“Because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at my feet in Kansas/on the A228 Tonbridge to Chatham.”

While this is ostensibly an anecdote about drugs and Bob Dylan that sort of hinges on a quote by Allen Ginsberg, I should tell you at this early stage that it really contains little of any of those people and/or substances. If you were hoping for something along the lines of “...and when I woke up I was down at The Wha jamming with Dylan, all the big names were there and it was only when Joplin upset her wine glass and I became entraced by its myriad colours that I realised someone must have snuck me some acid. “Oh Allen”, I cried! “You are a card!””...then you probably shouldn’t read on. Also, I think you have dissproportiantely high expectations of the blogosphere.

Just a warning.

 Also I'm writing this post-a hideous essay so it might read a bit stitltedly.

I’ve never been much of a one for substances. (Read that in Alan Bennet's voice, it works doesn't it?!) I think you can probably tell this by looking at me. It’s not that I object to them morally or out of a sense of social obligation, I’m all for them, in others, whatever makes you happy, it’s just that when everyone did it to look slick as a teenager I was too busy reading and staying inside the house to really commit myself full time to anything, and now everyone does it as an adult I’m just too much of a coward.

Also, do drugs at university in any real way and you have to rub shoulders with the sort of people who can only accurately be described as tit-masters, I would term them "creative drug takers" but to me that just sounds like they have found new and innovative ways to consume substances.
"He has started taking all his drugs anally via an ornate butt-pipe."
"Gosh! How creative!"
And anyway it doesn't correctly convay what complete tits they are...

I’m sceptical about the drug-inspiration relationship, I don’t think it’s causal and if it is causal I don’t think it’s simple, but there exists a breed of student who is convinced that, deviod of talent or creative zeal though he may be, the fact that he regularly puts cocaine up himself or a tab of acid under his tongue makes him a poet and a genius. These are people who have ignored Allen Ginsberg when he said “it’s not the experience - it’s how you apply that to reality, it’s what you do the next day.” People that have done the Beats a disservice, appropriating them and then systematically ignoring every aspect of them that involved hard work, humour, honesty or being alive to the subtlies of spoken language.

You know the kind of people I’m talking about. They have beards and an inflated sense of self-worth.

You know, tit-masters!

It would almost be more bareable to get your drugs from the trembling ranks of the horribly addicted than from the posturing ranks of English Literature students.

But my anger aside, here is your obligatory drug story.

The first time I went to see Bob Dylan in concert was two summers ago at a Kent based festival, it was fairly early in the year and it should not have been, but was, blisteringly hot. In the nature of festivals it was also distressingly crowded and generally awful, I have after many years of living with myself come to the conclusion that I have the stamina of an eighty something year old women, and I spent most of the time sitting on the ground in the centre of the crowd, worrying about my hydration and hoping that no sudden surge forward resulted in my horrible death. The music was good and helped to sustain me through the unpleasantness, I listened to Sea Sick Steve’s inditement of the American prison system from my two foot by two foot patch of field, reigned in on all side by the legs of thousands and thousands of strangers, with a new level of appreciation, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t waiting for Bob, throughout. He was naturally the final act.

Ten, warm, dizzying hours later when he eventually slunk on stage like a ancient but surprisingly sexy cat, everyone bah myself, lit several celebratory spliffs. By the end of the first song you could see the haze of them hanging lazily over the crowd. When he played Rainy Day Women 12&35 the haze doubled and sunk thickly. I suppose when Bob gives you a direct order you don’t ignore him “Oh? I MUST you say? Well, ok Bob, your the boss, man.” The fog of it was unbelievable, it was like Victorian London - but with pot.

Midway through Blind Willie McTell I could make out just make out through the fog, the couple in front of me. The boy was taking something powdered out of his coat pocket and proceeding to gallantly to proffer it to his girlfriend from the back of his credit card, (this seemed wrong on so many levels, it was like they had got the requisit equipment for taking cocaine but finding that they lacked a mirror had decided not to line it up with the card but rather to just heap it on the back and snort it from there. I’m not even sure it was cocaine, it looked yellow.) The first time they did this they were relitively successful, in that most of went up her nose, the five subsequent times she tried it the wind caught or her boyfriend’s hand jolted and a good 50% of it hit me in the face. I think they gave up when they realised I was taking more of it than they were. I should be greatful that they didn’t ask me for any money really.

