Steve_Bamlett_blog

The best books show that erasure is not an option but seeing all events as a part of a dynamic process to which we change our response, or even find atonemt for, is. August 17th Day Four in Edinburgh : At the Book Festival thinking about Two Queer books about transition and our response to it (Kae Tempest & Dean Atta), and accepting a New Cemetery with Simon Armitage.

Today was not a day for photographs but it was a great day in every other way. Our first event proper was seeing Kae Tempest speaking about his wonderful novel, Having Spent Life Seeking, I blogged about Kae Tempest novel (use that link to access the blog) earlier. This event was so exciting, chaired brilliantly by Michael Pederson, a friend and clear intellectual equal and themselves a queer novelist and poet. The questioning was, and I have grown in the past not to expect this, apt and flexible, taking into account Tempest’s wishes. I did get a chance to ask about the puzzles I had about the idea of atonement in the novel but did not expect the beauty and passion of Tempest’s answer, coming out of that part of his identity he sees as Jewish, ;pointing out the significance of Yom Kippur (came out as ‘onion Kippur’ in the AI voice to text generator) dating some events i the novel and the Jewish concept of atonement with its stress on individual duties and rewards missing in the concept. It is clear that though at-one-ment is also a Tempest theme the pronunciation of ‘atonement’ matters to him because it contains a musical term, ‘tone’, when pronounced as it has developed and that too is about bow how the tone of individualised voices merge with wholes. His expression of this had people in applause.

Tempest resisted reading from the novel – even resisted Pederson reading from it in his stead – but gave a performance at the end of a piece with some crossover themes. It was magnificent. Tempest addressed some of the changes in his own life – the effects, for instance of testosterone treatment following transition to trans male identity and acceptance of the ‘he’ pronoun, resembling the journey of Rothko in the novel, born ‘she’, introduced to us as non-binary ‘they’ and in the final part ‘he’.

Are those some of the surface changes betokening those of determination from various areas and choice that follow referred generally  in the passage I require from its appearance in my earlier blog:

Nothing here is erased even if it atoned for and time put at-one with itself. And tbe issue is that no event cannot be something for which persons can have the ‘will to be grateful for whatever comes and make peace with whatever came’.

The next was a person unlimited in their changes, of whom I wrote in a response to Dean Atta’s Memoir (use link for the blog) Person Unlimited: An Ode to My Queer Black Body. The event though was for a book as yet unpublished, and yet unread by me though I took advantage of being able to buy a pre-publication copy, his debut adult novel Big Man. Like Tempest’s latest book it was a riff on masculinity (but intersected with race)- even in its cover with black and white high-masc chains = one black, one white – intersecting differently over a torso imagined beneath them and the yellow ”cover’ on which they rest,

Atta said in answer to my question about the primacy of EITHER the pleasure of metamorphosis related to the dynamic flow of his speech and his prose-poetic form Or the pain of fragmentation in the eyes of others hat I needed to read Black Flamingo together with Big Man, and the memoir since only all three covered some sort of answer to this. Of course I will and may report back when I reflect on Big Man. He read the prefatory chapter that introduces the Black character Big, and his white lover, Little (binaries being necessary before they are deconstructed). He read two pasges in fact but the first mwas chosen as a flavour giver, so repeated below:

This certainly contains meat for pain and disgust hidden under fluid flow of pleasure and wonder, the mixed smell of wood essence and stale sweat, the taste of tears and cum. Even the fragmentation as firewood lurks here – a sparagmos too far if the whole tree is meant. It was a joyous event – not least with some of the discomfiture of the interviewer, Clive Grant, over the acres of ‘sex’ in the book. We were introduced to Dean’s partner, Tom, who took pictures. A great event.

Geoff and I had enjoyed the day so far. We went to a fine restaurant (the Kathmandu) but after dinner, Geoff chose to go home and I stayed on for the 8.30 p.m Simon Armitage event. The ostensible subject was Simon Armitage’s New Cemetery poems, about which I wrote at the blog linked on the title. Nevertheless these readings gave me surprises not least Armitage’s awareness the line ‘The departed are yet to arrive’ he considered so good when he wrote one morning at 9.15, he ‘packed up for the day’ thereafter. He is right of course. He addressed the mortality issue and I needed to ask him about how these poems related to those about the death of County Durham mining villages related in the song cycles I heard in Durham Cathedral (see my blog on this here), which look at how unfirm rock and stone is, as well as communities, coal mines, unions of workers despite our boasts of Firm As A Rock I Stand. He confirmed that his poem from that set Marsden-By-The-Sea had some autobiographical content in his boyhood discovery that his Marsden in Yorkshire was not the only Marsden, though now it has survived longer.

I returned to thebus stopo joyous at this even, held in the Spiegeltent. Armitage praised the space saying :I didn’t know whether to read poems or dance a can-can’. I rather surprised myself by shouting out: ‘Go on! Do the can-can’. Simon became Serious Simon. I wonder though if this was a mask because when he jokes his Yorkshire drollery rings bells (I was born very near his birthplace but somewhat before.) . After al his first words were about the AI auto-reporter at this event saying that when he spoke at a multi-lingual event in Japan, the auto-reporter could not recognise the term Poet Laureate and each time it was said reported it as ‘portable toilet’. Now there’s a whimsical cum-down for the heir to Alfred Lawn Tennyson, as Auden called him.

I finish this after our first Wednesday event – Gwen John at Modern Two Gallery – but that is for tomorrow (it was wonderful!) with a lay this evening. Bye for now.

With love

Steven xxxxxxxx