It's entirely Trinidadian, as jokey as it is heartbreaking, that, with three political parties, instead of finding one to vote for, we should end up with two to vote against.

Thanks, BC, for saying everything we need to know about this election in one sentence.

Put the blame on we

As I type, the UNC is having a political meeting somewhere in my neighbourhood. The first I knew of it was the soundcheck earlier this evening; out of nowhere, a deep, excited male voice boomed through the house, making the windows rattle. "Yes. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes!" It could have been the soundtrack to a porn movie. Then they started playing the annoying UNC campaign jingle. Now they've switched to what sounds like a parody of Akon's "Put the Blame on Me". Exactly how is this supposed to convince me to vote? It puts a definite end to my plans for a quiet night working away at my desk.

***

At least it's a change from the even more annoying PNM campaign jingle, which has been blaring from cars equipped with loudspeakers every afternoon this week. The chorus is a despairing voice bleating the name of the political leader and aspiring dictator: PATREHHHK! Then something about going down the road together. Down the road to where? National migraine?

***

In today's Express, Selwyn Ryan claims the PNM and the COP are running "neck and neck". But everyone I talk to seems morosely convinced that on 5 November the PNM will be back with a bigger majority. I don't know what would be worse: that, or a UNC government with Jack Warner and Ramesh Maharaj in high office. I wish I could believe the COP had a real chance of forming a government. I can't say I've been impressed by their campaign, or most of their candidates; but, if I'm certain of anything in Trinidad and Tobago politics, it's that Winston Dookeran is not a wicked man. Leave his real flaws aside--for now, that alone is enough.

My best realistic hope: an unstable COP-UNC coalition that collapses in a year or so and triggers fresh elections.

But I fear that on the morning of 6 November, we'll wake up and find that we're only just starting to realise what a mess we're in. Maybe we'll also finally grasp that it's our fault, not the politicians'--they're just preying on our prejudices and political immaturity. Then the real work will begin.

This Friday at Alice Yard: Proverb



Still from Proverb, a video work by Mario Lewis, the second artist's project in the new Alice Yard Space at 80 Roberts Street, Woodbrook; opening on Friday 19 October.

Last Sunday



Survey marker at the point where the Appalachian Trail enters Hanover, New Hampshire, from the east; 7 October, 2007

Balkan perils

A friend travelling in the Balkans writes from Ljubljana:

"The drunk Kiwi girl continued her violent rampage for about 2 hours, assaulting anyone who got near her. The police came and she assaulted them too. They handcuffed her and took her away. After that there was a lot of talk about it, and we went to a nightclub around the corner from the hostel which played the worst music I have ever heard in a club. Did anyone dance to 'Eye of the Tiger' when it was popular? One big guy in the club suddenly walked up to me, hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. He then told me that he liked me. The Danish guy I was with (who bore the brunt of the Kiwi attack) asked for a kiss as well, and the man said 'silly white man!' I am exotic, it seems."

This Friday at Alice Yard: Rack



Rack, a drawing installation by Adam Williams, will be the first artist's project in the new Alice Yard Space at 80 Roberts Street, Woodbrook, which opens on Friday 14 September.

Encoded



From the personal archive: Code was a "magazine" I "published" seven-odd years ago. It ran to two issues, each of which consisted of an eleven-by-seventeen-inch sheet of paper laser-printed on both sides, folded down to make sixteen pages, each four and a half by five and a half inches. To read it, you had to unfold the sheet. I must have printed twenty or so copies of each issue, and for the life of me I can't remember what I did with most of them, or who might have read them. Almost needless to say, I wrote all the content myself. I also can't remember why I never "published" issue three.

The big four-five

TRINIDAD & TOBAGO woke up on the morning of its 45th birthday and groaned like an octogenarian. It lay on the bed for a moment before opening its eyes to the blinding light coming in through the window. (The shade trees the British had planted had long ago been hacked down to clear the way for buildings, parking lots, smelters, churches, prime ministerial holiday homes and future monorail stations & child labour camps.) The country let out a little whelp, rolled over in the cramped, crowded, dirty, noisy little bed it had made for itself and tried to go back to sleep....

But even play-play countries in which grandiose official residences went up in record time but schools failed to open on the first day of term because of overflowing toilets, flea infestations & teacher absenteeism, must at least make a show of going about their business, even on their birthdays; and so Trinidad & Tobago sighed, steupsed, farted - and knelt at the side of its bed for morning prayers....

-- B.C. Pires, wishing the nation, ahm, a happy birthday in his column in today's Express.

