the end of the poem

Paul Muldoon must have seen me coming, when he named his series of Oxford lectures - which I have now, finally, after receiving them in the post in December, at long last started reading. Oh, yes: in my own small way I have myself been living the end of the poem.

Not only have I not written anything like a poem since the summer, when I was not working & had time & had the leisure even to think of myself as an artist; but I cannot imagine now writing one. Not that's any good. Not and someone publishing it - I just feel those days are over. I feel beleaguered, there's no mental space left; every time I do have an idea it turns to platitudes as soon as I try to articulate it. It's like one of those skulls in the movies.

I do know this is temporary and is one of the mythical syndromes that in fact serve to define one as an 'artist'; but there's no one to chivvy me out of it, this has been a year or more in the making. The main person who had faith in me is dead, and all the others have melted off into other little circles or what-have-you. And everyone is busy! (Not unlike your correspondent, I know, & of course that is part of the problem. LORD, for a decent trust fund!)

ANYWAY! One bloke who really does NOT have this problem is Paul Muldoon. My golly. Mr Prolific and not one to stand back waiting for other people to cheer him on, not that he's short of that either.

So I'm reading his Oxford lectures, collected up into a delicious Faber hardback called The End of the Poem, a series title which positively invites a Muldoonian exploration of all the meanings and applications of that one three-letter word: "End". He may as well have called his book The Word of the Poem, or The End of the Word. The Be-all and End-all of the Word. It's like literary criticism as written by an etymological dictionary. In the nicest possible way I say that.

It's also like an act of archaeology, in the way it categorises its shards (sic) of meaning, tweezes out the strings of code that have worked their way like worms into poems. I'm only on the second essay, which is quite brilliant - glittering, even - certainly dazzling. (There's a lovely string of forbidden adjectives for you!) It's a reading of a poem by Ted Hughes, from Birthday Letters, about an episode with Marianne Moore regarding Sylvia Plath. From this reading Muldoon extracts a whole civilisation in which both Ted and Sylvia were the emissaries of a conquering monarch, trained in the use of the customs and practices of the conquered nation, and Marianne Moore becomes a slave. Or worse: a piece of furniture. And a penitent. Amd while Muldoon makes a point about the true reading of this poem being impossible without quite extensive knowledge of many biographical and other details (including a highly specific alertness to the works of Harold Bloom, the combative American critic), this erudite reading is presented to us with such flourishes that one almost feels the need to undo ribbons.

This book is already acting on me like a tonic, though admittedly one which also says on the bottle, "You cannot do this!" It is beginning, just beginning, to remind me of the freshness of poetry itself, the news that stays news, the thing that really is unearthed in archaeological sites, whose very name is based on the ancient and necessary activity of making.

In the end is the beginning. These two elements are too closely related for it to be forgotten. So it becomes clear once again to Ms Baroque, who got her own name from the ancient and necessary act of - well - probably of cramming the ideas and words in until the poem pops under the pressure, that one's "social-artistic" life is only one little thing. That the faith of my dead friend is something I will in any case always have: he always was one of the true peers. And that the true, important peer group is in fact not the people you know but the ones who went before you: the people you know are simply your colleagues, and as such probably work in a different department.

a tragic story

I know a tragic little story, and its two characters are TS Eliot and Groucho Marx. Apparently they were mutual fans, and had a long correspondence that was in fact started by Eliot. (He asked Groucho for a photograph; the photo lacked a cigar, and he wrote back asking for another one.)

Well, Groucho was going to be travelling to England, and Eliot invited him and "Mrs Groucho" for dinner. He was overjoyed, and wrote that the proposed meeting had "greatly enhanced my credit in the neighbourhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street."

But the meeting was not auspicious. According to Roger Kimball in the New Criterion (sorry: I do know this story! but, like Groucho himself, when faced with the task of airing it publicly I have swotted up), Groucho "fortified himself by reading Murder in the Cathdral twice, The Waste Land three times, and brushed up on King Lear for good measure." And after the meeting, he wrote in a letter:

"Well, sir, as the cocktails were served, there was a momentary lull. ... So, apropos of practically nothing ... I tossed in a quotation from The Waste Land. That, I thought, will show him I've been reading a thing or two besides my press notices from Vaudeville.

"Eliot smiled faintly - as though to say he was thoroughly familiar with his poems and didn't need me to recite them. So I took a whack at King Lear...

"That, too, failed to bowl over the poet. He seemed more interested in discussing Animal Crackers or A Night at the Opera. He quoted a joke - one of mine - that I had long since forgotten. Now it was my turn to smile faintly."

With this cautionary tale in mind, I direct you to my newly-updated Weblogs list in the sidebar to the right. The list contains some of the blogs I read and enjoy. They are vastly disparate, but all worth reading in their different ways. Most of them are very well-written indeed. I'd say most of them are at least sometimes funny, that being the kind of thing Ms B likes; some of them are intensely so on a near-daily basis. Some are sweet, some are literary and informative; some are literary and sweet; some are political, some political and literary, and some are political and funny. Some are about London in all her changing moods and aspects, and a couple are about my own corner of it (yes, it's all mine), N16. Some have massive readerships and some are tiny. Some are by friends, and some are by people who are becoming friends. Many of them, when I read them, give me a temporary fever that makes me think: Arghh! I must write more like this!! which lasts until I remember the tragic story of TS Eliot and Groucho.

To get you going, here are some things I enjoyed this week:

Matt from On Grub Street works near me

Erin O'Brien exposes her enemies (& do click onto her main page for a great pic of Sophia Loren staring at Jayne Mansfield's bosom)

Join Pandemian's father on the bus to hell

JonnyB looks at Ray with new respect

Girl With a One-Track Mind is shocked by the grandmas

and, as a special bonus, The Friday Thing gets to the heart of the Gordon Brown 'n' Gandhi thing

photo above cRobert Altman 2005

Holocaust Memorial Day

This year's Holocaust Memorial was themed "Same. But different", with the aim of raising awareness of our common hunmanity; that it wasn't just Jews who were killed by the Nazis; and that genocide still occurs. According to a report commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust there is massive ignorance among Britons as to the true nature of the Holocaust. Quoted in The Voice,

"Holocaust Memorial Day Trust chairman, Dr Stephen Smith said: “Prejudice is not a problem for other people. It affects us all, be it because of our religion, our race, our sexuality or just our way of life. We must stand up to discrimination and ensure such atrocities are part of our past and not our future.

“This year on Holocaust Memorial Day, we invite the country to celebrate what makes them unique, and recognise that we are all the same, but different. We are an impressively diverse nation, and ought to take pride in this fact.

“We are calling on everyone to light a candle in memory of all those who have been persecuted in genocides.”

Following Normblog's copious and very useful links, I have found an Auschwitz Alphabet, a trailer for the film Shoah, an account of a trip to Auschwitz, and an interview with Anthony Julius on the "new" anti-Semitism.

