292 • Gnasher
The last time I met Tarantino
I was screening my ‘short’ at Das Kino
About Dennis the Menace’s
Parthenogenesis
Back in the days of Das Beano.
That ‘short’ was the only motion picture I ever finished (and it had only one screening) but there’s enough on the cutting-room floor to make a couple nice ‘longs’ if I ever get the time. The commemorative poem came along at least fifteen years later, a tardy response to Quentin who – with characteristically brusque erudition – had challenged me to write a metrically-perfect advert for the movie, in this form, in which one line contained but a single word. Of course Shakespeare did it better (‘Never, never, never, never, never’) but that’s too bleak a message for Sunday, when we should all rightly be devoting our meditations to Miraculous Births and their Consequences.
2 thoughts on “292 • Gnasher”
Excuse me, I have reservations about some of this blog. Isn’t there just a formula here, that you namedrop about people you have worked with (an impressive roster, admittedly), then write random rubbish about them? And also I don’t belive Das Kino in Hackney Wick was open fifteen years ago, so I wonder if you would clarify the timeline of the anecdote about what Tarantino challenged you to do. Thanks, DES.
Hi DES
You may well be right about the chronology. It could have been ten years ago, or five, that I accepted the one-word-line challenge. But I can’t accept that there’s a formula at work: these rhymes are bona-fide blurtings from the deep darkness of the subconscious, and such truths as they contain are more likely to be couched in the obscure logic of dreaming than to conform to the consensus-reality criteria by which you appear to be evaluating them.
Good wishes
Richard Lime