Long Cold III
A fair gale blows.
I wonder where my
jumpers are now.
Latest
Watching the Rains Roll Over
Keep her lit, they say, but she isn’t, and far be it from me
to be the spark, although you would stay arid for me,
brilliant white sandpaper of the most coarse variety
and office wall asbestos stacked up three score and a few
inches, and laid out.
The dangers of some asbestos products are winding.
He’s in the hollow (of that wall), between slices of
plasterboard, coughing on the commas etched into his skin,
while feeding himself dry honeyed loops, shovelling them
into his bloodied maw.
Benway: Entering the Rubicon
Entering the Rubicon
Benway found himself standing naked and alone. There was only white around him or, rather, there was nothing but blankness. He looked down towards his feet. He was stood on a blank floor of some kind, or that’s how it appeared to him. For any perception was obviously perceived. He recognised this as a meager concession. He had no idea what was really going on anymore and to escape into hollow theory is to remove the self from an immediacy. His feet moved him on the spot and his body turned at their insistence, in the direction he had fallen from. His eyes did not find the door that he had come through. Instead, there was only more blankness. He tentatively reached into the space and felt a solid barrier, a wall. He brushed and stroked the bareness in mild, absent curiosity, pressing his palms against it and spreading them slowly outwards until they encountered more barriers, complimentary walls.
Turning again, blinking, he noticed that there were no shadows, not even one of his own. Indeed, there did not seem to be a light source, as such, with the walls luminous in their own blankness. He pressed his hands outwards again, feeling the spatial impediment. His bare left foot stepped forward, only to be overtaken by his right. Looking down at the slow, deliberate movements of his most distant extremities, he sensed a physical perspective even though there was nothing visually. There was no other direction to go it seemed.
The Gears of the Apple
Imagine how strange an
experience it would be,
to have your eyes rot away
inside your head, because
they are made of apple.
The line between pursuit
and predation is a thin one,
drawn in dust with a fine razor.
Finger twitch, chest stitch,
all the heaving motion of a
giant trundling gear, sweating,
not a fulcrum of
anything but crude lashings.
Oh Pamela, to pray to you would
only admit crushing defeat,
and you would prefer chocolate
anyway but hey,
that would do for me.
Swing up, swing up, the Lord.
Note on a Harbour
Note on a Harbour
Could you uncrumple me,
or blow me up, or
assemble me from boxed
flat pack, because I am a sick
note,
and a pink ballon with
birthday wishes printed
in bold black comic
sans,
and a desk unit designed for
ease of use with a personal
computer,
or maybe some paper currency
or a black cat banger
or your kitchen, full of
so many different and
unnecessary knives.
Semicolon. Demi colon.
Demi colonic. Semi colonic.
Indefinite, two, four or nine
people you are, maybe more,
it is becoming more difficult to
count as I bang the
stretched tarpaulin and wheel
back along the dirty harbour,
and breathe the turgid sea air,
stale and hard in low long
it has been swilling about; it
takes one thousand years for
the water to flush itself out
and by that time it is
mank again.
An Earnest Engagement
- And the second of the day…
An Earnest Engagement
Two ticks ticked on the deed poll.
It was a riot, my darling,
but I cannot justify our proximity
in your unwieldy or unspoken terms.
The simplicity of the logistics of our
carefree entanglement
was entirely at odds
with the lub dub of my own ticker
- which told me to wrap her
up – and the erstwhile yearn
which now yawns into
the tarpaulin of a sleep gallows.
Bring forth the hurtler;
the hurtler. To go through your
ticker, and make it click or flicker
with loud and lofted language,
such brusque brush off the crisp cuff
of her sleeves, both of them,
which lie over there, very well,
that would be a fine thing.
I Forgive You, Richard
- Remember when I used to introduce poems in italics? That was brilliant. That is what I’m doing now. Also, today I will post twice, so watch out for that.
The following is a poem about a soccerball player. I would never write anything serious about a baller but a girl told me this was good. That made me laugh but then I thought. That is the reason why this is getting itself posted.
I Forgive You, Richard
You showed you were cast of
more than I,
borne from the earth,
and poured into a human cast.
Only years could set you -
over a course of thirty summers
your gelatinous, almost amorphous
self became solid in my shape -
and now you are more than I, more
than any other.
Today I saw your human core,
for just one second,
and you heaved a human sigh.
Long Cold II
Long Cold II
Most nights I sit by myself
and eat breakfast cereal,
with the television giving the room
a bit of a flicker.
Steve Jobs or, The Tweets of the World are a Constant Quantity but of Questionable Quality
Figure 66.1: Steve Jobs wears jeans.
At 7am I awoke. I got straight out of bed and had a hot shower. At about a quarter past the hour, Twitter illuminated me to the fact that Steve Jobs, Apple innovator, had died. Poor Steve Jobs had died.
