Favourite Poems: "Autobiographical Fragment" by Kingsley Amis

Which is better: a life of ease, or a life of exertion? This is an old theme in poetry (and art and mythology) but it's never been tackled more wittily than in this little-known poem by Kingsley Amis.

It has a remarkable resemblance to the famous poem "Toads" by Philip Larkin, his best friend. Aside from the theme, they both have the same slack metre and loose rhymes, not to mention the same basic structure. I wonder if that's a coincidence or if there's a story behind it.

Autobiographical Fragment by Kingsley Amis

When I lived down in Devonshire
The callers at my cottage
Were Constant Angst, the Art Critic
And old Major Courage.

Angst always brought me something nice
To get in my good graces
A quilt, a role of cotton-wool,
A pair of dark glasses.

He tore up all my unpaid bills
Went and got my slippers.
Took the telephone off the hook
And bolted up the shutters.

We smoked and chatted by the fire
Sometimes just nodding
His charming presence made it right
To sit and do nothing.

But then-- those awful afternoons
I walked out with the Major!
I ran up hills, down streams, through briars
It was sheer blue murder.

Trim in his boots, riding-breeches
And threadbare Norfolk jacket
He watched me, frowning, bawled commands
To work hard and enjoy it.

I asked him once why I was there
Except to get all dirty.
He tugged his grey mustache and snapped:
"Young man, it's your duty".

What duty's served by pointless, mad
Climbing and crawling?
I tell you, I was thankful when
The old bore stopped calling.

If this theme interests you, you might like my previous post "My Fondness for Death, Sickness, Grief, and Melancholy."

A Source of Human Dignity

Very often, I get excited about things that nobody else seems to get excited about, or maybe they just don't talk about them.

Recently I was telling somebody a story about something dramatic I saw on the street that morning. Even though the story was about an event that was unpleasant in itself, I realized that I took tremendous pleasure-- disproportionate pleasure-- in telling the story, and in my listener hearing the story

There's something very magical about stories, even rather mundane stories. One person is recreating, in their imagination, something that another person experienced. They inevitably add details and colouring of their own. And-- is it fair to say they add something else, at least sometimes-- "the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration, and the poet's dream"?

Each time a story is told, this magic is heightened-- so, when we get to a story such as that of Archimedes jumping out of the bath, it has attained the status of legend, the atmosphere of legend.

I found myself pondering why I get so excited about this, and it led me to a thought that has occurred to me many times.

It is, in my view, a great source of human dignity that every person's experience is utterly unique. Everybody sees and hears things that nobody else hears or sees. Obviously, this applies to internal experiences as much as external experiences.

You can learn everything about everything but you will never know what it's like to experience the same things as somebody else. Memory is irreducibly personal.

And the great thing is that this uniqueness applies no matter what you do. It reminds me of the Waterboys song:

I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon.

Somebody who spends their whole life in bed, perhaps an invalid, experiences something that a globe-trotter doesn't.

Does anybody know what I'm getting at here, and do you agree? I must admit that recently I'm getting very self-conscious about the things that excite me and don't seem to excite anybody else. (And no, I'm really not humblebragging that I'm so unique and deep and misunderstood.)

P.S. This fascination with stories, and even stories within stories, has been much on my mind this week because I've been rewatching Are You Afraid of the Dark?, a Canadian-American horror anthology for young teens. The framing device is the Midnight Society, a gang of kids who tell spooky stories around a campfire in the evening-- although they don't seem to meet at midnight.

The series is remembered very affectionately because it didn't lower the bar just because it was aimed at kids. The stories are often very high quality, and even feature twists you might not see coming. And they can be quite scary. You can see it all on YouTube if you want.

Anyway, stories-within-stories have fascinated me all my life. My favourite part of a Sherlock Holmes story has always been the client calling into 221B Baker Street and briefing Holmes and Watson on the details of the case. Similarly, I love horror films such as Dead of Night with the same format.

I've tried reading The Arabian Nights, the Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Tales is the only one I finished. I found the others fairly tedious, to be honest-- shame on me, no doubt.

And I even found The Canterbury Tales tough going, but I read it a long time ago. I do remember enjoying parts of it.