Ms B is saddened to admit that she increasingly hears remarks that sound anti-Semitic even from friends; and that they are often couched in rationalist terms, so that a comment may be ugly but is framed to sit unexceptionally within a specific conversation; or they are political, normally about the situation between Israel and Palestine, but somehow seem to extend further than that. Julius talks about anti-Semitism as being like a liquid, of which even a drop can begin to infect in subtle ways any liquid into which it is put.

Bearing in mind the continuing depressing - and to the Baroque mind so ill-advised - boycott of the Holocaust Memorial by the Muslim Council of Britain, I am also happy, thanks to Black Triangle, to bring you this quote from Elie Wiesel's 1986 Nobel acceptance speech:

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentors, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religions, or political views, that place - at that moment - become the centre of the universe.”

elegantly dressed, innuit

here is Nanook, trying to claw his way into Seven Sisters station in a beautiful sealskin coat and some really sensible mittens, unlike my fingerless ones

Yesterday was too much of a fuss to write anything. I was frankly knackered from the effort of everyday survival. That's what it's like in the frozen north.

To recap: when we awoke, London was shimmering whitely under a one-inch coating of light snow. It sat on the tree branches, it sat on the cars, it sat on the roofs, and it sat - perhaps most of all, in retrospect - on the points, wherever the Underground goes over the ground.

Dear old London doesn't cope very well with this kind of stuff: even in its article blasting the London Underground bosses for incompetence, the Standard referred to our modest inch of snow as "extreme weather." But really - do the services all think that in other countries the snow juat manages itself? There was not a single speck of sand or salt on Hackney's roads, not one truck, not one municipal worker out to make the borough's surfaces passable. By the time I left the house at 8.15 all the tiny little Hassidic kids were slipping all over the place in a half-inch of very slippy slush. But I made it to the bus.

Seven Sisters station was packed. It was a sea of people, unmoving. Well, they were undulating slightly, as sea plants will. But not going anywhere. The barriers were closed and a voice repeatedly announced that the platforms were too full and thet they were "holding people in the ticketing area." And, one couldn't help noticing, in the corridor areas leading to the street. I stood around for a bit, and then had a sudden forceful image of the gates opening and the crowd surging down to the tube, as one crushing entity. I left. (And 30 seconds behind me a tidal wave of at least fifty people surged out after me: they must have shut the station or made an announcement or something.)

So everybody in the vicinity was heading for the 279 bus. It goes to Manor House station! I jumped on it - by a miracle - and for the next next age and a half, as we creaked to a halt at bus stop after bus stop where dozens of people all waited resiliently, and then couldn't get on the bus because none of my fellow passengers would shift their sorry butts to move down and make room, I wrote, in my head, a post about how people have no idea how to behave on public transport. All the types. I won't list them all here.

This occupied me along the meandering ride through Tottenham, down the broken down escalator in Manor House and for a long, long time on the glacial-speed Piccadilly Line - where a fat man in a navy blue pinstripe suit (with stripes about 2cm apart), a big black jumper and a cheap camel coat stood in the space of three people, holding on to the overhead bars on both sides! so that he, his newspaper and his belly dominated the communal space in the manner of a tenth-rate local gangster, while a pregnant girl stood behind him, squashed. Oh, etc. All the way to Green Park.

I didn't change back on to the Victoria Line. I got out while I could. There's a Prêt à Manger (full name edited in with accents etc for readers abroad) right there, and the park had that sort of snow-muffled sound you get, and everything was white or grey and magical. The few people who were walking through the middle of it looked indistinct, just dark shapes: the environment took over. I walked into the park with my coffee - by now ludicrously late for work - thinking to walk across it. But in the strangeness I lost my bearings! I could have done it, of course - Buck House was just over the way - but the footpaths all looked the same, and there was a sudden sense of those London trudges, and nobody wants one of those. So I went back up and hopped onto a 38 bus, which whisked me in five minutes flat to the Prêt at Victoria. Hurrah!

And it had only taken two hours!

24-hour torture people

no picture here. I tried to find a pic of Jack Bauer, but they are all sanitised, glossy, pretty ones - in none of them is his chin dripping with blood. Yeah, vampire, hilarious

Another lazy post. Well, I'm lazy but the First Post isn't. Check out their article marking the return of Jack Bauer to our screens:

"On the 5th anniversary of the establishment of the detention centres at Guantanamo Bay, arguments about torture should not be restricted to whether 'we' have the right to torture 'them'. The decision of whether or not to torture is a decision about who we are and what we represent.

The US military recognised this in WWII when they rejected the use of torture against the Nazis. Now, in the new era of permanent war, societies that claim to be civilised and democratic should not be seduced by the hypothetical urgency of the 'ticking bomb' into enshrining torture as a permanent principle.

If they do, they merely give succour to their enemies and contribute further to the barbaric politics of the new century."

Ms B tried and pretty much failed to watch last night's episode, which doesn't augur so well for the rest of the series. Am I the only one who just thinks it's just plain wrong to watch someone killing someone by biting through their neck, in graphic detail??? 24 trades endlessly on the "but they're so evil" principle. I know it's hard-hitting political satire, moralistic there-but-for-the-grace-of-God, the-end-of-the-worrrruld-is-coming stuff, but it seems apparent that the compromises are taking place also within the viewer, who is encouraged all along to think - even while he derides the evil White house staff - "it's okay when Jack does it, because we LIKE Jack."

the shock of the old

I keep saying it and now I'm happy because someone else is also saying it: there's really nothing new under the sun. In all the important ways it is still the same old us.

So the technology's new. At least, it's newer than other things. But what we're doing with it - is that really so new? Haven't we been on a continuum all along? Wouldn't Dr Johnson have had a blog?

what's it all about, Alfie?

Here in Baroque Mansions I'd say we are as interested as the next person in awards - who wins what, and for what, etc. It's a barometer of where things are at. The question is, what things.

The annual TS Eliot Prize reading last Sunday night was an interesting opportunity to probe this very question, and your correspondent has been mulling it over sever since then. So, plenty to mull, but not much to show for it. I have no aswers. I'm as swayed by thins kind of thing as the next person, if only for the reason that these awards have tangible results (as any decision has), but of course one knows that they mean nothing in themselves. Because there is no such of a thing as empirical reality.

So it's taken me a round week to get to it. There were ten readers, one for each shortlisted book, who were supposed to represent the best poetry that was published in the UK in 2006. (More information about the prize can be found at the Poetry Book Society. It is a great award, actually, with a large cheque handed over to the winner by Valerie Eliot herself.) Accordingly, the Bloomsbury Theatre was packed out, and hot as Hades, full of people all trying to get through to A) the bar, and B) the person they had to talk to. It is more an endurance test than anything else, in many ways. And you never do get to have more than two words with that person you have to talk to.

At the interval, squashed in near the top of the stairs and desperately trying to figure out how to get the bottle of beer someone else had just kindly got for me at the bar (nb. Tim Wells owes me a fiver change) to the person I was supposed to be getting it for, I remarked to someone, "This is like trying to have fun in the Tube", and he said, "except that here you know everybody." I said, "yeah, it's the Poets Line." My companion shuddered: "I'd hate to see what the final terminus of that one looks like!" And yet, we are all headed there.

