Museum near Vienna. After buying my ticket I couldn't resist clocking-in at Gregor Maver's Mind the Gap installation. I left Gregor my Poet-in-Residence blog address scribbled on the card I clocked-in with, since there was an available white space doing nothing.

In the museum shop I bought a book; an important book by Karl Kraus which is titled Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind).  

More about my visit and why I bought Karl Kraus's book to follow.


Wednesday 19 February 2014

- doing nothing in an expanding universe -


 the celestial club  
  pops into existence  

 lie in a field and measure it with a ruler   
  every hour it grows  

  a rosy view of the future    
 < stifle a yawn > 

  those few snatched moments  
  watching the grass grow  

 the future ain't what it used to be 
 social isolation  vacuum packed  zero-point energy  crunch snap rip fade


and then the male nipple 
busy doing nothing . . .



Fifteen phrases, some adapted, plus the addition of four extra words to expand the title, served to make the above poem-construct and can be found on fifteen different pages in Nothing (266pp) if anyone with nothing better to do feels so inclined.

Nothing is edited by Jeremy Webb and published by New Scientist-Profile Books (ISBN 978-1846685187).


Yellowed Paper


The following is not specifically about Sigmund Freud but his image serves to represent for me those Jews who were fortunate to escape the talons of the 1,000 Year Reich, like the fictional character in my poem. The idea of newspapers to cover the windows and divide the world was inspired by a visit I made to Mark Manders' exhibit Room with Broken Sentence at the Dutch Pavilion, Venice Biennale, between 1st June and 24th November 2013. 

Dr. Freud arriving by train in Paris


He covered the windows 
with sheets 
from the papers,

their thin yellow skins 
divided the world 
from the world. 

The words 
in the papers:

Teller & Messer  Fischer & Tischler  Achtung! & Zeitung

meant little 
to him.
 One said he was blind.


. . . 


A splintering 
of a door in the night 
 - the Teutoni march in 

. . .  no-one's at home. 
No trace of a shadow 
was found. 



Tuesday 18 February 2014

joining the dots or a silent poem attempted


John Cage

three lines of dots represent the passage of time in seconds and silently reading  one dot every second the reader can try to visualize the temperature of absolute zero Kelvin where all molecular activity ceases and absolute silence reigns; the place we are going to is titled 4'33"and it is a composition in three movements by John Cage 

..............................
...............................................................................................................................................
....................................................................................................



footnote:
as I was writing 'joining the dots or a silent poem attempted' an aircraft flew loudly overhead, a cat screeched once somewhere in the street, a radio was switched on in a room nearby and somewhere quite far away but still within earshot a dog with a deep bark was heard repeatedly followed by the brief sound of a car horn and my fingers tapped the computer keyboard 273 times



Monday 17 February 2014

Sunday Papers (Sonntagszeitungen)


Yesterday morning being Sunday and having nothing better to do I visited several museum foyers and helped myself to a selection of the free leaflets on display in the publicity racks. Sunday Papers I call them. They keep me abreast of what's going on artistically here in Vienna. 

I then met some good friends in the Siam Restaurant near to the Musikverein, the home of the Vienna Philharmonic, for Sunday lunch. 

Monday after breakfast with my scissors, a roll of sticky tape a piece of card and my imagination I built a collage titled My Sunday Papers using images cut or torn from the leaflets found on Sunday. 

The resulting artwork, yes I will call it art, features the composer Richard Wagner and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.  





Saturday 15 February 2014

Not the Olympics




The European Mountain Running Masters Championship was held in Bludenz, Austria a couple of years ago and I was privileged to carry the British flag in the parade of runners from many nations through the main street to the starting area.

What I do is classed as amateur sport. What is an amateur?  It's what the word Olympics used to mean; Chariots of Fire and all that.




