Black Swan Green: List 3

Our Foreign Office've been trying to restart negotiations, but the junta are telling us to get stuffed.

“Pack of hyenas," Dad remarked. “The British'd show a bit of decorum. People have been killed, for heaven's sake! That's the difference between us. Will you just look at them!"

"Patronize your underlings in your supermarkets as much as you want, Michael.”

Some Argie diplomat in New York, still harping on about the Belgrano being outside the zone, said Britain no longer rules the waves, it just waives the rules.

“Are you trying,” Mum said with a half laugh, “to dazzle me with jargon?”

The Daily Mail listed all the lies the junta are telling their people. It made me livid.

“If I repeated it verbatim,” Ewan lowered his voice, “chunks of plaster would come crashing down from the ceiling, in shock. The wallpaper would unpeel itself. A pretty grim first impression that would make on your parents, don't you think? Very sorry, but some things must remain veiled in secrecy.”

The call ended with Mum shrieking the words “instructing my solicitors!” and hanging up.

Most of the thirty thousand enemy soldiers, she says, were just conscripts and Indians.

No, I haven't actually seen him, but come and arrest him anyway. He needs a good ramming with a shiny hard truncheon!

Swim across the lake in the woods, climb the quarry down Pig Lane, go nightcreeping across some back gardens.

There’re stacks of stories where the glass spells out something like
S-A-T-A-N-I-S-Y-O-U-R-M-A-S-T-E-R, shatters, then the kids have to call a vicar.

Better yet, the flat roof of the next garden's oil tank was just a foot below me, and screened by coal-blue conifers.

The second back garden was miles dodgier. The curtains and even half the windows were open.

“I was practicin' my trumpet,” said the man, “and I heard a funny sound, so I came out to take a gander.”

The game of Twister collapsed into a mound of crushed bodies, bent arms, and wriggling feet.
“Look at that rabble!” Squelch’s mum tutted, pleased.

The “solarium” sounded ace. A planetarium for the sun instead of stars? Maybe the vicar was an astronomer in his spare time.

Consequences is, these enchantible rectory houses are sold or rented, and vicars must move to little houses.

I do not charge you for this service. Is gratis.

“T. S. Eliot expresses it so—the poem is a raid on the inarticulate. I, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, agree with him. Poems who are not written yet, or not written ever, exists here. The realm of the inarticulate. Art”—she put another cigarette in her mouth, and this time I was ready with her dragon lighter—“fabricated of the inarticulate is beauty..."

Words say, ‘You have labeled this abstract, this concept, therefore you have captured it.’ No. They lie. Or not lie, but are maladroit. Clumsy.

“...William Carlos Williams asked me to abandon my husband and”—she uttered the word like a pantomime witch—"'elope'! Very romantic, but I had a pragmatic head and he was destitute as...épouvantail, a—how you say the man in a field who frights birds?”

“...William Carlos Williams asked me to abandon my husband and”—she uttered the word like a pantomime witch—"'elope'! Very romantic, but I had a pragmatic head and he was destitute as...épouvantail, a—how you say the man in a field who frights birds?”

Who foundationed European literature if not the ancient Greeks? Not Eliot's coterie of thiefs of graves, I assure you!

“You are being quintessentially truthful.”
“Anyone can be truthful.”

Absolutely, if you compose derivative verses of cupids and cliché, Miss Madden will remain with her ‘prat’ and you will justly earn derision.

Absolutely, if you compose derivative verses of cupids and cliché, Miss Madden will remain with her ‘prat’ and you will justly earn derision.

Truth is everywhere, like seeds of trees; even deceits contain elements of truth. But the eye is clouded by the quotidian, by prejudice, by worryings, scandal, predation, passion, ennui, and, worst, television.

But the eye is clouded by the quotidian, by prejudice, by worryings, scandal, predation, passion, ennui, and, worst, television.

If an art is true, if an art is free of falsenesses, it is, a priori, beautiful.

“Of course I am right. If ‘Jason Taylor’ was the name here, and not ‘Eliot Bolivar Ph.D., O.B.E., R.I.P., B.B.C.’”—she biffed the page with “Hangman” on it—“the truth will make the greatest mortification with the hairy barbarians of Black Swan Green, yes?”

If you still fear to publish in your name, is better not to publish. But poetry is more resilient than you think.

He was an amanuensis for my father, when my father was too old, too blind, too weak to hold a pen.

“I looked up Vyvyan Ayrs in the Encyclopaedia Britannica at school.”
“Oh? And how does this authority venerate my father?”

"...Critically respected in Europe during his lifetime, Ayrs is now rarely referred to outside the footnotes of twentieth-century music.’”
“That is all?”
I’d expected her to be impressed.
“A majestic encomium.”

My father praised Robert without respite!

“Sophistry,” she pronounced.
I'm not sure what “sophistry” means so I kept schtum.

“Robert's sextet is now impossible to buy. You encounter his music only by serendipity in vicarages in July afternoons. This is your one chance in your life. You can work this gramophone?”

“'Fantasy'? Pffft! Listen to Ronald Reagan's homilies! 'Horror'? What of Vietnam, Afghanistan, South Africa? Idi Amin, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot? Is not enough horror? I mean, who are your masters? Chekhov?”

Their lawyer contacted us this morning. He refused to tell me why they’d been extradited, but, putting two and two together—the husband retired from the Bundesbank six months ago—it's some sort of financial scam.