The TS Eliot reading is a great opportunity to see lots of poets read whom you might not otherwise get a chance to, like Paul Muldoon (if, like me, you missed his gig at Poetry International). Penelope Shuttle was brilliant, with very moving poems about grieving for her late husband Peter Redgrove; and several things about her work came clear to me as I heard her read the poems. This is what one wants from a reading! The person I was sitting next to leaned over as she left the stage and whispered, correctly: "She has the crowd."

Muldoon was engaging, but a little by rote; it all looks very easy for him now, and Ms Baroque is not so sure whether that's a good thing. Simon Armitage was more fun than I'd expected. He read better than the last time I saw him.

Two notes: he was going on about having wanted an "eighties lipstick colour" for the cover of his book, which Ms B can only applaud - and it was very eighties for boys to take an interest in that kind of thing - but, isn't that shtick - the poetry lipshtick - now the intellectual property of Christopher Logue, since his War Music instalment All Day Permanent Red? And also, it wasn't really till the end, once the drama of performance had worn off, that one realised clearly how little Armitage's poem (I wish I had the book here, I can't remember what it weas now) had been doing. It had endless refrains, which he read so well they carried their weight - you can see he's used to reading to schoolkids, whose attention you really have to earn - and this is also to be loudly applauded - but I can't see them doing that on the page: faced with that much repetition, doesn't the eye just skip - like a record? And about 1/3 too many stanzas, really, clever and fun as they were.

Tim Liardet was a big fave with everyone I spoke to but somehow I found him a bit - flat - a bit empirical, a bit - correct me, somebody, if I'm just missing something. A bit safe and middle class. He was writing about his work with young offenders & I can't help wondering if it was the subject matter that got him the gig. It just seemed a bit them & us to me & I didn't feel the poems probed very hard. Jane Hirschfield - the only other woman - much more engaging than I'd found her on paper. She also had some moving poems about grief, which were very different from Shuttle's. (She did betray her San Francisco origin almost immediately, by saying how delighted she was to be able to be part of this community of poets, or something. Community?? Hm. Hyenas at the dried-up old watering hole still sounds more accurate.)

WH Herbert wowed and amazed the auditorium into - well - amazement with his performance of Bad Shaman Blues, rendered as blues. Or a bluesy rap. Anyway - fun! And clever. And fun! He was followed by his polar opposite, Robin Robertson, who also read only one poem, a version of the story of Actaeon, from Ovid (of course).

I should say now that this story has always horrified me. It is one of the most difficult stories our civilisation posseses. I feel, as who wouldn't, a tremendous sympathy for Actaeon, who is after all only human and has done nothing bad, nothing evil.

He read in an urgent, insistent, almost melodramatically staccato voice, the Voice of Importance. The poem was indeed chilling, but it also felt strangely hollow and unedifying. I did read this one several times when I bought the book, and found it oddly expository and humdrum. "Marsyas" it's not. (The talk in the pub was of how little point there seemed in this "version" at all, given how ploddingly faithful it is to the already-plentifully-translated Ovid; I heard one person refer to the 2/3-page list of hounds' names as "the Donder and Blitzen bit".) You know, when somebody takes a story like this and decides to do a new treatmewnt of it - or a not-so-new treatment, whichever - you do think, what is the point, why have they chosen this, right here and right now? In this case, the answer may even be unintentional. The myth came out feeling less like a fable about what gods can do to mortals, or about power and subjugation, ot about mortality itself, than just some bitter pub-rant about women.

(I never did write about the contents of my blueberry-stained copy of Swithering. There is some beautiful stuff in there. But a disproportionate number of the poems are hung on one or two great images, and seem to peter out... and he has no humour.)

Paul Farley and Hugo Williams were what they were. Williams an elegant thing, and Farley still laddish. There is a peacock-feather-preening quality to several of our prominent poets, all boys; they use and overuse words, they squeeze them till they pop, and it all feels like showing off, a bit. They also publish each other. And my question is this:

No, I won't ask my question.

Bernard O'Donoghue read Heaney's poems, as Heaney has cancelled all public engagements for the time being. That was a shame; but Heaney is on the mend, and O'Donoghue read well, and it was good to hear them aloud, anyway. I was there to give them another shot, because here, once again, I have to wonder if I'm just missing something. The poems started, had middles, ended, and went up in puffs of smoke.

The win, when it was announced, felt anti-climactic: predictable, safe (again), staid. It didn't seem to move our relationship with poetry on at all. I don't feel this is Heaney's best book, just as Rapture was far from Duffy's best. It's a lifetime achievement award, on which basis the others might as well have packed up and gone home. But I'm glad they didn't.

the Green agenda

Leafing idly - if one can "leaf" on the internet - through the incorporeal pages of Jacket magazine, I came across this quote, from the novelist Henry Green's interview in the Paris Review in 1958:

"People strike sparks off each other; that is what I try to note down. But mark well, they only do this when they are talking together. After all, we don't write letters now, we telephone. And one of these days we are going to have TV sets which lonely people can talk to and get answers back. Then no one will read anymore."

Now, I love this! It's funny, and prescient, and it's a little scary to have the long-dead Green engaged in the dialogue we're having today, all about technology that didn't exist when he was alive - and in any case, he'd have said machinery. It troubles me.

Henry Green has always been a hero of mine, ever since I read his books Nothing and Doting way back in the eighties. I still think it's marvellous to have a book called Nothing, and most of his titles are similarly terse: Loving, Blindness, Back...

The books are terse, too: Green had an incredibly spare, open style. The two novels I mention are written in dialogue, with (let's say) two people talking about a third, and then the third, plus one of the original two talking about the other, and then someone else walking in and saying, "But I just saw her and she told me..." It's just like life, just as aggravating as life (this is discussed in the interview) and very funny. Although nothing ever seems to happen the story is moved inexorably on.

Henry Green is impossible to categorise, either as a person or as a writer. His class identities are all mixed up (relevant: it was the first half of the century), and he had a very strange way of looking at the world. His books are all surface - all from the outside: there are no hidden thoughts, no stream-of-consciousness, no Modernist under-the-surface maneouvering - he wrote about what showed, actions and words. But somehow this technique produced these living characters, and his books feel like personal discoveries. They are intense, private things, like prisms, to read, hold up to the sunlight and watch the air change around them.