The only thing funnier than that in the papers today--and I mean not funny-ha-ha or funny-strange but funny-heartbreaking--might be Juhel Browne's report of the media tour of the new prime ministerial palace:

The ground floor of the residence is where all visiting dignitaries would be accommodated in three self contained bedrooms.

Each bedroom has its own toilet and glass-door shower, chairs and a bed that did not appear to be more than 6ft in length.

The beds had mattresses with tags in Chinese words.

The bedrooms had large windows and curtains.

At least one of them had a clear view of the swimming pool.

There is a large room called a parlour which has chairs and sofas.

The ground floor also has a large dining area with a long wooden table and chairs and a meeting room.

There is a kitchen and preparation room for the food.

Some of the counter tops, however, are yet to be completed.

Are these haiku-like paragraphs straight-faced reporting, an odd attempt at irony, evidence of a journalist's utter despair? And what, I wonder, will Our Father have to say about it all?

Many correspondents, few lovers

Email is good for one thing only: flirtation. The problem with flirtation has always been that the nervousness you feel in front of the object of your infatuation deprives you of your wittiness. But with email you can spend an hour refining a casual sally. You trade clever notes as weightless, pretty, and tickling as feathers. The email, like the Petrarchan sonnet, is properly a seduction device, and everyone knows that the SUBJECT line should really read PRETEXT.

But one has many correspondents, and few if any lovers. Individually, they’re all decent people; collectively, they form an army marching to invade your isolation and ransack your valuable time....

-- From "Against email", an unsigned essay in the latest issue of n+1. (I sent my very first email in late 1995 or early 1996--I wish I could remember more exactly. But I remember who I sent it to and more or less what I wrote. I also remember a sense of awesome--or should that be "awful"?--thrill. I knew the world had changed, but I didn't yet know how. And how could I have guessed--I barely understand it now--that a casual click of the send button would start the avalanche that finds me here, a decade later, at the bottom of a scree-strewn slope, in the desolate sump of Facebook?)

To everything there is a season...

...and a time for every blog to get a new look. This blog reached that point many months ago, but lassitude and procrastination are strong with me. However, when the acquisition of a top-level domain name required me to design a new home page, I thought there was no point putting it off any more. Circumspice, dear reader, whoever you are. And here's a last look back at the blog's old incarnation:



I'll miss it a little--I'm silly that way--but I suppose I can always visit version 1.0 in the Internet Archive.

Meanwhile, nicholaslaughlin.com is now up and running. For the time being there's just a home page and a revised version of Choosing My Confessions, which collects links to various of my reviews etc., but eventually I'll post a page devoted to my Guyana book-in-progress, "Imaginary Roads", and who knows what else.

Oh, does this mean I'll now be posting here more often? Probably not, if experience is any guide.

It wasn't until 1955 that I came across the Walcott book....

It seemed to me quite wonderful that in 1949 and 1948 and doubtless for some years before there had been, in what I had thought of as the barrenness of the islands, this talent among us, this eye, this sensitivity, this gift of language, ennobling many of the ordinary things we knew. The fishermen rowing homeward in the dusk are not aware of the stillness through which they move. We lived in Trinidad on the all but shut-in Gulf of Paria, between the island and Venezuela; that sight of fishermen, silhouettes in the fast-fading dusk, so precisely done, detail added to detail, was something we all knew. Reading these poems in London in 1955, I thought I could understand how important Pushkin was to the Russians, doing for them what hadn't been done before. I put the Walcott as high as that.

-- V.S. Naipaul on Derek Walcott, from a piece published in today's UK Guardian, excerpted from Naipaul's forthcoming book A Writer's People.

See this post at Antilles for a snippet from a 1963 letter in which Naipaul praises Walcott's "startling vision and muscular expression"....

Yes, this is my water bottle atop the trig marker on Blue Mountain Peak--for a few minutes last Sunday, it was the highest water bottle in Jamaica. More photos from my hiking expedition etc. here.

...a day full of wonder and coprophilia, as children go to bed early hoping Mommy will once again make a cuckold out of Daddy....

Tonight New Voices hosted the first annual Brown Leaf Awards, for various environmental disgraces in Trinidad and Tobago. Muhammad and Attillah got all decked out in, respectively, top hat and feather boa; there were celebrity guests in the studio audience; Mr. Manners made an appearance, of course; and a good time was had by all, except, presumably, for the Brown Leaf Awardees.

6 April, 2071? 95 years and 11 months seems a decent age to live to. And surely I should get extra points--er, months--for being vegetarian and drinking so much tea.

