Now We Are Three

It's three years today since I started this blog.

It feels like much longer.

Some numbers, just for fun: in three years I've had, according to my stats counter, just about 9,600 hits, the overwhelming majority of them one-offs, people arriving here by googling peculiar combinations of words. In three years it seems I've managed 558 posts (not counting this one), which averages about one every other day--I had no idea I'd been so prolific (but there've been whole months when I haven't posted at all). There was a time, soon after I started, when I was the first-ranked Google hit for "trinidad blog". Now I'm not even in the top 200.

In April 2003, I did an "interview" via email with Mark Lyndersay, who was thinking then of writing about blogging in Trinidad for his Bit Depth column in the Guardian. It never ran, but I've kept that Q&A. For want of anything better to post on my anniversary:

Subject: answers about blogging
From: Nicholas Laughlin
Date: 4/10/03 8:03 PM
To: Mark Lyndersay

What drew you to blogging and finally drew you away? [I was posting very irregularly at the time]

I started blogging by accident--that's what I tell people. Like everyone else, I suppose, I'd been reading about blogs & bloggers for months; finally last Oct. or thereabouts I read an article specifically about Blogger software & the free hosting offered at Blogspot. I was curious. I checked out the site. They said it was so easy, anyone could have a blog going in three minutes. So without thinking about it very much I clicked the link, filled out a short form, & before I knew what was happening I had a blog. I typed in a sentence to test it. To my horror, this was suddenly visible to the entire world. A sense of obligation came over me: I felt almost duty-bound to provide content. Then also I was intrigued by the phenomenon, & thought that the best way to explore & understand it was from the inside. And then I thought it might be a good way to learn some basic HTML, of which I was then entirely ignorant. And of course there was an element of vanity to it: here are my thoughts, here is my name, acknowledge me, O world.

I kept it up for about three months, though with a significant gap of a few weeks somewhere in between. I was intrigued by the idea of creating a distinctly Caribbean blog--following regional affairs, expressing strong opinions, debating, demonstrating. To this end I started dutifully reading the regional newspapers online--the Observer, the Gleaner, the Advocate, the Nation, the Stabroek News, the Chronicle, & of course the Express & the Guardian daily, & smaller papers like the Antigua Sun & the St. Lucia Voice a couple times a week. But naturally this required a big chunk of time every day--some days I spent five or six hours (not consecutive) on blog-related surfing, which was ridiculous. I might have kept it up if I had a real audience--not thousands like Glen Reynolds, or even hundreds, but at least dozens. But on my very best day ever I had 27 visitors [four days later, when the Guardian feature appeared, I racked up 72 hits in a day--still my record], & I could tell from my stats software that most of these were in fact people who'd stumbled upon the blog accidentally via search engines--& thus not constituting a real "audience". I had relatively few Caribbean or Trinidadian readers.

So I didn't stop because I lost interest. I stopped because I simply didn't have enough time to spare to blog "properly". Real-world deadlines pressed in, I wasn't getting enough sleep, my Internet bill soared. I'm not a fast enough typist. (Glen Reynolds once admitted that the secret of his success was speedy typing.) And I couldn't argue to myself that I owed it to my readers. I pretty much had no readers--a half-dozen friends & that was it.

How did blogging fit into your hierarchy of writing? Was it a diary? A space for gracenotes? Public musings?

"Public musings", I suppose--I linked to & blogged about things I found interesting for one reason or another--often to things I disagreed with. I made a conscious effort to follow stories that intrigued me, or that I thought not enough people were paying attention to. I tried to cover WI literature as widely as possible--linking to book reviews, interviews etc. Sometimes, I must admit, I posted things just to keep the content fresh--to get the date stamp, as it were.

How frequently did you blog?

I tried to post daily at least. Some days--like Sundays, when the newspapers are thicker & there's more to disagree with--I might have posted five or six entries. But for a period in November when I was simply too busy to think about blogging, I left off altogether; a friend helpfully suggested I put up an "on vacation" notice. I was busiest in January, then suddenly realised I couldn't keep it up & halted in February. I still do post entries whenever something particularly catches my eye--once a week maybe, so the blog isn't dead. It's hibernating, let's say, half-opening an eye every now & then to see what's going on in the waking world.