Asked if he thought television and movies would alter the form of the novel, Green replied:

"It is simply that the novelist is a communicator and must therefore be interested in any form of communication. You don’t dictate to a girl now, you use a recording apparatus; no one faints anymore, they have blackouts; in Geneva you don’t kill someone by cutting his throat, you blow a poisoned dart through a tube and zing, you’ve got him. Media change. We don’t have to paint chapels like Cocteau, but at the same time we must all be ever on the lookout for the new ways. "

nb: I'm not going to write whole critique of Henry Green. I've found excellent and fascinating articles online which there is no point in trying to duplicate here:

interview in the Paris Review, 1958

Brooke Allen in the New Criterion, 1993

James Wood in the TLS, 2006 (I think)

housemates

Robert Sharp's riposte to the Big Brother Racism hoo-ha:

Clive Stafford-Smith has visited the ‘facility’ at Guantànamo Bay sixteen times. He likens the prison to Colditz Castle, the wartime prison camp. His message is simple and disturbing: The very methods employed by the US Government there positively encourage miscarriages of justice and wrongful detention. It is little known than most of the inmates were not caught directly by US forces, but by local Afghanis and Iraqis attracted by the US$5000 reward for captured terrorists. This money would affect a change in lifestyle equivalent to a windfall of £220,000 in the UK. Nevertheless, the word of these bounty hunters is treated as gospel, and the prisoners are detained without charge until evidence against them can be found. Detainees are interrogated and even tortured until they corroborate the story of those who turned them in. In one case, a 14-year-old boy named Mohammed Gharani was incorrectly assumed to be an Al Qaeda financier because the word for ‘salad’ in his Saudi Arabic dialect was similar to the word for ‘money’ in the Yemeni dialect. Those who held him had over-estimated his age by more than ten years.

Read the rest.

the Friday resolution: recap

Well, maybe not so much Friday as Robinson Crusoe.

This week's resolution is, very simply, to consume less. That is, to consume less in a simple fashion, simply. If you consume more in a non-simple, that is in a fancy, luxury, Marylebone High Street way, you undo all the good work of consuming less. No Aveda for me. Just at the moment.

This decision has been brought to you by, I mean was sparked by, many small realisations and catalysts. Money. The rubbish. The warmest winter in history. My clothes keep shrinking. My bank account keeps shrinking. The rent, I mean the sea level, keeps rising, and I'm tired of feeling tired all the time. Restaurant food palls, and restaurants also seem to be answerable to no one for their waste. I mean, recycling? And I saw a guy parking the Yum Yum's van outside the new Mexican place and then he got out and gobbed a great big gob of spit onto their newly refurbished flowerpot area. Ew! People who consume less don't have to worry about that kind of stuff! Nothing to do with them, mate.

I do love the lovely cheeses from Fresh & Wild, and we can continue to have nice bread, but I must resolve to eat less of it. And the spiced plum pickle. I resolve to buy less wine for the house, as by definition I'm drinking it alone if I'm here. It's 900 calories a bottle. (Mind you that's not so much compared to those little truffles they sell... but let's not talk about those.)

And I further resolve to knock all the restaurants on the head. Did I say that? Last night I met up with some adorable old friends, and it set me back £23. I can't keep doing that, however adorable they may be or however delicious the kofte.

I resolve to buy fresh, seasonal food - meaning we eat spring greens rather than baby Kenyan green beans. Leeks. Carrots. Potatoes. Good old English grub. Shepherd's pie. All these things cost less and consume less food miles. (Except I will have to still buy aubergines. I already don't buy courgettes out of season, anyway don't really fancy them after the summer. But aubergines. Dear me.)

I resolve to try and remember to carry a spare shopping bag with me at all times, so I won't need plastic bags in the supermarket. I can't promise to remove all packaging at the checkout, much as I like the idea: agitprop isn't really an essential part of my busy working day. Though maybe it should be.

I resolve to walk to Seven Sisters station at least a couple of times a week, which means I also resolve to get up earlier.

On my way to the station I can drop off the recycling. Of course, living in a flat and having to take the recycling to the bins means I can't be given discounts for the more I recycle, and may well end up - this is Hackney - being charged a penalty because the council isn't picking any up here. But even that isn't a reason not to take the recycling up to the bins on my way to work!

I've been turning the heating off a lot. Partly because it's not that cold. Partly because of the huge bills you get slapped with from British Gas if you so much as think about turning the heating on. Partly because I've been reading about the ice caps.

Oh where is the LO-OVE?!?

Simplifying is really complicated, isn't it? And every time I decide to stop buying things, something comes along that I need: like right now I need some new tights. And a new foundation (in oh how many ways! but no, just some make up will do for now: Maybelline). And my day-to-day boots are going. They are three years old. But I'm skint. And fat. And I owe council tax, which I'm sure I said already, so by consuming less I mean I must pay the council tax, which is like consuming more. Once I've done that I won't be able to consume anything.

So, to recap:
eat less
drink less
walk more
recycle
pay council tax
no new clothes - shrink to fit old ones
seasonal local food
heating off (saves money and re-caps, or at least less de-cap)

Oh, and by the way - if you leave chargers, i.e., phone chargers, in the socket between charging, they really do leak out electricity all over the house, costing you money AND shrinking that polar ice cap!

Looks like I'm going to be having fun fun fun! (Daddy took the T-Bird away.)

life and other random things

"History. We're steeped in it. It's everywhere around us. Like dust and pixies. " - Dr Oddverse's Different Dictionary

"Incontractable Blight" - spam header

Chris McKay, a Nasa astrobiologist, and part of the Phoenix mission, said that scientists must find a way of testing the new theory about life on Mars using the mission's existing scientific instruments. "Logical consistency is nice, but it's not enough anymore," he said. - Guardian, 8 Jan

"Stolid garbadine" - spam header

"At 1:30 AM I was having one of those terrible sessions of wakefulness on the sofa, eating pretzels and reading Martin Amis. " - James Marcus, 4 Jan

"JADE BADDIE" - huge headline, the Sun, yesterday (but they don't keep stories up)

Cat Hamlet, with thanks to Non-Working Monkey

elegantly lemmony

Forget Lemony Snicket. I'm talking Jack Lemmon, half Odd, half girl, the Prisoner of 2nd Avenue two decades before Neil Simon wrote the play (one amazon reviewer writes: "I loved this movie. I didn't find it depressing in the least"), the master of exasperation, the straight guy with a queer eye, the shmuck with an apartment, the man in a narrow tie. THE Lemmon.

Ms Baroque went to a party recently. It was New Year's Eve. Came home a bit the worse for wear having drunk her very genteel weight in cava, and woke the next morning to find these words typed on the computer screen: "A Secret Love Song to Jack Lemmon."

chain of fools

Okay, this has all gone too far. It seems that Baroque Mansions is at the epicentre of a 120-outlet Star*ucks galaxy. It's too annoying.

According to Oliver Burkeman in today's Guardian, the chain plans to open one outlet in the UK every fortnight for the next ten years - gazumping honest coffee shop owners and far better chains up and down every high street in the land.This is bad news. It's bad news for business in theUK, it's bad news for customers, and it's very bad news for coffee.

You can keep track of how your local expansion programme is going via this handy link, which allows you to track your "Starbucks density" (Burkeman's phrase, I believe; delicious, isn't it).

I'm putting this in my things to make and do column to the right. I can see it providing hours of innocent party-game-type entertainment on some rainy night. But the feckers don't even deliver.

the backlog

Sorry; Ms Baroque has a terrible backlog of blog posts, poems, articles half-written, half-thought-out, half-something-elsed. I'm off to work now. We're finally having our pre-Christmas lunch with the guy from the printers, so no writing of any kind can get done then. I have four meetings today. From 5.30 to 7pm it's yoga, which I realise is a good idea & indeed must pay for today, which'll take a bit of fancy footwork somewhere along the system. I'll get in around 8pm &, well, we'll see.

