Toy Fights: A Boyhood - 'A classic of its kind' William Boyd

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His father’s guitar playing also clearly had a strong influence on Paterson’s relationship with music, another major theme of the book. Paterson’s musical obsessions have often made their way into his poetry, whether that be the Forward Prize winning ‘Love Poem for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze’ or some of the stray shots he fires at jazz guitarists in Zonal– Julian Lage, for example, is brilliantly dismissed as “one of the many jazz smilers”. But in Toy Fights, Paterson also shows a talent for the type of music writing done by critics like Simon Reynolds in Melody Maker or Rolling Stone. The music of John Martyn, whose greatness Paterson claims is “incontestable”, is the focus of one excellent passage. Paterson is able to convey not only the nursery rhyme beauty of Martyn’s lyrics or the saxophonous density of his vocal delivery, but also the complex person behind the songs, ultimately offering a convincing call to “consider the life and the work separately.” Really? OK, I’ll take that encouragement. But there would be problems in terms of who is still alive. Maybe I could do it as science fiction, that could be the solution. It was very hard. I had studiedly avoided thinking about it for so many years. It would have been better – healthier – to look at it earlier, but given my task was to write up to the age of 20 it was hardly an episode I could avoid because it was formative. I thought: well, finally, this is where you have to turn and face it.

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Geri Horner wears vintage goggles and poses next to a yellow plane as she transforms into aviation icon Amelia Earhart for Halloween Schizophrenia... narcissists... origami, the peculiar insanity of Dundee, sugar, religious mania...” are included in Don Paterson’s long list of what this book is about. Not surprisingly for a poet who loves music more than poetry – “my minor curse is that I seem to be a bit better at the thing I love a bit less” – the list includes “the sexual excesses of the Scottish club band scene, and... the lengths we go to not to be bored”. Inside Charles and Camilla's state dinner: King and Queen enjoyed lobster ravoli andsalmon as part of eight-course feast in Nairobi At points, the pivots the book makes verges on shadowboxing. But it also feels like something unsurprising in a poet, which is to say some of it can be read as fuelled by a distaste for imprecision - a tendency online left discourse is undoubtedly given to. (and I do have a vague, not-very-worked-through theory that why so much online left discourse ends up in obscure cul-de-sacs or splinters is because people are generally no longer taught at schools the difference between rhetoric and literal speech, and people end up feeling a peculiar, doomed compulsion to defend or adopt rhetorical positions as though it was purely literal, factual speech. but that’s probably a conversation for another day.) Did that free things up for him? “I could see things a lot more clearly. It’s the gift of perspective you get from someone close to you dying, and you get to remember them correctly.” In the book, Paterson has only praise for his father, who was determined to be different from his own father, “a gruff, rough man of few words”. Paterson’s father, by contrast, was a sensitive type and a reader. Is Paterson like his dad, I wonder?It’s an obviously brilliant book which, if a book is a room, comes with its own elephant. For all the book sets out, from the preface on, a hatred of social media, this book - particularly in its footnotes and asides - bares distinct traces of the extremely online. Robert De Niro loses his cool in court after being asked if he urinated while on the phone to his ex-assistant and called her a bi**h

Toy Fights: A Boyhood by Don Paterson | Goodreads

Don Paterson was born in Scotland in 1963, this book talks about his boyhood and the struggles he had to become the poet, writer, and musician he is now.

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Toy Fights by Don Paterson | Waterstones

Paterson’s prose style is resolutely colloquial. He relishes hyperbole, vigorous cliches and swearing You might emerge from Baldragon with a heroin habit, tears tattooed on your face, pregnant, dead or all of the above, but you might have added to that a Higher Latin, an opinion on the South Sea Bubble and some basic facility on the clarinet.’You write: “My state in repose is bored, slightly afraid, agitated, and for some reason really dehydrated.” What’s with the dehydration? Our Yorkshire Farm's Amanda Owen 'is using her son Reuben's popularity to bolster her brand as she relaunches TV career after secret affair was exposed' I knew the game was up for me the day / I stood before my father’s corpse and thought / if I can’t get a poem out of this…” –Phantom, Don Paterson

Toy Fights: A Boyhood — Don Paterson’s memoir

Strictly's Janette Manrara and Alijaz Skorjanec reveal their plans for baby number two as they pose for sweet snaps with daughter Lyra Rose It wasn’t cathartic,” says Paterson firmly. “But it was necessary at some level to make some account of it to myself. It just wasn’t a period of life that I ever wanted to remember. So it was interesting… No, it wasn’t interesting, it was quite horrible. And I don’t feel lightened as a result, but it could have assuaged something at some level.” Family readersPeter Andre, 50, reveals the one major thing he and pregnant wife, Emily, 33, fit into their schedule ahead of the birth of their new baby For obsessives it’s a focus – I could latch on to it to stop my brain from eating itself. I still do it. At the last school council at St Andrews [Paterson is soon to retire as professor of poetry at the university], I found myself folding an alien tortoise. The book ends as Paterson boards the train for London with his guitar, aged 20. The timing is right, he’s been so many things already including a master of origami and a fundamental Baptist but especially a serious jazz musician. “We got to the station around 9pm... Mum miserable and weeping... Dad smiling and weeping. I was light and blank and stomachless with fear... astonished that I wasn’t doing what I’d imagined doing a thousand times, and bottling it on the platform.” Martina Evans Much of the book is put beautifully. For a poet, it’s more a book that’s obviously careful and aware of its language rather than something I’d describe as poetic or particularly lyrical. Actually, it frequently makes a concerted effort *not* to be these things (and when he borrows from his own poetry, he makes the quotes explicit)