When Belgianwaffle met David Thomas

Yes, it's that time of year again - and always a sense of a missed opportunity. Not wishing to be a killjoy ("oh really?" I hear) but wouldn't it be nice to have no cars AND no bikes - and just give the roads over to walking?

My reasoning is as follows - the car-obsessive person simply transfers their four-wheel behaviour onto two-wheels. The 4x4 driver mutates into the grimacing mountainbiker prepared to carve you up as you cross the (now car-free) road. Add to this a sense that the normal rules of the highway are no longer applicable - and you've the recipe for some nasty incidents.

A couple of years ago I had a run-in (verbal) with David Thomas of Pere Ubu - he was in Brussels at the Botanique with the Two Pale Boys. I like David Thomas - rather, I liked David Thomas - and I still like the music. However, I couldn't believe his attitude towards the one-day ban on cars. He saw this as gross intrusion by the State and extolled the joys of getting drunk and taking to the highway. Encouraging yells from the audience many of whom - I suspect - didn't quite understand his US-accented English and would be most alarmed if anyone smashed into their BMW on the Ring. (In any case, everyone now yells at concerts no matter what. It's the thing to do.)

I saw him after the show and said I asumed this was a put-on, some kind of showmanship. "No, I wasn't joking" was his reply.

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Reading this week has been rather strange and circuitous. Graham Foust led me to Robert Creeley who I now see as much more 'in correspondence' with Olson and Robert Duncan. Creeley then led me to J.H. Prynne - via Prynne's exchanges with Olson and Ed Dorn.

I always approach Prynne with trepidation. His volumes seem marked 'Off Limits', circumscribed by his Cambridge acolytes, or bearing the Poodle Shadow of Out to Lunch. It's hard to simply read the poems - in the sense not just of the complexities of words on the page but also free from other people's imposed readings.

This afternoon I read through poem after poem ('Kitchen Poems' and into 'The White Stones') untroubled by (my usual) nagging doubts that I am getting only five per cent or missing some major Marxist theoretical argument. And I realise Prynne is much more interesting than many of his champions allow. And - bizarrely, given my recent readings in astronomy, the calendar, crystals etc - how often these early poems return, time and again, to such concerns. There's something about the tone, too, which is compelling. Hmmm....

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Q: How do you solve a problem like Maria?

A: Switch off.

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Lara: "It must be nearly Autumn as people are sneezing."

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While it is gratifying to have a comment - see previous post - to find it relates to erectile disfunctioning is a bit of a - dare I say it - anticlimax.

Whoever did it: thanks but no thanks.