Themes discussed in the workshop include:
sonnet | pentameter
| rushes | Drum | Bass
| bends | more drums
| sex?
ELIZABETH: What's the next poem, Kim?
KIM: 'Club Mix'
RICHARD: [TO ELIZABETH] These two are remarkably related, in fact. Only yours is as light as a feather, and mine is as [STARTS TO LAUGH] clumsy as a tractor …
ELIZABETH: I thought you were going to say mine is as light as a feather, and yours is seriously profound.
RICHARD: No. Lumpen.
KIM: [TO RICHARD] Either way, you're not supposed to be commenting, Richard. Just read the poem. [LAUGHS]
RICHARD: [LAUGHS] Right.[READS 'CLUB MIX']
ELIZABETH: A sonnet?
KIM: A nine line sonnet.
CAHAL: It's not a fourteen line sonnet, definitely.
KIM: It's a post modern sonnet.
ELIZABETH: The form breaks down somewhere in the middle of the third to last line, doesn't it, where Richard gave a particularly long pause.
KIM: Particularly long, yes.
ELIZABETH: Yes.
CAHAL: And the last line's a particularly good example of filling out a pentameter: 'The drums the drums. The bass, the drums. The drum.'
ELIZABETH: 'Never Never Never Never ….'
CAHAL: Or you could just say 'De dum de dum de dum de dum de dum.'
KIM: It was never dumb, it was always 'drum.'
CAHAL: It reflects the relationships between the Club's Petrarch….
ELIZABETH: Where do you think Petrarch went to meet girls?
CAHAL: I think under ivy balconies, did he not?
LEONA: 'Rushes…'
ELIZABETH: I know, I'm stumbling over that first word.
CAHAL: It's not 'the rush to the head,' further down.
ELIZABETH: No, I mean 'rushes' - you have them in films, don't you? Or on the other hand, you have 'a rush.' Not plural.
LEONA: So you can have a rush from the drums, you can have a rush from other things. You can have a rush from the music, a rush from the …ah …
ELIZABETH: Drugs.
LEONA: [AGREEING] … drugs, from the lights, dancing, girl .… But then down here later is a 'rush to the head.' In the club sense, I think it's adrenaline, to get technical.
CAHAL: It's 'a rush to head/ that's blood I mean.' It may be adrenaline, but it's suggesting a rush of blood to the head. It's interesting that the first bridge of syntax – 'that's the soundtrack bass and melody set back and pretty.' You expect the second one to be like 'the bass' with the brackets that's the soundtrack. You expect it from 'a' to do the same thing. But I don't see why it does it. I don't see where the noun attached to an indefinite article is – whereas I can see there is one for 'the soundtrack bass.'
ELIZABETH: Isn't it that the sort of dislocation as to where you're sort of walking further, you're going further in, and the splits aren't as … in fact, what's actually happened is that the word 'pretty' [SNAPS HER FINGERS] has actually set off the idea of this girl.
LEONA: Yeah.
ELIZABETH: 'The risk the time the time the drum'….. that is an echoing line. What is it? …. 'The something , the something ….'
CAHAL: It's either Tennyson's 'Ulysses': 'to fight, to yield …
HUGH: Oh, yes.
ELIZABETH: 'To something, to something, to fight and not to yield' or something… Possibly, but for me there's something with lots of buzz in it as well.
CAHAL: 'You blood, you stones, you worse than senseless things.'
LEONA: But there's something more contemporary.
ELIZABETH: Anyway, that's a diversion, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
LEONA: The 'passing bells for those who die like cattle.'
CAHAL: Yeah. Yeah.
[LONG PAUSE]
CAHAL: It's the shift from the logic of the first six lines which is kind of setting a scene and telling a story. From 'how do you' – from there, on, it's really pounding, isn't it … And those last three lines are an accumulation, an almost pounding accumulation of sound and sight, rather than an attempt at a fragmented explanation building up to that … The bit from 'melody set back and pretty' … down to 'that's blood I mean' is telling some sort of narrative, it's setting a particular scene, not just a generalised one, but it ends …
ELIZABETH: But it goes again.