The writer, like the artist, works in a small room crowded with strange objects. He sits at a low, square table, painted brown. The desk faces a window.

It is early morning, and the light is soft. The writer, like the artist, sits and stares at the sheet of paper before him: empty, white. In his hand he holds a pen.

Making ink-marks on the sheet of paper: that, it has been said before, is what artists and writers have in common. But this morning, the writer, like the artist, does not know where to start; or, rather, how.

In his hand, the very slight weight of the pen--Sanford Uni-Ball Onyx, fine point, blue ink--is a gesture both familiar and strange. The pen is both a comfort and a provocation. And the empty, white sheet of paper is a prism through which the writer sees into his heart of darkness, and his heart of light.

The writer must start somewhere, so he starts with the simplest, most ordinary word he can think of. Anything could follow this word. The word is: “the”.

The writer stares at this word, scrawled in the upper left corner of the no longer empty sheet of paper. Anything could follow this word, but staring at it, the writer realises he doesn’t know anything.

He stares at this simple, familiar word--“the”--until it begins to look strange and unsettling. The writer wonders if anyone has ever really looked at this word before--the shapes of the letters, their darts and curves. The “t” and the “h” like cruel hooks turned this way and that. The “e” like a sickle. How would you pronounce a word like this? Why would you wish to? The writer wonders how anyone has ever been able to write this word, make those particular shapes with a pen, and then go on to write another.

Like the writer, the artist does not know where to start. The artist stares at the empty, white sheet of paper; he studies its grain, the way one corner curls slightly away from his table, the microscopic specks of dust across its surface.

The artist, like the writer, must start somewhere, so he draws a line: a simple horizontal line, in black ink, across the middle of the sheet of paper.

A line across the sheet of paper, for the writer, means either a blank space waiting to be filled, like this: ____________; or a sign for deletion, for removing something that, because the ink mark has already been made, cannot really be deleted: like this.

Either way, for the writer, the line is a mark of failure. It goes nowhere.

For the artist, the line is a line, one of the basic elements of his medium. It is a beginning. It can go anywhere. It is a horizon, beyond which all is possible.

The writer knows it is unfair to think so, and furthermore untrue, but he thinks it anyway, constantly: it is easier for the artist.

And the writer wonders what the artist thinks.

Dreams like a bird of impulse: throb & leap,
joy like a thorn....

Freedom is indivisible, and a threat to any newspaper in the region is a threat to us all.

Mr. Manners, prime minister of the Republic of Tings and More Tings, announces at a post-Cabinet press conference that his government's solution to teenage sexual promiscuity is to encourage young people to watch more TV; from the season premiere of New Voices tonight on Gayelle

Last month, the governor of the state of Oregon, Ted Kulongoski, participated in something called the food stamp challenge (read a New York Times report here). He and his wife agreed to spend no more than US$21 each on food for one week--$21 is the average amount given to Oregon residents who receive food stamps--to raise awareness of poverty and hunger in his state. Some called it a political stunt, some said it showed a real willingness to understand what it means to live in poverty.

I thought of Governor Kulongoski this morning when I read the front-page story in the Sunday Express, written by Andy Johnson: "Big Poverty Drop: Report puts level at 17%". I'll just quote the opening paragraphs:

The Government is readying itself to roll out a report which will say that poverty in the country has been cut in half over the last five years.

The Poverty Reduction Unit in the Ministry of Social Development is said to be completing consideration of a report from a team of consultants which put the national poverty figure at 17 per cent. This is half the 35 per cent figure which the Government says it met when it took office in 2002.

Consideration of the report is said to be underway, and it is expected to go before Cabinet shortly before being made the subject of official discussions.

Framers of the study, who produced the report, used an income level of $655 as a monthly base from which to establish the poverty line in Trinidad and Tobago. This was said to have represented a slim increase over the figure of $625 used in a similar study in 1999. The poverty line figure of $655 is determined as the minimum monthly income required by an individual in order to secure the basic nutritional intake of 2,400 calories a day. Persons falling below this level are categorised as being indigent.

A national poverty figure of 17 per cent will come as a shock to many....

Let's assume for now that these figures, clearly leaked by someone in the ministry, are accurate. I want to see the head of the Poverty Reduction Unit and his team of consultants--let's not think how much they were paid--living on TT$655 a month. I want to see the Minister of Social Development try that. And the Prime Minister, and Mrs. Manning too. And the whole damn Cabinet. How the hell--pardon my language, readers, but the sense of damnation hanging over this country gets heavier every day--how the hell could any sane person living in Trinidad and Tobago in 2007 say $655 per month is an income anyone could live on?