I tweeted, as one might, about Steve Jobs. Among the plethora of “RIP, Steve Jobs,” tweets, or saccharine 140 character odes to that tune, mine was chalky.
“While I suppose I’m a bit sad for Steve Jobs and his family, I mostly don’t care. My MacBook is great but I paid Apple €1600 for it.”
Steve Jobs made the lives of people who could afford it slightly easier with functional but elegant electronic consumer products. It isn’t charity; it’s business.
Jobs led a company, drove numerous companies, to create profit. By common moral standards this is neither a bad nor a good thing in itself, but the fact that Steve Jobs led the company that developed my laptop does not make my heart beat for him.
Further irked, the more I thought. A minute later I tweeted again.
“Apple were the ‘alternative’ multinational money machine, cooler than Microsoft? Steve Jobs wore jeans and t-shirts instead of suits. Great.”
I used to have a Dell laptop. It was really good. I also had a Sony walkman at one point. I don’t hold any love for the leaders of those companies.
The Sony walkman, one of those old ones that played cassettes, that was my first bit of technology that was my own. I look back more fondly on that than any other electronic product I have ever had.
Many of my generation learned to use computers with Windows products on Hewlett Packard and Dell Computers, as the next may learn on Mac operating systems on Apple Macs.
Bill Gates, the multi-billionaire name most commonly associated with Microsoft and Windows, is not a figure of public idolatry in the same way as the unexpired Jobs was.
An interesting albeit rather obvious comparison is fit to be drawn between Jobs and Gates. Within similar fields, both are very different kinds of innovators, inventers and visionaries. Yet Jobs is the alternative choice, the underdog, undermining the dominance of the big evil, Microsoft.
As my previously half-baked opinions on Jobs found solidity, I tweeted again. It was about half past nine by this time and it was my last shout on the matter.
“Poor Steve Jobs. He made our lives slightly easier with products that we bought from his company for cash money. A true hero.”
In 1987 a charity organisation called the Stephen P Jobs Foundation was started. A little over a year later it folded having done nothing other than employ famous designer Paul Rand to create its logo.
Ten years later, Jobs terminated all of Apple’s corporate philanthropy programs when he rejoined the company. This was because he wanted the company to concentrate on becoming profitable again after a period of decline. These programs did not resurface.
I have no favouritism towards Bill Gates or any business person, but where the veneration of Jobs comes from is beyond my grasp. I don’t wake up every day and thank Adi Dassler for my shoes or Levi Strauss for my jeans, and they were pioneers in their fields.
Neither do I thank Rupert Murdoch for bringing me Premier League soccer every weekend. BSkyB innovate. They bring us Premier League coverage in new ways every week, giving us more access. Sky have directly empowered British football through their coverage, innovative branding and inventive market penetration, indirectly leading to the exponential improvement in quality of these leagues and, by proxy, our enjoyment of them.
Jobs was an innovator, but so is Jonathan Ive who has contributed just as much if not more to what supposedly justifies Jobs’ sanctity now: Apple’s innovation, invention and technological vision or, sleekly designed iPhones that are updated every couple of months rendering what they replace obsolete and the most depreciable consumer good since toilet paper.
I have no bad will whatsoever to Steve Jobs and I take no pleasure in his death. I feel bad for his wife who is, according to many sources, a nice person. I feel bad for his family and those who counted him as a friend.
The painful Twittering of millions of people in mourning over a megalomaniac business man does raise my ire though. Why this particular genius? Why not the others, the ones that aren’t the heads of multinational corporations?
A cult of personality rears its head now. Jobs may have been a genius, but he was also a man who wore denim jeans, turtle neck jumpers and (probably) endearingly tattered converse.
Jobs was his own best marketing tool. The sudden fall in Apple’s share price upon news of his death is as much a testament to that as it is to his capacity for invention.
The design team is still there. The people who developed five generations of iPhone in the space of four years – each shinier than the last – are still at Apple. So don’t worry.
The problem for us is that the same lovely face isn’t there to put the new product in our hands anymore. The ‘alternative’ guy – the lesser evil to Bill gates or some soulless Japanese technology company – is not there to keep us loyal.
But it isn’t Fairtrade iPods and iCoffee that we’ve been filling up on. It has always been the ‘alternative’ value of Apple, the Steve Jobs factor even when we don’t see him.
This tragedy means that now we have this vacancy in our lives, a lack of an intermediary between the product and our money. We’re lamenting it. The thing we associated with “innovation” and “invention,” is gone. And all we have is product, pure product, pure Apple.
And only now do we realise that the thing we worshipped all along, the thing we pay tribute to now, only ever hid our worship of the product, the consumer good that is Apple, in all its ‘alternative’ glory.