Thursday 13 February 2014

Breath (2013) Venice








Francis Galton like his cousin Charles Darwin wrote a book to do with evolution. Galton's book was titled The Hereditary Genius and its subject was eugenics. According to the author unsuitable persons such as the deaf would be put in places of assisted living to prevent them from reproducing. He also claimed that it would be possible to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations. 


Another supporter of eugenics was Alexander Graham Bell who suggested blocking the immigration of deaf persons into the United States. In 1896 in Connecticut a law was passed forbidding marriage between persons suffering from epilepsy and mental illness. In 1909 sterilization was introduced in California and Washington following its introduction a couple of years earlier in Indiana.


Galton's dangerous idea took root in Germany and became known there as racial hygiene. Alfred Ploetz who had spent 5 years studying racial genealogies in the United States established a German Eugenics Society and Francis Galton became its honorary president.

Soon there were several German writers on the eugenics bandwagon. The wish to emulate the United States was strong. In 1920 the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche and the jurist Karl Binding published a book with the alarming title Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living. 


The Rockefeller Foundation supported German research with cash donations. One of the main beneficiaries of American money was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Psychiatry, which institute was to supply doctors for the mass extermination of disabled people and the genocide of the European Jews and gypsies.


In 1929 the American Paul Popenoe published Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of the Results of 6,000 Operations in California. The work was translated into German and came to be used by the Nazis to support the claim that sterilization was beneficial.

In 1934 Joseph Goebbels the head of the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propoganda organized collective visits by thousands of SS officers and other interested tourists to various institutes such as the infamous Eglfing-Haar Clinic, mentioned in the Nurenburg Trials,  in order to prove the necessity of sterilization and euthanasia.

In May 1936 Professor Harry H Laughlin of the Untied States received an honorary doctorate at Heidelberg University for his work in eugenics.

In 1939 with the issuing of an official document from the office of Adolf Hitler on the 1st September the euthanasia game was in full swing. The Führer stated:

Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgement of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death. 

The result of this instruction was that 70,273 persons were designated as unfit to live were killed over a 2 year period in an operation known as Aktion T4.

In January 1940 the first recorded case of patients being killed by gas took place at the Brandenburg Clinic.

When Aktion T4 was closed down in 1941 the death clinic doctors and their staff were sent to Poland, to Treblinka and Sobibor to continue the work.



Before it was all over Joseph Goebbels, head of the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and Mrs Goebbels were destined to contribute to the euthenasia programme by murdering all of their 6 children and committing suicide.




Tuesday 11 February 2014

Beatrix Kaser's Fire & Glass




I am honoured and delighted that one of my artistic photographs has been chosen for the cover of Vienna artist Beatrix Kaser's latest exhibition catalogue: Feuer & Glas - Leidenschaft & Liebe (Fire & Glass - Passion & Love)

The exhibition was launched earlier this evening at the Sala Terrena in the Heiligenkreuzer Hof in Vienna's 1st District. More information about the artist and her work below:


Visit the artist's website from HERE 

A small selection of additional photos are posted below to present to the reader  a sight of the original artwork, a glimpse of the teamwork and planning involved and to show the skill of the Venetian glass blowers of Murano:
















Sunday 9 February 2014

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) Gathering Evidence




On 12th February this year it will be 25 years since my favourite Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard died. I plan to visit his grave, which is not far from here, sometime this week to stand for a moment in reflective silence. 

I'm currently rereading the David McLintock translation the novel Concrete (in German Beton).


A lot of Austrians don't like Bernard and the reasons so many of Bernhard's fellow Austrians don't like him are not hard to find. Bernhard exposes their weaknesses and also the roots thereof. He delves into their secret dark corners. He changes their names and writes about them and their scandals in his thinly disguised novels. He provokes them until they have to react. 

When I came to Austria the great theater director Claus Peymann was here, blown in like a breath of fresh air, and so I went to the Burg to watch the Thomas Bernhard plays, as well as the others, in order to improve my knowledge of German. I particularly enjoyed the Bernhard comedies. I instantly became a Bernhard fan.