CAHAL: Yeah.
ELIZABETH: It does feel to me like the approach to the scene, I mean, to the club, or whatever it is, and then a kind of general and actual memories, and then you’re into sensation.
LEONA: Which is more or less how I remember it.
ELIZABETH: They didn't have clubs when we were young, Leona.
LEONA: They had something else. They didn't call them 'clubs'.
KIM: Disco brothels.
CAHAL: Disco.
KIM: I love that last line. I think that's [TEASING] not derivative of anything.
CAHAL: It goes to 'the drum' singular.
KIM: Yes. And that's what makes it interesting, I think.
HUGH: [QUOTING FROM CONRAD'S HEART OF DARKNESS] 'The horror, the horror.'
KIM: [JOKING] No, it would have been 'the horrors, the horror.'
ELIZABETH: But the point is it becomes a sort of archetypal thing.
CAHAL: It resolves to, yeah. What is the meaning of the drum, outside of this club?
ELIZABETH: Yeah. Yeah.
CAHAL: It means 'primitive, ' doesn't it? Primitive or menacing. And yet that isn't what this is about.
LEONA: The heart.
CAHAL: Yeah, yeah. In any other context, 'the drums the drums' is about war. Or jungle messages. And it's repetition here, while it may be used to refer to this particular scene, is very specific. I don't think one can say 'the drums, the drums' without conjuring up things like the Thirty Years War, Joseph Conrad …
ELIZABETH: It also sounds like the drums.
CAHAL: Yeah. But it's interesting, isn't it? It says 'drums and bass' rather than 'drum and bass.' Quite odd.
ELIZABETH: Don't you think he put the 's' in all the way through, just so he could take it out?
CAHAL: Well, one doesn't think of drums and bass, nowadays.
ELIZABETH: No, one doesn't.
CAHAL: In the old days, you would have said 'he's on drum, he's on bass' but now it's drum-and-bass. And that is because there are basically two sounds, one which is the bass, and the other which is the drum. It's not like Keith Moon and all that stuff. Basically.
ELIZABETH: Basically.
CAHAL: The idea of the drum is more repetitive. It's narrowed down …
LEONA: Come back Ginger Baker.
CAHAL: I don't know whether the expression 'drum and bass' implies a narrower range of sounds….
ELIZABETH: It just happens to be that that's what happens to be the phrase is, isn't it?
CAHAL: But 'drums and bass' sits rather oddly, because the cliché has crept in, so if you're thinking in those terms, and you say 'drums and bass' you're appealing to something other than the cliché 'drum-and-bass.'
LEONA: No, no. What we're talking about here is not a bass. What we're talking about is a sound, which has nothing to do with an instrument. What you do is you take all the bass sound within a piece of music and you amplify it and you amplify it and you amplify it until there's very little left other than that physical shaking that actually hits your chest. When you go in to these places; you're assaulted by this physical thing.
KIM: It's a heartbeat.
LEONA: It isn't the sound of a bass instrument that's doing it, it's the whole bass line out of any part of the music.
CAHAL: Which is why I understand something different by 'drum and bass' which is bass in that sense.
LEONA: Yeah. It's why some people kill their neighbours.
CAHAL: When you say 'drums and bass' it sounds like you're talking about something old-fashioned, like: 'there's the drums and there's the bass.'
ELIZABETH: But is it not just that the poet is indicating there then that he is not wholly at home with this world. It's us going in there … And we haven't quite got the terms right … We're describing in terms of what we're hearing.
CAHAL: What you describe as 'bass.' Yeah... 'with the assistance on the drums' is very specific at the end. ' the bass the drums. The drum.'
ELIZABETH: But it's still saying: 'The drums are the bass. The drum is the bass. ' It has taken on the bass line.
CAHAL: Through the bass the drums. Oh, right.
CAHAL: There's also a reading that says that the rushes - in the 'filming' sense - the rushes are good. Yeah?
ELIZABETH: Yes!