Yesterday was all about getting the new laptop, which I did, meeting the vendor at Starbucks (ugh) for the handover, under the chaperonage of a colleague. Then the frantic scrabble up to Oxford Circus to the loathesome Apple Shop for Microsoft Office on the way home.

(Disneyland of computers, I say; I felt cloyed, sick, within seconds of arriving. My eldest, the Urban Warrior, says it is more like 2001: A Space Odyssey, than Disneyland, all white with big slabs everywhere. He and his mate were laughing themselves sick at this and they are right! It's totally excessive. But none of the assistants punched anyone while I was there.)

Anyway, Disgusted of Stoke Newington finds when she arrives home that Microsoft's packaging is four times larger than the tidy-looking DVD case which in fact houses the software and its booklet, and is all anyone needs. So, I apologise, Earth. I had to throw away a plastic mountain. And now I don't even have time to do the thing it was for.

The UW and his mate went out at 10pm and came back in just before 2am, which was fine except that they woke me up. It was that kind where you know it's going to be insomnia, where you're thrashing around and your brain is spinning, so I got up and read emails etc. Back to bed at 3.

Now: shot away, destined for meetings, and not a minute to call my own. Yesterday I even had to stand up all the way home.

This has taken me seven minutes to write. Here are some of the coming attractions Ms B has half-written about:
Martin Amis, the latest delight
the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, awarded last night
time present and time past, both perhaps present in time future

That last is a drag; I was hoping for a bit more room in time future.

Christmas every day

Santa baby

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left to right: Natalie, Naomi, Kitty, Isabelle, Mlle Baroque.

I'm forever blowing bubbles

The editorial committee here doesn't spend all day sitting on its arse: it does make some decisions. The decision not to go on about the funny terms people access the site via google searches for sometimes saddens me, as there are some crackers. But today the committee has given me a special dispensation to thank the person in Holland who searched for:

older women blowing bubbles

This morning I woke up to an email from my dearest most beloved friends, who now live in the San Francisco Bay area and are seen in the Baroque vicinity approximately once every blue moon. (You can guess the number of times I have been to San Francisco. That's right.) Now, these friends - the first people I met after landing in London, when I was 19 and they were all of about 30-something - have written that they are now 60! And they say I do not look old at all in the pictures I sent them, and that in any case they consider me still an infant.

They came over here young, like I did, but in flight from the draft in the USA, as products of the sixties, and I think I can say they have lived their lives according to their values and ideals. They've never owned a house, been tempted to put their energy into "things" (I know - it's not my way - not that I own Baroque Mansions, far from it), got sucked into the vortex. They never had to become Jack Lemmon. They do gardening and t'ai chi, and I still sometimes think of the colour therapist* they used to go to to in the eighties - a 90-year-old Quaker woman named Alice. I was very inspired by her example, and now I know why: I too will be working when I'm 90.

Their habit of wandering (I used to love the stories about the Magic Bus) meant they never got indefinite leave to remain in London, so for the past ten years they've been back in the States trying (always trying, travelling light) to make a go of it there. Can you imagine! In these years! So part of the email was about their half-Dutch neice who is doing a graduate degree in Europe, and how that reminds them of what they miss.

The long email has reminded me of what I miss. I read my stats at just the right moment.

Oh, Dutch searcher, whoever you are: Come back! We promise we will! (whether waving or drowning...) (less of that - ed)


*you lie on a table and they beam differently-coloured light at various parts of your body. At the time I was very interested in Bauhaus, and Johannes Itten's theories of colour.

poetry to the people - whatever that means

As if you could "give" it back. But that's what Ted Kooser, the erstwhile American Poet Laureate, is doing with his column, American Life in Poetry. (There's nothing like this in England: look at that title. Is it not the most economically polemical thing you;ve ever seen? It's worth visiting his beautifully-designed website for the masthead alone, which features Kooser looking like an apple doll against the backdrop of an old weathered barn hung with rusted implements, and wearing an excessively well-chosen sweater that looks like part of the wood.)

The column publishes a poem a week, syndicated across the vast newsprint plains of America. Kooser has published lots of good poems, and the debate rages in America (where they do still get much more sentimental about poetry, as about everything else, than people do in Britain) as to whether this populist impulse, this popularising agenda, this (oh my God, I'm not trimming back, am I) is doing poetry real-time harm under the guise of good. Remember the stick poor old Garrison Keillor came in for.

Anyway, Ted Kooser recently devoted the column to a tiny poem by a 2nd-grader from Detroit, Tatiana Ziglar. She's a darling thing, who, when asked by an interviewer what was her favourite thing in Detroit, answered "Mississippi." Her poem is about what a seashell might say to her if it could talk, and it is charming. I guess we're not asking it to be more than that and it is wonderful that she's been published in the column.

Common Janthina

My shell said she likes the king and queen
of the Poetry Palace because they listen to her.
She tells them all the secrets of the ocean.

This column has to take "poetry to the people" to an extreme level - if the phrase carried implications of naivety and an untutored freshness. It has generated masses of sentimental (and some rather puzzled) column inches in the States. I'd hope it might prompt some discussion of what exactly people mean when they say "poetry", and "the people," and "give." What is this ownership of poetry? It's ownership of a particular kind of passport, the key to the kingdom, it's the feeling that this stuff is for you. Some people, of course, have always had that. I was born with the keys sticking out my back pocket. (They're the key to the back door, though; and I cut my foot open on the ripped screen.) Others loiter around the border, peering over the old city walls, but all they can see is old roofs.

Kooser is not the first person to put travel-brochure posters out & fling open the gates, of course.

When I was a teenager I had a book called I Never Saw Another Butterfly - beautiful drawings and poems by children in Terezin. I was nearly still a child, and did a lot of babysitting, and was very taken with the book. And much of it is gorgeous, really.

I was also fascinated by the New York School poet Kenneth Koch's book, Wishes, Lies and Dreams, about his experiences in New York City teaching kids to write poetry. I'm still fascinated by it, as much technically by the exercises themselves as anything else. Some of the poems spoke to me very directly when I was young. I mean under 14 or so. And they are still evocative, as this one:

I am grass as green as can be.
I am a tree on a leaf.
I am in New York on a flying blueberry.
Mud is pretty.
Rain is ugly.
I am on a vine.
I am snow.
I am snow in Spain.
I am rain in Spain.
I am the sun in Spain
I am in Spain
I am Spain

--Marion Mackles, 4th grade

Churlishly, though, I'm going to end this discussion with a poem by a man who was himself "of the people," and didn't need to have poetry given to him, whether "back" or for the first time. People thought he was lazy. He wrote poems on scraps of paper under haystacks when he was supposed to be working. His "mss" were so tatty and badly written out that they were hardly even editable. Literary society, when it took him up, did him no favours at all, but he carried on writing forever. Some of his best work, written in almost non-existent mental health, was never published at all till 100 years after his death.