I also went to Thomas Bernhard book readings, Thomas Bernhard exhibitions and many Thomas Bernhard events in Vienna and Upper Austria and Ohlsdorf which was Thomas Bernhard's home. Now and then there were only a handful of people at these events but I was always happy that I was one of them.

I remember one exhibition in a Vienna Palais where I had all three rooms to myself for over an hour, and then two or three other people came in. I found that particular Bernhard exhibition so fascinating that a week later I went again.

This second time the Palais was even busier. At least six other people passed through my space during the couple of hours I was in there. In particular I recall the sudden presence of a disturbingly loud elderly couple caused me some annoyance. I think I was reading slanted newspaper accounts under glass of the anti-Bernhard anti-Heldenplatz demonstrations.

Thomas Bernhard is an Austrian writer but he was born on a trawler in Holland where his mother had fled to avoid the angst and trauma of giving birth to an illegitimate child in her Roman Catholic homeland. Thomas was brought up by his grandparents who doted on him.

In his youth he succumbed to pneumonia as a result of unhealthy working conditions. He was sent to a hospital for the terminally ill and the elderly. He subsequently wrote of his early life and his hospital experiences in a book, translated by David McLintock, titled Gathering Evidence. The following insightful quotations are to be found next to the five chapter headings in that book:

No one has found or will ever find. - Voltaire 
(Chapter 1 - A Child)


Two thousand people every year attempt to put an end to their lives in the province of Salzburg. A tenth of these suicide attempts are successful. This means that in Austria, which together with Hungary and Sweden has the highest suicide rate in the world, Salzburg holds the national record. - Salzburger Nachrichten, 6th May 1975
(Chapter 2 - An Indication of the Cause)


It is an irregular uncertain motion, perpetual, patternless and without aim. - Montaigne
(Chapter 3 - The Cellar: An Escape)


Being unable to overcome death, misery and uncertainty, men have agreed, in order to be happy, not to think about them. - Pascal 
(Chapter 4 - Breath - A Decision)


Every sickness can be called a sickness of the mind. - Novalis
(Chapter 5 - In the Cold)

To complete the story I turn to Martin Chalmers' introduction to Thomas Bernhard's novel Concrete (Beton): 

"Bernhard, who had often been close to death since contracting pleurisy  and tuberculosis at the age of eighteen, did not want his burial to be an occasion for another kind of humiliation. He was determined that there should be no hypocritical gestures  of reconciliation over his dead body by an Austrian state and an Austrian literary establishment."

On the 16th February when the news came that Thomas Bernhard had died four days previously it was already too late for the hypocrites. As per the script there were only three people present at the funeral. 







I have now been to Vienna's Grinzing Friedhof to stand at the grave of Thomas Bernhard. I spent a few moments reflecting on his life and its relationship to mine. I concluded that the graveyard was home to the ashes and bones of several of "The Ignorant and the Insane" (Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige in German) which is the title of the Thomas Bernhard play I was going to see at the Burg after visiting the graveyard. I took several photos of Bernhard's last resting place. I think the above are the two best.

Gustav Mahler's grave was nearby so I went there too. A friend took the photo below. I placed myself alongside the stark headstone to give you an idea of scale.





Two Owls




In the barred cage
the hook beaked  pair  
watched me
and in their large brown heads     
revolvers on short necks
their amber eyes grew wide 

and time passed 
till I 
the mad  prince 
was pronounced  
exstinguere
and their interest quickly waned 
and their eyes shrank back 

***

I had not thought to  ask them   
if they liked to be visited  
in their asylum
of carrying on 

locked in  
on all sides
and fed in the night 
or if anyone had weeped 
and wailed
for their martyrdom 