Is blogging a Trini thing? Would you rather lime and chat than write?

There's no mass audience here for Caribbean-interest blogs, I think, & the big "international" blogs are so deeply concerned with US politics that they aren't of much interest to most of us Trini web-surfers. The global-Internet-geek culture which seems to fuel the blogosphere hasn't achieved critical mass here yet. (And few of us have broadband.) But I wonder if it isn't just that the right kind of Trini blog hasn't been started yet--a blog with lots of gossip & politics & bacchanal, updated tirelessly! Perhaps an energetic enough Trini blogger could make it happen--& one popular blog might create enough of an audience to feed many smaller, more specialised ones.

Personally, I'd rather lie in bed reading than blog or chat or lime. I've become seriously reclusive in my early-onset middle-age [ahem! I was 27 when I wrote this], & very dependent on the consolations of fiction. --But I don't know if you can usefully compare blogging to verbal conversation. Blogging's premise is a mass audience, I think--whether the blogger means to show off to that audience or convert it. The medium has its own very heady pleasure. I can't say I prefer it to the pleasure of conversation (or that of emailing, or keeping a journal). It's a less essential pleasure, certainly. (Though I imagine in a few years personal weblogs of some sort will be as universal as personal email addresses.)

And there is, of course, the thrill of feeling that you're in on something--the early stages of what could be a revolutionary new medium--or could be merely a dead end.

I hope some of this is useful to you. I'm not very coherent on the subject--my thoughts on blogging are many, scattered & inconsistent. Let me know if there are any gaps you want filled.

Cheers.

Nicholas

***


"Here are my thoughts, here is my name, acknowledge me, O world." The world has never paid very much attention, despite my occasional contrivances to increase visitor traffic. I suppose I must once have found this discouraging, but I've gradually come to think of this blog not as a form of mass communication but as a sort of wastebook (in the Lichtenbergian sense) that happens to be online & is hence potentially accessible to millions of readers, almost none of whom, however, is interested. (You're practically my only regular reader these days, Georgia.) Knowing I have no particular audience relieves me of the obligation to be "relevant" somehow, by blogging about politics or current affairs, etc.--& leaves me free to post whatever catches my fancy, from odd snatches of poetry to squibs plucked from old notebooks. (Lately, it's been heavy on Guyana-related material, my so-called Guyana project, which began as an intense but confused interest in the place & has evolved fairly rapidly into a book-in-progress with the working title "Imaginary Roads".)

It's also reassuring to know that if anyone googles my name, at the top of the list will be something I've created & can control: this eccentric, discontinuous, sometime-ish stream of observations, discoveries, complaints, questions & textes trouvés revealing my interests, my obsessions, & perhaps more of me than I really intended when I started out.

From the Guyana Project

I always prefer to travel with maps; it unnerves me not understanding the geography of a place, not knowing which way is north. In any strange place, city or island or jungle, I try to keep a map with me, so I can check the landscape I see before me against the drawing on the paper, relate the time it takes to move from one point to another to the lines and symbols on the chart. I never feel I know a place until I can somehow impose upon the fabric of my sensations and memories an image as seen from some impossible location high above the earth. But I had not been able to find a good map in Georgetown, and now I was travelling blind, as it were; like a man groping round a room, I felt I was drawing on my other senses to fill in the blank spaces in my idea of the land I was crossing.

Nicholas on the road to Nappi, North Rupununi, Guyana, 9 August, 2005:

Guyana's long-awaited 2002 census report--or at least an "intermediate" "core analysis"--has been released; see the front-page story in today's Stabroek here.

When I was in Guyana in February and again in August I heard several theories about why the census results had been delayed so long. It seemed generally agreed that the figures would point to some demographic trend the PPP government was not pleased about. The summary is: Guyana's East Indian population, an absolute majority as recently as the 1980 census, has declined from its 1991 proportion of 48.65% and now accounts for 43.5% of the national population. The African population has also declined (by 2.1%) to 30.2%. The mixed race population, meanwhile, has jumped to 16.7% (three cheers for miscegenation). Most striking to me, Guyana's Amerindians are now 9.2% of the population, up from 6.5% in 1991--which may reflect improvements in health care, nutrition etc. or, as a Guyanese friend pointed out to me, may simply mean the census-takers counted more carefully this time (it's thought that Amerindians have been seriously undercounted in earlier censuses due to the relative remoteness of many of their settlements & distrust of coastlander officials). When more detailed figures are released it'll be interesting to see whether the increase has been consistent among all Guyana's nine officially recognised Amerindian peoples, or concentrated in just one or two.