Anyway, here are two freaky coincidences that happened to me this week.

1) I asked a colleague if he had ever seen Are You Afraid of the Dark? He said: "I was just talking about it two minutes ago with C----", another colleague.

2) I'd already been thinking about giving The Canterbury Tales another go when I went to meet a friend who I meet every week. We always meet at the same spot, a book exchange shelf. As soon as I went to meet him, my eye was struck by The Riverside Chaucer on the exchange shelf. I picked it up. "Yeah, take that", he said. "I just put it there."

(But if I do give The Canterbury Tales another go, it won't be that edition, which is in archaic English. That's how I read it before. I think I'll try a modern English translation this time.)

Any suggestions of other works of fiction (on screen or page) which involve tales-within-tales are most welcome. I read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell recently, looking for just this. It was very good, and it is indeed full of tales within tales-- but there's no actual frame narrative. Each tale randomly breaks off and is succeeded by another, and so on, until the second half of the book when each of them are concluded in turn. Interesting in its own way, but not what I was looking for.

(As with all such fictions, the most boring story is the longest. This seems to be an iron law of fiction.)

A Twenty-Year-Old Review of Porterhouse Blue

Here's more from my old blog. I still like Tom Sharpe (now RIP) though I haven't read him in a while. When I say I'm an anglophile, this is the kind of thing I mean-- quite apart from Shakespeare and Constable and all that.

Porterhouse Blue

Tom Sharpe

rating: 5/5

“To Skullion, emerging sleepily from the back room, the sight of the Dean in his dressing-gown holding the knotted end of an inflated contraceptive had about it a nightmare quality that deprived him of his limited amount of speech. He stood staring wildly-eyed at the Dean while on the corner of his vision the contraceptive wobbled obscenely”.

That’s pretty representative of a Tom Sharpe paragraph. Academics, incongruously buttoned-up prose and ludicrous situations are the order of the day. Of course, all farce is about contriving weird scenarios, but Sharpe does it so much more ingeniously than most. His plots are like Fawlty Towers scripts, taking relatively harmless elements and stirring them together to create spectacular explosions.

I made a happy discovery the other day; a load of Tom Sharpe books in The Secret Bookshop (which certainly lives up to its name, since I was only alerted to its existence that week), going at three euro apiece. I’m not going to review them all here, but since Porterhouse Blue is his most famous and the best I’ve read so far, it’s the obvious choice.

The funny thing about this book is, though I’d always loved the title, it made me a imagine a book that was pretty much the yin-yang opposite of Porterhouse Blue. I thought Porterhouse was some kind of alcoholic drink (I was only sixteen) and the title evoked a rich royal blue liquor in a shapely bottle; it had the timeless, tranquil air of a still life. I imagined it was a very staid and contemplative talky book about the human condition, possibly set at the height of the Victorian era, and containing a climactic scene where Penelope Carmichael has a moment of epiphany watching birds eating crumbs in the garden.

Porterhouse is actually a Cambridge college, the nadir of scholarship and the zenith of snobbery, and a Porterhouse Blue is a slang-term for a stroke brought on by the dons’ sybaritic lifestyle. (A blue ribbon, known as a blue for short, is awarded in Oxford and Cambridge for sporting achievement.) A former Porterhouse boy, a left-leaning politician, returns as Master to modernise the college, proposing female students and Fellows, contraceptive dispensers and a self-service canteen rather than the lavish kitchens the Fellows have enjoyed for centuries. There’s also a resident graduate student with a guilty lust for his horribly obese cleaning lady, a servile porter who will stop at nothing to uphold the current regime and a TV presenter who specialises in making documentaries about the passing of the good old days.

Sharpe’s view of human nature is jaundiced in the extreme– virtually everybody in his novels is motivated by some kind of spite, greed or perversion– but his temperament is basically reactionary. He doesn’t romanticise the past (the Fellows of the college and their titled and privileged past students are shown as stupid and callous) but his sting really comes out when he is aiming at the liberal left. Although he seems to hate modernism more for its philistinism and illiteracy than for any more social or political animus. (It’s nice to read Sharpe at one point– I can’t find the passage– describe somebody as being mad only in a figurative sense to mean angry rather than insane.)