Emmonsail's Heath in Winter

I love to see the old heath's withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling,
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing,
And oddling crow in idle motions swing
On the half rotten ashtree's topmost twig,
Beside whose trunk the gipsy makes his bed.
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread,
The fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn
And for the awe round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.

--John Clare

resolution: a form of concentration

Oh yes it is.

I resolve in the coming year - and, dear readers, please assume that anything Ms B resolves to do in this series of resolutions has already entered her activity stream - to concentrate, across the spectrum of meaning for that word.

Last night I directed someone I don't really know to my blog and then suffered all the pangs of knowing it was being read. (Normally I only hope it's being read; there's a difference.) Naturally I went on too and read it, to try and imagine the experience. And what did I find? Verbiage. I resolve to concentrate that verbiage by remembering my editorial skills, and by being one flipping heck of a lot less self-indulgent! I resolve to try and eliminate the following mannerisms:
Well,
actually
However,
dependent clauses necessitating endless strings of commas
and all the other little qualifiers and intensifiers that you don't need if your words are doing their job properly. I'm all for Mannerism, but not all the time.

I further resolve to concentrate by having actual (see, I'm doing it again) content. You can't concentrate what you ain't got.

Furthermore, I resolve to concentrate by paying attention. I seem to have lost the ability to do more than skate over the surface of everything, and this is not making your correspondent happy.

I'd say I might resolve to concentrate my efforts, maybe attempt less, but I'm not sure that's possible. See below.

I will concentrate on poetry by starting an occasional series featuring the work of contemporary poets. Starting soon. How frequent this will be depends on how many contemporary poets I feel like asking, and whether they say yes.

I will concentrate on the other stuff by beginning another series which I intend to launch in a few weeks, called My Life in 99 Books. If I do one a week it will take me nearly two years.

I will concentrate more at work; the trials must be nearly over, I can hear the flutes warming up. There is no Sarastro (though there is still Sarastro); if I want spiritual inspiration I will have to do it myself.

And finally I resolve not to do everything by myself! To re-constitute the dramatis personae.

total kitsch

Okay honeys. It seems there is a huge untapped well of longing, relating to the thirst for knowledge of whether Sonya has indeed killed Pauline Fowler.

Put yourselves at ease. Yes, Sonya did hit Pauline; but she didn't mean to. She was goaded. Pauline's lines right before the blow were shocking even to a seasoned viewer (part of the terrible scriptwriting thing I mention below. The humble viewer asks nothing more - or less, indeed - than to be able to simply believe what is put before him of an evening). And Pauline was fine right afterwards: like the proverbial blow to the head that reverses amnesia, Sonya's slap totally cured her of all the bitter acrimony that had been poisoning her most recent storyline. AND, two weeks earlier, Pauline had herself smashed a plate over the hapless head of Joe, and I am waiting for that salient little morsel to come out at the trial. (There has to be a trial, so they can bring Joe back to the witness stand for a dramatic denouement; but, as with Jake, I fear they will not take advantage of the opportunity for fictive closure.)

I'm sad to say, however, that the whole impossible storyline of Sonya's arrest etc has only been brought to you by a powerful cocktail of appalling scriptwriting, acting and direction, and the tacit understanding of every single viewer of 'Enders that life in Albert Square is not as life anywhere else.

Shame. I much preferred Dennis & Sharon.

And in fact this is only fitting. Nostalgia is the quintessential Albert Square emotion. They've rather cleverly engineered it so that, however much a storyline may annoy us at the time, we pine for it afterwards. Now, that is like real life!

And no, no, a thousand times no: Dot had nothing to do with it! The thought.

the laptop of the gods

The day's a washout. I can't think about anything. I also can't describe how upset I am, & all because I left a bag on a 76 bus this morning. It was a pink patterned shoulder bag, of the kind that comes free in the magazines - in fact, it's the best one that ever came free in the magazines. In it were - get this - a DVD I was returning to Amazon; a copy of last week's New Yorker containing an article by Milan Kundera on "world literature" which I was only half finished reading, and on which I wanted to write something, and which is no longer up on the New Yorker website; my payslip; a letter about my council tax and another one from my landlord (so, lots of addresses, then - but fortunately no actual bank details); and my laptop.

Oh yes - my beautiful 12" iBook - my half-written article on MacNeice, maybe a CD of poetry being read by poets (so no great loss there) - my working environment, my settings... just - the laptop. My computer.

It happened because my eye was hurting. See, with a sore eye, why was I even taking the flipping laptop? Habit. I was sat there debating with myself whether I should nip ("nip") down to Moorfields and get it checked out, as no one had seen my eyes since a week after the lasers. I was trying to analyse the quality of pain , to make the triage decision. I was probably not thinking very well, because my eye was hurting and I had a headache. So it just so happened that, as the bus pulled up to the stop just over the hump of Stamford Hill, I suddenly decided I must go to the hospital, and jumped off. My bag was at my feet. I was thinking about other things. I was late, there were kids and people crowding my space... I just jumped off.

My eyes are all right. Sore. They hurt but not for a reason (beyond having 20 lasers each less than two months ago). The pressures weren't exactly my late Christmas present but they were all right.

After the hospital I changed all my passwords - the last thing we want is someone going through my bookmarks, getting automatically ushered into my Amazon "store" and 1-click-buying a new fridge, eh! Not much I can do about the letters. I mean, you have to carry these things around sometimes, you just do. I needed to ring, go to the post office (if there still is one), etc, and simply had the payslip in there because I had got it yesterday at work... Lordy. It's not a crime, is it. And whoever has my computer now also has my address. But then you can't say, "now they know this flat exists," because this flat always existed, you can see it from the street. Just having my overdue council tax statement isn't going to change anything, is it?

And, and...

I've been to the bus depot. They got radio controls to radio out to the drivers, but no response. I've rung again in the afternoon, after the drivers' lunch breaks. And the girls says it's worth trying again tomorrow, just in case. So let's weigh up the Good Citizenship equation.

Ms Baroque feels sick.

oh so elegantly Bowie

now that's my idea of a sixty-year-old guy (in Christopher Nolan's 2006 movie, The Prestige)

Although it saddens me to do so, I will confess - because I'm big and I can scoff at myself - that once, years ago, when my brother came into the kitchen and said something about David Bowie - a new album, maybe, or he was listening to some particular song a lot - this would have been in about 1984 - I sneered, dismissing him (Bowie, not my brother) as "the Andy Warhol of music."

Can you imagine? How wrong on both counts. And I can still remember the moment I looked at a newspaper rack in CVS drugstore, among the Russell Stover candy boxes, and saw in the paper that Warhol had died. It didn't seem possible. Thank God I have grown up.

Anyway, it's true: back when it counted, back when I had the chance, I was never really a fan of David Bowie. Space Oddity particularly got on my nerves (&, in truth, still does). (Sorry, David.) But now, now - ah, now, I can say that it can't be all that bad to be 60 if David Bowie is 60.

I could rhapsodise - about how surpassing freedom it is to walk along on a sunny day with Bowie's singles playing really loud in your iPod; or about how happy I was just the other day when I bought Hunky Dory in my lunch hour for a fiver, to listen to at work; or about Bowie's gorgeous voice and how it stays with you for days after listening to his records; or, to be honest, simply about his beautiful cheekbones; but I won't. You know it all anyway.