So you can see why many people thought the government was deliberately withholding the figures: ten months ahead of what everyone expects will be a nasty general election, in a country where the two major political parties depend on ethnic voting, it's revealed that the ruling party's base is shrinking. Interesting that the state-owned Chronicle didn't put the census story on its front page, & published an article giving the reaction of the PPP's general secretary, Donald Ramotar (no link; the Chronicle website is a mess):

He said "the census was taken in 2002 which suggests that the composition of the population was more or less the same in 2001 when the (general) elections were held and the PPP won over 53 per cent of the vote. Clearly, the PPP was getting a large (number) of crossover votes."

Mr. Ramotar noted the Census 2002 showed that the East Indian population was 43 per cent, while the PPP/C has been able to secure more than 53 per cent of the votes and argued that this destroyed the myth of the PPP being an Indian party.

"Historically, even if the PPP received all the Indian votes, it could not win government. And I am also sure that a certain percentage of East Indians did not vote for PPP. Our national, broad appeal saw increasing support in every election from other ethnic groups--Africans, Amerindians and Mixed," he offered.


This is interesting too: as pointed out by this Stabroek story, the figures suggest that 40% of the Guyanese born in the late 1970s no longer live in Guyana, a devastating accounting of the brain-&-brawn drain that's afflicted the country for decades. The census also counts just over a thousand Brazilians living in Guyana, a far cry from the figures I've heard bandied about ("maybe ten thousand just in the Georgetown area").

All, somehow, relevant to the Guyana project....

Formicae

No one has attended more closely than I the unendable arguments of insects, the disputes of their assemblies, the debates of their swarms. No one has made a more painstaking or painful study--I have winced under stings, bites, scratches, scrapes, inhaled repellent gases, pinched caustic liquids, and trembled through strange fevers of their venomous devising--a more eager or anxious examination of their multifarious civilisation, collectively so vast as to be incomprehensible, despite the insects' individual minuteness. I, an amateur (if to love can be ascribed my terrified activity), have suspected and discovered truths to which the doctors and professors and technicians have been blind.

-- J.S. Roman, from "Entomic Deceits"


My blood, I have discovered, is attractive & tasty to the ants, & they will come far out of their way to have it. --Of other personal fluids they will take spittle, but with apparent reluctance. --These mornings I draw a little therefore, an eighth of an ounce or so, & using a sort of tiny aspergillum I sprinkle it on the floor near my table. Quickly the ants stream in from the other rooms in meandering progressions. As they swarm about the scattered drops their glee assumes a series of intricate patterns in continuous motion. These I closely observe, sketching rapidly with pencil & paper. When, having consumed the blood away, the ants evacuate the room, I translate my sketches into passages of appropriate symbols, using specially prepared grids. Several stages of decoding, according to formulae I have with great effort & ingenuity devised, reveal my poems.

What do the ants mean by their avidity? Merely hunger, & their craving suggests our own for supersubstantial nourishment. Their mindless frenzy creates its own vortex of beauty; an image of the inexorable (& voracious) universe. The means by which I translate this into words seem to me purer than any other yet conceived.

Of course I fear the ants; they know me too well by now; whereas I know next to nothing about them. (This is partly deliberate.) I do not even know exactly where they come from, where they assemble, to which nest they carry their daily spoils of my flesh.

-- J.S.R., from the "Nevertime Notebook"


Hungry for the blood of all that move,
hungry for the hidden sweets of flesh,
atoms solving round each point of love,
you weave the fraying world into this mesh
of tingling taut commotion that is God's
(or galaxy's) propulse to holy state:
the sling He shoots me sodden out of sod
to that ecstatic fire I cannot sate.
Your frenzy circling seconds sprung of chance
must teach me to be eager for delight
in every slip or start; your furious dance
my pattern, smarting, craving, to requite.
You wake me with your kisses red as thorns.
To lust, to stinging lust I am reborn.

