Niall O'Sullivan – Poet

There’s a little project online called wordia.com, who focus around a word for the day and get someone to wax lyrical about a particular word. Unsuprisingly I picked “evolve” for mine. Here’s the video.

Hello all, just a quick heads up to let you know that I will be doing my thing in an extended set on Wednesday. The show is at the Boileroom in Guildford and the night is called “Blank Verse”. Because this is the first in the series, with Byron Vincent, Luke Wright and Dockers MC to come, Wednesday’s gig will be free, so that all the locals can get a gratis night of spoken word and to give them a taste of the joys to come that will only cost them a mere £5.

I’m really looking forward to this one, I like performing outside of London, you get a different kind of audience and more of a chance to be yourself. I for one love reading for longer sets of an hour or so, I get to really shift into my own gear and work up a real rapport with the audience. All my best sets have been extended sets.

For some reason though, extended sets are a rare thing in London, they tend to get handed out to big, well established mainstream poets, but otherwise the idea of a one hour set is usually accompanied with the necessary pre-requisite of an Arts Council application, working with a mentor/director and tightly scripting a one person show that involves a typical autobiographical “how I overcame a particular problem” type slant. Hey, many good shows have come from the aforementioned technique, but there are plenty of poets that could deliver a fantastic, seat of the pants reading based on lots of work. A whole lot of poets have written reams of good work and have enough stage experience to pull this off no problem. So come on London promoters, and I include myself in this bit of finger pointing, let’s start trusting our acts a little more and give them a meatier set to play with.

I have read for an hour in venues around the country for years as well as in Berlin and Norway. I’ve heard stories from Roger Robinson and Nii Parkes about how they anded up reading for over two hours to rapt audiences in Poland. At the Royal Festival Hall I watched Henry Rollins kick arse for nearly three hours of spoken word last Friday. I think the London circuit could stage some unforgettable extended sets in the years to come. I guess I should practice what I preach though, so keep an eye on how I book the Cellar in the year to come.

Actually, I did read one extended set in London, well, within the six travel zones anyway. It was a one hour reading for the Bexley Library Volunteers Christmas party. Most of the audience were over sixty. It was a great gig! You can listen to the whole thing on the audio page of this site.

Anyway, rant over, hope to see you in Guildford. It’s going to rock in a way that all these London 15-20 minute portions can only aspire to.

I keep getting into arguments with some other peeps on the internet about this and made the following post to clarify my views on the whole X Factor v Rage Against the Machine for Xmas no1 malarkey.

Over the past four years or so, the UK Christmas number one has been a syrupy ballad sung by the winner of a top rated TV talent show. Many people have argued that innovation, creativity and real talent are being neglected and that we should make a statement to say that we will not stand for this. All well and good. But here are my reservations.

1. By the time we get to the Xmas number one, the horse has already bolted the stable. In the same way that a pest like Knot Weed establishes its roots across a network of land before sending up its first shoot, the X Factor has already made the bulk of its money from telephone votes and advertising revenue. The album and singles charts have already been dominated by the acts that have performed on the prime time show, tabloid newspapers have shifted units by placing the hopefuls on their cover. The trickle of royalties that the Xmas number one generates is nothing compared to the real money made during the course of the show. And like the aforementioned Knot Weed that sends up another shoot from its powerful underground root network as soon as the last one is chopped down, when Joe goes down the dumper, another friendly face pops up in his place.

2. So in the light of the above metaphor, we attack the roots of the pest plant, but we find that X Factor and Simon Cowell are not the roots. They are just a bit of basal growth that the smiley flowers of the X Factor winners spring from. Like its predecessor Pop Idol, X Factor itself could also be chopped down to the ground and all we’ll get is another variant of the same growth popping up in the next year. The roots are the almost nameless, almost invisible corporations that enable this to happen.

3. There are other plants that can compete for the same resources as this one, and they are less aggressive, less invasive, more diverse. So we try to chop down any competing shoots of the big greedy plant in order to help them grow. Most of the time it doesn’t work: it needs the effort of many to keep the monster at bay. So everyone chooses to help protect one of these other plants and help it to compete against the big greedy one. The only problem is, the other plant is growing from the same network of roots as the big greedy one, it is actually another part of the same organism. Whatever sunlight it grabs is filtered back into the network of roots and still helps to sustain the big greedy plant. This is basically what happens when you buy the RATM single. The rage of their music, the integrity of their lyrics is just more colourful foliage designed to fool other organisms into helping it grow, while it nourishes the roots of corporations such as Sony that will continue to plough the money into commercial enterprises that separate the credulous from their cash.

