QI continues to blot the midweek BBC schedules

QI continues to blot the midweek BBC schedules, sloshing around the comedy quiz genre in an entirely pointless, middle class way. Not that there are any comedy quiz shows that aren’t middle class; Radio 4 remains their spiritual home, where any trumped up theme is an excuse for establishment luvvies to engage in mutual masturbation and bad puns. But QI is particularly repellent. The object is to give long-winded comedy answers rather than obvious ones, which is how every other one of these shows from Never Mind The Buzzcocks to the Newsquiz works, except that they at least have a pretence of an overarching theme. QI plumbs new depths of verbose palliness - I nearly lost my dinner after witnessing Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and John Sessions reminisce about parties they’d attended. And when the guests are actually displaying their useless knowledge, the effect is of a load of sad Open University lecturers sitting in the pub and trying to get one up on each other. Alan Davies looks as if he’s had to drink himself half-unconscious just to get through each edition, with obnoxious results, while Stephen Fry peers owlishly at the autocue as if he’s never seen one before. When will producers accept that the ONLY good comedy quiz show is I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, and ever more shall be so?

I don’t really know why I still go to open mic poetry nights

I don’t really know why I still go to open mic poetry nights, as I reached the age where other people’s earnestness becomes anathema quite a while ago. But as Paul Stones, host of Howling at the Moon, said last night (though in slightly more diplomatic terms): ignore the fact that most of what people have to say is embarrassingly crap, and open your mind to what might be the nugget of truth within.

Howling is not strictly a poetry night. It’s not very strictly anything. And what always starts off as a typically British crowd, perched silently on bar stools, usually turns into a heckling mob with the most unlikely members of the audience taking the stage to tell a bad joke, recite a limerick they wrote when they were ten, decry George W. Bush, play guitar poorly, or discuss druids. And if we’re lucky the excellent MC Braniac will be there actually being funny.

Earnestness abounds, but so does chaos, which is what keeps me coming back I suppose. Trouble is, the Full Moon pub is under new management, the type that likes dark red paint and dark moody bar staff. There was a definite feeling last night that Howling might not be at home here for much longer, given that its core of performers and fans are a bunch of filthy hippies. Not being part of this core, I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to find the truth in the theatrical mumblings of a sweaty communist, or at the bottom of an overpriced bottled beer. Looking is fun though.

Writing teenage fiction - it’s a funny old game.

Writing teenage fiction - it’s a funny old game. If you hit the right notes, fortune and glory shall be yours. More probably, you’ll cock it up completely, because after all, who really understands teenagers except other teenagers. But there is one thing on your side - all children read up. So while the 16 year olds you think you’re writing for may not read you, 12 year olds will. 10 year olds read Louise Rennison and Seventeen. 8 year olds read (past tense, probably) Judy Blume. If you want a 17 year old reader the worst thing you can do is write something ‘targeted’ at him.

I use ‘him’ because I’ve just read Doing It, Melvin Burgess’s novel about teenage boys and sex. Try as I might, I can’t imagine this book speaking to a teenage boy (or girl for that matter). I can imagine them reading it, because after all it’s fairly explicit hur hur. But is anyone really going to feel that, yes, these are my problems, and the terrible burden of my hormones has been lightened by being understood?

Junk (Burgess’s equally controversial 1997 novel) was a very good book about heroin addiction, escapism, first love, and music, amongst other things. It had an important message and it conveyed it through a good story. Doing It is so determined to tackle the taboos surrounding teenage sex that not much else gets a look in. I felt exhausted by the end, as the four main characters lurched from one sex crisis to the next. There are other things going on - one boy’s parents are splitting up, so they appear in some detail, but all the other families, classmates etc are vague ciphers. And as for authenticity, let’s just say I can’t imagine a streetwise 14 year old exclaiming “I told him the most monstrous pack of lies!”

But Burgess is very successful, so someone out there is reading. And he does ‘get it’ in a way… He certainly conveys what sex education has for the most part woefully failed to, that sex has insanely complicated emotions attached to it and you can’t avoid them, that there are double standards, that no means no but it can also mean ‘I don’t know’ (a tricky one that in a world of potential rapist hysteria), that we have brains as well as genitals and we have to listen to both but it’s ok if the brain goes quiet sometimes…

But if I’d read this book when I was 15 I don’t think I would have appreciated those insights. I would have thought “hm this isn’t much cop, I’ll just go and read Wuthering Heights and then rifle through mum’s dirty books later.” And I turned out just fine.

Hurrah and hoopla www.poetrymagazines.org.uk went online on Friday

www.poetrymagazines.org.uk A large (and growing) slice of the Poetry Library’s magazine collection can now be found here, as part of their ongoing digitisation project. As well as the creative content of current and previous issues, there’s an ‘about’ section, subscription rates, submission guidelines, staff lists and cover art for each publication represented.

The site is a marvel of understated, ergonomic design, which is a relief. There would have been little point making this stuff accessible outside the geographical confines of the South Bank if the text was then swamped in complicated navigation and silly graphics. But we do get a spiffy search function which can find an author’s name, a title, a year of publication or any words from a title or poem text.

It’s pure browsing heaven, and I will not get ANY work done today.

My television has been banished indefinitely

My television has been banished indefinitely to the spare room, due in no small part to Nissan Micra and their current advertising campaign. It has become clear that I’m not the only one whose teeth and fingernails start screaming in protest every time I hear the words ’simpology’ and ’spafe’, but why?

The thinking behind these ads is obviously ‘this Micra is so original, radical and downright funky that we need to invent a whole new lexicon to describe it. Also, we are generally wacky and innovative, as reflected in promotional sidebars in national newspapers where we - get this - just go right ahead and make up words for random concepts that have so far escaped definition.’ Sorry Nissan, but Douglas Adams and John Lloyd got there (or somewhere similar but less obnoxious) twenty years before you, and did it with a light touch and an understanding of human nature that you can only dream of.

The main reason the adverts are so ground-breakingly annoying is that they utterly fail to grasp how language works. Yes, new words are created, and old ones adapted, all the time, thanks to text messages, pop songs, websites, TV shows, playgrounds, films… but they evolve organically, have an history, and will only survive if they are useful. No advertising executive can yank a hideous portmanteau word into existence just by willing it. And of course, the lack of any kind of wit or irony doesn’t help. If only that whispery, lubricious voice would intone “free… insurance… frinsurance!” at the end of the advert, but no. The Micra obviously takes itself deadly seriously, which is exactly why it’s impossible for the viewer to.

Thomas Lux and Anne Rouse @ the Nightingale Theatre, Brighton (14.8.03)

The South is doing wonders for the poetry scene in, well, the South, sticking its neck out to promote our writers and take on the projects everyone wants to do but somehow never gets to round to… unique events like tonight’s reading help to give the region a literary identity that isn’t subsumed into the London scene.

The windows of the tiny, hot Nightingale Theatre look out over the roof of the train station, appropriately enough for Anne Rouse’s poems. Her themes are travel, alienation, homecoming, danger, her poems swooping in to catch the detail of her native Virginia as well as Florence, Edinburgh, London and Cornwall. Her rich accent floats between East Coast and East London (she now lives in Hastings) as she shifts from languid and colloquial to urgent and lyrical. The grouchy, uprooted, haunted figure of Jean Rhys hovers over her work, along with other uncertain, flawed voices. The effect is tantalising, making the poet herself seem almost absent. But her presence on stage is solid enough, funny and warm and just slightly nervy.

Tonight’s reading marks Thomas Lux’s publication for the first time in the UK (with The Street of Clocks, from Arc), and precedes his Aldeburgh Festival appearance. Originally from Massachusetts, he is a big, tanned, long-haired man who reads with a powerful, drawling momentum, savouring each title, each telling rhyme and repetition. His talent for a striking title (’Debate Regarding The Permissibility Of Eating Mermaids’; ‘The Late Ambassadorial Light’; ‘Unlike, For Example, The Sound Of A Riptooth Saw’) is reminiscent of Billy Collins, as is his warmth and passion for the small delights and pains of life. But Collins all too often reaches curiously deadening, cosy conclusions, whereas Lux is far more equivocal and brutal. The rural America of his childhood feeds images of treacherous swamps, deserts and forests inhabited by strange and wonderful beasts, whether a baby-swallowing snake or a fiery bird showing the way to safety. His best poems are wry, dark examinations of humanity’s betrayals of nature and nature’s betrayals of humanity, as in ‘Jungleside’, ‘Slimehead’ (named for a fish dubbed ‘orange roughy’ by restaurants to be more appealing - “humans eat first with their ears”) and ‘A Library of Skulls’, Dewey numbers and all - a sly twist on the memento mori trope. He is not afraid to be moral, trusting humour and judicious metaphor to temper the message.

Live, one of Lux’s most powerful poems is ‘Bonehead’, a polemic against 1950s small-town life and the wider malaise it was a part of, which he delivers with special vigour. But even here he is concerned to implicate himself (and every individual) in all the good and bad of the world: “Bonehead Truman, McCarthy, Eisenhower too/Bonehead me, bonehead you”. That is the difficult and joyful truth that Thomas Lux seeks to impart - we are responsible, to ourselves and to our surroundings, and with the acceptance of that responsibility comes the real enjoyment of and engagement with the world.