E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

On Thursday, July 25 th at noon, within seconds, I went from being a middle-aged slightly chubby university lecturer and poet, to a man bizarrely christened into the world of Boy Band mega-celebrity.   For, as the police report confirms, I was assaulted, that moment, by several members of The Wanted , famous bad boy antagonists to One Direction – and, as linked to manager Scooter Braun , tied into the heady milieu that also includes Justin Bieber , and his balcony-spitting entourage.   Cue their hit song “All Time Low”. What I don’t want to do here is go over old, and stained ground, but to express my astonishment at just how privileged and above-it-all (literally) this celebrity culture is.   For, in a sort of grotesque re-run of Marie Antoinette , the “boys” seem to have decided to drench me with a bucket load of champagne as I nonchalantly passed beneath their window. The undisputed facts of the case are this, according to the police report.   I...

As has been noted elsewhere on the net, there's a link between Lady Gaga and Lady Godiva - though the earlier lady sought to pass unseen though naked, covered herself with her long tresses, and was only spotted by Peeping Tom - and acted for the good of her people.  It is likely that Gaga partly based her name on that of the famous woman of nakedness, though. And now Gaga has shown up at the blank other end of that spectrum, the red carpet of the MTV awards - as far from Coventry's middle ages and over-taxation as seems imaginable - covered only in meat.  As this was yesterday's news, I don't want to dwell on what such a statement means - indeed, the semiotics of Gaga seems a tad 80s as a time-waster.  We know she is mass figure, we know she seeks attention, we know she claims to be an artist.  I am more interested in the great big what next that faces all artists of her size and wealth and fame - she is, in a sense, the new Hirst . One can only deploy so many...

Adam Foulds was a poet. Now he is a Booker nominated novelist who writes about poets - and a poet. Foulds is on a meteoric trajectory. Good luck to him. I think all poets should write novels. They pay better and get more attention. Do more people read them? How many poetry books get optioned? What is writing for in the 21st century of celebrity? Poor Mr. S. Fry has begun to discover too much occasional tweeting is damaging his rep. A Sunday Times article lambasted him for being so obnoxiously omnipresent. Fry has the Welles status - media type with big brains - but sadly, looks more like Wilde than contains that man's genius. Good luck to him.

Although Eyewear predicts a pandemic to break out sometime soon, perhaps in the next fortnight, I have still been going out into the crowded coughing streets of London. Last night, I found myself invited to a VIP-studded event at the “Yellow Café” at the flagship Selfridges store on Oxford Street, London, to celebrate the start of its 100 year birthday bash. On hand were the Westons (the hosts), Lily Allen , Joan Collins , Boris Johnson , and several famous models – as well as several leading younger poets, such as Emily Berry , Joe Dunthorne , and Allison McVety . The paparazzi ignored us poets, instead leaping all over Allen and Collins. Fame fame fickle fame. Anyway, what were the poets doing there? Glad you asked. I was a Contributing Editor for Conde Nast’s special magazine, Selfridge’s & Co 100: Art, Life Shopping – and edited the page of poetry. There have been over 200,000 copies of the magazine published, making these poems among the most widely distributed of the...