the sweet story of four Boy Republicans and a girl reporter in a land called Ohio

The publication company for which I worked for five years as a reporter and editor publishes six magazines. They are local monthlies, at once humble and successful. Americans love small town papers.

President George W. Bush visited two of the Scriptype Publishing communities during his dubious stay at the White House and I was obliged to cover both events in a professional capacity. The publications are apolitical and I wrote mainly about what it was like for a small municipality to host the president. Courtesy of Scriptype Publishing, I have posted two short excerpts from the resulting articles at the bottom of these ramblings for the curious.

Obtaining press credentials for a presidential visit is not difficult. Dubya wants to be on the cover of the BroadView Journal with its circulation of 8,000. And he has a whole bunch of people that make sure the fearless editor of said publication has no troubles getting in to say hello to the nation's top dog. Once the credentials are in hand, media personnel are moved quickly to the front of the endless line to get into the event. Be rest assured, Dubya is much more concerned about a reporter or photographer getting in to see him than his adoring constituents.

(And it is a satisfying moment indeed when a tattooed, pierced black-lipsticked goth chick dripping in camera equipment is escorted right past a horde of patiently waiting conservatives and bustled inside just at the doors close for good. I know. I've seen it with my own eyes.)

Both events were unremarkable to me except for the details. The secret service staff was composed of men who were simultaneously frightening and endearing. Armed security men peered from every corner of the properties surrounding the events (that's Men With Guns On Top Of Buildings). The White House press corps had a surprisingly normal appearance. (Baseball caps, rain slickers, sloppy tennis shoes.) Then again, what did I expect? A breathless Lois Lane with a shiny pageboy furiously scribbling in a notebook?

But this post is not about covering a Presidential campaign rally, it is about the aftermath of covering a Presidential campaign rally.

It is about four Boy Republicans and one Girl Writer.

When the Ohio Presidential rally concluded on Sept. 4, 2004 in Broadview Heights, Ohio, I stepped out into the stifling heat and humidity with the rest of the throng, most of whom were considerably more electrified than me (being in a room with 3,000 Republicans, excited nearly to ejaculation was, however and admittedly, a singular experience). The event was held at the local high school and the entire campus was a sea of gridlocked vehicles. I sauntered back to my car, opened the windows, put on some music and closed my eyes. There was no reason to contribute my Mini Cooper to the mass of Escalades and Hummers and Mountaineers.

After about 15 minutes, the lot was still quite jammed. But it had cleared out enough for me to see four young Republicans, all wearing ties and blue shirts exactly like the ones Dubya wears. They were milling around their Ford Escort, which was unique not only because the hood was open, but also because it was one of the few cars in the internal combustive mass that had a gas mileage of over 13 miles per gallon.

The boys looked young enough that I should probably remove the "girl" portion from my cloying third person self-title of Girl Writer (but I will not). They were worriedly looking around, jamming their hands in the pockets of their Good Pants and scratching their heads. One held a pair of jumper cables.

I scanned the crowded lot with disgust, sighed a great big sigh, started the Mini and drove over to the four Boy Republicans.

They swelled with hope as I approached. "You boys look like you need a jump," I said.

"Sure do," replied one (each of the four was completely indistinguishable from the others: short hair [cut special for the event], bad ties, polite demeanors).

"I'll give you a jump," I said, pulling the pug nose of the Mini up close to their Escort. I popped the hood and got out of the car to make sure they didn’t short out my electrical system.

While the Escort was charging, I decided to take advantage of the indisputable power I had over the situation.

"I want you boys to do me a favor and take a look around," I said, indicating the surrounding sea of unmoving cars, in which moneyed white people sat in the comfort of cool manufactured air. I wiped sweat from my forehead. "And now take a look at my car." They turned their collective attention to the Mini. "Given my car and the fact that I am a reporter," I held up my press pass, "you boys go ahead and take a guess. Do you think I'm a Republican?"

They looked sheepishly at the ground and at each other. "Um, probably not," said one of the Boy Republicans.

"That's right," I said, "I'm not a Republican. But I'll bet you boys are Republicans. Am I right?"

They looked at their feet. They nodded.

"You're in good company. There's a whole bunch of Republicans here," I said, looking over the hazy miasma of the campus-turned parking lot. "Funny thing, though," I sighed, crossed my hands over my chest and leaned against the Mini. "All these upstanding fellow Republicans of yours and not one of them drove over here to give you good looking young boys a helping hand."

The Boy Republicans did not say anything. Instead, they went about the business of disconnecting the cables and starting their Escort, which elicited visible relief in all of them.

I closed the hood of the Mini and faced the Boy Republicans. "Now tell me," I said, "did you learn something today?"

They nodded. One said, "Er, yes, ma'am." with uncertainty.

"Good," I said. "That's real good. Now I want you boys to remember exactly what you learned today and think hard about it when you go and cast your vote for the President of the United States. Can you do that for me?"

The Boy Republicans indicated that they would.

I nodded and smiled, pausing for an uncomfortable moment to look each of them directly in the eye. "Well you go on now and have yourselves a good day."

They thanked me copiously as I got in my car and drove to the end of one of the lines, which were moving a bit faster by then.

Okay, so the Antichrist won anyway, but, hey, I tried.

* * *

The following article excerpts are courtesy of Scriptype Publishing. Reprinted with permission.

Bush Hones in on the Heights
The Broadview Journal, October 2004

"On September 4, 2004, hearts around the globe mourned for the town of Beslan, Russia, where authorities were still recovering bodies from a building that would normally be filled with the joyful voices of children: a schoolhouse. In Florida, the entire state held its collective breath and waited for a violent and unwelcome visitor named, innocuously enough, Frances. It was 115 degrees and sunny in Baghdad.

Some 12,000 donkeys converged at the Firestone Stadium in Akron to cheer on one John Kerry, whose political counterpart, a man once nicknamed Slick Willy, was contemplating the disquieting phrase, 'open heart surgery.'

Thirty-five miles north, in the humble burg of Broadview Heights, however, 'twas the elephants that lumbered."

Excerpt from coverage of Sept. 4, 2004 campaign rally, Broadview Heights, Ohio.

An Insider's Look at the Presidential Visit
The Richfield Times, October 2003

"Actually being there was a far cry from watching the event on television. It rained. A lot. People were outfitted in garbage bags. People were soaked through. Everyone waited. And waited and waited. Technicians fretted over power cords that were wrapped in duct tape and lying in muddy puddles. The spot marked 'White House T. V.' was occupied by a guy with a big camera and a ball cap. 'I do this freelance,' he said, just another guy at work on a day the President noted was a well deserved day off for so many other American laborers. At 10:15, admission to the event was closed. The number of frustrated ticket-holders that were turned away was anybody’s guess. Despite it all, nearly everyone maintained a certain euphoria."

"For Bush supporters, as well as for those who choose to ride the donkey over the elephant, there is no minimizing the effect of a booming voice announcing, 'The President of the United States.' Bush’s charisma was evident from the moment he took to the stage, waving and sporting a Local Union 18 cap. 'I’m thrilled you’re here. I’m thrilled I’m here,' said Bush to the adoring crowd. He braved the rainy weather along with the throng, recognized the difficult economic times, particularly for Ohioans, and promised recovery. He extolled the virtues of the American worker and vowed to stand steadfast against terrorism. The speech was prewritten, perfectly suited for its audience and the media. He delivered it expertly, effectively and powerfully. Every word of it was undeniably quotable. It lasted just under 30 minutes."

"Patriotic music ensued. The President shook hands and then, he was whisked away as silently and effortlessly as he was delivered.

The vacuum of his presence left one feeling like a lover, passionately and intensely kissed, then abruptly abandoned. Such was the stark contrast of the anticipation and the thrilling event to its absolute conclusion."

Excerpts from coverage of Sept. 1, 2003 Presidential Labor Day speech, Richfield Ohio.

art plays vital role in patients' recovery

Tristan at the Emotional Blackmailer's Handbook knows exactly how I feel. Click on the picture.