His strongest suit is probably the description of his characters’ thought processes. Sharpe’s subject matter, bawdy farce, might lead you to think his books are written in the style of a Sun newspaper article, but nothing could be further from the truth. He is in fact a former academic himself, and not averse to literary name-dropping or giving an occasional flourish of scholarship.

For instance: “The image of Mrs Biggs, a cross between a cherubim in menopause and booted succubus, kept intruding. Zipser turned for escape to a book of photographs of starving children in Nagaland but in spite of this mental flagellation Mrs Biggs prevailed. He tried Hermitsch on Fall Out and the Andaman Islands and even Sterilization, Vasectomy and Abortion by Allard but these holy writs all failed against the pervasive fantasy of the bedder. It was as if his social conscience, his concern for the plight of humanity at large, the universal and collective pity he felt for all mankind, had been breached in some unspeakably personal way by the inveterate triviality and egoism of Mrs Biggs. Zipser, whose life had been filled with a truly impersonal charity– spent holidays from school working for SOBB, the Save Our Black Brothers campaign– and whose third worldiness was impeccable, found himself suddenly the victim of a sexual idiosyncrasy which made a mockery of his universalism”.

Another reason I like the seventies Pan editions of Sharpe’s books is so trivial I’m almost ashamed to mention it; I love the inky, compact typeface that they’re printed in. There’s something robust and earthy about it. Not enough attention is paid to typefaces. Does the meaning of a sentence subtly change from Times New Roman to Cooper Black? You know, I think it just might.

The Front Room

This week, I sent a friend my poetry collection Suburbs of the Soul. Don't rush to Amazon to buy your own copy. It's not available online. Or in the shops. Or anywhere else. It is, in fact, a PDF document I put together in about an hour, issued by my personal imprint Snowglobe Press (who also "publish" my hand-drawn birthday and Christmas cards).

The "collection" is twenty-eight pages long (with photographs I copied and pasted), containing some of the poems I wrote over thirty years.

Re-reading them, I honestly think some of the poems I wrote in my teens and twenties (and afterwards) were pretty good. So much work went into them. And so much thought!

Here is one I don't think I've ever published on the blog, but which I think is fairly good. It was inspired by an actual photograph of an actual "sweet girl graduate" (to quote a different poem on a similar subject), clutching her script and wearing her mortarboard, in an actual front room. I wrote it in 2003.

The Front Room

Whoever took a photograph that was not sad?

A million mantlepieces bear their tender gloom

Of seasons all gone sour, and dreams gone to the bad,

And summer sunlight chilly with the touch of doom.

Those fragile smiles, those background faces’ vacant stares!

(The dust motes flicker in the front room’s morning sun.)

What camera caught these troubled glances, unawares?

Whose sombre face is this, so failing to have fun?

But sadder than all of these, the "happiest moment" snaps;

The beaming bride, the rose-cheeked girl in mortarboard.

Surely joy lingers here? Perhaps. And yet perhaps

These pictures capture all the joy our lives afford.

Look deep, and see the wistfulness their bright eyes hide.

(The lonely front room tingles with the old clock’s chime.)

What shade lies on this graduate? What ails this bride?

What sadness tinctured in the darkroom of sly Time?

The Best Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World Episodes

My favourite podcast of all time is Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. Jimmy Akin is a Catholic apologist and a polymath. In this series, he talks about various "mysteries" with Dom Bettinnelli, his genial co-host.

Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World is very much in the tradition of TV shows such as Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of.. (although it's considerably less sensationalized than that one), as well as the Ripley's Believe It Or Not franchise. I've loved that sort of thing all my life. (My favourite example was a kid's book called The Giant Book of Fantastic Facts.)

The show is from a Catholic perspective, and some of the topics are of special interest to Catholics (like Marian apparitions), but mostly they are of general interest. In each episode, Jimmy examines the mystery "from the twin perspectives of faith and reason".

I'm usually a latecomer to TV shows and podcasts, but this one is an exception. I've followed it from the very first episode, having already been a fan of Jimmy Akin.