-- J.S.R., "Sermon to the Ants"

...although we live in a time that sets great store by measuring progress ("research" in academic parlance) in precisely demarcated areas of knowledge, real advances are often made by people happy to muddle along within the splendidly vague job description advanced by Susan Sontag, whose "idea of a writer [was] someone interested in 'everything'". Why, realistically, would one settle for anything less?

-- Geoff Dyer in today's UK Guardian, writing about "gatecrashing the experts' party".

My interest in A.J. Seymour goes back to 1998. That was the year that Faber introduced its short-lived Caribbean Series, edited by Caryl Phillips. To launch the series, Phillips, Robert Antoni, & the late Antonio Benitez-Rojo were sent on a Caribbean tour, with a stop in Port of Spain for readings & speeches. That evening, when the formal events were done & the small audience was buzzing around & gossiping, I nervously went up to Phillips & asked if the new series would eventually include poetry. I suggested Martin Carter [*see below] might be a good poet to begin with. He answered noncommittally, then said Seymour was also in need of revival.

Our conversation ended there. I was left with the sense that I ought to know something about Seymour--I was vaguely aware of his connection with Kyk-Over-Al, but had managed at the age of 23 never to have read any of his poems. Then in late 2001 or early 2002 a book arrived from Guyana: Seymour's Collected Poems, recently published. At last! was the first thing I thought.

I ended up writing a short review for Caribbean Beat & a longer one for the Trinidad & Tobago Review. I was fascinated by the poems in the first place, but also by their author, & especially by the fact that he seemed all but forgotten outside Guyana, despite his crucial role in the development of West Indian literature in the 1940s & 50s.

I got it in my head that I'd write a profile of AJS "one of these days"; I quoted his poems occasionally in my blog, & started keeping an eye out for references to him or his work.

Nearly four years later, the profile still remains to be written (it's currently scheduled for publication in Caribbean Beat in 2006), but two recent trips to Guyana have refreshed my interest in AJS & I've stepped up my research into his life & work. Along the way, I've noticed that there's very little useful information on Seymour on the Web--scattered references, almost no hard facts, & at the moment the top Google hit for "a j seymour" is my own review of the Collected Poems.

A little HTML knowledge is a dangerous thing. Partly to force myself to sort through the AJS material I've collected, partly to give him some kind of meaningful online presence, I've put together a few modest pages with biographical information, links to other online resources, & excerpts from some interesting documents. At the moment this is occupying a corner of my already rambling website, but at some point in the future I may get enthusiastic enough to acquire a top-level domain name. And this is very much a work in progress; as time & energy allow, & as I come across more material, I'll try to make the site more useful. Do email with suggestions or criticisms.

So, for what it's worth: A.J. Seymour online.

[* The publishing world has finally come around to Carter. There are currently two substantial editions of his poems being prepared for publication, one edited by Ian McDonald & Stewart Brown for Macmillan Caribbean, the other edited by Gemma Robinson for Bloodaxe.]

From the Guyana Project

Just write it flat, I told myself, write it, as it were, in a monotone, don't be distracted by anxieties of style. Don't try to explain what you didn't understand. Press on, though you can barely see what comes next and can't see what comes after that. Make it clear how confused you were, how scattered your thoughts, how patchy your knowledge, how arrogant your assumptions. Don't be distracted by anxieties of truth. This is all a fiction you've been assembling in your head anyway, trying to make yourself believe you really know where you've been and what you've been doing. Already you're inventing apprehensions and motives to fill the gaps in your memory. Already the phrases in your notebook, however hastily or petulantly you scribbled them, take on the authority of history, supplying details you cannot dispute because you cannot remember them otherwise. Already some sensations saturate and overpower others, and you rewrite your untidy fictions under their influence.

New working title: Imaginary Roads

Rejected working titles:
Strange Name for Stones (after A.J. Seymour)
Cartography of Stones
Imaginary Maps
Imaginary Countries
Imaginary Journeys
Empty Maps
The Map of the Savannahs Was a Dream (after Wilson Harris--but too long. Make this the working epigraph instead)

All of them attempting to name the tension between physical & mental landscapes....