Dear readers, I am celebrating the first full day of my gall-free existence with a quick peruse of yesterday's Evening Standard: the winds of change are indeed, it would seem, upon us. I entered the hospital yesterday inspired, doubtless like so many others, by Gordon Brown's promise to "do his utmost."* I was further cheered by having spent the previous night laughing like a drain at a vintage Newsnight (Paxo: "But you haven't even said anything yet! It's all waffle!") (and someone else: "Oh, I think Brown's utter lack of charisma will be good for the country. Most people have had enough of charisma."). There was a baby-faced MP with improbable eyelashes who had talked - "waffled" - in really Blairite soundbites about the NHS' great strides forward, so I put my experiences of March behind me and walked into the Homerton with a light heart (and a light handbag) and a rather heavy gall-bladder.

I left many hours later with a light head, a heavy bag (full of assorted prescription painkillers, anti-ulcer pills to protect me from the painkillers, and some strange antibiotics more normally prescribed - apparently - for gonorrhea, but given me in this instance because they are also used to treat "infections that have moved to the blood"), a distended abdomen and, thank Gord, no gall bladder.

It turns out that the injurious organ was far worse off than the doddle and mollycoddle they had said they anticipated. Riddled; raddled; inflamed, infected and inflated; and, most disgustingly, full of pus - a fact which the chirpy doctor repeated three times, in terms that made me wonder how the hundreds of stones had even fitted in. Maybe that's why they were being squeezed into the corridor. Anyway, as she said, it rather accounts for the parlousness of the past months! And I now feel less like a weed... rather, am a little retrospectively shocked.

Lesson learnt? Even last night I thought I would get by on one painkiller, one tablet of; within two hours I was scrabbling for the other painkiller and other tablet, and this morning have cheerfully taken all four pills, though the food I was supposed to have them with went down less happily. The other lesson seems to be about not moving around, but the codeine should help with that. The incision below my belly button seems to bleed every time I try to get out of bed.

The Baroque sis was perfection itself, the Florence Nightingale of Hackney. 24 hours after landing at Heathrow she came to the hospital with me and was patience and fortitude in one for the next 13 hours. She even mopped my brow with a cool damp cloth, in that first grim hour of coming round, and it is amazing how it helped. I don't think anyone's ever done that to me before. (She is still, as I write this, asleep now.)

Sis has a funny story - I remember the incident but don't remember it as funny, however it seems to have cheered her day immensely. She says when I had come back to myself a bit I said to her, "Oh God, I feel terrible. Can I have my bag? I want my jewellery."

And now, back to my twilight doze, to wait for the next guest post. If they're all as good as Chippy's I may just have to give these guys my blog.

* I for one would have jolly well hoped so - after all, you're the the prime minister now, Gord! You'd better not sit around all day doing the crossword and playing fantasy football! I mean, I've seen "The Office"...

Some Baroque Business In Beating About Hackney

It began with a premeditated assault outside the Hackney Empire two weeks ago. Not that knowing what caused me to write this article will make much sense to you, given that we’ve only just been introduced, but I do like to get to basics, as quickly as possible. You should know, for example, that I’m a male exotic dancer based in Bangor* and that I rarely get chance to visit London. Yet I jump – if not gyrate – at any chance I get to expand my horizons. That’s why I was quick on my well-oiled heels when I recently received an invitation to attend the annual meeting of the British Thong Society, that august body of men and women who, last month, voted me their new honorary chairman.

There was a beautiful dawn that day in early June when I set out for London. I arrived a little past ten in the morning, spent the afternoon at the A.G.M., and then had an enjoyable evening with my society friends before we concluded business with a few too many cocktails in the West End. I woke up in my hotel room the next morning, not a little hung over, with a feather boa tied around my knees, and feeling rather ashamed that I hadn’t made better use of my visit to the big city to do something more cultural. It’s why I was determined to use what time I had left before my afternoon train home to see the sights and how, at ten thirty, I found myself walking through Hackney.

I’d got as far as the Empire Theatre when the attack occurred. One moment I was enjoying my walk, the sensation of sun on my skin; the next moment I was hopping around like a man taken with an sudden obsession for doing the Lambeth Walk. The pain was unreal. Something sharp had cut across my flanks.

Now, before you get too concerned, this isn’t as rare an occurrence as it sounds. If often happens to those of us at home with our bodies. People often take offence at my walking the streets wearing only a thong and pair of cowboy boots. I turned around ready to defend myself from the usual red faced puritan type who usually launch these cowardly attacks. I wasn’t at all expecting to see a face I’ve come to know so well through her blog. It was Ms. Baroque, grinning widely and holding a garden cane which she had just put across my bare buttocks.

‘It is you, isn’t it Chippy?’ she asked, peering over her glasses in that way she has. Perhaps I’m not used to these big city welcomes but, to a simple boy from Bangor, I thought it a bit late for her to be doubting my identity given the lashing she’d just dealt out.

‘Ms. Baroque!’ I replied, not unkindly despite still smarting with a mild agony. ‘Imagine meeting you here! What can I say? It brings tears to a man’s eyes!’

‘Oh, sorry about that,’ she said, casting the cane back into the garden from where she’d snatched it from a pensioner’s display of prize sweet peas. ‘You know me… I do like to make a big first impression.’

‘Or a long and slightly red impression bearing a more than passing resemblance to a welt,’ I said, craning my neck to see the damage done to my immaculate rawhide. The last time something like this had happened was when Bryan Appleyard had ploughed into me while test-driving a G-Wiz through the city streets. Unlike that previous meeting with a famous blogger, this time I was sure there’d be no unhappy scenes involving an electric vehicle speeding off into London traffic while its driver screams ‘eat dirt, anti-rationalist!’ at me while giving me the finger à la Wittgenstein.

Instead, Miss Baroque and I slipped into a coffee shop where we spent the next two hours discussing the world of blogging and our mutual love for the written word. It was there that my dear friend first suggested that I provide some cover for her while she went into hospital to have her versification valves scraped, her metrical carburettor reshanked, or whatever else passes for a 10,000 mile service to these poetic gods.

‘Oh, Chippy, it would be wonderful if you could just write me a little something,’ she said. ‘Nothing too long, perhaps seven or eight thousand words. And make sure you get somebody to proof read it. You know the trouble you have with spelling... I won’t have mistakes like that on my blog. You know… this isn’t Chip Dale’s Diary!’

She was clearly referring to the incident when I wrote a stinging letter of rebuke to The Times about an article they’d printed about‘s Madonna ’deification’. I’d misread the headline and thought it about something much more interesting but far less sanitary. Unfortunately, the newspaper’s editor had seen fit to publish my letter and address. My name has been something of a joke among Madonna fans ever since.

‘Okay, I’ll write something not too long and arduously checked for spelling mistakes,’ I agreed, ‘but, my dear Baroque: what am I meant write about?’

She smiled, no doubt recognising me for the simple soul I am. She reached into her bag and handed me an old dusty volume of Wallace Stevens’ poetry.

‘Here,’ she said in that wonderfully dusky accent of hers, ‘just pick out a poem and talk about it. Only, Chippy, just for once, won’t you say something intelligent? My readers are a refined bunch. They don’t want those crass thong jokes of yours. You do know they can get quite tiresome?’

Never has a man in his weekday thong been so insulted. But I knew she meant nothing by it. I just put it down to her tricky gall bladder and I told her as much.

‘It will do you some good to be shot of the thing,’ I said. ‘And then you’ll be able to write a poem about it. Such a good word, gall. There’s sure to be plenty of words to rhyme with it.’

‘What about bladder?’ she asked, clearly less impressed by the lexical possibilities.

