Craig Raine and the world's most famous arsehole

There are plenty of English poets that I just don't like, but Craig Raine is the only one that I have personal-type beef with.

For those who don't know, Raine is described in Wikipedia as 'the best-known proponent of Martian Poetry'.

Well, exactly.

His long poem 'History The Home Movie' is a book so exquisitely bad that it has its own section in secondhand bookshops, next to 'History'.

He once wrote a poem called 'Arsehole', about his wife's arsehole. The first verse goes like this:

It is shy as a gathered eyelet
neatly worked in shrinking violet;
it is the dilating iris, tucked
away, a tightening throb when fucked.

Funnily enough, if you put "Craig Raine Arsehole" into Google you get this picture:



So imagine my delight on discovering that Raine has been employed by former KGB man Alexander Lebedev to add an air of literary gravitas to to everyone's favourite right-wing daily, The London Evening Standard. This is ironic, given that Raine's wife, presumed owner of the lyrically fibrillating arsehole, is Anne Pasternak Slater, neice of Boris Pasternak, author of Dr. Zhivago an excellent book suppressed for many years by everyone's favourite agents of socialist terror, the KGB.

His first piece (I presume it is just the first since it's not about anything terribly current, so it looks and reads like they've just said, go ahead and write whatever you like) an essay on Jeff Koons and high art appeared about a week ago. It's a hijacking of of Koons's work that allows Raine to push his three ideas and contains examples of writing that are Rainian beyond parody:

Koons is true to the coruscating wattage of flowers and will not, apparently, admit the obverse — those same petals anointed with rust and decay. We are used to the ironies of modernism, its sceptical interrogation of romantic feelings, but Koons is part of a tradition that goes back to the Renaissance, back to Michelangelo's drawings of “ideal heads”, a tradition that admits selection and improvement, a poetic treatment of reality.

All I can say about it is that if you've ever written something, and then woken in the night and been overtaken by a subtle dread and felt exposed and embarrassed, and thought that maybe what you'd written, despite everything, really had sounded pretentious after all, and then wished that you could take it back, only it's out there irrevocably in print, so maybe you'd ended up knotting the duvet in your toes and secretly promised to yourself just to stop trying to attract attention to your ideas and resolved to from now on be an ordinary working stiff, you really should read this article.

Raine is co-editor of a literary magazine, that should be called Arrête!

Kate Moss and the World's Most Famous Vagina

Writing an advertising blog is an extraordinary thing. Blogger is owned by Google, so it's attached to my calendar which is attached to my email account. So once I'm dead Google will have this historical resource with which the information archaeologist of the future will be able to reconstruct the subtle changes in the commercial climate prior to the total failure of capitalism which preceded the Magnificent Famine of 2010.

I have a friend who spends his life in Cairo reading court records from the Ottoman Empire in medieval Arabic, so to suggest this isn't to overestimate the significance of what I do, merely to state the frank desperation of PhD students, now and forever, in search of an original sphere of research with which to bag a grant.

Anyway, I hope that you're enjoying my blog from your vantage point in the future, whoever you are. I bet the future is shit. I bet it's like a flagship branch of Fitness First in space. But then you probably won't even know what Fitness First is without some special neural download, fucko.

Not being from round here, you need some guidance from someone who at least has a vague fucking clue about what is going on. So one important feature of millenial advertising blogs to which I would like to direct your attention, oh supernerd of the future, are the writings of Kate Moss. Kate Moss was a regular commentator on Scamp's blog for around a year, between 2007 and 2008. The online Kate Moss, whilst sharing many of the attributes of the real Kate Moss, was clearly just an advertising creative posting irrelevant, but verbally inventive comments characterised an extreme childishness plus an obsession with body fluids, group sex and crack cocaine. You might think such a persona would have appalled the industry which gave her life. No, no. In fact, quite often her comments would elicit responses from Scamp's readers like:

Anonymous said...

I only read this blog now for Kate Moss' comments.

Or

Anonymous said...

Only Black Pencil for copy this year went to.....Kate Moss.

Now there is something extremely nasty about Kate Moss. Not just that the things that "she" was saying were unpleasant and distasteful and constitute a perpetual libel of the real Kate Moss, but the idea of a man posing as a woman in order to describe the willing moral degradation of a woman within the almost totally male context of Scamp's comment section was unsavoury. But nonetheless, he/she was extremely funny. And no doubt the man (or perhaps men) behind her* was probably just a gifted copywriter, capable of normally dysfunctional relationships with women, but possessed of an amazed horror around the range of roles the media forced him to manage in relation to women who had found, in Kate Moss, a receptacle* which could contain all of these painful and contradictory impulses.

Kate Moss doesn't seem to have been active since Scamp's live debate with Dave Trott, which I can only assume is down to one of the sudden crippling attacks of self-consciousness anyone who feels the need to continually expose some shameful part of themselves online is prone. I imagine.

I can't help feeling that what my blog needs is an Agony Aunt - like Campaign has Jeremy Bullmore. So I thought I'd put out the call - if you are Kate Moss, or you know who he/she is or are, please do get in touch. If the experience of daily blogging left you feeling too thinly stretched*, perhaps a weekly unpaid gig here might be more to your taste.




As mentioned in my last post GC appeared last night on stage, performing a monologue as part of "A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer", the follow-up to Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues". For the last twelve years Ensler has allowed people to perform her show for the month of February, without paying her for the rights, with the profits going to women's charities that help support female victims of violence. This has turned into massive global vagina jamboree, known as V-Day.

It's a pretty easy get, you know, would you prefer it if women weren't so often the victims of rape and torture? And if you're thinking "no more so than anyone else" you need to get a grip on just how much your facetiousness prevents you from being fully alive.

As Ensler might be loathe to admit one of the reasons for its massive success is use of the word "Vagina" in the title. I think this is a happy fluke on her part, since, by calling the follow-up show "A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer", she's demonstrated she knows not a damn thing about marketing. Nevertheless exploiting the special rule around the title of works of art (for instance, I can mention Conrad's "The Nigger of the Narcissus", without being accused of racism) to allow women to mention their genital organs in polite company is a beautiful thing - something Virginia Woolf could never have dreamed of.

The monologues are on again tonight, if you work near the Strand do come, it will get you off the streets for an hour and help prevent violence against women.

Also, Waterboarders Weekly have just posted a disgusting article about porn. I suggest you ignore it totally here.

So there you go Sociology PhD researcher of 3009, now go off and write a whole section of your thesis on nihilistic writing and cultural taboos. Twat.

* Kate Moss bait see?