4. So, now that the metaphor is getting a bit out of control, how do we deal with this problem? If you’re really worried about the environment and find out that MacDonalds are giving proceeds to Greenpeace, do you start buying Big Macs every day? Of course not, you know that MacDonalds cause a lot of problems for the environment, from their packaging, to land cleared for cattle, to the methane emissions and energy cost of the cattle themselves. It’s just another way of making more money from you while making you feel like you’re doing something good. The best thing to do would be to give your money directly to Greenpeace. It’s the same thing when you hear that the RATM proceeds will go towards helping the young musicians excluded by the X Factor culture. Giving the money directly to the charity will help a lot more without having the corporations make more money from your concerns.

The best way to say no to this is not to watch the program, not to make the phone vote, not to buy singles at Christmas. Give money to community music initiatives or even volunteer to help. Support your local music scene, if you see a band or artist you like, buy the CDs they bring for sale. They always make more money with this method than they do from shops or amazon ( who demand a 60% discount which usually brings no profit at all to independents.)

The charts have been in decline as an institution for the past decade, with singles selling less and less. Better to let an institution that has implicitly stated “what sells most is best” to carry on quietly dying rather than rehabilitate it by trying to get a seemingly credible artist to number one. This has happened before with Iron Maiden going straight to number one in the late eighties and early nineties after grass roots campaigns, only to fall out of the top thirty the next week as the pop acts continue to rake in the cash. This time wont be any different.

I might have never finished my degree in Fine Art ( live the cliché!) all those years back, but I’ve got that bit closer to being exhibited by the Tate than my fellow ponces. That’s right, yours truly has written the Poem of the Month on the Tate’s magazine website.

The poem is based on Gordale Scar by James Ward, which is currently hanging in the Sublime in Crisis room of the Tate Britain. The painting is a romantic landscape in the tradition of the Sublime. It would be very convenient for me to outline what the Sublime is, yet, as a two day symposium at the Tate that I attended came to prove, it is incredibly difficult to pin down. Many sublime paintings concentrate on disasters or Biblical catastrophes such as the Deluge, humans and animals are often depicted as tiny insectlike organisms engulfed by natural conditions that portray a level of sentience and malevolence. But many Sublime works seem to capture the same feeling without resorting to the portrayal of catastrophe, Gordale Scar is one of them. The landscape itself can be found in Yorkshire, but Ward exaggerated and distorted the scale for the painting, and replaced the sheep and goats that wee grazing there with cattle and deer.

I was going to include a quote by Nietzsche, but found it a little pretentious. The quote is the famous “if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” While I think that the quote helps you to understand what the poem is saying, I think it was right to leave it out. So, for all those too lazy to click the links above
here’s the poem and the painting.

GORDALE SCAR

It is not true that the gaze travels outwards,
over the heraldic beasts, between the limestone
hulks, skimming the stream where the last
surviving glints of light twinkle, onward
into the numb dark where minds are not welcome.

It is the scar itself and John Bull’s eye
that funnel into you, breach the iris,
pummel the retina, flume through the optic nerve
to ambush the cortex, seize synapses to find –
the flags packed up, the fortress long deserted.

For anyone that didn’t make it, here’s an video of my set at Utter! Evolution a few nights back, click on the “facebook” icon in the top right hand corner to watch it in HD. It was a quality night, with great performances by Baba Brinkman and Kelly Swain. Big kudos is due to Charlie Dupree, who not only wrote some blinding new material, showing a real grasp of the concept, but also memorised the whole lot and performed it seamlessly. Richard Tyrone Jones was his usual charismatic self, energising the room despite having a bad case of the lurgy. Robin Ince headlined the show, and while he confessed to being grouchy after commuting from Brighton, it certainly put some fire in his belly as he gave both barrels to Anne Coulter and some similarly tactless audience members. It was a great end to a great night.

While I am always grateful to be asked to do a whole set of my human evolution poems, I don’t think I was at my best here. Call me a prima dona, but I’m just never that comfortable with the sound of a crowded bar filtering through as I read. I’m not a “between bands” type poet, so I appreciate having a bit of silence to play off, apart from after I’ve told a joke, of course…

The look of disappointment on my face when I find myself dealing with a drunk at the very beginning is completely genuine, though I turned it into a one liner. I’ve dealt with enough drunks and hecklers in my time and made good sport of it, but I really wanted this gig to be different.

