Homily

And so another languid excursion through the Italian homeland has run its course and we find ourselves pottering about the conservatory at Lickham Bottom (yes, we bought the Smithy’s Cottage) dabbing at the spots on our succulents. Once again we were thwarted in our efforts to attain a private audience with Pope Benedict, despite having brought him along a splendid bromeliad, unfortunately confiscated by a member of the Swiss Guard (looking not unlike a semi-furled maypole) who politely informed us that pineapples are not permitted in the Sistene Chapel due to the corrosive effect of yellow spot virus on the frescoes. Pity. We had hoped to reminisce fondly with His Holiness on his Ratzinger days; on jugendlich star jumps upon Nuremberg lawns and full-throated treble renditions of ‘Vorwärts! Vorwärts!’. No such disappointment in a meadow outside San Casciano near Florence though, where we were roundly applauded by locals and tourists alike for our full-costume recreation of the ‘kiss in the field’ scene from Merchant Ivory’s A Room With A View, Perkin on this occasion taking the Helena Bonham-Carter role (to my own gouty Julian Sands). Critics suggest this to be the superior combination, Mr Lovely’s facial features more naturally evoking those of a crumpled Victorian dwarf.

Judith Beheading Holofernes - Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Upon returning to Rome an entire afternoon was devoted to plodding out an equilateral triangle in the Palazzo Barberini between Caravaggio’s rousing depiction of Judith lopping off the head of Holofernes (her expression more akin to having been asked by her Grandma if she knows what ‘teabagging‘ is), Raphael’s slinky sideways-staring and dirtily nipple-tweaking La Fornarina and the Gents Toilets. Eventually ushered out by a battery of stern, gesticulating widows, we idled the short kilometer to the Spanish Steps in the hope of trainspotting a few audacious Roman lads dirtily nipple-tweaking teenage Korean exchange students. Greeted instead by German hippies teutonically strumming ‘Pennyroyal Tea’, we sought refuge in that gallant old chestnut of the Romantic era, The Keats-Shelley House, whose sad, stately windows gaze eternally down upon Israeli drum circles and Somalian gentlemen hawking clicking magnets. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, the house (with its attendant museum) is one of the great oases of preserved-in-aspic nineteenth century Italy, worth a visit for its remarkable collection of late-adolescent, homosexual volunteers alone. We marvel at the trustees’ ability to winkle these rosy-cheeked and bumfluffed cherubim out of their boarding-school dormitories, curate their hair into effortlessly undulating flopsihood and arm them with enough Keats trivia to keep you from simply pulling down their linen slacks and spanking their bottoms right there on the spot. Amazing to think that these gauzy veal calves will one day metamorphosize into tumescent, walrus-tusked Members of Parliament, all ruptured capillaries, dried spittle and leathery after-shave. But for now, in juicy pupa form, they can be rolled up into impromptu cannoli and stuffed down the oesophagus in a single marscapone-gorged gobble. It was whilst gazing upon one of these gossamer apparitions that we learned details of the scandal which surrounds the composition of Keats’ celebrated poem, ‘Ode to a Nightingale‘.

The story runs as follows. It’s early 1819. Keats, despondent over the death of his younger brother Tom and stirred by a blossoming romance with Fanny Brawne, is ensconced – between bouts of early-nineteenth century swooning – in the Hampstead house of his friend Charles Brown. Ostensibly he’s writing poems, but there’s an awful lot of sighing going on, a good deal of staring out of lead-mullioned windows at mulberry trees, occasional listless walks freckled with reveries on daffodils. Brown himself, consumed with jealousy over Keats’ new-found obsession with Fanny, is almost unnaturally solicitous, beetling along behind the poet with bowls of cold damsons, picking up his grief-sodden hankies for cataloguing in a private collection, all pinned, dated and calibrated for snot content. Brown is at great pains to liberate the uninhibited flow of Keats’ poetic spigot, to get him back on the horse of poesy and off that of the bucking and whinnying Miss Brawne. Reams of paper and pre-inked quills are strategically positioned around the house in spots where the poet’s muse seems most likely to pipe up; beside the beds, in all lavatories, under pillows, by vases of lilies, tucked into frames of mirrors, next to watercolours of uninhibited boys bathing in tarns beneath The Langdale Pikes. Brown has taken to skulking for several hours each morning on his hands and knees beneath Keats’ window, making crude Nightingale-like noises with his tongue, forefinger and a sprig of stinging nettles.

All of a sudden, if Charles Brown’s self-serving memoirs are to be believed, the breakthrough materialises.

“In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of the nightingale.”