Today's Stabroek News publishes an abbreviated version of the review of Denis Williams's Prehistoric Guiana that I wrote for the August Caribbean Review of Books--unfortunately without a note explaining its original appearance in the CRB. As far as I can make out, mine is the first review of the book to be published anywhere. I must admit I'm keen to see how (if?) Guyana's archaeological & anthropological establishment respond to this non-expert's take on Williams's opus.

Also in today's Stabroek: Al Creighton on Edward Baugh; & an article on the plan to have Georgetown placed on UNESCO's World Heritage list, including a list of the eleven main sites around the city chosen for preservation (the twelfth, Sacred Heart Church, burned down last December and the Catholic archdiocese hasn't decided what to rebuild on the spot--the parish wants to reconstruct the church in concrete, the archbishop says that's pointless).

This Is the Dark Time My Love

This is the dark time, my love.
All round the land brown beetles crawl about.
The shining sun is hidden in the sky.
Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow.

This is the dark time, my love.
It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.
It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.
Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.

Who comes walking in the dark night time?
Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass?
It is the man of death, my love, the strange invader
watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.

-- Martin Carter

Happy Republic Day.

A Brief Note on the Music of Bach

by Thomas Milliongate

The best description I know of the music of Bach occurs, unsurprisingly, in Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently.

"The air was full of music. So full it seemed there was room for nothing else. And each particle of air seemed to have its own music, so that as Richard moved his head he heard a new and different music, though the new and different music fitted quite perfectly with the music that lay beside it in the air...."

It is the music of the universe, the music the universe would make if every particle sang and every force hummed; the music the universe does make, if only we could hear it; the music God hears; and we hear it in Bach.

Beethoven, my great lover, even at his most exalted is always terrifyingly or wonderfully human. He is imperfect; we recognise this glorious imperfection and even rejoice in it; we share it. We love Beethoven as at the best of times we love ourselves. We cannot love Bach the same way. He is, it seems, inhuman: superhuman. We love him as we love the universe, as we love God. It is not instinctive. It requires an act of faith. And really to listen to Bach requires courage. One finds oneself horribly wanting. There is consolation, but it is profound, metaphysical, difficult, detached. It is the consolation of an ultimate order in which we have we know not what part. Properly listened to, Bach must make us weep, or make us helplessly abstract.

We can imagine what Beethoven thought. Bach's mind is as inconceivable as the mind of God; and perhaps as eternal.

-- From Small Print, the little "magazine" I started in 2000 & which ran for a single issue, read by perhaps a dozen people. I came across the files this evening while looking through old backup CDs. (As it happens, Dirk Gently is sitting on my desk at the office right now--I've just been lending it to a colleague.) I also found an article on the NASA mission to the asteroid Eros that I wrote some years ago for the Express, & a review of W.G. Sebald's Vertigo that the Express declined to publish--among other disjecta membra.

Housekeeping note: I've finally got around to posting Interrupting the Conversation: Trinidad's StudioFilmClub, the essay I wrote with my friend Leon Wainwright for the catalogue of the exhibition of Peter Doig's StudioFilmClub posters that ran from late April to July at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and then moved in August to the Zurich Kunsthalle.

(I made it to Cologne for the opening of the show; flew in sleep-deprived just in time for the morning press conference; & that night after the formal ceremony--my friend Uta supplied a live translation of the speeches--there was a party in the lofty museum restaurant, with a DJ playing 70s Jamaican music, a motley crowd of wealthy patrons, curators, dealers, journalists, & art students, & next morning I found out we had collectively drunk 310 litres of koelsch, the local beer.)

Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they're tremendous tools of freedom of expression.

Reporters sans frontières has compiled a Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents; download in PDF format here.

I don't know if the bulk of people, including Trinidadians, really believe that genius can be manifested.

I guess that's Vidia's bitch: that they don't know what they have, and how can they encourage it if they don't know what they have. The same belt of society we're talking about: people who could give more patronage, who could be less interested in the latest paperback. I don't know what critic is going to write about the play at what level.

