10 QUESTIONS - NATHAN PENLINGTON
Nathan Penlington is a magician, poet, writer and stand up word chucker. He is cleverer than I am but we share a love for words and music and visual thinking. You can check his stuff out here and here and all over the place.
1. Where are you? Describe your surroundings
I’m in my small basement flat in Hackney. I’ve been a voracious reader since my teens, and I’m continually inspired by novelty, but now that means the book piles are fighting it out with the coconut monkeys, obscure board games, and magic props. I guess I now live in that magical forgotten street brick-a-brac shop I imagined I would find as a child.
2. I always imagined that Bob Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna’ was written about a visit to an art gallery and if you know which art gallery it was you would be able to unlock the imagery contained therein. Do you have any pointless theories?
Perhaps the definition of being creative means you constantly have pointless theories. I have always kept a notebook, and I have always kept all of them. My teenage diaries and notebooks though are particularly full of pointless, intellectually brooding, and ridiculous theory. I’ve just pulled one off the shelf at random to make sure I’m not making that sentence up. This is my teenage theory of Nowism™: “Simplifying to the extreme I define Nowism™ as increduality toward postmodernism with its great academic and cartoon antiheros, and its great Coca-Cola™ sponsored nil:nil penalty shootouts. You do not live in the dust of the hundred years dead. You live here, and you live now. Let the dead worry about the past. Embrace Nowism™ before it embraces you”. I think that speaks for pointlessness itself.
3. My son puked his tea all over his mum’s shoulder this evening which I thought was quite funny until I realised she was wearing one of my best jackets. It reminded me of when we were teenagers and couldn’t go to parties without Sice chucking up the four cans of Mackesons that he’d bought for the occasion. Sometimes we didn’t even get out of his kitchen. I once got so drunk on whiskey when I was fifteen that I ended up in next doors house and everyone had red eye, like photograph red eye. I threw up in my sleep that night and my dad threw me in the shower where my sister tells me that I kept on telling him to piss off. The next morning all my posters turned their heads to stare at me and I wasn’t allowed any tea. Another time I lost the keys to a car he had borrowed to take us to Blackpool. My brother and I had to sneak out of the hotel and walk back up the Golden Mile looking for them but we never did. Another time I, well, you get the idea. What grim memories of childhood are etched onto the inside of your consciousness like primitive wall paintings depicting my dad chucking spears at me?
You should keep the jacket as it is, and show it to Sonny when he is older. Once me and my mate Kriston bunked off sixth form and went to the Offy. By ten o’clock we were sat on a bench near the cut drinking cheap vodka, by twelve o’clock I had passed out on the bench. Kriston shook me awake so we could move before everyone came out for dinner. I sat up quickly, and projectile vomited all over his favourite suede jacket. He refused to clean it, and wore it for years with the stain on the shoulder. He said it was a badge of honour. Mind you, we were into Bukowski at the time.
I was born and brought up in Rhyl, North Wales, which means my brain is full of grim childhood memories, and I guess inversely for most, particularly of the summer. I started my first job when I was thirteen, working on the crazy golf and trampolines, for 65p an hour. Trampoline duty was the worst, I don’t know how many times I had to mop the springs and rubber after some kid had pissed themselves in jumping excitement.
4. I’m listening to ‘All Around My Hat’ by Steeleye Span which I loved when I was a kid. it’s fucking awful. Are there any songs/bands/films/cereals that you can’t understand why you ever liked?
The first records I remember buying were early-to-mid Shakin Stevens, including The Sunsets albums, but stopping abruptly at ‘Lipstick, Powder and Paint’. I even collected Hula-Hoop packets to save up tokens for a t-shirt with his face on. I like the Sugababes and The Supremes, I like them even though I want them to be better than they actually are. The Supremes’ ‘A Bit of Liverpool’ must be the worst Motown album ever made. But maybe age decreases your sense of embarrassment, sometimes, even now, ‘Eternal Flame’ by The Bangles shuffles its way onto the hifi, and I don’t even flinch.