‘Gall is a ball but a bladder is gladder,’ I said, as quick as a flash…

Ms. Baroque’s silence was almost as thick as this one…

So, anyway… Here I am, ready to write something very meaningful about poetry. I’ve managed to open the book and I’ve thumbed through literally pages of the stuff until I came to something that took my fancy. I should warn you that there are no more thong jokes from hereon in. This is where I get serious. The poem is called ‘The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician’. And in the worlds of the late great ol’ blue eyes (Sinatra not Stevens), it goes something like this…

It comes about that the drifting of these curtains
Is full of long motions; as the ponderous
Deflations of distance; or as clouds
Inseparable from their afternoons;
Or the changing of light, the dropping
Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude
Of night, in which all motion
Is beyond us, as the firmament,
Up-rising and down-falling, bares
The last largeness, bold to see.

I hate to be reductive but there are, broadly speaking, two types poet. There are those poets who want to put things in a simple but elegant way (Pam Ayres springs unfortunately to mind) and those who aren’t happy unless they’re tying you up with riddles. So, for example, when Alexander Pope (of the first camp) said ‘Whatever is, is right!’ he summed up the whole of his Essay on Man in one simple phrase. If I’m honest about it,*** you can skip the rest of his Essay 'if you make sure you remember this one bon mot. Pope’s helpful in that way. It’s not at all like reading, say, Emily Dickinson. Once she starts harping on about horses having their head toward eternity you can get quite lost. Stevens is another in this second camp. He can also get a bit elliptical like Dickinson, only with much less fodder…

I suppose Ms. Baroque would not want me to go any further without mentioning that there are other types of poet but I’m not so sure. Like all kinds of art, you have to be careful. What begins as a bit of ambiguity ends up with you looking at a leaky bathtub painted purple and containing a large plastic cockroach. The less said about that sort of ‘art’ the better. For me, great art (and great poetry) draws you towards its structure, even if this means drawing you into formlessness in order to emphasise the importance of structure. Even Joyce, who wrote perhaps the greatest example of unstructured art in Finnegan’s Wake, was led by very deep structures. The ramble that is Ulysses draws your attention to the shape of the epic and the mysteries contained therein. Finnigan’s Wake does the same, painting the deep structures of language itself and of the deep cultural subconscious. Stevens too is always on about form in one way or another.

Take the first verb in our poem. ‘Comes’ is an odd one, which looks forward to the second line. ‘It’, ‘that’ and ‘is’ form the backbone of the opening lines, which leans forward, stretching for completion like the curtains, billowing out into the room with these graceful motions which have so enchanted the poet. The effect is enhanced by the two words ‘Drifting’ and ‘curtains’, which have to be read long, slow and unhurried. The long first line draws out time and the caesura of the second shortens it again. The effect is a physical one. The lengthening and then the contraction replicate the motions of the curtain, slowly rising as it catches the air and then, as the overlap of the curtains breaks opens at the height of the billow, the whole thing suddenly collapses, ready to rise again on the next breath.

Need I point out that the ‘ponderousness’ of the ‘deflations of distance’ is both directed to the image and the phrase? The alliteration of the hard plosive ‘d’ sounds encumbers the line, which is itself self-contained and trapped between two caesura. It is a baggy curtain on the page which marks the point where Stevens shifts from the small and to the grand scale.

This is, for me, the moment of brilliance at the heart of the poem. There are usually moments such as this when Stevens is on form, where the things that had previously seemed small to us, almost insignificant and domestic, begin to have larger significances beyond the normal. We get this when Stevens turns his attention to the ‘clouds are inseparable from their afternoons’. Moving from the room to the landscape, the poem is duly transformed from one about a domestic phenomenon to one about the universe as a whole. It’s very much like Stevens at his best, when the light of a single candle can illuminate a patch of ground in a valley and then suddenly dominate the whole of the landscape. It happens in an instant and he is sublime when making these switches from the specific to the universal.

Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude
Of night, in which all motion
Is beyond us, as the firmament,
Up-rising and down-falling, bares
The last largeness, bold to see.

The ‘firmament’, here, is a word Stevens reaches for. It comes to us from outside the domestic language of the early part of the poem. It is in a sense ‘beyond us’ too, part of the attempt to objectify the whole universe which we now see breathing with the ‘up-rising and down-falling’. Even the coupling of the words, ‘up’ with ‘rising’ and ‘down’ with ‘falling’, seems deliberately structural. It repeats the pattern of the poem: the curtains and the clouds face off against the breeze and the afternoon. Again, it’s about cause and the effect. It is about the largeness, impossible to imagine, yet we can see at second hand, evident in the movement of a drape.

Stevens looks to the movement of curtains and sees the movement of the universe; a long chain of cause and effect. It is as simple as it is profound.

It is hard to say more because if we wanted to say more, it would be like moving from describing the curtain to describing the universe. It would be moving, also, from poetry to prose. Great poetry often abbreviates vastness, contracting a lifetime of understanding into a simple dense yet beautiful phrase. And causes and effects are too mysterious to follow all the way back to the origins. It’s like being assaulted in a London street two weeks ago and then finding yourself writing about a poem you’ve never before read.

It is just the sort of thing I think Ms. Baroque would really appreciate.

* To be exact, I’m Wales top male exotic dancer.**

** I feel obliged to use footnotes. I really don’t know why. Perhaps I’m just an accommodating soul and feel a need to honour Ms. Baroque in her absence.

*** I’m honest about everything. When you wear only a thong, you can hardly do anything but be honest.

London Literature Festival 2007

Those blog-browsers based in London should already know that the London Literature Festival kicks off tomorrow at the South Bank Centre.

If that's your sort of thing, you can read about the poetry highlights of the festival - including details of poets, performers, dates, times and venues - by following this link to one of my other blogs, the daily updated 'live poetry' site, Poets on Fire.

You can also view the other events and activities on offer by visiting the South Bank Centre.

Jane Holland, guest blogger
Raw Light

five of the best

Regular readers may recall that tomorrow, Thursday, is the day slated for the excavation of the Baroque gall quarry. The baroque flat has been cleaned, the chicken soup made; the baroceries are in the fridge (at least they had bloody well better be; I'm actually writing this on Tuesday morning); and I am busy psyching myself up to hand my mobile over to the sis tomorrow when I'm under the - under - hmm, under the laparascope.

The joyous news is that the hospital says they will send me home the same day! So I can recuperate right here on my white couch, rather than having another tiresome and traumatising experience with those rude ward nurses. It was going to come to blows.

And the even more joyous news is that I do not need to spare even one worry for Baroque mansions! For the next two weeks I have five, count 'em, five top-notch house-sitters all set to mind the lights and curtains and water my prize roses.* They have been sent their keys and told what kind of food the cat likes. I am beyond thrilled to have such a glittering line-up of funny, sharp, and (mostly) grammatical writers who are all happy to blog for Baroque.**

Over the next two weeks you will be able to read guest-posts by:










Chip Dale
I hope Chippy needs little introduction. He is Wales' top stripper: a man who bears an unfortunately marked reemblance to a certain prominent Welsh Liberal Democrat; a man whose very mercurial and eclectic Romanian girlfriend fills his life with potato vodka, knives, chickens and high-pitched pop music. He is president of the British Thong Society ("Between Buttocks Clenched"., est. 1912), and a sensitive man whose love of the higher truths of art must struggle to survive the vicissitudes of life in a thong. Chip's influential Diary ("Chip Dale is nearly as great as me!" - Norman Mailer) first attracted my attention when I noticed his looks; not for nothing is he known as Bangor's finest. Chippy is also one of the few people I have ever met who understands the effect it can have when a close relative decides to raise poultry. And when I witnessed his dismay at Gabby's mishandling of his Faber volume of Auden, I knew I had found a blog I could trust.

Chip Dale's Diary












Non-Working Monkey
Non-Working Monkey was once indeed non-working, living in a flat in Brixton which she shared only with an enormous malevolent cat. She has since raised "non-working" to a state of being which must struggle to co-exist with... working. Her new life on a seemingly endless contract in Amsterdam has made her blog very picturesque, with constant references to canals, cheese, and international European types; and her accounts of trying to maintain her true non-working state are sometimes heartrending. She is wonderful in a temper and wonderful when she is sitting in a cafe taking photographs of her coffee. Oh, yes. It's a life of connoisseureship and I am delighted she has agreed to share it with you. I should mention, she also has a thing for a Canadian pathologist who cuts his own hair.

