Low Life Art Stuff

Beyond the Blue Dragon on Newport Road, familiar Finch territory, “Worst hotel in Cardiff - the bedding is appalling” or “excellent value for money !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”, both this month’s comments on Trip Advisor, take your pick. East of here, out front of the social housing, transient accommodation bed-sits, nineteenth century stone built three stories, gardens paved over, is the Slavic Bar. It’s opposite a house, buried deep in its unclipped hedges, now giant green and towering, called Dom Polski, Polish House. Our friends from the East.

The low garden wall is lined with Slavic faced, crew-cut drinkers. Trainers. Cans. Cigarettes. Laughter. One of them demonstrating to another how he’d managed to punch someone in some fight somewhere and the victim had gone down with a single blow. He weaves it into the thin air, this clout, wide-mouth laughing. Takes another pull on his can, gets his cigarette lit. They could have done this in the comfort of the New Dock Tavern at twice the price but that Broadway pub has gone the way of all its fellows – the Locomotive, The Bertram - unprofitable and shut. So they drink in the street, or just off the street, in trouble-free unregulated harmony, the traffic louder than they are.

I go by here with my notebook. There’s that thing about walking and writing. The two are so close together. Walk and the ideas come foaming up. Scribble them illegibly, try to decipher your gems when you get home. Half the time this proves impossible. I don’t know the answer.

I’ve tried making notes by speaking them into a recorder, or in times of great desperation onto my phone, but this is pretty hopeless. At home I hear mostly the noise of the passing cars or the wind or both. My voice in the mix but hard to clarify. Notes by hand, well we’ve been into that. You need to stop and write slowly. Then either it starts to rain or the moment of inspiration passes.

Ideas are such fleeting things. Hold then up for consideration and they crumble. It is as if you have to get them down without actually thinking. Such a hard act.

None of the drinkers write. I’ve seen no evidence of any of them with pens or paper. Bukowski, if he were alive and here, would have made a whole book out his observations. He would have been there with the can drinkers, knocking his back and encouraging his fellows to go for more. Garrulously smiling. Then he’d make a poem of what he’d seen and heard. A dying art. Or maybe by now, in the twenty-first century, we’ve read just too much of this low-life as art stuff.

Henry Miller started it. Sitting in Paris cafes with his wine and his notepad. Recalling the drunken mauls and women chasing he got up to among the bars of Brooklyn. Whole novels fell from his pen. Sit and wait and stare and the world will give you what you need. Why walk anywhere?

But I have to. It’s what I do. I reach the house and get myself in front of the machine as fast as I can. Turn it on. Will it to boot-up just that little bit more swiftly and then, there it is, the Windows screen and Word launched. I press the keys and out it comes.

Dusty Things That get In The Way

My mother always had a deep dislike of books. They were dusty things that got in the way. They had to be stuffed from sight into the backs of cupboards. In the front room bookcase was a set of china dancing ladies, a carriage clock and a fruit bowl with no fruit. My books were upstairs, under my bed, in a box. How reading became my lifetime’s obsession I’ll never know. It could have been my uncle, who each Christmas gave me books about Poland. Or my father who’d offer me Dickens when no one was looking. Or maybe it was the local library where out of nowhere I found choice and freedom and endless science fiction.

Once this road had been embarked on there was, of course, no end. It was never a battle between reading or not reading but always one of what to select next. The massively politically incorrect Henry Miller, when I discovered him, offered a panoply of directions. Barely a chapter of any of his books went by without the author coming up with long lists of recommended works and the names of great authors that readers should follow.

In a dark corner I found the great fantasist John Cowper Powys’s 100 Best Books which offered a sort of road map. Better was Philip Ward’s mind-bending A Lifetime’s Reading in which a game plan for the next fifty years was delineated. This offered the reader an enthralling education through the consumption of five hundred books. Did I manage it, all 500? Certainly not. But I had a go.

How you decide on what to read next is, of course, a matter of enormous interest to publishers. Do you pick your reading matter by reputation of the author, because you’ve read about the book in the papers, heard about it on TV, liked the sound of title, or seen it in the hands of others, intently being read on the train? “I can’t understand why anyone would want to write a novel when you can pick one up for just a few cents” said an American journalist. And he was right. The market is glutted. The choice goes on forever.

Bookclubs offer one way out. Here you gather among friends, all having consumed the same title, to praise, destroy and discuss. Once that’s done you collectively select the next month’s read and off you go, a mandated title to explore.

Sometimes there’s a surprise waiting. At a club I attended I had the author secretly wait in the kitchen while the discussion rolled and then brought her out when all was done. Luckily the book had gone down well. But it might not have.

Book clubs are booming. Check your library for information about the nearest one to you.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #173