English literature – Robert Garnham

Professor Zazzo Investigates – 2. In Search of Lost Thiim

The fact is that for some time now Professor Zazzo Thim has been lost, and it is my duty to find him. The manner of his disappearance is, beyond question, one of the most unusual cases I have ever come across. Yet the evidence I have before me, and the testimony of various witnesses, all point to the one conclusion: that Professor Zazzo Thim is trapped, helpless, somewhere in Marcel Proust’s grand novel, ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’.

It did not take me long to deduce the basics of this case. Various students and colleagues of the Professor attested that he was busy constructing some sort of grand device in the basement of the institute in which he was employed. Various noises had been heard from the cellar towards the end of each academic day, and strange lights were seen by those leaving the building, orange in hue and regulating a slow rhythm. Those closest to the Professor could not find out from him exactly what it was he was building, though one colleague, Doctor Hermann Spatt, was most helpful in his assertion that the Professor was constructing a device which would, atom by atom, replicate his body as a series of words, and distribute them throughout a chosen text.

‘How do you know this?’ I asked

Spatt grinned at me from across his desk. I asked my dear old colleague. I came right out and asked him. Of course, he was pretty drunk at the time. But he told me what the machine entailed and what would happen to him as a result. At this, Spatt’s smile faded, and he leaned back in his chair. ‘Such a sad waste’, he whispered

‘You must obviously have been close to your colleague’, I said, gently.

‘Thim? Oh no, I couldn’t stand the chap. What I’m sorry about is that a book so wondrous as a la recherche should be sullied by his ugly mug’

The key to the basement in question remained locked and, on account of the strong, fortified doors to the cellar, I quickly deduced that it would take months, possibly years to enter that sacred room. Yet I remembered what Doctor Hermann Spatt had told me, and I set about reading Proust’s epic tome, that I may find some mention within its pages of the eminent Professor Zazzo Thim.

The institute was good enough to provide me with accommodation during my stay. It was late autumn, and the trees were almost without their leaves. The paths around the park land in which the institute is set were slippery, and it seemed the sky was hardly ever anything but a deep grey. Proust’s volumes accompanied me everywhere. I would take walks in the gardens, or through the woods, with one volume open under my nose and the next thrust under my arm. I would go to the dining hall and sit with the other students, hardly noticing their banter, so engrossed was I in the societal gossip as recorded by the redoubtable Marcel. Even my rare journeys outside of the campus were spent in the company of the Guermantes family, the many minor characters and the overriding sense of times past as recorded in those weighty books. It seemed my whole life had started to revolve around the novel, and I would make lists of the endless family members, associates and contemporaries of the narrator, but each evening I would sit down and study these lists, safe in the knowledge that none of those mentioned bore the slightest resemblance to Professor Zazzo Thim.

At around this time, Doctor Hermann Spatt, with the help of two science students and a Professor in electronics, began to build a machine using the blueprints found in Thiim’s empty office which might, when up and running, be able to rescue the Professor from the depths of the accursed novel. The machine started to take shape in a far corner of the institute’s gymnasium, roped off from the rest of the hall by an arrangement of badminton nets, and each lunch time I would call in to see what progress was being achieved

‘None at all’, Spatt said, despairingly. ‘The machine just won’t function. It needs more electricity than we are supplied’.

‘Then how did Thim’s machine run so effectively?’ I asked.

Spatt pushed back the hair from his forehead and let out a deep sigh. ‘The energy needed to suck a character from a book is ten times more powerful than that needed to throw a character into the narrative. You see, Thim had the advantage of gravity, but we have nothing, nothing at all.

I walked around the machine and looked at it from many angles.

‘It’s looking quite hopeless’, Spatt said, and I swear I saw a tear well in the corner of his eye as he contemplated his missing colleague.

That night I retired to my room. By now the bed was covered with the six volumes of Proust’s masterpiece. My reading of it was haphazard at best, covering the first three sections of each novel simultaneously, so that my understanding of the plot and the order in which Marcel’s life was playing out was tenuous at best. At worst, I didn’t know what was going on.

So many dukes, matriarchs, minor members of the aristocracy, childhood memories, subtle, beautiful women with strangely masculine names. That night I fell asleep and found myself in a nightmare, a dark, dismal Paris street where Proustian characters advanced upon me with their arms outstretched, their eyes displaying a frightening malice, humming, intoning some strange, ritualistic prayer which sounded for all the world like Kylie Minogue’s first hit single, ‘1 Should Be So Lucky’. I woke with a start, frightened into reality yet not trusting the world around me, the darkness of the night, the wind which, ever so gently, was roaring in the trees and felling the last of the leaves.

I got up and walked to the window. I was dizzy, I was sweating, yet the room was cold. It was as if the natural laws which surrounded us all had ceased, that the earth itself no longer recognised whatever constitutions had kept it going for so many years. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the trees, and the leaves falling, one by one, across the sodium light of a campus street-lamp.

‘My God’, I whispered.

Excitedly, I telephoned Doctor Hermann Spatt immediately. He answered on the third ring, and asked, blearily, what it was I wanted.

‘The machine!’, I said. ‘You remember what you were saying? That Thiim had the benefit of gravity?’

‘Hmm?’

‘And that we needed more energy because we were sucking a character out of a book, not throwing one in?’

‘Yes?’

‘Then why don’t we just turn the whole machine upside down? Put the machine on the floor and the book suspended above?’

There was silence on the other end of the line, and then Spatt’s voice came back. ‘My word’, said he, ‘You’re a genius’.

The next morning Spatt, accompanied by his assistants, set to work making the modifications I had suggested, while I, now with the help of three assistants of my own, continued my reading of Proust’s novel. We each took a volume and, starting at the very beginning, ploughed our way through the dense script, using different translations and even the French language original, so that we were working on three separate texts at once. Halfway through the afternoon Spatt rang to tell me that the machine was working perfectly, and all it needed was for me to find Thiim in the novel so that we might rescue him. This news gave us a welcome feeling of progress and we intensified our efforts until, by six in the evening, we were all very tired and our eyes and heads ached.

‘Thank you, lads’, I whispered, as they headed towards the door.

‘Erm, we were wondering’, said one of them, an amiable young man by the name of Adam. ‘Would you like to come out for a drink tonight?’

I smiled at their offer, for it was proof that we had gelled as a team. ‘Thank you, but I would rather maintain my capacities’, I told them.

Their shoulders slumped.

‘And I suggest you do the same, for we need our full concentration if we are ever to find the Professor’

Adam smiled. ‘Very well’, he said. ‘We wouldn’t have gone overboard, anyway. Just a couple of drinks and then back home.’

‘Thanks once again, I whispered

The days were getting shorter, and once I had eaten my dinner, (accompanied, once again, by the ever-present Monsieur Proust), I went back to my room and prepared for sleep.

To be honest, I was beginning to doubt that we would ever find Thim in this mammoth book, and a part of me was content just to sit back and enjoy the experience of being a small part in such a large, well-funded experiment. Though the more I thought about it, the more desperate I started to become, as I realised that the whole project now depended on me and my abilities to wade through the novel for just the smallest clue. Worse still, I was afraid to sleep, for I knew that I would be haunted by Kylie once again, that inane, stupid song, ‘I Should Be So Lucky!’ Timidly, I retired to my bed.

At two in the morning I was woken by a fierce pounding on my door. Hardly able to concentrate, I opened the door and blinked in amazement to see Robert de Saint-Loup.

‘Do forgive my intrusion’, said he, ‘But I was wondering if you had had word of the Duc de Guermantes?’

‘I beg your pardon?’, said I, hardly believing my eyes.

At that moment M. de Charlus bounded down the corridor and patted Saint-Loup on the shoulder. ‘There you are!’, said he. His eyes then focused on myself, standing in the doorway in a pair of boxer shorts and nothing else. ‘Hello!’, he said, twirling his moustache.

‘I say!’, said a voice from the end of the corridor. They both looked up and bowed, courteously, as Albertine approached. ‘Are you not on the way to the Verdurin ball? I proclaim it to be the most whimsical event of the decade!’

Hurriedly, I shut my door, then went over to the window. Oh, what a scene met my eyes!

The quiet park was awash with people, elegantly dressed, bowing, nodding, dancing, chatting in the glare of the street-lamp as if they were in a ball or a turn of the century function. And they were all, I was horrified to note, characters from Marcel Proust’s mighty tome.

I telephoned Spatt and he confirmed my worst suspicions. Some students, drunk of course, had broken into the gymnasium and fiddled with the machine. Instead of pulling the hapless Thim from the depths of the novel, they had, wantonly and without thought to the effects of their crime, pulled out every other character instead.

‘But this is horrendous!’, I whispered.

‘There’s no choice’, said Spatt. ‘We must round them all up and post them back into that hideous novel. Do you know what they’re doing now? They’re in the canteen, holding a mass madeleine tasting. This has got to stop!’

‘There’s only one way we can get them back into the novel’, I told the Doctor. ‘We must break into the basement and use Thim’s machine.’

It took the best part of the night to round up all of the characters. Because we had been using three different translations, there were three of each of them, and the three Marcels had met some time after half four and, indignant that their individualities had been compromised, had challenged each other to a duel, (from which, naturally, each one backed out.) Charlus was the worst, and three of his characters had to be retrieved from the public lavatories and from various male student’s bedrooms before they were all accounted for. At last we had rounded them all up and we were engaged in the act of congregating them around the door to the basement, a tricky act which was achieved only by the entertainment of a piano playing Chopin and the liberal refreshment of champagne. Spatt and I, meanwhile, busied ourselves at the door. The thick oak would not budge to our shoulders, neither to rudimentary battering ram fashioned out of an old roll-top desk. However, when one of the Robert de Saint-Loups saw what we were trying to achieve, he supplied us with some dynamite which, he assured us, was fresh from the Great War battlefields.

The following explosion was deafening. Two of the Mme de Verdurins went flying through the air, their stiff petticoats flaying in all directions. At last we entered that hallowed room and saw Thim’s machine which, somewhat comfortingly, looked not unlike the reverse example we had fashioned in the gymnasium. Yet only now did Spatt and I see the almost fatal mistake that Thim had made. Indeed, the machine functioned well, and had been put together expertly. However, the absent-minded Professor had, one can only assume, accidentally, mistakenly placed within its confines not Proust’s magnificent novel, but a CD of Kylie’s first UK Number One hit, ‘I Should Be So Lucky.

It didn’t take long for the machine to be put to use. How affectionately we said good-bye to all the characters, who each invited us to various balls and society functions for the following Paris season. When they were all quite delivered, Spatt and I took Thim’s CD upstairs to the gymnasium, where we placed it on top of the machine and pulled the necessary levers. Seconds later, Professor Zazzo Thim materialised

‘Oh, my word’, he said, feeling his nervous forehead. I was having the time of my life! I’ve never danced so much!’

‘You realise what you did?’ Spatt asked

‘Oh, the CD? Entirely intentional, my dear friend.’

‘But that’s preposterous!’

‘So many hours l’d spent on that machine, a copy of Proust under my arm. So many years I’d dreamed of meeting those wondrous characters. Yet when it came time to leave, I thought long and hard about it …

‘And?’

‘And I realised I would rather be with Kylie, instead.

‘Good gracious!’

‘Well, my dear Spatt. They’re so stuffy, aren’t they? And Kylie’s much more vivacious’. At this, Thiim looked left, then right, then left again. ‘And another thing’, he said, confidentially. ‘She’s quite a go-er, I can assure you’.

Alas, the story does not end here. The following week, Kylie’s management refused to confirm that a new mix of her original hit single had been mixed, with some quite bizarre vocals by various French dignitaries, mostly concerning the petty discriminations and social faux pas of turn of the century Paris.

‘My god!’ Spatt whispered to me, down the telephone line. ‘We must have sent them to the wrong place!’

Yet not one scholar, student or academic genius happened to notice that Proust’s six-volume masterpiece now seemed not to have a single character at all.

Made for Each Other

Poem

They were always meant to be together.
She was a Pisces
And he liked fish and chips.
She was a vet
And he looked a bit like a pug.

I love you to the moon and back, he said,
Which varies depending on its orbit.
He said it with a twinkle in his eye.
Which he was due to see the optician about.
He said, I am an artist,
A visionary,
The brush sings in my hand.
She said, great,
I need the bathroom painting.

He was a locksmith.
She held the key to his heart.
The other was left with a neighbour.
Let’s make sweet music, she said,
And they wrote a song about Haribo.

They had such similar interests.
He read War and Peace
And she posted a lot on Twitter,
Both have 280 characters.
And each night they’d go home
And Netflix binge on the weather forecast.

She’d had such a sad life.
Times were hard growing up.
Food was scarce.
They had to eat the cat.
Cook a curry,
At least they knew it was
Made from Scratch.

I’ll provide for you, he said,
They give you free food in McDonald’s
If you wear a deliveroo uniform.
He’d lie awake at night wondering
If anyone’s ever had to give
A trigger warning for a spoiler alert.
And why the song
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover
Only mentions about six.
And why it’s called instant coffee
When you’ve still got to boil the kettle.

She’d practice yoga,
Holding her legs at ninety degrees.
He’d sigh and say,
Heaven must be missing an angle.
She took him to an exercise class.
He wore a fake beard and
An eyepatch and a parrot.
No, she said,
It’s Pilates.

She said, I’ve always been an optimist.
He said, so’s my sister, she works
At spec savers.

One day they went on a picnic.
He hired a plane and
One of the best pilots
But a terrible speller.
It wrote in the sky,
Will You Mary Me?
She hired a hot air balloon
And painted on the side, Yes!
He hired a plane to pull a banner
Which read, Fantastic!
She hired a hundred drones to spell out the words,
Well, that’s settled then.
He hired a flock of pigeons
To spell out,
What’s for dinner?
Soup, she said.

They were always meant to be together.
That night he said to her,
The world is our oyster.
And she went into anaphylactic shock

Some thoughts on performance poetry.

I was contacted by a student at Exeter University to answer some questions for her dissertation. Anyway, here are my responses. I hope they make good reading.

1. What is your impetus to write? When and why do you write and perform?

I suppose with me the impetus is just to make people laugh. I’ve always been a fan of comedy and humour but never found the vehicle to do this myself until I discovered performance poetry about five years ago. And once I started I realised I could tackle subjects such as gender, sexuality, human rights, loneliness and my own personal failures as a lover but using humour to mask these themes and make them more accessible for the audience.

Oh, and lust. Lust is a great impetus to write! Saying the things that you never could say in real life, knowing that the object of your affections will never know!
I write every day for at least an hour, and on my day off I try and write all day, with gaps for swimming etc. Exercise makes my brain work! The actual physical act of writing feels kind of like a little ceremony and that’s the only time when I feel like a real poet

2. Do you use YouTube/social media to promote your work? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using online platforms?
Yes indeed. In fact I don’t think I’d be getting half the gigs I do get without social media. For a start it’s a great way to keep in touch with what’s going on in the spoken word world. But it also gives you an accessible platform for promoters and other poets to see your work. I can go to a gig in Wolverhampton or Basingstoke and people know about my work because they’ve seen me on YouTube or Facebook.

You do tend to feel more like an avatar at times. I always wear the same sorts of clothes for performing because this is my trademark and people recognise me from photos. I’ve not had many drawbacks from using social media, no stalkers or online abuse or anything, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time! And sometimes I wonder if I’m online too much and that people will get sick and tired of seeing yet another spikey haired selfie. I think you do have to be a bit shameless at times!

3. Do you try to cultivate a relationship with the audience? If so, how do you go about it?
Yes, it is always good to connect with the audience. I’ve actually read about this in performance books and acting manuals because I do not come from a performance background. I try to be warm on stage, I try to look at everyone in the room and look up from the page as I write. I try to smile a lot.

If I go to a gig in a new place, I’m usually very accommodating beforehand, being pleasant and saying hello, because these are the people who will be the audience once the gig starts. I also try to react to the previous performer. It’s hard to go on stage and do a poem about (for example) getting envious about beards, when the previous poet has just done a stirring emotional piece about her dead grandmother. So I try to warm everyone up perhaps with some audience participation. Everybody say yeah!
I also try to react to things that happen. Every now and then one audience member will make some funny sort of laughing noise at a place during a poem where it’s never happened before, so I will stop performing and look over at them. That always gets a laugh. And luckily, you don’t get heckled much during poetry. (See below).

4. Do you care what an audience thinks of your work?
It would be nice not to, but sometimes you do. If it all goes right and people laugh at the funny poems or clap enthusiastically, it’s a magnificent feeling. But every now and then you’ll get someone who disagrees.

There have been a couple of notable heckles. The first was sheer comedy, because I have a poem which starts with the words ‘isn’t it annoying when you turn the page’. I got as far as ‘isn’t it annoying . . ‘ when someone shouted, ‘Yes!’
And recently out in the sticks I did a gig in a church and I performed my Jeremy Clarkson poem, which usually gets a fantastic reaction in the city urban centres where I normally perform, Bristol, London, Exeter. But out in the sticks it was evident that everyone was a big Clarkson fan, and after the poem someone shouted, ‘At least Jeremy Clarkson makes me laugh’. And afterwards I thought, wow, if only they’d liked that poem! I shouldn’t have cared too much, but I did, and I thought of an amazing comeback to zap him with. Trouble was, it was six hours later, as I cried myself to sleep.

5. Would you alter your style to cater toward an audience? you were being paid and were asked to edit a poem (ex for swears), would you do it? If you weren’t being paid, would you do it?

Yes, absolutely. I’ve done this on numerous occasions. My poetry isn’t rude or heavy on expletives, but every now and then I do radio, or street poetry, or family fun days. (What the hell are they doing booking me for a family fun day?!). So I’ve excised verses and taken out rude bits, certainly. I’m very aware that he promoter is the person in charge and I don’t want to upset them.
I’d love to be more passionate about this and say things like, ‘I don’t want to compromise my artistic integrity’. But then I always think, ‘There’s a time and a place for everything . .’. Last summer I did a family fun day on Paignton Green to a beach full of families and kids in the hot August sun, and before I performed they played that ‘What does the fox say?’ song, and I remembered chuckling to myself before I went on thinking, ‘I’d love to do the poem about Orgasms right now’. But I was very professional.

6. What do you think an audience is looking for when they attend a performance poetry night or slam?
I think if it’s performance poetry, the audience just wants to be entertained. Poets like Pam Ayres and John Cooper Clarke have revolutionised the way that performance poetry is perceived. The audience will always be different to the more weighty, beard-stroking patrons of page poetry ‘readings’. In this, there are links to stand up comedy. Performance poetry is a wide church which embraces poetry, ranting, comedy, rhyming, rapping, and every night is different, so audiences love the mix and the variety. A well run night will have a bit of everything.

Slam audiences are up for the same but with the added bonus of a competitive element. Slams have a reputation for being youthful and raucous with lots of whooping and stamping of feet. Getting whooped is always a bonus. I’m always glad to be whoop-worthy, even if I’ve just crashed out of last place in a slam.

7. What is new about spoken word? Is spoken word poetry even new?
As you know, there’s always been a tradition of spoken word, and someone once told me that all poetry was originally intended for word of mouth.

I think lately spoken word has enjoyed a renaissance because of social media. A three minute poem makes a great YouTube video. A politician can say something stupid on the nine o clock news and by six o clock there are poems uploaded getting millions of hits. Social media allows politically aware poets with a good ear for a rhyme to react quickly.
Lately, performance poetry has been adapting to other media and using the language of stand up comedy, rap, chanting, pop music, even computing. (I’m currently working on a batch of poems which are written as if they’ve been produced by a computer programme that’s ever so slightly faulty). I know of performance poets who incorporate magic and juggling. And Cat Brogan performs which hula hooping!
In this regard I think performance poetry is the most postmodern of crafts. But it’s not new. My hero, Frank O’Hara, was influenced by movies, theatre and abstract expressionist art, and he was writing in the 1950s. And thanks to YouTube, Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame is now down to three minutes.

8. Do you use multimedia, props, or technology in your work (videos projected while you perform, music, loop pedals, etc) and why?
Personally, I’m rubbish at technology. But over the years I have (take a deep breath) performed a duet with a videoed version of myself on an iPad, built a large hadron collider on stage out of garden hose and custard cream biscuits, built a robot version of myself on stage out of cardboard boxes, a hair brush and a fishing rod, played a theremin on stage made from two French loaves and a pair of Wellington boots, and I regularly perform with a pink bird puppet called Mister Pinkerton.
9. What has spoken word poetry done for you in terms of shaping an identity? What has it done for you in general? Has performing poetry improved your confidence?
Yes, indeed. I’d been in a play before I discovered performance poetry, but I was terribly shy and unsure of the world right up until about 2011. When I started performing I discovered that there really isn’t that much to be scared about, particularly with performing, and better still, that everyone has a right to a voice and views and can be treated equally because of these. Coming from an LGBT background and being a teenager in the 1990s meant that I always saw myself as Not Being Right compared to the rest of society, but thankfully now things are a little more equal, and the fact that I can be judged – or better still, not judged at all – has come about purely through performance poetry and Being Myself. If that makes any kind of sense!
10. Do you feel that as a spoken word poet you’ve become part of a community? What is that community like and what does it do for you/what do you do for it?
Yes, there’s a wonderful community particularly down here in the south west, because there are so many different voices and styles of performance. There’s also a very strange crossover between page and performance here that you don’t tend to get in other areas. There’s no snobbishness! We are also very welcoming to newcomers, such as students from the university. Ian Beech, Tim King, Morwenna Aldiss and I all run different poetry nights and we are all keen on giving new people a platform to perform and to advance their abilities. I often get emails for advice. And also, over the last few years I’ve begun to realise that my best friends are all now spoken word poets. We hang out and drink and talk about our lives and that, I suppose, is a community!

Going back to the LGBT thing, I grew up seeing the LGBT community as being something to aspire to but also something that didn’t seem very interested in me. Last year I performed at London gay pride and afterwards I got this sense of my poetry helping me affirm who I am. It told me that i was already a member of this particular community!

11. Do you think you can “find yourself?” Does spoken word allow you to do this, and if so, how?

I’ve probably answered that already, actually. It’s helped me discover my identity and it’s given me friendship with similarly minded people.
And the writing process itself is somewhat like therapy. Being insecure about love and relationships and sex and the state of the world is a horrible state, but the moment you start to write about it, or make fun of (for example) having really bad sex, then it somehow makes you feel much better. So now I know how those ranty poets feel! It’s such a good therapy!

12. How would you characterize “yourself” on stage? What do you turn into? ex do you have a persona you fall into?

Absolutely.
It took a while to find this character. I used to perform in tshirt and jeans. Then one day I came from work in a shirt and tie and I just kind of kept that up. I don’t think many performance poets wear shirts and ties, because they’re all so trendy and they’ve got interesting hair. So my stage persona began to adapt to the clothes that I was wearing. Next I added a jacket, and then a jumper, and now the quintessential Robert Garnham look is complete! (And the tie is a little nod to Ron Mael, one of my favourite musicians).
My stage persona is an exaggerated version of myself. I always think of myself as being super confident on stage, but someone’s mother said that she really liked my slightly nervous manner. I became terribly self aware after this, which probably made me even more nervous! But I think if I go in with a clear idea of what to do and what to say, and then add this layer of nervousness, then that’s probably what’s working.
I try to sound like a very deep, meaningful poet who just happens to be saying very weird things. Slightly academic, a bit old fashioned. That’s my persona, I suppose.
It’s hard, then, slipping out of this persona. I usually need to wear different clothes and have a shower to get rid of the gel, and change my glasses, before I feel like the version of myself that I’ve always been. When poets see me in ‘real life’, in a hoodie and shorts for example, they always say, ‘I didn’t recognise you’.

13. Do you think a certain type of person does spoken word? If so, what is that person like?

I’m not sure. There are so many different types of poet and performer. I think more people would do it if it had the media coverage that comedy gets. I mean, if I can do it, then others can, because it felt like it was ready made for me before I’d even performed a poem!
If I look at the backgrounds of my closest poet friends, there’s an amazing array of routes into performance. Chris White comes from a theatrical trained background, Tim King was in music, Chris Brooks was a comedian. Yet there also seems to be a lot of librarians: Ian Beech, James Turner, Alaisdair Paterson. What’s that all about? And come to think of it, my background is in museum management!
Slam poets and performance poets often come from minority backgrounds. They act as powerful voices for their communities, such as Vanessa Kisuule, Chanje Kunda, Dean Atta and your good self. They have something to say, which needs saying, and performance poetry is as good a vehicle, and as accepting a vehicle, as any. Often there seems to be a gender bias towards men, which makes programming events difficult when you realise that you’ve got 10 men and 2 women appLying for slots at a poetry night, which is where curating comes into effect. (That’s my museum training coming out again!)