Non-Working Monkey











Erin O'Brien
What can I say? Erin O'Brien is a phenomenon, a small whirlwind in Ohio. She writes a bi-weekly column in the Cleveland Free Times as well as her blog. Her novel Harvey & Eck was published last year. She finished two novels left unfinished by her brother when he died, and she has written fearlessly about his tragic death. She writes pretty much fearlessly about lots of stuff most people would find a bit too exposing - she recently posted a picture of her vibrator lying in bed with a face drawn on it - but of course, the great secret Erin knows is that we are all just people, and that what might look unbearably personal is in fact universal. She is a very human and screamingly funny writer.

The Erin O'Brien Owner's Manual for Human Beings











Jura Watchmaker
Francis Sedgemore is an ex-scientist and now science writer. His coruscating common sense enlightens not one but two blogs: his own, and now the anarchic Drink-Soaked Troskyite Popinjays for War. His blog name references the watchmakers of Jura, whose federation influenced the anarchist movement (Kroptkin wrote:*** "the egalitarian relations which I found in the Jura Mountains, the independence of thought and expression which I saw developing in the workers, and their unlimited devotion to the cause appealed far more strongly to my feelings; and when I came away from the mountains, after a week's stay with the watchmakers, my views upon socialism were settled. I was an anarchist"). So, as well as of science****, Francis is a deep well of political and cultural reason. He is of a type all too rare these days: a writer who can leap the almost unbridgeable chasm between modern culture and the facts.

Francis Sedgemore
Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War











Jane Holland
Jane Holland has a thing for knives almost equal to that of Chippy's Romanian girlfriend, Gabby. But where Gabby screams "Hiiiii-YAA!" and makes people worry about the curtains, Jane calmly sits and pens**** poetry reviews. Oh, yes. Jane is a superhuman writer with five blogs, five kids (plus a home-schooling habit), two poetry collections, a novel, a lease on a house that expires in July, and a dark past. (Well, she used to be a professional snooker player.) Our tastes in poetry sometimes seem almost diametrically opposite, but Jane writes extremely sound reviews, and her poetry's not so bad either (I have to say this, but it is true. Buy her book). Her latest collection is Boudicca & Co, published by Salt (I knew her before), and she has recently had an idea for a new blog. Is there no stopping this woman??

Raw Light
Poets on Fire

* that's you, readers. You are my prize roses.

** Note to self: next time anyone asks me what was my best-ever blogging experience, it'll be my five wonderful guest-bloggers all saying yes.

*** I love playing six degrees of separation. We're at a low number of degrees here: after the 1905 revolution the Graf (or count) Buneyev escaped from Siberia, where he had been sent for his anarchist activities. (He hid in a barrel.) Managing to get to London, he went to see the only person he knew: his old geography teacher, Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin helped him, and he ended up on a farm in Pennsylvania, where his house was the hub of the Russian anarchist emigre circle. His son, Dimitri Petrov, grew up to be my Uncle Pete. So I owe Kropotkin - indeed, the Jura Watchmakers - a family debt.

**** You like the technical way I bandy about the word "science"? I have a whole category in my labels called science. I think it has two posts in it - and, if memory serves, one of them was about an amoeba in lipstick. Francis, on the other hand, has been a research specialist in space and atmospheric physics. He was Denmark's lead scientist with ESA's Cluster mission to the earth's magnetosphere.

***** This is an archaic word. Can you see "keyboards" taking up where "pens" leaves off? "Jane keyboards poetry reviews." Neither can I.

elegantly dressed spectacles - family visit special bonus

I'm waiting for my new glasses to arrive. They are going to be splendiferous!

Alas, I need about six pairs. The good news is that all of them are going to be equally dazzling, so much so that I can hardly wait for their arrival! (This is even aside from any advantage to my actual ability to see. I'm assuming there will be some.)

And I have decided to eschew the cheap lenses that Specsaver has been foisting on me for years, as if mere cheapness is in itself clever: my new (proper) opticians tell me they won't touch those with a bargepole. And my pencilled countertop calculations were heavily influenced by the fact that the ultra-posh Kodak (I think) lenses throw in a spare pair of glasses (with only one prescription in them) for free. Now, if there is one thing I've learned over the years, it is that a spare pair of glasses is really hardly a luxury at all. So I'm getting (adorable, rectangular tortoise-shell) posh distance-&-reading glasses; red rimless spare distance specs; small dark oval reading specs (my all-time favourite frames, given yet another incarnation); and I'm keeping my present reading specs to be my new computer specs (which is what I mainly use them for anyway).

Can you imagine: and I just bought a smaller handbag.

But! I have just today spoken to Gary the optician, wondering why I have not yet seen these wonderful glasses, which were supposed to be ready "by" yesterday. He tells me his glazing machine is broken. He says he can cut lenses but he can't put the groove into lenses for rimless frames. For some reason (his shop is on Highbury Corner) he sounds as if he is in the middle of the intersection; I can hear every car, truck, bus, passerby, more clearly than I can hear him, and indeed the line cuts out at one point. Sometimes Gary sounds as if he's underwater. He clearly - remember, last time I saw him he'd spent an entire day moving his boiler at home to a new location and plumbing it in, but he needed two small parts for it - he clearly just isn't getting a long very well with machines.

He continues: "this is of no use to you whatsoever, it will bore you, but it will do me good to get it off my chest. See, inside the machine there are these two cameras... they're so small you wouldn't even believe they're cameras!"

"Yes I would," I say.

"And one of them is broken, and I think it's coming tomorrow. But if it doesn't, then it'll be early next week... I was here till midnight the night before last!"

Meanwhile, here are my dad and his parents, circa 1941, in their glasses.

By the way, this picture makes clear to me something my mother has been remarking on for years and which anyway I have suspected: that I am the absolute spit of my Grandma. I have a treasure trove of pictures brought over by my indefatigable sister, and I'm sure Grandma will be reprised over the coming weeks. There's a hat & coat set you have got to see.

And here's a bonus from about ten years later:

elegantly dressed picnics

Okay, so it's summer - and it's cold, and it was raining, and it's supposeed to rain a lot more for the next week or more. Let's live vicariously. Let's go to the past, to a strange time when everything was yet to come... .

I don't know who the others are, but right in the middle of this picture are Grandpa and Papa (spot the teenager) Baroque. I reckon the year is about 1950, give or take. Look at the lovely picnic spot they've gone to! (It will be somewhere in upstate New York, near the tiny town of Sidney where my grandparents lived.)

The picture was clearly taken by Grandma, and I surmise it was taken before the picnic. You can see it in their posture: "come on!" And is that a tupperware cake box the lady is holding?

before the knife - an everyday tale of sublimated control-freakery in Upper Street

I tried, I've tried I've tried. But my concentration is strangely shot. My sister arrives at the crack of dawn tomorrow and I'm under the - well, you know... the day after.

So today it was no use. I tried to do my MacNeice - still flushed with the editor telling me I was the only contributor to that issue who had even thought about what they were going to write - but it was just little ants marching across the page. I tried to read Jane Holland's review of Jacob Polley's new book, Little Gods; I even had Little Gods in my bag (sadly, unsigned; I did see Polley read from this and was so useless at remembering my book that I had to ask him to sign a Selected of Donald Hall. Hey: I like to live on the edge). But no; couldn't do it.

Instead, I found myself thinking that to buy some meringues at Ottolenghi would be the most useful thing I could do, so I got on the bus for the Angel. (My hair looks much better, btw; they are darlings at the salon. Lara who does my colour had a fantastic hairdo today, all hairspray and little quiffy bits, and when I commented on it she said she'd been watching Dita Von Teese on something-or-other last night and that inspired her to pull her socks up. I mean put her hair up. They're so great in there, we all kiss each other goodbye. It's like a party.)

