He’s right about super…vision, especially for the two of us who walk mostly with our eyes fixed firmly on the ground. – "Watch out there!" one of us says to the other.
The other day we were walking in the city together not far from those dead spaces that surround railway stations, you know, fireweeds bursting out of heaps of rubbish, boarded up and decaying Victorian buildings, that kind of thing. – "Georg Baselitz", I said, "and his paintings of men with unzipped flies and their penises showing. He said he was first inspired by one of Brendan Behan’s more drunken performances of his poetry".
My fingers began trying out my trouser zip. – "Watch out there!" the other one says.
Baselitz changed his name to that of his home which he had left behind in East Germany. That would make me Max Overton, which I somehow prefer as a writer’s name to my own, also being the name of the home I left behind in The East Midlands. For a life of wandering, in literature somewhere between the life of an artist and that of a pilgrim. But mostly a clown’s. Wasn’t there once a clown called Max Overton? – I am sure there was – Who one day when he was about the age of seven ran off to join the circus.
mmj