Apparently purged of his prurient obsession with the infamously small-breasted Fanny Brawne and enraptured by the melodious exertions of Brown’s moist organ upon nettles, Keats had popped off behind a plum tree and rattled off an eight stanza paean to a small brown bird. He had then come rattling back indoors, giddily stuffing scraps of paper like shopping-lists into crevices in bookshelves, from whence Brown was later able to retrieve them and wave them in the world’s (and Fanny’s) face as evidence of Keats’ sexless muse having rebounded. What he had not bargained for, however, was the existence of an earlier draft of the manuscript tentatively titled ‘Ode to a Chicken‘ (Keats, always game for a pun, had taken to referring to Fanny as ‘My Little Pullet‘) discovered by Joseph Severn after Keats’ death in 1821 tucked under the poet’s mattress in the house on Piazza di Spagna. This draft, clearly treasured by Keats (and now housed in the Keats-Shelley Museum) had been carried by the poet on his travels for at least three years and was somewhat burnished, evidently having been the source of frequent inspiration. It appears to confer significant doubt upon Charles Brown’s assertion that tireless avian ventriloquism had succeeded in inciting Keats to transcend his destructive heterosexual infatuation with Fanny Brawne and to return to a course of benign pederasty. Judge for yourselves:

Ode to a Chicken

I

My balls ache, and a flatulent airlock pains
My bowels, as though of Chianti I had drunk,
Or leached blue gin into the veins
All afternoon, and floorwards had sunk.
‘Tis not through chagrin at thy little teats,
But being too happy in their littleness –
That thou, bow-leggéd Pecker of the dust,
In some mildewed bathroom,
Of sallow cream, and roaches numberless,
Appraise them uncertainly and gently squeeze.

II

Ugh, for a bottle of Chilean! that hath been
Cool’d a long twenty minutes i’th’freezer compartment,
Tasting of twigs and the peasants’ feet,
Warts, and pesticide, and oh, antifreeze!
Ugh, for half a pint of the warm Bulgarian,
Full of bits, the empurpled Butanol,
With chunks of cork a’bobbing at the brim,
And black-furr’d lips,
That I may slug, and go completely blind,
And with thee fade away unto the carpet brown –

III

Fade far away, torpify, and quite black out
What thou in shallow-pile had nearly known,
The cataplexy, belch, and brewer’s droop
Here, where a man sits and hears himself groan;
Where pride shakes a limp, sad, sloppy sausage,
Where manhood pales, grows earthworm thin, and dies;
Where but to speak is to be full of shame
And leaden-loined despairs;
Where Beauty cannot tease a half-way pole,
Or new Love beget another one ’til tomorrow.

IV

Stay here! don’t go! for I’ll be better next time,
Not hamstrung by Bacchus and the farts,
But on the fright’ning wings of Sobriety,
Though the corkscrew mocks the trembling hand,
I’ll deflower thee! Hopeful is the night,
And badly must I seat my Moon upon the throne,
Blustered about by all its gusty rips;
For here there are no turds,
Save what from bottom are with breezes blown
Through rubiginous sphincter and winding flabby tubes,

V

I did not see my Y-fronts at my feet,
Nor what oniony incense hangs upon my chin,
But in the vulvic darkness, guess each lap
Wherewith the lockjawed mouth endows
The arse, the thicket, and the pube-bush wild –
Pink foxglove, and the bequivered jellybean;
Fast-swelling petals sprung with follicles;
And mid-way’s tiredest tongue,
The coming musk-rose, full of viscous sap,
The murmurous sigh of climax sighted in the glade.

VI

Chicken, I am trying; and, for many a time
I have been half way there with treacherous Dong,
Called him soft names in many an abject groan,
To rise into the air his flexuous length;
Now just as ever seems he rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with that ache,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy.
Now wouldst thou sing, and I am all in vain –
To thy high requiem I am a sod.

VII

Thou merit not this little Death, impenetrable bird!
No thirsty Fartsack to bring you down;
This same old tune and passing gas was heard
In ancient days from Jollyone The Clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that whined a path
Through the sad hearts of ladies, sick to come,
Who laid in tears beside the pliant horn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed girls in basements, groping on the foam
Of ordurous futons in fetid flats forlorn.

VIII

Forlorn! The very word it doth propel
Me upwards, to clamber atop my old bookshelf!
Urrà! I trust I still can leap so well
As I was famed to do, crapulous gnome.
Urrà! Urrà! My reedy body sails
Past open window, o’er bedside table,
Past mattress edge, and now ‘tis buried deep
In kilim thin and unforgiving:
Was it a vision, bird or aeroplane?
Fled is that chicken: – do I wank or sleep?

Nashville - Greg Miller

No controversy surrounds the recent gushing forth of Greg Miller’s muse. Armed with a Guggenheim scroll and his famously oversized equipment, Miller ventured south on a journey of purgative rediscovery; to Nashville, home to Bocephus Hank Williams and Old Hickory Jackson, to Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Kenny Chesney and Keith Urban; and to Goo Goo Clusters, the only between-meals snack known to be modelled on human faeces. Nashville, the city where George Jones launched his sausage and where Mr Miller’s sausage launched Greg. His resultant trawl along the fist-through-the-sheetrock, neighbors-fucking-like-termites dreamscape of his childhood has spawned the finest body of work Mr Miller has produced since his seminal Italy series (although thankfully there are less swimsuits). Hand-crafted using actual rays from the sun onto cellulose acetate, employing all the faculties of vision, cognition and time, Greg is hanging upside-down painting delicate frescoes in a climate of immediacy, charalatanism and splatter; a privilege for which he may be forced to live in a cave or teach at a University.

Nashville - Greg Miller

Nashville - Greg Miller

Nashville - Greg Miller

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