So I kissed Lara goodbye in the street and went on the bus to Ottolenghi. Via Past Caring - no furniture in there I needed - and then Flashback, where I bought some Mozart piano sonatas for my recuperation (it's all second-hand) and two videos for ditto: Cyrano de Bergerac, starring the ineffably curative Depardieu; and that sweet eighties film, Letter to Brezhnev., which I think will be a feel-good film par excellence to get me better. Then I went up Cross St (past Get Stuffed, the taxidermist) to Ottolenghi, where I replenished my supply of overpriced, enormous designer meringues, at a cost equivalent to only about five large packets of chocolate Hobnobs. But I can't eat Hobnobs anyway, so it is all academic.

Then thought I might as well have a quick look in Jigsaw...

The silver strappy top will be fabulous for recuperating with abdominal scars, because it's one of this summer's smock shapes. It's so cute. Can you just see the whole thing? It's a bit small in the bust, but that's not a problem because I'm told the real weight loss has barely even begun, & anyway it looks fine. So I asked the girl for a little cardigan to put on over it, to see how it might look in real life. The cardigan was so lovely... I liked it almost better than the top!

But I had to go to the cashpoint, due to some vicissitudes of my cash flow, and on the way back from there - feeling, I have to say, by this time really stressed out and aware of the impending knife and tired of carrying my laptop and aware of spending money and needing still to go buy food - I happened to see this beautiful Chinese orange handbag in the window of Spice... and you know, it is small (but cunningly roomy), and I've been thinking for weeks: I'm going to have all these incisions on my right side, which is where I carry my bag, and all my handbags are huge... even after I'm okay to go out I won't be able to lift the damn bags...!

Well, so after buying the handbag, only in grey not orange because it's more versatile and anyway the hardware was gold on the orange one which is not me - and the top and the cardigan in Jigsaw (my lovely recuperation outfit which will cheer me up no end after all the months I've spent watching my same two grey Gap T shirts get baggier and baggier, one with the stray thread that hangs down just at the V of the scooped-out neckline) I had to go have a coffee and sit down. So tired. So many bags. Plus the laptop on which I had been unable to do any of my work. And, like, all these days of getting caught in these downpours, today I bring my umbrella out and of course it stays dry!

I've bought the food. Cooked the chicken. Changed the beds. Done laundry. And the dishes. And watched EastEnders (don't even ask), and taken the rubbish out (but not replaced the bin liner). And had a big fight on the phone with my lovely pain-in-the-ass eldest child the Urban Warrior, and then put my head in my hands and cried, wanting to ring someone and wail at them, "it's so awful and no one will help me, and no one cares and I'm going to be put under and cut, and you have no idea, I spent so much money - !" But there wasn't anyone.

So then I went and cleaned the kitchen.

Oh, and a family friend says to me, "don't worry, it'll feel like a whole new world. You'll see, it'll be great." She goes,"you'll have to be careful what you eat for a month or so, you can't eat anything greasy. But that's okay because you won't feel like eating anything." She says, "well you'll lose tons of weight!"

So, maybe no chocolates after all. Will it never end?

On the other hand, it looks like I might be reading at the Poetry Cafe on July 7th (Ringo Starr's birthday, I can tell you now for nothing). To be confirmed.

things to make and do

(By this stage I'm sure I owe Will at Drink-Soaked Trots some money or something.) You can:

• make your own Bayeux Tapestry

• sign a petition supporting Rushdie's knighthood

Sorry, not writing much this week: I'm getting ready for the op and the arrival of the Baroque Sibling. In half an hour I'm off to get my roots done - if I get stuck in the house with pains in my side, gas pumped into me, anaesthetic in my system, painkillers dulling my sense (as if of hemock I had drunk) and some mad, grey-haired old lady in the mirror it will just impede my recovery. I need to get a chicken and make the soup for afterwards - remember last time? It took ages and then I had to make the soup when I was sick! (I don't think the Baroque sister has ever made chicken soup out of a whole chicken. I could be wrong, but I may as well do it today anyway.) I should really change the beds, too. And pick up my new glasses, if they're ready. Oh, and write the rest of my MacNeice piece.

But at least I've given you kids something to keep you busy while I'm busy! Oh, and the other thing you can do, if you feel like something a bit more poetry-based, is:

• get on over to Andrew Shields' place and

  vote in the final round of his Daily Poem Project. You have till July 1st.

Have a great day!

Gray's anatomy of human nature

I have been reading Bryan Appleyard's review, in the Sunday Times, of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, by professor John Gray. It's so interesting - so full of things that I've been thinking, and thinking I was the only one thinking them - and also of things I'd never have thought of, that now look like things I was waiting to realiser - that I have lifted some snippets out of it for your, dear reader, delectation. By all means go and read the whole article. Or read Appleyard's blog post about it. Or even buy the book.

By the way, I'm not framing it all as quotes. Unquoted statements below are Appleyard's; quoted statements are Gray's. The analysis of liberalism is largely Isaiah Berlin's.

.....

Antiutopianism is the deep consistency in all [Gray's] thought. It led him to support Thatcher in her efforts to save the British economy from the near-anarchy of the late 1970s, but mostly in her resistance to communism, that supremely lethal utopian project. Yet he also observed the agonies of liberalism in her deluded attempt to impose free-market reforms and intense social conservatism, nostalgic for the bourgeois discipline of the 1950s. “It was an impossible task. She produced a society that was almost the opposite of the one she intended. The free market dissolved the very values she espoused."

Man, he asserts, is a tribal carnivore possessed of reason. His reason may give him science, a progressive, cumulative enterprise, but it cannot give him the wisdom to transcend his nature.

Uncovering the faith base of seemingly rational opinions is a Gray speciality. He finds the apparent rationalism of militant atheists such as Daniel Dennett, Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens particularly funny.

He regards atheism as a late Christian cult, based on the supremely Christian (and Marxist) idea that by changing people’s beliefs, you change their behaviour. He also sees an irony here. “They attack something congenitally and categorically human as an intellectual error, yet call themselves humanists.”

...With the threat of religious-linked terrorism, the lesson of that secular fanaticism that had cost tens of millions of lives in Russia and China – and continues to do so in Sri Lanka and Nepal – seemed to be completely forgotten.

The liberal state’s job is to hold different world-views in balance, but it cannot resolve conflicts between them. It cannot, for example, say to Muslims “You are wrong” and to Christians “You are right”, because it then ceases to be liberal. At its most effective, it holds back the instinct of humanity to form itself into competing tribes. But the liberal state is perpetually threatened by – and will, over time, surely be overthrown by – an unusually aggressive tribe. True liberalism is, therefore, necessarily a tragic view, sceptical of all notions of progress.

“Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”

...Many of the neocon prophets were originally Trotskyists, a clear sign of the utopian linkage between Marxism and the neocons.

...The roots of modern terror lie in the western Enlightenment. Before the 18th century, he argues, wars and terrorist campaigns were not conducted as if they were mechanisms of general improvement. It was the French revolution that introduced the idea of terror as a tool of progress

the language of love

Last night, with Mlle B out at yet another sleepover, I watched a movie that's been sitting here costing me money for a couple of weeks. It's a movie I'd never seen before: Almodovar's Talk to Her.

Shocking I know, but it has taken me years to get Almodovar. I saw Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown and thought it was kind of cute, but too brittle to really resonate. Last year I saw Volver in the cinema, and began to realise how shallow my assessment of Women on the Edge had been.

So last night I watched Talk to Her. This movie seems to me far more daring than either of the others. It's so subtle in its exploration of how we associate things, how we process feeling to action, that I feel I need to see it again. It obviously deals with many of the same things - aspects of the same issues, or issue - as the others, because Almodovar is clearly a man with something on his mind - but it seems to me to go deeper then they do, further inside.

And indeed its issues are all about what's inside us, and how it gets to the outside, and what form it takes when it gets there. And look at those pinks and oranges! Look how wonderfully not-quite-symmetrical that shot is.

The central character, Marco, is the emotional heart of the piece. I loved the way everything is really understated, but that his emotional reactions to things are showcased. His face is so impassive, but then a tear will roll down it. In that way it reminded me forcibly of Bergman's Magic Flute - which, I have to say, was tremendously influential on the young Baroquina, back in the day. This is a film that also dwells almost as much on the reaction of a spectator as on the action itself, for its subject.

