Winterbrass - Jason Tyndall

The Bureaucrat

"Below their message
Containing me under my office
He, 'neath those supplies used to stress it
Me in his office"

-from "Winterbrass", the new poetry collection from Jason Tyndall.

"Tyndall marvels and winces at our despair; his dispatches are humane, generous and quietly furious"
Publisher's Weekly 
"Elegant complexity or exhaustive simplicity? Tyndall is the later-Wittgenstein of modern verse; of that which we cannot speak, we must allow Jason Tyndall to say it for us"
Independent
"An unfashionably honest howl of raw refusal; a refusal to accept the solipsism of modernity, a refusal to accept its ironical vanities, a refusal to accept acceptance. We are sleep-walking through a waking dream, Tyndall says, and instead of taking pot-shots at the Sandman we must place Morpheus square in the cross-hairs. But - he whispers - what if we miss?"
Kendall Murray, Literary Review
"Tyndall speaks with a tongue that has licked the moon, kissed the stars and sucked the very heat from the sun. Muscular and fearless, he goes about his work with a deeply moral fervour."
Times Literary Supplement
"Through a kind of liturgical necromancy he digs up urban horrors, reanimates them as pastoral idylls, and invites us all to blow his horn of plenty"
Spectator
"Crucial"
Guardian

Jason Tyndall, yesterday

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Neutral pig's head island

“Those who say that fiction isn’t relevant any more should read Houllebecq – he is in a class of his own”
- Literary Review

That’s what’s written on the cover of the paperback edition of Michel Houellebecq’s ‘The Possibility Of An Island’. The Post-Modernists argue that fiction isn’t relevant anymore, and the book world is listening fearfully. Brandishing Houllebecq, it lands a confident counter-strike…

No, of course the book world isn’t fucking listening; it’s a non-issue cooked up by a reanimated corpse-journalist, rotting but somehow still walking, who very likely hasn’t read the book, instead cobbling a review together by cribbing the press release, posing a few straw men and hitting the word count with a handful of desperate cliches. If blogging really is a public challenge to print journalism, and this is the standard we are up against, then it’s a pushover. In 1946 Orwell wrote ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’:

In the morning, blear-eyed, surly and unshaven, he will gaze for an hour or two at a blank sheet of paper until the menacing finger of the clock frightens him into action. Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases—“a book that no one should miss”, “something memorable on every page”, “of special value are the chapters dealing with, etc etc”—will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and the review will end up at exactly the right length and with just about three minutes to go.

After sixty years of journalism little has changed. Indeed, it has probably got worse. Orwell, after all, is dead.

Avoid

“Quintessentially English”

“Achingly beautiful”

“…on acid”

“…on crack”

The decline of the pig’s head in butcher’s shop windows

In the past, when people were fully aware that what they were buying was a dead animal, the customer would check out the eyes for signs of decay. Milky? Sour complexion? Then it’s been hanging around too long. The trained consumer looked for signs of a healthy animal. At least, healthy until it was slaughtered. Nowadays, the consumer’s reaction to a disembodied pig’s head would be along the lines of “fucking hell! That’s a fucking pig’s head. Jesus, that’s revolting”, and they would promptly leave. The public want their food free range, organic, humanely reared and slaughtered, but they certainly don’t want anything resembling a dead animal.

Not Partisan

According to http://www.wordcounter.com/cgi-bin/politicalresult.cgi, this blog is, amazingly, politically neutral.