see nerd) blog
2008d

state of the canard address

Domestic press releases happen. This year, I got my revenge in first.

State of the Canard Address
— an annual press release from —
dylan harris
(ok, so there’s no canard, but you get the drift)

I began the year preparing to move from Mechelen, a near suburb of the imperial capital Brussels, to Dublin, a sweet little village in an outlying province. I loaded the van with a few boxes and rather a lot of imperial beer. Unfortunately, I had to drive through bandit country, where busses stand tall and coffee condemned, where my dear cat Madam was fatally mugged.

I don’t believe in Gods, and I wish they’d return the complement. In June, Fuzzbot, the God of furballs, got fed up with my lack of prayer and made a miracle anyway: two black Irish furball generating purr monsters moved in.

In September, I presented some poetry with processed photography to the Electronic Literature in Europe conference in Bergen, in Norway. This is a strange little country, still independent, with odd customs like burying haddock underneath radiators.

In December, as Devon Garde, I released the album flock state, for sale online. Wurm Press published Europe, a chapbook. Some of my poetry was incorporated in a corner of Wu Xing, by Meri von KleinSmid; the music was broadcast around Europe.

31.12.8

collection?

I’ve decided, finally, to look at my poetry to see if I can throw a collection together, one that might interest a publisher.

There are complications, such as that this site will stay up, and the poetry (not the collection) will remain here under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Licence permitting derivation, sharing and reuse of the poems. I’m not scared of home recording technology for books & literature, I’m looking forward to it. It’s done immense good in music, there’s far greater access to choice for consumers and musicians. There’s great opportunities for all the industry: consider Radiohead’s In Rainbows. The only losers, by their own hand, are the tyrannosaurs, with their idiotic suing of prospective customers for listening to what are now marketing channels.

The primary product is no longer what someone buys, they get that free; you sell them extras. Listen to an MP3, like it, buy a better MP3, buy a CD, buy a gig ticket, buy a T–shirt. Read a poem, like it, buy a book, buy a T–shirt (you just wait!), go hear the MP3. Hear a poem, like it, buy a better MP3, buy a CD, buy a book, buy a T–shirt! Run software, like it, buy extras, buy support, buy the box, buy a T–shirt, buy a stuffed Tux.

See a poem on a website, a fairly badly presented website to be honest, go buy a beautiful book? The poem is not what people buy, it’s the book, the poem’s the hook to buy the book. Put that hook out there, out everywhere you can, don’t hide it in artificial scarcity. Would you refuse to put an advert out because lots of people might see it?

As an aside, I’m getting nearly enough visitors here for advertising (maybe 420,000 hits this year, doubling every year or so, that’s approaching the magic million). The poem’s the free content to attract the paid for advert, an established Internet funding mechanism. With the Internet and digital copies, the poem is no longer the thing you buy, it’s the hook to the book, the MP3, the T–shirt, the gig …. Mind you, what will probably stop me taking adverts is animation, movement, intentional distraction. I won’t accept that, it’s rude, it’s the stink bomb in the lift. I appreciate the people who come to my site, I won’t annoy them.

Now, I’ve got music on this website, photography, as well as poetry. You know which content gets the most hits? The photos? No. The photos of beautiful woman sans clothing? No (which surprises me). The written poetry? No. The music? Well, sometimes. The recitals? Yes, it’s usually recorded poetry, my recitals, recently tin rush :: po, this month it’s an engineering rush (i) :: the argument. Now, given I’m not well known, this could be the artefact of the MP3 indexes that refer users here, but, every month, people come, they return. I think it’s more than just random links. The poetry, the recordings of the poetry in particular, bring the success. You can bet, incidentally, I’ll be doing something about that: watch out tunecore. I just need the time.

I wonder if I can find a publisher who’ll get this. Or at least who’ll risk it.

So, anyway, the collection. I went back through my old poems expecting to find they were pretty awful, and most should be dropped. What I actually found is most are pretty good. There are indeed some crap ones, and one or two seriously dire, but most are pretty good. Obviously this is my opinion, and I wrote the dratted things, so I might just be very biased, but, whatever, I was surprised by what I found.

So instead of assembling a possible collection, I’ve assembled a possible seven collections. Urk.

This ignores my existing home made chapbooks, and their assembly into three existing apparent collections. But those collections don’t count; they’re home made (they’re not even self-published), they’re not selected, they’ve not been edited independently.