The film even opens with a rather long contemporary ballet sequence, and then a shot of the audience. It's impossible, with the information we have so far been given, to read these things. We have no idea, as the tears form themselves in Marco's eyes, who he is.

The person sitting next to Marco in the theatre looks over at him, sees the tears, and is visibly taken aback by them. Or, no - interested. Curious. I laughed at this point, it was so delightful, but the point is we reinterpret that look several times throughout the film. As in life, the meaning accrues with knowledge and experience, and can be retrospectively adjusted.

Cinematically daring and beautiful, saturated colours, undulating countryside that looks like a woman's body, women's bodies looking like the countryside... The film leaves room for faces. Faces, faces, as in Bergman. How we communicate our feelings. Our expressions. The women who are in the comas, one is a dancer, the other is a bull-fighter: their expression was in how they moved their bodies, and even now the camera lingers on their faces, their expressions of perfect serenity.

The other main character, the wonderfully named Benigno, is presented to us by observation only, without all the tedious labellings many films would feel it necessary to make. In one scene someone calls him a "retard" and that is as close as we ever get to an official line on him.

It brings to mind the words of the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, when she said, "I will a tale unfold...", comparing it to taking a new frock out of its box.

Anyway, the film opens with a dance scene. The central scene is a long clip from a rather extraordinary silent movie Benigno has seen, which mirrors his own emotional state and drives him to the physical expression of his love for the comatose Alicia - a physical expression which is only, by the way, natural. And it ends with another dance, this one staged by Alicia's dance teacher, which also mirrors the concerns of the movie. Only where the movie started with Marco's tears, it ends with him smiling at Alicia as she sits two rows behind him. And by then, when you get it, the image of the rows of couples dancing slowly across the stage is spellbindingly poignant and beautiful. By then, Marco didn't need to be crying while he watched, because I was crying for him.

In the language of this film it's only Benigno's choice of a girl in a coma as the object of his affections, only his inability to realise how one-sided that is, that renders it not 'natural'. And Marco's acceptance of Benigno's feelings is implicit, even after the scene where they argue about it - obviously, because they are two sides of the same man, which is Almodovar. Ultimately the film almost asks the question of whether it even matters that a love has been reciprocated. Note: love, not just desire. Benigno has loved and cared for Alicia tenderly and devotedly for four years by the point where we meet him. By his own lights, they get along together like an old married couple. After Alicia wakes up she remembers nothing about him, and is herself unaware of having been touched in any way by him, either physically or emotionally. But she is happy and light as only a loved person can be.

This aspect of the film is so stylised that it reminded me of another movie, one I saw untold aeons ago - Bertrand Blier's equally unlikely, strange, funny, dangerous, and touching Préparer Vos Mouchoirs,* or Get Out Your Handerchiefs - but that is another story.

Sorry; this all feels very approximate to me. We have had the ultimate rainy Sunday here in Baroque Mansions.

* Gerard Depardieu's second film. I simply didn't know what had hit me.

hitch your wagon to the Hitch

Sorry, I just have to do this: it's either that or email it to everyone I know.* It's vastly entertaining,** all except (Dame: just coincidence that she herself has received the same honour?) Shirley Williams' hideously depressing (and, I think, now famous) reply.***

And even that becomes more amusing once you read normblog's reflection on the glove we have thrown in the face of Australia by knighting Ian Botham.

And Boris Johnson's hair! Is it just me, or is it really starting to look as if he's dunked his head in a candyfloss machine?

While we're on the subject of the Pakistani Minister's remark, here's a timely (thanks for the excellent new catchphrase, Dame, Shirley!) reminder from Andrew Anthony in today's Observer of the "justice" meted out during the fatwa. Apparently enough - while it may be "as good as a feast" - is not "enough."

In his article, "Sir Salman is a godsend to literature and free speech," he writes:

"Lord Ahmed... said last week that he was 'appalled' by Rushdie's knighthood, though I suggest not quite as appalled as I am by Ahmed's peerage, because the author had 'blood on his hands'. Yes, that's right, not the demented Islamists who murdered Hitoshi Igarashi, the book's Japanese translator, and wounded the Italian translator and Norwegian publisher, and burned to death 37 Turkish intellectuals in a 1993 hotel attack in an attempt to kill Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator."

Anthony's article also touches on the ludicrousness of contemporary chain bookselling, frankly always welcome.


* Thanks to the Drink-Soaked Trots for the video.

** & I never thought I'd be saying this about the Hitch! Dear God. Still, I always say the ability to have a rethink is a sign of intelligence.

*** And he's right: it's about what she didn't say.

my weak

On, was it Wednesday? I was moaning to someone on the phone* about how boring it is being sick, and how tired I am, and how my life is for nought, and they said: "You sound pretty busy for someone who's not doing anything."

Nothing is very hard to achieve, and it is hard to sustain.

Anyway, I had a social engagement this week. Two. I met my Turkish friend Cora Murphy for a coffee on Wednesday. She is doing the unthinkable, and moving to Cork, of all places. So it was like a farewell coffee, but it didn't feel like it, and I will go to Cork. I love Ireland and I'm already yearning to go visit her there. When she finally arrived in the coffee shop - forty minutes late! - I was on the phone, so she had to sit down and get a menu without recourse to my encouragements; it felt just like the old me. That was when my other friend said...

Because right after that coffee I had to get in to town for the launch of the new issue of Poetry London at 6.30pm. I had to, because they had Jamie McKendrick and Ciaran Carson reading.

(The Belfast poet Ciaran Carson is a genius rare, and the author of one of the strangest books I own: The Twelfth of Never - a sequence of sonnets written in alexandrines, drawing on Irish and Japanese imagery and lore. My favourite poem in it:

The Rising Sun

As I was driven into smoky Tokyo
The yen declined again. It had been going down
All day against the buoyant Hibernian Pound.
Black rain descended like a harp arpeggio.

The Professor took me to a bonsai garden
To imbibe some thinblefuls of Japanese poteen.
We wandered through the forest of the books of Arden.
The number of their syllables was seventeen.

I met a maiden of Hiroshima who played
The hammer dulcimer like psychedelic rain.
The rising sun was hid behind a cloud of jade.

She sang to me of Fujiyama and of Zen,
Of yin and yang, and politics, and crack cocaine,
And Plato's caverns, which are measureless to men.

It gives me the shivers every time, which so many poets will tell you is the only sure test of whether something is really working or not. To hell with critical theory. Needless to say, The Twelfth of Never is one of my all-time favourite books. And I love so much in his others, too. "Delft."** Anyway, as he crooned menacingly into the mic, he has been trying to write love poems now they have peace in Northern Ireland. But somehow half the poems he read had Stasi men in tham. They were brillliant, too.)

I had to get a cab to Foyles in the end. I just wasn't going to be late. Needless to say, the whole launch was great, Jamie McK included (hje has a new colleciton out in the autumn), and my friend Kathryn Maris read some smashing new poems about God - I really loved 'em - and had a lovely chat with Tim Dooley, who is also about to be published by Salt. Do buy his book when it comes out.

The dinner after was fun, it was wonderful, but of course all I could have was a bit of white rice. And some of the cucumber matchsticks from the crispy duck. I felt drunk on three glasses of white wine.

Dear readers, can you imagine? The next day I hoiked myself out of bed and went to the good old Homerton, where they told me:

a) I am fine for my operation.
b) 8-12 glasses of wine a week is, like, nothing! (I knew that; but this was a doctor speaking.)
c) I will most likely be sent home the same day! It's keyhole surgery! So the whole thing has now been reduced virtually to the level of having, say, an extremely troublesome tooth out in mid-Hackney.

From there, as it was a beautiful day, I went down to Goldsmiths Row to Little Georgia - the new one, and I should say right here that they no longer do the piroshki, not that I could eat them now anyway. They did me a nice chicken breast and salad. And black coffee. My heart leapt when I reached the canal, I hadn't realised how much I miss it. When I worked along it I was always writing poems about it.

