Review of Järvinen, Bedtime Story

Lari Järvinen, You Want Your Bedtime Story? Autopsist Books, 2010. 78 pages. €15.49.

Apparently this book of poetry is translated from the Finnish--it's hard to tell from the rather spartan, vanity published hardcover whether the translation was performed by the author or someone else (his mother?). But if this was poetic in the original, it's not so much any more, sad to say. The really sad thing is that Järvinen is clearly aware of the genres and formulae of modern poetry (I detect no classic forms in this volume), and has been imbued through a literature degree with the right balance of cliché and absurdism necessary to please a poetry tutor, but has no aesthetic, no imagination, no cold fire burning in his rectum that makes him want to fucking create! Just show some passion, man.

I don't want to say there's nothing of worth between these covers. They're just not worth 20 cents a page. If the author had spent the last ten years publishing his work in little 'zines, memorial anthologies, specialist subscription blogs, trade journals, and revues, we might see a career's best collection like this that had been filtered, edited, selected, and the good pieces would be those that survived. Instead we have a rambling love poem that goes on for over four pages, with the repeated refrain:

What an asshole.
Who would do that?
So disrespectful.
You deserve better.

(It's about a vampire, by the way.)

I always try to pick out the best before I sink in the knife, but while this volume is not entirely lacking in the good, it is utterly devoid of the best. Good ideas are poorly executed ("Weird and Wanting", which is a Kulyk Keefer wannabe). The rare competent execution is in the service of the shittiest cliché ("We Destroy Peaceful Eyes", a cheap rip-off of Friesen's "Shunning"). Many poems are both mediocre in delivery, and passingly original but uninteresting in concept ("Is a Very Weird Question", "All Through His Life", the Villemairesque, but less facile, "Before the Virgin"). Themes range from the realist to the gritty to the noir, via dream-like and surreal and scatological, but never shocking or repugnant. It's almost as if the poet went out of his way to be as unremarkable in every way as humanly possible. If the Bamffette hadn't passed me their free copy, I'd be angry that I'd wasted money on it. (Even then, it's not staying on my shelves; back out to Bookcrossing you go, young hardback!)

The last poem in this anthology is titled, "I kind of hate you."

Yeah, you too, Larry. You too.

Come Back Here, Man!

gimme my daughter

Fuqueà La Policía

This beautiful scene briefly adorned the side of a disused charcoal warehouse in Québec City:

(Briefly not because I expect it was or will be cleaned any time soon, but because as soon as another tagger adds their contribution, it will be changed, and therefore gone, in the manner of the Delian ship that retains its conceptual identity while losing all of its essential parts in time…)

Somehow, in whatever order, and however conceived by the artists, we have here a happy collocation of an abstract bird, a cartoon goblin or vampire, the slogan “Fuck the police”, sundry layers of tags in various stages of defacement, and a Pacman-ghost. As all artists among us know, it makes no difference whether the sloganist added her words to the icons elsewhere on the wall, or whether the duck-fancier adorned the rebellious chant with his favourite animal—the end result is all that matters, and is the same either way. L’artiste est mort.

What will interest us for this critique is the juxtaposition of the jaded, counter-cultural chant with the stylised hieroglyph of a constipated duck, and we shall proceed as if the other motifs in this portmanteau were absent (as indeed at one time in the past they may have been, or in the future—or another present—they may be).

The canard, holding itself uncomfortably upright, shoulders hunched as if against the cold, or the misery of days-old white bread lingering in its colon, is facing away from the confrontation, not wanting to get involved, but unable to pretend that it isn’t aware of the problem. Perhaps by keeping its head down, it hopes, it can avoid becoming a victim to the brutality, corruption, prejudice and endemic abusiveness of the Gendarmerie Royale; perhaps by keeping its beak shut, it dreams, it will not be seen as a threat, it will not stand out from the crowd, and it will not be harassed or bullied.

We all know, the artists tell us, that this won’t work, however. Oppression is everywhere; even the act of keeping one’s head down is to fall victim to the chilling hegemony of the constabulary. The silence of the oppressed is the victory of the oppressor. Unable to hide from this fact any more, the duck finally releases its tortured sphincter and shits out a gout of furious words: “Fuck the police!” If it has to die for this rebellion, it will die free, and it will leave the stink of truth on its remorseless killer.

Eurovision Dreams

Yesterday's dream:

EXCITING NEWS FROM THE IRISH EUROVISION SELECTION COMMITTEE!

Tomorrow's reality:

"In breaking news from our entertainments desk, Ireland's Eurovision hopes have been shattered for another year, in what experts are calling an ill-advised decision to submit a lying, foreign, dead guy as this year's entry into the contest. More at eleven."

Horror

Seen in the wild (aka on the wall of a gentlemen's toilets in a pub in downtown Black Diamond last weekend):

Now given, there was a blocked pipe or something in the urinal in this pub, and so the smell in the toilets (the gentlemen's at least) was bad enough to cause this visitor to hold his cider in for as long as possible before a second visit. And given, pub toilets are not the most pleasant place to spend a penny on a Friday night, what with the floors becoming progressively tackier, with plastic cups and cigarette butts filling the urinals, chewing gum mixing in with the medicinal pineapple chunks, a half-open cubicle door where someone who had his poorly cooked kebob at the wrong end of the evening is audibly struggling. But come on.

Horror?

If this is horror to you, then I'm afraid, in the words of the inimitable Blackie Lawless, you've not been 'round my house on a Saturday night.