There’s a lot of work to do with these possible collections. The poems need tightening, some with thumbscrews, before I let them near any editor. They need ordering, some more than others. But they’ve taken a basic form. So wish me luck …

27.12.8

westvleteren

My Christmas treat has been in my fridge since February, complements of my last job. My boss presented me with three bottles of Westvleteren, often acknowledged as the best beer in the world. I’m spending this Christmas alone, so I’m sampling them today, from weak to strong.

The blond (5.8%) is absolutely delicious. It has all you’d expect from a good bottled beer, including a firm head. It’s been in my glass for a few minutes, and it is still producing lively bubbles, yet does not taste gassy. The flavour is a tasty hoppy foreground on a gently sweet background, very well balanced. A very good beer.

Now I’ve opened the brown (8%). Again, it has the firm, strongly flavoured head. It’s one of the most intensely flavoured beers I’ve ever had from a bottle. It’s how I remember Czech beer used to be before the fall of the Berlin wall. The flavour is full, well-rounded chocolate, again superbly balanced. The beer demands to be drunk slowly, and not just because of the 8%. Now, I’ll admit browns generally aren’t my favourite, but even so, this one is highly enjoyable, the best I’ve tasted.

I’m saving the final bottle for tomorrow …

… and now it’s tomorrow.

When I open any of the bottles, the beer stays still, under control, but when it’s poured the beer is immediately alive. The gas is perfectly balanced. These beers are very well behaved.

The final brown (10.2%) starts as a sweet concoction, with a distinct hint of chocolate and hops. It’s a strong but good flavour, very well balanced (again). It is very strong beer, but the alcohol doesn’t dominate or spoil the beer at all, unlike most strong beers. It’s a gorgeous, warm drink.

Overall, these are fine beers. Whether they’re worth the difficulty of acquiring for those who live outside western Belgium, that’s a separate question. If you don’t understand that question, read the wiki entry. These as once in a lifetime beers; as such, they are perfect.

25.12.8

busy busy busy

I’ve a poetry recital coming up on Wednesday 17th at Wurm im Apfel. I have to prepare my set, including, for the first time, some seen, heard) poetry videocasts.

I’ve Europe, a chapbook, to launch at the recital. Fortunately it’s not me having to assemble the things, but that’s only by luck. Thanks, Kit!

I’ve a new album released online on December 8th, Devon Garde’s flock state. It’s available in iTunes, emusic, Amazon, and many other fine stores :-) . I’d like a few CDs ready for the recital.

I’ve the material for a DVD chapbook in seen, heard) poetry. I want to assemble it over Christmas.

I’ll produce a leaflet for the recital, mentioning most of the above, and this website.

I’ve heard some first collections launched recently. I can do one hell of a lot better. I’d like to start preparing something before the New Year.

All this hasn’t stopped me producing finse, although it certainly slowed me down.

13.12.8

domestic incidental

My kitties came back from the vet slightly lighter on Tuesday. Were they human, they’d be candidates for the original Sistine Chapel choir, should schoolboy myths be true.

After the first evening, when I sat on the settee and let the post-anaesthetic them doze on my lap because it was the only way I could stop them trying to jump on things and miss (or worse, get there, jump off, and miss), they rapidly recovered and proved it by confiscating my wealth of kitchen paper, taking it from one élitist roll to the more egalitarian thousands of very small sheets, redistributed to all corners of the kitchen.

They’re back to normal now, being six month old nuisances, as they should be. They’re back exploring the outside world, but they’ve not been back up the tree in the back neighbour’s garden yet. Or I haven’t seen them. We’ll see; today is the first day when they’re going to be shut out again, while I work. If they’re going to regain their adventurous spirit, which they may not, over the next few days the kitchen will slowly accumulate twigs.

10.11.8

dress codes

I went along to the Dublin munch last night, and it was thoroughly sociable if a wee bit underattended.

My only potential problem is that it’s deeply connected with a club event, and that club event has a dress code. I’m excluded by dress codes.

Dress codes are not about making an effort, they’re about forced conformity to an arbitrary opinion. They’re not about expression, they’re about denial of different expression. At their stylistic worst they’re about maintaining the mediocre.