An hour in sunstruck and disproportionately blissed out on Bob, it became increasingly hard to differentiate between what was my heat-beaten, weary, Bob-addled mind, what was the considerable amount of second-hand marajuna I was consuming and what were the after effects of the mystery substance that now grittily adhered to my face. Trying not to think about it, I gently parted the pilable doped-up crowd, moved closer to Bob and devoted what remained of my non-clouded mind to looking at him.

Afterwards as my mother drove me home, I vaguely tried to determine the extent of my contact high, yeah, I was very relaxed and content, but then that was because I was finally having a sit down after 10 hours on my feet, I was very euphoric but then I’d just seen the face of Bob, in person, who wouldn’t be euphoric? (Nobody, that’s who!)

I gazed lazily out the window and tried to weigh up the situation. Probably not high, I thought, no, no, in fact definitely not, I knew how it felt, I would know now. And beside there wouldn’t have been anywhere near enough of it on the air, or flying backwards into my face. I was being ridiculous.

And thats when I saw them, drifting behind the rooftops. 

All the stars. 

And they weren’t far away and silver any more either they were huge and gold and close. Strange, fiery, beautiful. They had all changed their starry arrangements and I could see them slowly drifting into new and increasingly elaborate constellations.

My god, I thought, I’m completely gone.

Whatever it was that blew back into my face has taken me aboard it’s magic swirling ship!

“Oh!...Oh! Oh! Look at them! The stars! My god! Mum! Are they the stars?” 

They were so exceedingly beautiful I thought I was going to weep.

My mother gave a perfunctory glance over her right shoulder towards the bright sparkling starry dynamo with it’s mystically-shifting constellations.  She didn’t seem as taken with them as I was but obviously she wasn’t chemically enhanced like me, she wouldn’t be alive to their beauty in the same way I was.

I think she waited a respectable time before disabusing me. I was allowed a good ten seconds of thinking I was a poet and a prophet before she said kindly...

“Anna, those aren’t the stars. What you’re looking at is about 60 flying paper lanterns.”

“Oh.”

“They were letting them off at the end of the concert, I’m surprised you didn’t see them then.”

Clearly I had been focusing on Bob.

When I looked again it was obvious. Dissapointing. I wasn’t at all stoned either, I realised, just tired and stupid.

The weird things was that for that split second in which I thought things had all got a bit hallucinagenic, I understood the appeal. I had thought to myself “Well, look at that! Stunning! I really must do this again. Not a substance person my arse! I can't believe I have wasted so much time not doing this! I'll google that powdered yellow gunk when I get home and buy me in some of that baby!” I had been fully convinced of the drug-inspiration relationship, (obviously I'm not now, if anything my non-drug induced "hallucination" has compounded my belief that inspiration is a matter purely of chance and usually of misunderstanding,) and ultimately, why spend all that money and risk such cerebral damage when you can achieve similar effects by depriving yourself of water, looking at someone you fancy till your oestrogen levels make you light-headed and then idiotically mistaking things for other things.

I stand by Ginsberg though either way, the experience itself doesn’t make you creative, you have to something with it. Perhaps if I had genuinely had been high, and genuinely had seen each star in it’s golden Blake-esque glory then I would have turned that experience into some sort of trancendently beautiful modernist beat poem, grown a beard, upped my sense of self-worth to ridiculous levels and mingled with my fellow English students, a bona fide convert to the tit-master way of life, but who needs drugs? As it is, I've turned my non-drugged, flying lantern based anti-experience into a mediocre, slightly disjointed post-essay, blog ramble.

Which I feel is similarly valid, artistically.

Languages or Things I'm Really Bad At Part 1.

Five years ago, when I was in my final year of GCSEs, my French teacher dedicated one of her lunchtimes to a half an hour phone conversation with my mother. I don't know if she made some small talk or whether she just dove straight in there, but the purpose of the call was to establish why I was so bad at french. Take a while to consider that. She phoned home to ask why, it couldn't just be that I was bad, I was so bad that there had to be a deeper explanation!