CAHAL: And that's the soundtrack. If you use 'soundtrack' you're really using it literally, or you're using like 'this noise is the soundtrack to what's going to happen in this club' …. But the idea of 'melody' in the context that we've been describing seems like days, like it would be very setback and primitive and pretty …
LEONA: Well, pretty something, which isn't the same thing as 'pretty.'
ELIZABETH: [TO LEONA] Yeah. Good point. Good point.
CAHAL: Pretty …
LEONA: … loud.
CAHAL: It seems to me that this is either merely a verbal tick to get through to the end of that line or it's actually part of some other sense that's staggering through. I suspect there are two senses there.
ELIZABETH: As in 'Club Mix.'
CAHAL: 'The rush is good.' That's the soundtrack
ELIZABETH: I mean, what that brings to my mind is 'This is a how-d'a-do.'
CAHAL: But it's not a 'howd'a-ya'. There's a definite question in 'Howd'a-ya' which there isn't in 'how-ya. ' It's … Now, 'the bends' – is 'the bends' a term that's useful in club technology? Is it drinking too much water?
ELIZABETH: Oh, I see what you mean.
CAHAL: Is it sweating too much out? What happens if you sweat too much, and you drink too much water without salt?
LEONA: You're making this up!
CAHAL: I can hardly tell when I'm faking or working something out. So we don't know what 'the bends' means.
ELIZABETH: Well, yeah, we do. 'the rushes' and 'the bends'
CAHAL: Well there seems to be some tension between the rushes and the bends in the deep-sea diver sense.
ELIZABETH: Yes.
CAHAL: And the tightening drums. The tightening of a drum is rather like the things you tighten around your diving outfit. What all this does for us, I don't know.
LEONA: Not a lot. Because there isn't enough to support much.
CAHAL: But I don't know what the things themselves are doing here. 'The bends' and the 'tightening of the drums.' You see, tightened drums suggest very physically 'drums' rather than just the rhythm, doesn't it? We can actually see there is actually a snare drum there that somebody has keyed up, or a tom-tom that has been keyed up, and that seems to support this idea of separation of drums and bass, and the idea of the melody set back, and the drum, the actual drum.
LEONA: It doesn't have to be the drum head, though, does it? It could be a tightened rythm. Tightening the rhythm.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, but it is such a visual thing.
CAHAL: I don't feel that. I might believe it, but I don't feel it …
ELIZABETH: I think it is getting all a bit druggy down here. I think the rest of the band tracks the sound … I mean tightened drums might also be eardrums, banging away.
LEONA: Yes, yes.
CAHAL: I'm just afraid that there's something really obvious here, it's going to be like a Morris Minor or something. And that's why we're all so baffled here. Completely baffled. [TEASING, TO RICHARD] So what do you young chaps do in these places?
HUGH: … What's very interesting, I think, is in the last line,
and how long is that first sentence, a whole poem, until we get to 'the drums,
the drums.' Full stop. 'The bass, the drums.' Full stop. 'The drum.' Full stop.
I don't know what I'm saying about that, I'm just noticing it.
CAHAL: But you’re drawing it to our attention.
HUGH: Well, what I'm saying is that the poem essentially floating around a main verb or a main subject, and yet at the end there is a very definite drawing down, and that's done syntactically as well.
LEONA: You could read it as a sexual encounter. I think you could read this as sexual. With all that happening in the beginning and what happens after.
ELIZABETH: I thought the bit in the middle was kind of evoked by the sensations of the sounds, rather than happening in the same time as the rest of the things.
LEONA: Yeah. The connection with a different kind of story.
ELIZABETH: It's almost hallucinatory. Well, a real encounter could be hallucinatory in that situation.
LEONA: I don't mean that something's happening. For instance , I'm thinking of the description of the visit to the swimming pool in a much earlier poem of Richard's which can be read as what's happening in a bed rather than what's happening in a pool. I think there's just a suggestion …
KIM: So, what's it about Richard?
RICHARD: 'Tis what it is.
ELIZABETH: [TO RICHARD] There isn't anything else you want to request from us?
LEONA: [TO RICHARD] You've had all you want from us about this? Are you getting ready to say 'You idiots!'?
RICHARD: No. I don't think there's much there, [LAUGHS] so you got a lot out of it.