For more typical pictures, and for sixty things you may or may not have known, check out the BBC.

out for the long haul

I love this picture from the Guardian: "Oh no - it's rising!"

"You must pay the rent!"

"I can't pay the rent!"

"You must pay the rent!"

"I can't pay the rent!"

Tony Blair rejects the idea that he should set a personal example by taking fewer long-distance holidays. He told Sky News that he doesn't think anyone should have to make such a sacrifice, that even in the teeth of global warming it would be "unreasonable" to expect such a thing of us. He says he's telling it like it is. He said, grammatically, "I personally think these things are a bit impractical actually to expect people to do that."

So, come on! How many long-haul flights (return) a year do we think constitute our right as human beings? Let me know. We'll take a poll and send the results to Sky News.

Let's take Ms B as our first example. I fly only to the States. Since January 1987 - that's right, in 20 years - I have been there I think seven times (it might be six). I thought it was because I didn't have the money. I took that as it came, because that's life - it would have been the same if I'd moved somewhere in the States, which people do, and then you get settled, have a job, kids, friends. Plus I love it here. But have I been making an unreasonable sacrifice all this time?

If my lack of long-haul flights is unreasonable - and you could argue it is, considering that I've missed my siblings and cousins, neices and nephews, aunts, uncles and parents getting older - does that mean Tony Blair will make it so I no longer have to make this ridiculous & uncalled-for sacrifice?

Or do we think he should just get real?

Oh, but not to worry - Downing Street says this is not about the Prime Minister's travel: "'This is not about the prime minister's travel', a source said."

And anyway, science will save us: "I think that what we need to do is to look at how you make air travel more energy efficient, how you develop the new fuels that will allow us to burn less energy and emit less."

"I'LL pay the rent!"

those were the days, my friend

you'd never fool him now

I guess we're still in the aftermath of Christmas. Families are still doing things together (I saw Miss Potter with my friend and her kids yesterday) and, well, just thinking about each other in a slightly different way. Dave Hill (the only person I know who can casually refer to "my sixthborn" - and I come from a big family) went to see Happy Feet with his three youngest kids, and, via the agency of the Beach Boys, had a whole train of thought which Ms B has had many times in the past, too.

Our generation is not as previous ones. Our kids are listening (and believe me, I have resented it! Try sitting there reading the paper while your own kid co-opts "Tainted Love" right out from under you) to our music. They no longer feel the need to rebel by rejecting everything we once held dear. Our music is directly where today's pop came from - there would be no possible credibility to be gained by rejecting, say, Sister Sledge or Sly Stone. So they steal our vinyl and our mojo with it.

In the case of my middle-born, the Tall Blond Rock God, this syndrome has been taken to an extreme. He plays bass. He loves "vintage rock." He listens to Pink Floyd, okay, and Led Zeppelin by the gigabyte, and Black Sabbath and Aerosmith and tons of others. Well - all the others. I started it. I gave him The Wall for Christmas when he was 11. (And now he's always late for school! & I ask myself why...?!? Like, du-uh.)

But what cracks me up is the other stuff he comes out with. "Mummy," he'll go. "I've been listening to this band all week, Canned Heat?" Or, "Have you ever heard of somebody called 'Jethro Tull'?" I love to mock him for his dad-rock tastes - and as if to thank me he gave me a double-CD set of Tom Petty for Christmas. (YESSS!)

But there was a time when even my savvy kids were naive little products of nineties pop culture, who knew only what they were told on CBBC.

One day when my eldest, who is now an Urban Warrior and into "stencil art" but at that time was a fresh-faced thing who wanted to be a cartoonist (it might yet happen), was about 10 or 11, I bought something I thought my best friend might get a kick out of. It was a sheet of disco-themed wrapping paper, purple, with a repeating pattern of pictures of disco balls, platform shoes, and the head of Michael "Jackson 5" Jackson.

I showed it to the Future Urban Warrior and said, do you think she'll like it? He appraised it earnestly, but also coolly, and said yes, he thought she'd love it. But he goes, "the only thing I don't get is - who's that guy?"

I tried to be gentle. I said casually, "Oh, you know - that's Michael Jackson, when he was about 13, in the Jackson 5, you know..."

He blanches, he falls back, his mouth drops open. He says to me finally - "y-you mean - is Michael Jackson - black??"

Oh, how we larfed.

you know what to do

Okay, so Christmas is over, & the new year is beginning to feel a bit flabby - but it is time for the 2007 Weblog Awards - the Bloggies.

Fancy a Bloggie Sunday? (Well, Ms B didn't, particularly; I had other work on, and was thinking of a walk in the dull grey stuff we call fresh air; but I have been undeniably sidetracked by this Bloggie business. In particular, once you get onto the Bloggie page, you can visit the pages of the winners and runners-up from previous years, which is a little too tempting on a boring winter weekend!)

The deadline for voting is January 1oth - Wednesday. You have to vote for at least three blogs overall, I guess to prevent everybody's mother just going in and voting for their kid's blog. I've just done mine, I'm pleased to say! Check my links list to the right for additional inspiration if you feel the need.

I know the label at the bottom of this post says Shameless Puffs, but I hasten to point out that I'm not actually puffing myself here, as such. This is more a public service announcement in which I just flag this up just in case - ahem! - you know - you felt like voting... (mumbles) for my blog at all... or for any of the other wonderful things you have been reading lately...

the baroque resolutions, part 2: Pru's frock

On Christmas I spoke to my dad, le Comte de Baroque (pictured above, on a Christmas some years back). I think we can call him that. We hardly ever call him anything much, in fact, because we don't speak to him very much at all: maybe a couple of times a year. This is the pace at which he himself set our relationship back in the day when I myself was little Mlle B, and with a few rantings and ravings thrown in from time to time I have respected that pace.

Anyway, I asked him how he was, and he said: "Well - I'm wearing my trousers rolled."

The great thing about my dad, aside from the fact that he is the reason I knew what he meant, is that he knew I would know, and never felt the need to explain his allusion, which is a conversational tic that destroys conversations.

Also, it's true. Thanks to his emphysema, the payback from 50 years as a politically agressive smoker (like, he started a smoking club at work when they banned it in the staff room), the last time I saw him he was sitting in a chair, with his feet encased in black support socks and propped up on another chair. That was in summer; he wore shorts. If it were winter, you might need to roll your trousers. Still, it was better to see him looking like that than the way he'd looked before he started getting the treatment. Then, he used to fall asleep all the time and everyone was saying: "dad's getting old..." Scary. And not that old in the scheme of things.

So it's nice being able to talk to him again, and it's also nice - when on site, that is - not to have to breathe the fumes. He used to have these parties where he'd invite all his friends from work. Well, his friends from work were the smoking club. Three weeks later you'd meet some guy in the mall, and Daddy would say, "You remember Dan? You met him at the party." You'd be going, "Dad, I couldn't SEE him at the party."