One of the things I like about the podcast is how comparatively seriously they take it all. There are plenty of jokes and moments of light relief, and some of the episodes are humorous in nature, but for the most part the tone is endearingly earnest, rather than hilarious or tongue-in-cheek. Each mystery is unfolded in a methodical and even somewhat academic manner.

I haven't listened to every episode, or even anything close to it. I generally skip the UFO episodes, of which there are many. (I find UFO stories boring and corny, and don't believe any of them.) I'm not keen on the parapsychology episodes, either.

My favourite episodes are those which introduce me to a mystery I'd never even heard about before, or which analyze a mystery which is somehow one of a kind. 

So, without further ado (I love that phrase, here are my favourites:

https://sqpn.com/2019/05/fatima/

Well-trodden ground for most Catholics, but it's so interesting and astonishing, it never ceases to be of interest. And it's fun to hear a well-known mystery get the Mysterious World treatment.

 https://sqpn.com/2019/06/the-voynich-manuscript/

A strange manuscript, which came to light in modern times but whose vellum been carbon-dated to the fourteen century. Written in a language (or code) that nobody has been able to decipher. Truly a unique mystery.

https://sqpn.com/2019/07/joseph-smith-mormon-prophet/

I've been fascinated with Mormonism from my twenties. Jimmy and Dom are always kind and respectful, but Mormonism's founder doesn't come out well from this examination.

https://sqpn.com/2019/08/the-betz-sphere/

A small steel sphere which came to public knowledge in the seventies, and supposedly had many strange properties. I'm very sceptical about this one, but I'd never heard about it, and it's interesting. 

https://sqpn.com/2019/10/numbers-stations/

Mysterious radio stations where numbers are read about at repeated intervals. Sometimes includes a call signal. There's not much mystery about these. They undoubtedly exist, and everybody knows their purpose: to transmit coded messages to intelligence agents. But they're still extremely creepy and fascinating. A new one has been started recently, broadcasting to Iran.  

https://sqpn.com/2020/04/david-koresh-waco-siege-branch-davidians-texas-apocalypse/

I knew next to nothing about David Koresh, even though I remember the story being in the news all those years back. And I find cults interesting. The sequel episode, in which the disastrous raid on the Branch Davidian complex is described, is also interesting.

https://sqpn.com/2020/08/ruby-ridge/

Not really a "mystery", per se, but a compelling story about another disastrous raid. I'd never heard about it before.

https://sqpn.com/2021/08/the-exodus-did-it-happen/

I'm a fairly sceptical guy. I've always found the story of the Exodus kind of hard to swallow and wondered if it's to be taken as literal truth. This episode provides some surprising evidence in its favour.

https://sqpn.com/2021/11/d-b-cooper-the-hijacker-who-got-away/

Ah, D.B. Cooper. Who doesn't love this one? The hijacker of a commercial flight who managed to parachute away from the plane with a lot of money, although he probably didn't survive the jump. But nobody knows for sure!

https://sqpn.com/2022/02/our-lady-of-kibeho-marian-apparition

I'm fascinated by Marian apparitions and I knew very little about this one.

https://sqpn.com/2022/04/the-green-children-of-woolpit/

This is about as singular and one-off as it gets. A medieval English legend about literal green-skinned children who appeared out of nowhere. So many incidental details about the story give it a certain plausibility.

https://sqpn.com/2023/03/joshua-abraham-norton-first-american-emperor-emperor-norton/

This is one of the "funny" episodes, and it is absolutely charming. About an eccentric who proclaimed himself an Emperor and was indulged by many people.

https://sqpn.com/2023/05/the-amazing-story-of-iron-mike-malloy-michael-malloy-mike-the-durable-murder-trust/

Another funny episode, about a syndicate who decided to kill a drinking buddy (and Irishman) for insurance money. However, he seemed impossible to kill. Not really that funny, I suppose, since they did kill him and went to the hot chair.

https://sqpn.com/2023/11/our-lady-of-zeitoun-egyptian-apparition-coptic-church/

Jimmy Akin has named this the most persuasive of Marian apparitions and it's hard to argue with that. It was filmed!