Then up to Highbury for an eye exam. It is far too complicated to explain, but suffice to say that Ms B will need a new pic for the top there. Not only will I be half the width of that pic (my cheekbones are already back), I will be two pairs of glasses away from it - for yes, those are already not the ones I'm wearing now! (The things you never knew...) I will have three: distance, reading, and screen. That may seem excessive, but I have decided the time to fuck around with my eyes is over. The screen ones will be my current reading ones; the reading ones will be my ancient trusty sunglasses frames (don't worry; they're small) all fitted out with new lenses; and the distance ones. Well. They will be ineffably wonderful. Tortoise shell.** Rectangular. Every time I tried them on in the shop they did that thing, and made me laugh! I love them. You'll see.

Let's not think about the money.

So that was Thursday. Yesterday I barely remember, but I know it involved taking the old frames up to the opticians. (It doesn't really hurt that the optician's cute; he's been moving his boiler at home, had to go get some parts, was attractively covered in dust; said if the specs come in after Wednesday he can drop them at my house!) Today I slept in a bit better, but have felt as if I'd been hit with a mallet all day. Poor MacNeice has had to go jump in the river yet again.

See, it sounds action-packed, but in reality, no.

I'm living on plain bread and prawns, and a bit of broccoli. Everything else makes me feel sick. I had white fish and rice last night, but it was a devoir. Meringues are like dust. Not the attractive kind that covers the optician, either. I have to cook Sunday lunch tomorrow. I can go through the motions, but even if it seems nice - squash, rice, roasted garlic - it will be oil-free and therefore can't give me the one thing my entire system is craving.***

My lips are permanently dried up; my hands, my mouth, the skin under my eyes. I get in bed at night and my skin is sort of burning up with dryness, & I have to get up and go put cream on so I can sleep. Girls, we really do moisturise from within! You are what you eat. Well - you are what you eat; I'm only as good as my face cream. Still we're getting there, only a few days to go, and soon... soon... soon...


* Not Mama Baroque. She doesn't even answer the phone any more. She knows what it'll be like.

** Carson is the mastrer of the incredibly long line. His lines are typically long enough to requre two lines in printed text, and yet they remain cohesive lines, units of sound and meaning. Even in his sonnets as above he stretches it to a foot longer than the traditional English sonnet form allows. Received wisdom says the alexandrine can't work in English, that the line falls apart; I say in Carson's work it is a plangent, very watertight and yet supple, thing.

*** Fake, of course. What do you take me for?

**** No; the boys will be here. And my aunt was going to bring her new little dog, but the dog has a sore bottom or something, so best not to go visiting right now, I say!

I was talking to the Urban Warrior on the phone as I walked down the road yesterday. He gave me a gleeful real-time tour of his and his friends' graffiti exploits up and down the high street. I can't obviously divulge them here, but I'm not exactly impressed. Years of art training that boy's had, from the best - the best! - and this is what he has to show for it? "Well," he says," there's a lot of subtlety in it, you have no idea." Most of the subtlety I discerned was "how did you get up there?"

The good news is that, although he got thrown out of his music technology BTEC course, he somehow sat the City & Guilds sound engineering exam - ahd has apparently passed it. He was crowing and chortling with smugness, about that and about how high up he got with his paint. Anyway, as I said to him, he is a very bright guy and will succeed at whatever he decides to do. That was never really the issue!

Duhig turns on the light

"As the notes at the back of Ian Duhig's new collection tell us, Umberto Eco has said that 'all the problems of the Western world emerged in the middle ages'. This statement looks compelling, post-9/11: the problems of the Middle Ages have indeed come back to haunt our post-Enlightenment dream. It is time to reconnect.

Ever since his first collection Duhig has had an ear to the keyhole of the middle ages, listening to its echoes of meaning in our language, our symbols. The Speed of Dark takes this on as a whole collection — a collection which does not in any way feel dry, or learned (though it is very learned). This book is funny, dark, brutal and sophisticated, adopting the often dialectical religious world-view, the transgressive satire, the modernness of the medievals — and by extension the medievalness of us — via two 14th-century French manuscripts..."

My review of Ian Duhig's extremely interesting new collection, The Speed of Dark, is now up on The Poem website.

Of course, now it's up there all I can think of is the things I didn't say: always the way.

modernism in one easy lesson

The modernist critic Guy Davenport, writing to James Laughlin of New Directions (undated):

"Speaking of Columbus, I've explained the colon that begins Paterson* all sorts of ways (Europe: America) until it dawned on my feeble mind that Cristobal Colon is the gentleman's real name. Keeping to the formula pater: son."


*William Carlos' Williams' seminal poem

wish I'd been there...

Sorry, I normally make it a point never to post on all those clever little google searches that lead people to the door of Baroque Mansions; but there've been a couple lately that made me sit up and take notice. Like this one:

green piccadilly wednesday "manor house" argument

Sounds great, doesn't it?

And someone earlier today googled "tim turnbull johnny cash" which is a serendipitous connection I'd never have made otherwise! Ias there something I'm missing?

nothing to do with me?

Yesterday I had a conversation with a fellow blogger about the minefield that is online politics. That is, the vitriol with which political matters get discussed in the blogosphere. It seems dangerous to get involved, even if you think you know what you think, because really - life's hard enough.

One subject I've steered well clear of is the Israeli/Palestinian issue, because I just don't feel well-enough informed to be able to defend my position. Even so, I was nonplussed and chagrined some time ago when I had an email from my union - the NUJ - describing its AGM, at which, no, I hadn't been present.* This email went all through the kinds of things you'd expect it to say, and then at the bottom, tucked into a sentence containing three separate issues which had been voted on, there was a small item about a protest boycott against Israel...

Well. I thought that was a little bit strange, a little bit overtly partisan for a union which represents journalists, who are supposed, after all, to pursue (I thought) the facts, and the truth, not opinions. Especially not mass, crowd opinions. This boycott is being compared to the boycott against apartheid South Africa, but even in my Woman-on-the-Clapham-Omnibus state I can see that the situation is a mite more complicated than that was. And my distrust of trendy mobbishness is such that I had my doubts about that one, too.

Anyway, shortly thereafter I found Norman Geras posting frequently on his blog with reference to a similar boycott, by the academic union, against Israeli academics. This also seems strange! I thought academics operated on an international "Academics Code" (more like guidelines, evidently) whereby they were supposed to be impartial - pursuing pure research, facts and the truth, etc - and to stand above politics. But here they are, boycotting their (non-political) fellows, for political reasons!

The hoo-hah over Rushdie's knighthood - and the fact that the honours committees were supposed to have not offered honours to people who might spoark off a reaction elsewhere - illustrates, to me, the urgency of our need to establish some kind of line and then stick to it regardless of what those who disagree with it might think, say or do.**

Here's Norm, making a pretty damn good point:

"Imagine two situations, both involving a religion with influence over large numbers of people. (1) The religion teaches that all are children of the same God and have a spark of the divine within them; and therefore one must treat others with respect. (2) The religion teaches that only some people are favoured by God and those who are not so favoured are contemptible and inferior or some such."

So, today I happened to look in on a favourite blog of mine, The Shaigetz, which is written by a Hassidic Jew living somewhere in my neighbourhood. This writer is apparently someone who left the Hassidic fold and then went back, at a cost of much soul-searching, and having confronted and accepted the anomalies inherent in true multiculturalism. This quality makes him or her a wiser person than many. I was struck by this most recent post:

"Of course our Universities and College Union, the UCU, voted overwhelmingly in favour of seeking 'a comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli institutions'. They represent the students, the loony left, the ones who are going to right the world's wrongs – with, of course, special focus on those perpetrated by societies or groups perceived to be more consistently successful than their own.

What really bugs me is the muted reaction by everybody else. Is it just because we don’t blow up trains that nobody cares very much that blatant anti-Semitism has become the hallmark of the British left? Is it just because nobody is scared of us that nobody minds that British academia has been turned into a hostile environment for anyone Jewish? Not for being Jewish, of course. But, because as Jews, they represent the State of Israel.