Le Comte was also the one who set the impossibly high standards for Christmas (read: everything) which have practically destroyed my relationship with my kids (hold on: that's not right! Well, whatever). He's the one who made me Baroque. He was the one who reassured me when I was four (flying in the face of anything you ever heard in the Catskills) that, yes, pink and red could go together - if you were in Mexico... It was his amateur dramatics company that gave me my chance to be a little Siamese Princess (no lines) (or was it the Crown Prince, and I had one line? Yes, I think that's it: a line to make up for being a boy), and ruined my childhood (read: strengthened my character) with seemingly endless productions of "Kiss Me, Kate!" I know all the Cole Porter songs. He gave me Klemperer's 1964 recording of the Magic Flute (still the best, if you don't count the Beecham of 1937) for my fifteenth birthday (and I still have it), and he's the reason I care about which recording. Oh, and he taught me to make meat loaf. He said he had no idea how he made it, he just did it, and if I wanted to learn I had to watch him do it. So I did.

He also, some years ago now, gave me his facsimile manuscript edition of The Waste Land, showing Pound's edits - handed me the baton, as it were (I loved twirling a baton when I was six; I could make it go pretty damn fast). So, with my necklace rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin, with my pink pashmina and my red shawl-collared cardigan with its glittery brooch, I shall enter 2007 modestly with resolutions sticking out of every pocket.

In a minute there is time
for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

couldn't have said it better myself

The New York Times has published a comment piece on the death of Saddam which states the reasonable position so perfectly - and in such dispassionate, cool, clear prose - that I am linking to it here.

somewhere over the rainbow

Dear darling readers, when have you ever known Ms Baroque to rely on some random video for her content? Never, that's when. But here in Baroque Mansions we are possibly feeling a bit soppy with post-New Year hormones, or we've really had enough of the Saddam-inspired misery, or else this video simply hits all the right Wizard-of-Oz-comes-to-Woodstock notes (see how it changes into colour) - whatever, it just captures the moment for me and I hope you like it. Consider yourself hugged.

the baroque resolutions: part one

Like most people, I find the New Year painful, as the (read: our) mistakes and failures of the last year stand in bold relief against the seasonal memory of all the aspirations we had for it (read: ourselves). Autumn is a flabby season in many ways, all about comfort and compensation, and December's just a big fat excuse for all the excesses that will come to haunt us at, oh, about 9am on January 1st. By the time we get down to the serious business of thinking ahead we are a veritable soup of floating irresolution. All we know is that something must be done! But what?

Well, I have thought about it, and I have made some simple resolutions. They follow the SMART formula: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely.

I resolve firstly to post one New Year's resolution each Friday for the month of January. This way I will not be able to post them all in one mad, gluttonously well-intentioned hit and then forget all about it. You can expect the first one tomorrow.

In the meantime, here are some of the many things I will NOT be resolving to do:

join a gym (they reckon £200m in wasted fees a year)
give up smoking (I don't smoke)
give up alcohol (but see Week 2, next Friday)
hypnotise myself for any reason
have therapy
go on a diet (that detox thing made me sick as a dog and I was as fat as ever)
take up a language
meet a nice man (not SMART as out of one's control, see?)
advance my writing career (not very SMART either)
go out more
stay in more (except my stomach)
make more money (not possible)
join an evening class
get a pet

Join me tomorrow for my Zenlike first resolution. (Actually, each one is more like a heading. As Captain Barbossa might say, it's more like guidelines...)

elegantly dressed aunties

Here is a shot from the Woodstock edition of Auntie Vogue, circa 2000 or so. The models are, left to right, Nana Baroque (aka "Aunt Nancy") before she reinvented herself as a North Carolina beach-babe; "Supermodel Grandma" Aunt Babs; and Meema, displaying the timelessly casual look that has so influenced the Baroqueistas of today, who seek pieces out in flea markets and vintage emporia all over the place.

This feature was shot on location in a beauty spot known locally as "behind Nadja's old back porch". Fiddlehead ferns are supposedly a mountain delicacy, but the supermodels are far too elegant to eat them.

and while we're on the subject...

Who could resist this picture of the luch-lamented (in Baroque Mansions, anyway) Scooter, taking shameless advantage of le Baroque Brother? Or this one of me and my sis, in which every single thing she's wearing (okay, except the glasses) is actually mine? (Note how mine are in any case big enough for two. It was, just, still the eighties though. I loved those sunglasses.)

"written by fools to be read by imbeciles"

or, the joy continues

Literary critic of the moment John Sutherland may have started a trend. Blogosphere readers will recall the hoo-ha started by his piece in the Telegraph about the inferiority of online book revewing. Well, now The Wall Street Journal, not content to look less tech-savvy than the Brits, has jumped on the bandwagon with its own blog-bashing comment piece, by Joseph Rago. I've just caught up with it thanks to the New Criterion blog, Armavirumque.

The wonderful thing about Rago's piece is how he employs his fantastically erudite vocabulary and frame of reference only for good, to make his point, and unwinds the lingering skeins of his sentences across the floor of meaning, so that the whole knotty conundrum of the blogosphere - including the cheap psychology behind it - is laid bare all over Grandma's carpet.

But enough of that. The real find, thanks to Armavirumque, is at a site called Iowa Hawk, which purports to have uncovered Rago's first draft "in an empty ink barrel in an alley behind Dow Jones".

I read it before I read the original, and I thought it needed some editing. "Old Rago's right," I thought to myself. "Those bloggers have no self-discipline whatsoever." Imagine my joy when I discovered that most of the egregious bits are still in the final version!

Ms Baroque has never claimed to be high-brow, and see how that 's paid off?

Katya Petrov, happy birthday sweetie

My cousin Katya would have been 37 today. She was the absolute best.

the ultimate happy slap

I'm not reproducing it here. Suffice to say that Ms B did not buy the Guardian today.

The news coming out about this execution indicates that it was shambolic and revengeful. It was carried out on Eid al-Adha, which is supposed to be a festival of charity, when Muslims remember those less fortunate than themselves.

However, rather than behaving in a civilised manner those people present behaved rather as Saddam himself or his henchmen might have behaved, back when he was in power. The video reportedly contains a voice of someone begging the people taunting Saddam to stop, on the grounds that he was facing execution. The trapdoor was dropped while he was still saying his prayers.

The picture which occupies almost the entire front page of today's Guardian - taken, presumably, from the above-mentioned video - was apparently taken on somebody's mobile phone. Happy slappers the world over will be feeling pretty chuffed, not to say validated.

Eid mubarak!

Canadians - what do they know?

dateline: Ontario

The London Free Press reports on a charity event held yesterday in Toronto, organised by local Muslims in celebration of Eid al-Adha. To mark the festival, which is about remembering those less fortunate than yourself, they gave out free meals - what sounds to Ms B like delicious chicken biryani - at the Salvation Army downtown.

Azhar Qureshi, one of the event's organisers, told the newspaper: "This festival is what joins Christians, Jews and Islam. It is a time of year that we are all joined together under the same tenet of faith."

Well - that's what they say in Canada.