That said, I learn twice as much in front of an audience than when reciting at home and I’m certainly stronger with the new material because of it. Apart from the occasional intruding voice, the audience were pleasant and smart enough and the evening carried on from strength to strength. I’m beginning to quite enjoy going on first too, where the price of a slightly cold audience is offset by the benefit of being able to have a beer a bit earlier and enjoy the rest of the show. Big thanks to any of you that turned up and much gratitude to Richard Tyrone Jones for including me on such a great night with such a strong line up.

Tomorrow night I will be performing some of my Palaeoanthropological poetry at Utter Evolution at the Cross Kings in King’s Cross. I’ll be reading first, probably round 7.50, so get there early for that reason but also because the door charge jumps from £5 to £10 at the stroke of 7.30. Details below:

Thurs 15th Oct: Utter! Evolution. Robin Ince, Baba Brinkman, Niall O’Sullivan, Kelley Swain, Charlie Dupre. Paid Gig contest (Ajar mic): Michelle Madsen, Alan Wolfson, Ashna Sarkar, Fran Isherwood.
Cross Kings, York Way, King’s Cross, £5 before 7.30pm, £10 after. ‘Attend’ the Facebook event: http://bit.ly/utterevol

It should be one hell of a night and I’m planning on filming my set so feel free to overreact to everything I do and say. Really looking forward to seeing Kelly Swain read from her fantastic collection Darwin’s Microscope and finaly getting to hear excerpts of Baba Brinkman’s Edinburgh hit The Rap Guide to Evolution.

The event will be hosted by the genetically endowed Richard Tyrone Jones.

Sometimes I find myself muting my praise for Richard Dawkins. In the Guardian-reading, liberal, accommodating, live-and-let-live atmosphere of the London literary scene, standing up and telling whole groups of people that they’re wrong about things seems terribly improper. Most of the poets and writers I run into these days are atheists and agnostics, but they are quick to distance themselves from Dawkins with the usual provisos that while they agree with him, they find him too strident and arrogant. Others like to fire off the accusation that he is militant, as if writing books and giving lectures about what you do or don’t believe is equivalent to being a member of the Baader Meinhoff collective.

Dawkins’ latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth-The Evidence for Evolution, seems to have been received with less hand wringing than his previous bestseller, The God Delusion. Maybe this is because he has laid off god and got stuck into the target of creationism instead. Perhaps the liberal types that I associate with will have less of a problem when the creationists tend to be located within America’s Bible Belt and consist of the same evidence-illiterate wingnuts that equate socialised medicine with the Third Reich.

The statistics quoted in the appendix of The Greatest Show on Earth speak for themselves. A recent Gallup poll shows that 44% of Americans think human beings were created by God in their present form one time in the last 10,000 years. Before we Europeans start patting ourselves on the back too rigorously, 28% of Britons polled think that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, and no, they aren’t being all clever about the evolutionary history of birds.

Even within the seemingly educated circles I have moved within in London’s arts community, I find very little knowledge of evolution displayed. Many friends find my love of evolutionary science to be a quaint little hobby, rather than a genuine passion for what is the only theory to truly explain the diversity of life on earth. There are a shocking amount of people that don’t accept evolution, but what is even more shocking to me is the amount of people that accept the fact of evolution while showing no interest or knowledge about it. It is as if that famous (inaccurate) progression from ape to man happened at some point and that’s all there is to it. If anyone wants to look for reasons for the occasional surge in believers in creationism, I think the ignorance of many who accept evolution is just as much to blame as the ignorance of those who do not. And if you suspect that I am alluding to you with this description, then yes, it is just as important that you read this book with an open mind than it is for a creationist to.

You may find some traces of that so-called Dawkinsian stridency in the opening pages, Dawkins is quick to compare creationists to holocaust deniers and label them “history deniers”. But he is right to do so, holocaust deniers and creationists, as well as those that deny the moon landings happened or insist that the collapse of the Twin Towers was due to a controlled explosion, follow the same patterns in ignoring and misinterpreting evidence. After this initial battle cry Dawkins settles into doing what he does best, unveiling the delights of the natural world in poetic, beautifully written prose that will cause the hairs on the back of your neck to stand up (which is, of course an evolutionary throwback to our hairier ancestors…).