The subtitle of this website is expression not convention. That’s not chosen at random, that’s the kind of man I am. Dress codes are convention, literally, and, like any convention they may intend to raise low standards but they actually deny the highest. If something is beyond the nous of the couture bouncer, that something is excluded.

My highest standards aren’t at dressing, of course, not by a long shot, but if these guys were running a poetry event I’d be barred for not slouching down the middle of the road, not slinging a guitar on my shoulder, not shooting gunman fashion.

I’ve seen and felt so much anger and hatred generated by arbitrary convention, often by those enforcing nonsense against those who know better, and usually because the enforcers haven’t made the effort to understand what they’re enforcing. This is why some people refer to dress codes as dress fascism; they’re quite literally about excluding difference. They’re a very minor form of fascism, of course, but the attitude is fascist through and through. Fascism isn’t alright when it’s in small places, fascism breeds in small places, especially when those small places are small minds. Dress codes are wrong because they say if you don’t like the look of someone it’s alright to exclude them. That attitude kills, has killed in great quantity in history, it is never acceptable.

9.11.8

next

I’ve not found a place to belong. Ireland’s as flawed as the UK for me; at least blighty has London’s hurricane, all of an artform isn’t much the same.

I wanted France, when I was spotty. I think I’ll target Paris once this Irish phase has faded. It’s already fade.

But that’s so unimaginative; it’s a short nip across the shortest of the wet English borders. There’s so much more to our wee planet.

Yet I desire the things that you only find in complex cultures, in complex cultural mixtures. It’s the difference between old world and new world wines, perhaps not so ironically. Maybe I think of Europe, more than anywhere else because I’m European; I grew up with it, with its stories.

I’ll guess I’ll see what the choices are when the options arise. Not the anglosphere, though; I like to enjoy eating.

8.11.8

insecure social

I need to develop some social life here, I think, to gain me a little bit of an anchor, to reduce the alien loneliness I feel towards this alien city. I’m going along to language classes, but whilst they do give me contact with different people, which is important, they don’t give me social space.

I’m reconnecting with the scene, although I don’t hold out too much hope there. I was quite involved in the UK, but generally unable to settle. The exception was Norwich, which I remember as buoyant and rather joyful. I’ve been to one event here, which was uninvolving. I’m going along to the same again tonight, writ large, which I expect to be uninvolving again. But where else can I be open?

Being social has never been one of my strengths. Oh, in a small group I can release my humour and strike a few jelly splats, but in a larger group I strike silent. Humour is a wonderful act, but a false one.

The reason why I’m doing this is annoyingly familiar. The last couple of months have been a little difficult. I’ve grown rather too fond of someone, with her encouragement, probably unintentional encouragement. I need to grow unfond again; my fondness is unwelcome and unwanted.

This is not exactly a new experience; indeed, it’s the reaction I’ve generally received throughout my life. I’m encouraged to get close, I approach, she sees, doesn’t like, and I become unwelcome. It’s unpleasant, it’s always unpleasant, but, well, it’s life. I just wish the encouragement wouldn’t happen.

It’s rather depressing, if entirely sensible, that the dinner I was supposed to be having with A tonight has quite deliberately not been mentioned by either of us. I’d rather things were different, but she prefers the bank with the balance in, quite unsurprisingly.

8.11.8

other companies i won’t use again

There are some other companies I will never use again.

MFI^* are just incompetent. That they still survive, presuming they do, has to be because there aren’t enough IKEA stores around. I once ordered some goods off MFI. They didn’t bother to tell me when they arrived. When I finally attempted to find out what had happened to my goods, they’d lost all record and wouldn’t return my deposit. It wasn’t worth the grief of chasing them properly for that kind of money, and no doubt they knew that.

Argos have, once too often, given me the wrong product and refused to change it to the one I ordered. That’s, at best, bad staff training, but I suspect worse.

What really annoys me is that none of these companies, including PC World and Vodafone, have the culture of correcting their errors; they all have the attitude that if something goes wrong it can’t be their error unless the customer really has a go at them. That attitude is not good enough, not good enough at all. This culture of arrogant incompetence is embedded in both the UK and Ireland, and is one reason why I really don’t like either country that much. It’s very true there are significant exceptions to that general rule, but the problem is they are exceptions, not the rule. ^*Since this happened, MFI were bought out, and have now gone under.

4.11.8

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