The Devil's Pleasure Garden

Some Senryū

She’s like a good book:
One is avid but in a
Hurry to finish.

Life is where you can’t
Believe what your friends tell you
About your haircut.

Men prefer women’s
Bodies to their souls because
They change more slowly.

Poems are like farts:
Other people’s stink; one’s own
Have subtle perfume.

Going to the loo
At a party is like death:
No one misses you.

Was it Heraclitus
Who said you never
Get the same haircut twice?

My skills as a thief
Have enabled me to steal
What belongs to me.

The library of
The inner self publishes
No glib synopsis.

So obscene in the
Strainer of biography,
The warm cheap detail.

The pointlessness of
Principles: to keep you from
Behaving badly.

Too frivolous, we
Are betrayed by our depths; too
Deep and we get bored.

More of This Refinement;

On YouTube, Here,

And Here;

And in a Book, Mon Dieu!

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox, and YouTube, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

I-could-not-love-thee-dear-so-much-loved-I-not-moi-même-more sort of thing.

In bed with the Girls

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

Film reviews

Favorite song

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

Lubitsch

Fellini

Hitchcock

Kubrick
de Sade
Joyce
Nabokov
Leonard

To consider what

One wants is to go in a

Hundred directions.

Human risk, wretched

Human purity: nothing

Unsubtractable.

Forty-nine years old and

I made it without

Killing anybody.

At least life is brief:

It holds your face in the shit

And then lets you go.

Chaos eats outward

At the compact order in

The heart of chaos.

My daemon uses me

To read every book

I can get my hands on.

It was the poets

Who invented God, after

Which they swallowed him.

My vulgarity

Is all that stands between me

And my suicide.

The avant-garde is

Founded on the fairy tale

That art moves forward.

Who has not changed channels

In belief that the

Broadcaster felt the blow?

I think of Homer

Or Shakespeare and I want to

Weep. And some women.

Naiveté and

Cynicism: pups in the

Same noisy litter.

The laughing gods weren’t

Aware of being gods. That’s

How we got caught here.

Consciousness grazes,

A random velvet sweeping

Animal muzzle.

We try to make artists,

Like our own children,

Into ourselves, and can’t.

We seek the poet

Who’s right all the time, but who

Could bear to find him?

The moment we have

A feeling it has always

Been exactly so.

With an adequate

Stomachic one has no need

Of philosophy.

We neither transcend

Nor identify ourselves.

Something prevents it.

The humiliating

Message: you can’t think

The thought that brought you here.

What is poetry

But poverty, the will in

Tight circumstances.

The serpent holds to

His lines, shouldering through the

Maze of his pattern.

Very pretty. But

Imagine having to feel

That way all the time!

Oh, my fuck-eat-drink-

Swim-sleep-write-feel machine, do

Not abandon me!

Seducible high

Spirits meld with statements, and

Are contradicted.

There is no diversion.

Diversion itself

Engages our passion.

Claustrophobic confession:

Try not to

Characterize me, I’ll scream.

He descended into

Hell to write these things.

And it ain’t over yet.

Pretentious Pictures Presents

My husband suspects
A 20-minute romantic comedy without much dialogue

A middle-aged woman in love with a younger man is frustrated at every turn in her attempts to bring them together. But she doesn't know how to quit.
A restaurant. The patrons are in evening clothes, the waiters formal. There is no music, only the soft sound of voices in conversation. Michaela, elegant in a black dress, participates in one such conversation.

We can't hear what's being said but the atmosphere is happy, polite. Her husband presides with an easy charm. Over her shoulder we see the couple they are dining with, Philip and his wife. Philip's eyes are toward the other two, perhaps carefully so.

Michaela is absorbed in the general conversation, self-forgetful, but she too is restraining her gaze. When it does rest on him it is with a gaiety that seems a touch contrived.

She gets up and walks away, pausing to greet friends at another table. As her husband and the younger woman continue chatting Philip permits himself a discreet but lingering glance at Michaela. She is several yards away in profile, smiling, nodding.

Suddenly, absurdly, she is nude. She stands there talking with someone, in heels and necklace, tiny purse in hand, oblivious to her nudity, as are those around her. This is Philip's fantasy.

But now, even more absurdly, she does notice! She looks down at herself, shocked. The others don't see.

She does not convulse and cover herself but stands her ground, purse lifted in her hand, and glances at Philip—too briefly to be eloquent, but sharply. He looks away mortified.

Instantly she is dressed again and, taking leave of her friends, she proceeds to the bathroom...

Michaela has reached a certain age, and worries about her beauty—but Philip, her husband’s business associate, is mad about her. And she about him: lightening has struck.

They do everything they can to meet but are constantly frustrated—each episode an assault on her dignity.

He's not a bad husband; she loves him. And his passion for her is keen, so keen that he can tell something, or someone, is on her mind, and watches even as the lovers try to elude his eye.

So does Philip's wife. He's starting to disappear at odd times. In fact she's sure there was a stranger in their bedroom while she was asleep. Did someone reach the balcony from the street outside and—?

As Michaela climbs a steep street past Philip's apartment, where the balconies hover near the steps, her friend hails her from up high—from where she spies at the other couple. That night she steals down and stretches their balcony—

The co-star is Athens, the only place this story could happen. Every opportunity, every chance meeting, every frustration is a piece of Athenian realty.

Always elegant, always in a little black dress and heels, she hangs from balconies, climbs cliffs, crosses deserts, clings between moving taxis—
—but her dignity prevails, and the sound of her steps as she threads the Athens labyrinth is the music of the film.

Pretentious Pictures Presents

My husband suspects
A 20-minute romantic comedy without much dialogue

James Joyce

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Here are some notes on Finnegans Wake—“a bag-man’s babble, a bomb site, a druid’s curse on Rome, an Irishman’s revenge on English,” etc.

I’ve got a fair bit o’ the Irish in meself, as I confess in My Racial Profile.

Which may account for my positive outlook: Joyce said yes, Becket said no.

On the other hand, Joyce made a dubious choice.

Beckett? I prefer Pinter.

It’s all in the book, if you like books.

Casanova, or rather Casanova’s descendant, is trying to get a lecturer appointment at Oxbridge, when he makes the mistake of defending Finnegans Wake: “It’s a bit of an avalanche—a comic monologue—a barroom rant—a child’s private language. The one thing it’s not—is serious.”

Uh-oh. You want a job, you gotta be serious.

Seriously,

Bob

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His recent The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

“I was beastly but never coarse. A high-class sort of heel.”