Wednesday night poetry

[lederhosen]

After more unsuccessful jobhunting, I was cheered up by rediscovering this one by Clive James:

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

And August is almost over, which suits me fine. Roll on September!

Exercise since last update: 16km. Total 373km/224mi: still plodding towards Weather Hills.

Comments

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

I'm very fond of that one, in a "Remember, thou art mortal" sort of way. After all, for all of the snickering over seeing absolute dogs of novels in the remainder racks, it behooves every writer to remember that s/he could end up there just as readily as that aforementioned enemy, and sometimes due to conditions out of the author's control. (In some ways, it makes up for the frustration of incompetent publishers hanging onto a manuscript for two years, repeatedly posting a release date and then pulling the football away at the last minute, but I repeat myself.)

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

The other bit I love about that is the implication that some writers care less about their own success than about their rivals' failure; I don't think James is actually one of them, but there were and are plenty of that type around.