Friday 7 February 2014

winter games trophy



bloody the white ocean 
with whale meat waste 
in the cause of science

radiate the blue sea 
in the cause of science 
with nuclear waste 

in the cause of scienc
apply the new wax 
to the skis

 hurry 
make haste
our leader is coming


Certificate



 Poetry Contribution 
Award 


This 
Certificate of Presence 
in the micro-Landscape 
when viewed through the opened Window 

is hereby 
presented to 

your name here
......................................

in memory of Sir David Brewster the 
inventor:
Of the Kaleidescope  

and in recognition of the Holder's 
Contribution to the Art 
of reworking 
the Shapes Tones and Colours 
of Poetry 


signed: Seymour N Glass        



Thursday 6 February 2014

C O N C R E T E



RESOLVED TO BEGIN I LAY AWAKE AT FOUR O'CLOCK IT WAS COMPLETELY DARK AT FIRST IN VIENNA WITH A YELL I FLUNG OPEN THE WINDOWS THE WORLD A MONSTER BUT I MUST BREAK LOOSE I GOT THE KETTLE ON I LOOKED STEADILY AT THE DESK WONDERING WHEN MY WORK WILL TAKE SHAPE IT'S FRIGHTENING AND SUDDENLY WITH A DEVILISH LAUGH I THOUGHT I'LL NEVER DO IT ONLY A MADMAN SOMEONE DEMENTED COULD HEAR IT CLEARLY BEETHOVEN! AT THIS MOMENT TAKEN OVER THE HOUSE COMPLETELY BECAUSE I AM NO LONGER CAPABLE OF WRITING IF ONLY I HAD A FRIEND! WE NEED SOMEONE FOR OUR WORK AND WE CONSTANTLY OVERRATE AND UNDERRATE OURSELVES PERHAPS I'VE MADE TOO MANY NOTES WITH SCORN AND CONTEMPT HAVING ALWAYS BELIEVED THAT PUBLISHING IS SENSELESS FOLLY AND EVIDENCE OF A CERTAIN DEFECT OF CHARACTER WHATEVER THE CONSEQUENCES ON THE OTHER HAND OLD PRINCE RUSPOLI ALTERNATES BETWEEN SCHOPENHAUER AND NIETZSCHE EACH MONTH AND DANGEROUS PEOPLE FROM FLORENCE TYPICAL OF THE SO-CALLED UPPER CRUST NEVER OUT OF THE LIMELIGHT OF THE MOST SUPERFICIAL KIND WHEN ON HER BED I FOUND PROUST'S COMBRAY THROWN DOWN AS IF IN A FIT OF RAGE BECAUSE I WANTED TO START WORK ON MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY AS EVERYBODY KNOWS BUT I DIDN'T PURSUE THESE SPECULATIONS AND I WON'T NINETY PERCENT OF THE TIME

- one of the postmodernist methods of constructing a poem consists of taking a phrase or word per page from a favourite book, in my case Thomas Bernhard's novel Concrete, and assembling them in order as in  my example here - obviously Bernhard's novel Concrete is not written in pink Helvetica upper case -

what you see above comprises fragments of text from the first 35 or so pages, the longest fragment perhaps 5 words and the shortest just one word - the book is 154 pages in length so the purist would have to keep going - right through to the bitter end and the final word in Concrete which is anxiety - 



Tuesday 4 February 2014

Power Lines






. . . and you must not touch it or you will die - Genesis 3:3



"Surrounded by darkness 
again,"
I tell Dot,

It's not her real name.

 "I quote
 from the paper:

'Heavy snow in the trees
and ice on the branches . . .'"

And show her the
 picture
of two 
in the road,
" - they've brought down the power lines
- there's people without  . . . "

 - zap p p p ! 

The lights
in the streets
all around blink back on . . .

Needles fall silent
 from knitting
black socks . . .

"Them trees 
has no power," 
 - Dot's little joke -


. . . and the needles 
click on




Monday 3 February 2014

letter to a big cheese




don't lie 
to the face 
in the mirror, 
- tell 
your lies 
to the face 
in 
the 
moon