5. I love listening to Richard Brautigan read his poem ‘Boo, Forever’
Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a top
I’m haunted by all the
space that I will live
without
you
It sounds like he’s rattling a stick inside a bucket as he reads it. What poets/poetry influenced you?
Brautigan’s reading voice really surprised me the first time I heard it. It’s like he has the voice of an automated telephone service and words are stitched together from pre-recorded vowel sounds. But his simplicity of language, his playfulness, and the lightness with which he conveys sorrow and loss is something I try and achieve in my own writing, even in its most experimental form. The British equivalent is the novelist BS Johnson whose attempts to create a new form to reflect the content of each of his books means his work is also very close to my heart. I tend not to separate poets out from other writers, as some of the most poetic writers have avoided writing poetry. And so many twentieth century experimentalists, particularly those of form, are a constant inspiration; JG Ballard, WS Burroughs, Milorad Pavic, James Joyce, Edward Packard, Raymond Queneau and George Perec.
6. I’ve just flicked through a copy of Huey P Newton’s ‘War Against the Panthers’ looking for inspiration. Enclosed within it’s pages I discovered a piece of paper with Richard Sonnenfeldt’s signature on it. This was sent to me by a friend a number of years ago, a friend that I fear I have neglected somewhat recently. I will rectify that immediately. What was the last occasion on which you suffered guilt?
The death of someone that you have been close to in your life, will always make you feel guilt. It is a sign of how important they were to you. My mate Kriston died at the beginning of the year, and although we had been close for years, we just hadn’t spoken to each other for quite some time. Time and distance tends to do that. All you can do is acknowledge the guilt, swallow it, and move on.
7. I need an assistant but I can’t afford to pay them. If I had a assistant I would make more money and would be able to pay them. What should I do?
There is a government drive to encourage volunteering. I think it has something to do with them trying to staff the Olympics as cheaply as possible, and them not wanting to give anything actual back to the community. You could probably get funding to ‘employ’ a volunteer, which you could use to pay them until you earn enough money to actually pay them. In that way no one looses. And there might also be one more person wearing a tabard at the 2012 opening ceremony.
8. Today I feel like John the Baptist as depicted in Geertgen Tot Sint Jans’ fifteenth century painting ‘John the Baptist In The Wilderness’. As well as being a stunningly beautiful painting, one of unusual depth for it’s time, it speaks to me of melancholy and uncertainty; of being trapped with a space without constraint. How are you today? Is your path forward clear and true or a roundabout filled with brambles and wee bitey things.
I’ve just been to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, our kitten Kook, who is teething, took a flying fanged leap at my ankle and drew blood.
9. I did a remix for Kid 606 a couple of years ago that he liked. I even sang on it. What’s your proudest achievement?
When I was a child my Dad used to play us ‘Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of The Worlds’ every Sunday. The fear I felt running to school on Mondays, pretending the lampposts were Martian tripods, is etched into my very being. A wrote a poem about it, which includes a short bit of the Narrator’s introduction, which I performed on BBC Radio 4. So, technically, I have been Richard Burton in Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of The Worlds on Radio 4. Even with my over active imagination, no one would have believed at the beginning of the 21st century that that was possible.
10. On the 21st March 2000 Alan Bennet wrote in his diary ‘Read the hitherto unpublished extracts from Sylvia Plath’s diaries without much interest. I hadn’t known about Hughes’s homophobia - though I’m not sure that antipathy to Truman Capote can be so consumed, Capote really deserving a phobia to himself.’ Is there anyone that you cannot stand. Somebody who’s viewpoint is diametrically opposed to yours and who’s very existence is a daily effrontery. At the minute mine is the bloke who parks his car outside my house when he has his own garage and DOESN’T EVEN LIVE ON MY STREET!!!!!
I was talking about this very subject with a friend on the way to Wales a few weeks ago. It was decided that everyone needs a nemesis. The difficulty is finding someone you respect enough to hate with venom. I’m currently writing a new show about the world’s most famous psychic who, unfortunately, already has a worthy nemesis. But the world of psychics, mediums, and clairvoyants is full of con-artists and frauds eager to exploit the sick and vulnerable, any one of which makes my blood boil.
