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Mystic writing pad

Mystic writing pad 2 [drawing, 297mm x 297mm] incorporates ‘Since Jerusalem’ by Stephen J. Williams.
Mystic writing pad 1 [drawing, 297mm x 297mm] incorporates ‘Since Jerusalem’ by Stephen J. Williams.
Mystic writing pad 6 [drawing, 297mm x 297mm] incorporates Sigmund Freud’s ‘A note upon the Mystic Writing Pad’ (1925); ‘Uncle Stranger’ by Stephen J. Williams (which is a version of a diary kept by Trevor Williams); and [There lies Peter Clutterbuck now], a poem by Stephen J. Williams.
Mystic writing pad 5 [drawing, 297mm x 297mm] incorporates [most there is just this] and ‘Sr Pessoa’, both poems by Stephen J. Williams; and Sigmund Freud’s ‘A note upon the Mystic Writing Pad’ (1925). Published in Pink Cover Zine No.3, November 2018.
Mystic writing pad 1–5 »» https://goo.gl/7MPD8W
Mystic writing pad 9 [drawing, 297mm x 297mm] incorporates ‘Uncle Stranger’ by Stephen J. Williams (which is a version of a diary kept by Trevor Williams); and ‘Exposed’, a poem by Stephen J. Williams.
Mystic writing pad 8 [drawing, 297mm x 297mm] incorporates ‘Uncle Stranger’ by Stephen J. Williams (which is a version of a diary kept by Trevor Williams); and a version of another drawing, ‘Detail of Decay’ (a study of an Adolf von Hildebrand statue, by Stephen J. Williams.
Mystic writing pad 4 [drawing, 297mm x 297mm] incorporates ‘Since Jerusalem’ by Stephen J. Williams; and Sigmund Freud’s ‘A note upon the Mystic Writing Pad’ (1925).
Mystic writing pad 7 [20171212 drawing, 297mm x 297mm] incorporates excerpts of a diary by Trevor Williams; and ‘Transposition in the words of James Baldwin’ by Stephen J. Williams, which is a transposition in words spoken by James Baldwin. This drawing was published in Rabbit Poetry—a journal for non-fiction poetry (RMIT University, April 2018).
Mystic writing pad 3 [drawing, 297mm x 297mm] incorporates ‘Since Jerusalem’ by Stephen J. Williams.
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Serge Gainsbourg’s empathy

Do popular songs aim low? According to the French wikipedia, Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Le Poinçonneur des Lilas’ was a hit in 1959. It is a poem about a ‘ticket puncher’ in Mairie des Lilas (a railway station in Paris) who talks very quickly about punching holes in tickets all day and about someone making a final hole for him, where he won’t have to listen to talk about holes any more.

Serge Gainsbourg photographed by Claude Truong Ngoc, 1981.
Serge Gainsbourg photographed by Claude Truong Ngoc, 1981.

(The original music video—with English subtitles—is also on YouTube, but the audio track is not clear.) “The main road,” which the persona of the poem says he hopes to leave, is actually, in the French lyric, “la grand’route” or ‘the great highway’—surely a reference to the road we all take to the grave.

The song is a poetic and political act of empathy, and of a kind that has become rare in the sanitised marketplace of popular songs. And it is the poetry that saves it from being only political ideology and lifts it into the realm of art.

Gainsbourg died in 1991, having established himself as one of the world’s most influential popular composers and performers.