https://sqpn.com/2024/09/the-zodiac-killer-crimes/

The show tries to avoid too many true crime episodes, which is laudable. I'd never really paid much attention to the Zodiac Killer until I listened to this episode, then I was fascinated by the subject for a while. It also got me to watch the 2007 movie Zodiac, which can hardly be praised too highly.

https://sqpn.com/2024/11/investigating-medjugorje/

I've never paid that much attention to Medjugorje. I've always been a sceptic. Jimmy and Dom devote three episodes to the subject, and....well, I came away more sceptical than ever. But interesting stuff, for sure.

https://sqpn.com/2024/12/the-man-from-taured/

An absolutely fascinating story of a man from an apparently non-existent state, who was detained by Japanese police in 1960. I'd never heard of this before.

https://sqpn.com/2025/04/jack-the-ripper/

I've never been particularly interested in Saucy Jack, but this is a good distillation of the head-spinning number of theories that have proliferated down the decades. They did several episodes on this one.

https://sqpn.com/2025/10/the-tennessee-prophet-john-hendrix/

A man who seems to have prophesied the building of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Manhattan Project. Absolutely captivating.

https://sqpn.com/2025/12/the-amazing-sea-monkeys/

Unless it's false memory syndrome, I'm pretty sure I can remember encountering advertisements for these critters, which were first marketed in 1962. One of my colleagues was actually given some as a gift, when he was a kid. He thought they were lame, although apparently they have their own fandom.

The guy who came up with the idea is interesting for other reasons, which are quite shocking.

So what are you waiting for? Go and listen to Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World!

Polybius

Have you ever heard the urban legend of Polybius? Here is a perfectly adequate summary from Wikipedia:

Polybius is an urban legend about a mysterious arcade video game. According to the legend, the game appeared in arcades around Portland, Oregon in 1981. The gameplay was supposedly psychoactive, abstract, and dangerous. Children who played the arcade game were said to suffer from amnesia, seizures, night terrors, and hallucinations. Despite these adverse effects, the arcade cabinet was described as so addictive that players returned to Polybius repeatedly until they went insane, died, or vanished. The lack of any surviving Polybius cabinets is explained by men in black who were said to record data on the players before removing all the arcade machines.

Polybius is probably my favourite spooky urban legend-- despite the fact that it's a manufactured urban legend. That is, it seems to have been started by an online article in 1998. (Although, tantalizingly, it does draw on various rumours about video arcades back in the eighties.)

Here are some the reasons I find the story so spooky:

1) The strangeness of the name Polybius. It's not the sort of name you'd associate with a nineties video arcade game. (Admittedly, I don't know much about nineties video games.) It's the name of an ancient Roman historian. I seem to recall that the choice of name might have been a nod to something Polybius wrote about mass hysteria, though I can't remember where I read that. I find this oddly sinister.

2) The fact that the game's "cabinet" was said to be a plain black cabinet, and that the game itself was "abstract and geometric". I also find this oddly sinister.

3) The understatement of the story. Although the above summary mentions players of the game dying and going mad, most of the accounts I read-- or perhaps this is just the version I preferred to remember-- didn't go so far. Instead they mentioned that the game was addictive, and that it gave people nightmares, hallucinations, and insomnia. This is somehow much creepier, in my view.

4) The fact that the scary element in this story is the opposite of everything that is traditionally scary. Video arcades are public, busy, modern, and high-tech (for the time). Spooky legends tend more towards deserted, abandoned, dark places. Why this should make the story scarier, and not just more original-- I'm not quite so sure of that. (The obvious answer is to say: because it suggests that dark forces can strike us anywhere, even in mundane and modern settings. But I don't think that's it, somehow.)

5) The lack of any final climax, pay-off, or "reveal".

So, do you find the story scary?

I think I'll have much more to say on the subject of why I find particular stories scary, and why I seek out particular stories. It's one of those topics where I want to write about it to form my own thoughts, as well as to communicate them. 

An Incidental Query

Would a world full of idealists be a better world, or a worse one?

It's not a rhetorical question. I'm interested in what people think.