"Anna is perfectly capable in other areas and I was just wondering if there was anything going on at home that might be affecting her ability in French."

"Anything going on at home?"

What my mother should have said, tearfully, was "At home? At..? Oh god I was afraid of this. You see I've recently taken a French lover. It's tearing the family apart but I just can't leave him. Anna's french was perfect before Pierre came into our lives but now she can't bare to use the language that she hears us speak when we make love."

What she actually said was

"What? No. I can't explain it, sorry, she's not good at French. There it is. Bye Mrs C-"

This annoyed my teacher who I think had genuinely expected a reason, maybe not Pierre, but something to explain my complete inability to pronounce "soeur" ("sir" it transpires, not "sewer" or "sue-eeeur-r-r-" In my defense look at those vowels! Freakish.)

There were in fact a few reasons; the one that stands out for me is that my french teacher was one of the most singularly terrifying and intimidating people I have ever met. There was nothing necessarily formidable about her physically (she wasn't some sort of broad-shouldered, leather-clad, Ratched-figure like The Head,) but she was tall and severe and just generally gave the impression of being wound up tighter than a clockspring. Unspeakably intense, she would, before an oral, adopt what I can only assume was her "interested listening position" it involved grasping her jaw-line tightly with one hand, bending her trunk forward so her face ended up about 30 cm from your own, and glaring.

Some people were fine with this but no matter how many times I saw her adopt it I never started an oral without thinking "Ho-lee-Christ, woman!"


Another and perhaps more genuine reason was the one flagged up by my mother; I have no natural skill with French just as I have no natural skill with any language. As far as I'm concerned it was only sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of my parents that meant that I managed recognisable English. I learnt to speak pretty fast, considering my deafness (I was a complete dud of a child,) but in my haste I failed to appreciate the finer points of phonetics. After four years of being "Anna Thavory" a women came once a week to bridge the terrible gap between my loose bundle of speech impediments and actual spoken language, teaching me, with the aid of balloons, how to pronounce Hs, Vs, Ss, Ths, and Bs. A lot of the process involved holding my head against the balloons, talking into them, and feeling the syllables sort of knock playfully against my five year old face. This was fun but looking back I'm really not sure it was an approved technique.
It worked though and "I'm not an animal I'm a fu-thum-fuman b-being." became "I'm not an animal I'm a human being." Obviously that was just a sentence for the sake of comic example. I wasn't given that to say, as few speech therapists like to draw vocal comparisions between their pupils and the Elephant Man
(how ever apt they may be.) It's just not good practice.


I want to say that perhaps if Mrs C- had been aware of my lack of talent for accurate sound making she would have accepted it as the reason she was seeking. It explains "sewer" at least. But it wasn't just pronunciation with French, it was everything. Sense, word order, number of words required for a sentence, the whole haphazard and contrary business of gendering things (vagina is masculine. Why?) Words on their own were fine, I couldn't say them but I liked them, pamplemoose for example, what's not to love about that! Ecchymose, hilarious! But no matter how much I like the constituent parts of the sentence it would be beyond me to say "my grapefruit is bruised." I don't know what sex grapefruit is for a start, and for all I know fruit bruising has a different term. I just can't do it. There is no explanation.


About once every two years I'll forget all this and make tentative steps towards learning a new language before remembering about a month in when things get beyond words and phrases and into construction "Oh right. I'm really bad at this. It's all coming back to me now."
This summer I tried Hebrew and Arabic, I liked the latter because "My name is Anna" translates as "Ana ismee Anna." as in "Anna! It's me! Anna!" and I liked the former because to my mind it is what Bob Dylan would speak to me in the passionate throws of our love making ("Ken! Erev! Ken! Oh, Yekiri, ken,... ahuv sheli." and so on.) Both of them feel more natural in the mouth than French ever did, both make use of the sort of guttural chokes and lispings that I was obviously trying to go with when I first learnt English. I want to say I'll be good at them but deep down I know I won't. There is simply no future for me in Gaza Strip diplomacy.
I know it. Mrs C-, if she's out there, glaring intensely at the screen, she knows it, although neither of us are able to work out the reason for it.


That's all.


Leila Tov and Jayyid Sa'adat.