I think if I lived here I'd be more distressed. I can see a great despondency here, from the artists or writers who want to do something. But then, is that very different from London or Paris? I have rage against the stupidity of Caribbean governments; but [not] despondency. [In the situation], anger is a healthy thing to have.

-- Derek Walcott, interviewed in today's Express by B.C. Pires (whose book Thank God It's Friday I've just been reading again, trying to write a short review). The play Walcott refers to, of course, is the musical Steel, which opened at Queen's Hall last Tuesday night. The reviews (Lisa Allen-Agostini in the Guardian, review not online, and Terry Joseph in the Express) were, let's say, mixed, but on opening night the mostly well-heeled audience gave the production a standing ovation, and it's announced today that the show's run has been extended. Steel's biggest problem, I think, is not its length (over three hours) or the historical inconsistencies (playwright's prerogative), but the music; and that's obviously a crippling problem for a musical. Steel doesn't sound Trinidadian; the melodies fight against the syntax of the lyrics; & two of the climactic numbers, one meant to be a winning Panorama "bomb", the other the soca hit with which the character Growler makes his comeback, are musically entirely misconceived. So much effort from a clearly hardworking, hard-singing cast, producing so little emotional effect; if only (I found myself thinking) Andre Tanker were still around to work his arranger's magic! And I can't talk about Steel without mentioning the particularly strong performance by Conrad Parris, an exceptional young actor (who I happen to have gone to school with) who should by now be playing leading roles from the major repertoire, if only we had "real" theatre here (& so back to where we began: see Walcott's interview).

I read it as a teenager, for the "dirty parts"; then in my 20s, when as a young writer it "blew my mind"; then in my 30s, when it seemed the most piteously tragic book I'd ever read (Nabokov also termed Lolita a tragedy, remarking in its defence that "The tragic and the obscene exclude one another").

And then I read it again in my 40s, when its comedy repeatedly cracked me up, and left me wondering how I'd never seen it before. Most recently, in my mid-50s, I read it for consolation when, newly displaced to Jamaica, I was in the process of "collect[ing] my scattered skeleton" (Carter); and that reading was a pure, uncomplicated delight. Re-reading it again in my 60s--and seeing what new and utter mutation it has once again achieved under the depredations of yet another passed decade--is one of the few treats I hope still to have in store.

-- Wayne Brown on Lolita at fifty, in today's J'ca Observer.

No Poem

Too many ideas about what is a poem.
No ideas about what is a poem.

What is a poem about too many ideas.

The poem lodged like a seed in the teeth of the world.

The aim of poetry is: "Thoughts that are not at peace."

A poem that prefers maps to photographs.

Convinced that poems can exist.
If a poem were not an accident.
If a poem finished what it started.
If a poem were not surprised.
If a poem were willing.

Ten thousand false starts.

There are other things to do with the truth than tell it.
A lie does concern itself with the truth.

Poetry is what survives a poem.
A poem is what survives poetry.

-- N.L.

O Maker,

there is so much slug inside these shells,
here, at the end of December,
at the edge of a world I couldn’t blame if you did not remember.

"I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art."

Happy fifty-twelfth birthday (as one scholar put it), Lo.

The lyrical and ironic tone of Phillips' narrative voice may owe something to the prose of W.E.B. DuBois--who finished writing The Souls of Black Folk in February 1903, at just the moment Dancing in the Dark begins. The novel reads like a gloss on DuBois' theme of "double consciousness" in African-American life.

The black artist's challenge, wrote DuBois, was to escape "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" and "to merge his double self into a better and truer self."

It is hard to recognize that effort in the antics of Williams and Walker. (DuBois himself would have shuddered at the spectacle.) But this elegant, painful novel finally gives them the honor their audience never did.

-- From Scott McLemee's review of Caryl Phillips's new novel, Dancing in the Dark.

During the early days of her rule, she survived various attempted coups--one orchestrated by Patrick John with, bizarrely, the help of Ku Klux Klan mercenaries--and did not flinch. Once she calmly locked the door to her office and walked out by the back entrance while members of the Defence Force, which she later disbanded, came for her up the front stairs.

R.I.P. Eugenia Charles

(Read Polly Patullo's obituary in the UK Guardian.)