While The Greatest Show on Earth starts off as a confrontational broadside against the forces of ignorance that threaten to undo the legacy of the enlightenment, the rest of the book is sparing in its references to creationism. In each chapter, Dawkins concentrates on a different facet of the evidence for evolution, starting with the vast range of forms that we have “sculpted” the bodies of animals into via domestication, or “artificial selection”. Darwin himself opened On the Origin of Species… with a similar argument, though concentrating on pigeons rather than the example of dogs that Dawkins uses. From there, the proceeding chapters highlight different aspects of the evidence for evolution, through radiometric dating, the fossil record, embryology, geographic distribution, shared characteristics between species and indisputable molecular evidence. The point couldn’t be made more clearly: the 44percenters are wrong. To continue to make creationist claims in the face of such evidence is history denial.

With all this legalistic rhetoric about evidence and history denial, you could be forgiven for thinking that The Greatest Show on Earth is a polemical, hectoring, prosecutors’ speech. However, Dawkins remains one of the most eloquent and poetic communicators of science today. His prose about the natural world is every bit the equal of anything David Attenborough has put on screen.

Natural selection is all futile. It’s all about the survival of self-replicating instructions for self-replication. If a variant of DNA survives  through an anaconda swallowing me whole, or a variant of RNA survives by making me sneeze, then that is all we need by way of explanation. Viruses and tigers are both built by coded instructions whose ultimate message is, like a computer virus, ‘Duplicate me’. In the case of the cold virus, the instruction is executed quite directly. A tiger’s DNA is also a ‘Duplicate me’ program, but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of the efficient execution of its fundamental message. That digression is a tiger, complete with fangs, claws, running muscles, stalking and pouncing instincts. The tiger’s DNA says, ‘Duplicate me by the round-about route of building a tiger first.’[p392]

It is passages like the above that help convey the rules under which the natural world adheres and how anti-intuitive these rules are to human brains. Dawkins is not out to comfort us with teleological fables of a world that was built for us, but rather, he communicates the sheer beauty and intensity of nature that can be appreciated once we cast aside the idea of ourselves as the indulged and privileged centre of creation. One can either view a meadow of flowers as an aesthetic sop provided by a benevolent creator for our relief (unless you suffer from hay fever as I do) or you could view it thus:

A meadow full of flowers is nature’s Time Square, nature’s Piccadilly Circus. A slow motion neon sign, it changes from week to week as different colours come into season, carefully prompted by cues from, for example, the changing length of days to synchronise with others of their own species. This floral extravaganza, splashed across the green canvas of a meadow, has been shaped and coloured, magnified and titivated by the past choices made by animal eyes: bee eyes, butterfly eyes, hoverfly eyes. In the New World forests we’d have to add hummingbird or in African forests sunbird eyes to the list. [p51]

Knowledge is something that is reliant on minds for its distribution, if the vast population of humanity turns it back on knowledge, then knowledge will either die ( like many volumes within the library of Alexandria) or lie dormant through a terrible dark age until other minds arrive to take them up again. One could easily point a finger at poor education or theocratic dogma, but we should also take into account the intelligentsia, the educated population that neglects to educate itself further. To all those whose interest in evolution may be piqued by what has been quoted above, I can truly recommend The Greatest Show on Earth as a great place to start. Not only will it help you to do your part in dispelling much of the ignorance of nature that threatens to grow to epidemic proportions; it will also help you to appreciate the greatest show on earth, life itself, in the years you have left to enjoy it.

Richard Dawkins coined a fantastic phrase in The Ancestor’s Tale: the discontinuous mind. The discontinuous mind is a kind of binary way of viewing the world, the non-realisation that many boundaries and watersheds exist for legal and bureaucratic convenience, they do not really reflect a substantial change in the real world. The discontinuous mind believes that a seventeen year old mind is not ready for the consumption of alcohol on the eve of her eighteenth birthday but perfectly ready for a tipple at the stroke of midnight. The discontinuous mind thinks that 69.9mph on a motorway is completely risk-free but 70.1mph is certain death. The discontinuous mind looks at a fine progression of hominid skulls, from the ape-like Sehelanthropus to Homo Sapiens idaltu and agonises over which one was the first real human.

In 1991 an excavation of the grounds beneath a medieval church in Dmanisi, Georgia, uncovered a hominid mandible. By 2001, three more skulls were unearthed. The fascinating detail about these skulls is that they were definitely the skulls of an earlier species of human. Not only that, but they were more archaic and apelike in their morphology than Homo Erectus, the species of human thought to be the first human to step out of Africa into Eurasia about a million years ago. Many palaeoanthropologists thought that there was a good case to be made for classifying the finds as a member of an earlier species, Homo Habilis (the name means “Handy Man”, habilis is the earliest hominid to bear the moniker of “homo”) Not only that, but the bones were found in sediments that were dated to around 1.8m BCE. Their very basic tool kit also pointed to the fact that we were dealing with one of the earliest examples of the homo lineage.

Like many other finds, such as Homo Floresiensis, more commonly known as The Hobbits, these finds were a wonderful surprise rather than a sudden destructive blow to everything we assumed about human evolution. Homo Georgicus, the name assigned to it by their Georgian discoverer David Lordkipanidze, was seen by most as a further branch of the many migrations of humans that streamed out from Africa, the peopling of Eurasia by modern humans happening about 100,000 years ago. These finds are far from new and the inferences made about them are far from conclusive.

Not that any of this seemed to occur to the editorial team of the Independent, who splashed an image of one of the skulls found in 2001 across their front page today and exclaimed ” A skull that re-writes the history of man”. The subtitle continues breathlessly, “It has long been agreed that Africa was the cradle of human evolution. Then these bones were found in Georgia…” Everything about the article seems to suggest that the finds are new: “Scientists have found a handful of ancient skulls…”, the article is reminiscent of the over-excitement and missing-link bleating that accompanied the unveiling of the Ida fossil earlier this year. To cut a long story short, the article is based of a speech given by Professor Lordkipanidze at the British Science Festival in Guildford. The idea proposed in the talk is that Homo Georgicus is an actual ancestor of African Homo Erectus ( or Homo Ergaster as they are also known), in short that the evolution from Homo Habilis to Home Erectus took place during a little detour in Eurasia before the return to Africa where the Erectus population eventually became Homo Sapiens. Not only that but Lordkipnidze also makes the following statement ” I don’t think that we are so lucky as to have found the first travellers out of Africa. Georgia is the cradle of the first Europeans, I would say.”

This phrase is just crazy on so many levels, firstly the idea that it is more lucky to find evidence of the earliest known human migration into Europe than to find the “cradle of the first Europeans”? Holy Lucy, mother of Nariokotome Boy! I have no idea what he’s trying to say here. On the most sane scale he may be saying the important shift from Australopithecus to Homo (discontinuous mind ahoy!) happened in Europe, this is what the article seems to elucidate; but on the absolute out there end of things we have the available misinterpretation that the evolution of modern humans happened in Europe. This is as out there as the assertions made by Chinese officials over the years that Chinese Homo Sapiens were not part of that last human movement out of Africa but that they evolved separately from Asian Homo Erectus. Such statements are laughable in the face of overwhelming genetic evidence.

Palaeontologists are notorious for over exaggerating the importance of their own finds and putting down the finds of others that challenge such claims. Even more so when the finds are from their own nation. Raymond Dart, the founder of Australopithecus, is notorious for his assertions that these early hominids used bone tools and were formidable hunters when later evidence showed that they were probably omnivorous gatherers, no australopithecine tools have ever been found. The real decisions about many human finds are put into place by the peer review of a wide community of palaeoanthropologists and not by the excited assertions of the founders. Not that such a caution will occur to the thousands of laypeople that will lap this up this morning and annoy me in casual conversation for many months to come.

Ventriloquism for Monkeys has been nominated for the People’s Book Prize, a monthly book competition decided by the votes of you, the public. You can help the book by simply clicking the link below, registering and voting. It’s the first poetry book to be nominated too. It should only take a few minutes of your time. Please vote!

http://www.peoplesbookprize.com/book.php?id=124

Here’s an mp3 of my set at Littlest Birds at the Whitechapel Gallery a few weeks back. You can have listen by clicking on the play button below or you can save it for your mp3 player by right clicking the download link. There’s a little bit of feisty language and some slightly rude poetry, so maybe it’s best if you don’t play it through loud speakers at your office/church/bus top deck/local hospice. Oh, and I shout in a really poor Jamaican accent within the first 30 seconds. I remember telling people in workshops to be careful when trying other accents in readings and here I am doing the opposite. I’ll start using similes next.

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