In an ironic twist of fate the wandering people now carry a state as their cross as they traverse Europe.

I am a British Jew and I am not prepared to carry the torch for anyone. But neither am I prepared to use a different yardstick for my people than for anybody else. I therefore never ask brown people for their views on Africa, slant-eyed ones about Tiananmen Square or short, fat, white ones with loud shirts their position on the war in Iraq. I likewise do not wish to express my views on the occupation except to declare, that if I were to feel under siege, unwelcome and unwanted in the UK, I could hardly be blamed if I recalled the justifications for fighting occupation, I heard on the BBC."

I may not know much, but I do know that if we believe in the right to free speech our journalists union should not be throwing its weight into one side of a story. And that if we really truly believe in the right to free speech we should not be "worried" about our decision to knight Rushdie. You know? We should remember what happened before.

* I do realise that this is a living lesson in the cost of not participating - being an activist - and that if I'm not there to vote I can't expect to be represented. Then again, I also feel this motion should have been discussed more widely, debated maybe by emails etc, before being passed. I may have been lazy in trusting the union not to throw a curve ball, but then you can't be everywhere at once.

** I also happen, as regular readers might recall, to be deep into Louis MacNeice's long, brilliant poem Autumn Journal, which is about the atmosphere in the autumn of the Munich crisis. Do we all know what that was? That was when the European leaders got together and tried to appease Hitler by selling Czechoslovakia down the river. Result? Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.

"But once again
The crisis is put off and things look better
and we feel negotiation is not in vain -
save my skin and damn my conscience.
And negotiation wins,
If you can call it winning,
And here we are - just as before - safe in our skins;
Glory to God for Munich.
And stocks go up and wrecks
Are salved and politicians' reputations
Go up like Jack-on-the-beanstalk; only the Czechs
Go down and without fighting."

The moral cost of political inactivity - or individual nothing-to-do-with-me-ism - is one of the main issues in Autumn Journal, and MacNeice points the finger at himself as much as at anyone else.

elegantly dressed words

Deep in my MacNeice piece, now, so no picture. I'll let him provide the images:


Shelley and jazz and lieder and love and hymn-tunes
And day returns too soon;
We'll get drunk among the roses
In the valley of the moon.
Give me an aphrodisiac, give me lotus,
Give me the same again;
Make all the erotic poets of Rome and Ionia
And Florence and Provence and Spain
Pay a tithe of their sugar to my potion
And ferment my days
With the twang of Hawaii and the boom of the Congo;
Let the old Muse loosen her stays
Or give me a new Muse with stockings and suspenders
And a smile like a cat,
With false eyelashes and finger-nails of carmine
And dressed by Schiaparelli, with a pill-box hat.

Autumn Journal, section XV

arise sir fatwa

Rushdie quote of the day: "What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." *

Last year I was made redundant from an urban regeneration programme in east London. Over half the residents of the neighbourhood it operates in are Bangladeshi - or, being accurate, Sylheti - Muslims (Sylhet being a very poor, rural region within Bangladesh). The younger generation have mostly been born in London, and their parents mostly haven't. There are high levels of literacy, language, unemployment, housing, health, mental health, drug and other problems, and the neighbourhood is characterised by the "batten down the hatches" tendency that can characterise immigrant communities. The undisputed centre of power is the mosque, the mosque is entirely run by the old men, and the brand of Islam practiced locally seems to be pretty fundamentalist, as I described in some posts last summer.

Last spring, with lots of us facing redundancy, we all got to talking in ways we never really had before - bonding over our shared uncertainty, saying goodbye to what had been a pretty intense shared experience, and discussing our hopes, fears and plans. I was privy to a lot of this as I was also acting as union rep. One day I got to chatting with a Bengali colleague of mine, and in the course of it I mentioned that before the council (long before the council) I had worked for Penguin Books.

His face took on a look of significance and he went, "ohh-hhh..."

I thought, "hullo! I never had you down for the type who's interested in publishing," but I thought maybe the imprint has such name recognition or something, so I said, "what?"

And he starts blushing, hemming and hawing like a denizen of Hogwarts suddenly asked to name Voldemort. I still didn't get it. Then he stammers out something about "that book, you know..."

Dear God. Even after five years in that neighbourhood I hadn't seen it coming.

And here we are again. With a fresh fracas breaking out over the scarily inappropriate reaction in Pakistan** to the news of Rushdie's knighthood, I'd be interested in how the news is going down in my old stomping ground.

Or maybe I'd find it boringly predictable.

By the way, back in the day we were quite scared in our little Penguin shop in Covent Garden - Penguin was afraid to be seen to do a reprint, even though the book was selling like hot cakes; there were lots of bomb threats. My sweet, mild-mannered erstwhile workmate might not have liked to consider the implications of that.

* Bonus quote of the day (hat tip to the Drink-soaked Trots): "Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him .. his mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for forgiveness to Almighty Allah."

This is Iqbal Sacranie, ex-chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain, speaking at the time of the original fatwa against Rushdie. Knighted two years ago, he is is now Sir Iqbal Sacranie. So much for all the Pakistani cries of "Wolf! Wolf!"

** "This is an occasion for the 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision," Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, told the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad. "The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."

see, I only get the best

Someone in Germany has reached me by googling: "I'd like to be an unhappy man as a happy PIG"

I'm not so sure about that... I bet a happy pig's pretty happy.

a formal distinction

I like this, from Auden, in The Dyer's Hand:

"The difference between formal and free verse may be likened to the difference between carving and modelling; the formal poet, that is to say, thinks of the poem he is writing as something already latent in the language whcih he has to reveal, while the free verse poet thnks of language as a plastic passive medium upon which he imposes his conception."

Of course the sad truth is that both are true, maybe almost in equal measure; or more and less so at different times (sometimes separated only by a split second! No wonder it's hard).

newsflash: comedy after all

Oh my God! I take it all back! Classic.

Dr Caligula in the home counties. Unattractive Rob so wet he squelches when he walks... Remember? This character started with a massive judgement meltdown when he faked Dawn a credit card in Jane Beale's name... ah, innocent days! Well, it has realised its perfect apogee in this episode!

I loved the fake blood on Dawn's arm getting messier in every scene... May getting more and more wild-eyed as she sings lullabies and prepares the criminal caesarean... I tell you what, after Dawn bashed Rob with the lamp, stabbed May with the illicit scalpel and drove off in the rented car I burst out laughing.

It's that old satisfying feeling: you'd almost think Grant must be around somewhere.

And anyway I'd forgive a lot for that scene with Big Mo in front of the telly with the enormous jar of pickled eggs.

Twenty minutes later, editing in: still laughing. Ah, happiness.

in which I choke on a heart

a foolish attempt

How can it be?? How can an artichoke heart - a beautiful, soft, delicately flavoured flower that melts on your tongue - how can it be like a piece of tasteless wet old leather?

Frozen artichokes! I must have been insane. Does anybody here know how they work?

The story of my life at the moment: the most expensive food, badly cooked. Really. I should just give up, and live on pre-cooked prawns, chili sauce, dry bread and boiled broccoli. It's expensive and crap but, unless you steam the broccoli dry and burn it, at least it's reliable.

scraping the barrel in Albert Square

Just as it seemed to be getting better.

Now the bloody Polish guy is hitting Shirley - in the same room, the same doorway, where they set the whole turgid business with Denise and her insane wife-beating ex, not one year ago. I thought th ePolish builder was going to be fun! But no! They just can't spot comic potential, they think we all want to sit around larfing at those endlessly repetitive Keith jokes. And I'm sick of domestic violence. It's all biology equals destiny, on EastBloodyEnders, isn't it. Women are weak, duplicitous, conniving creatures at the mercy of their hormones and their men, and men are great lumps.

There must be another storyline available in this day and age. Even that book last year said there were seven, but EastEnders only ever uses three of them.

Not only that but "my mum's a slag" is wearing pretty damn thin. What is this, 1957? Jesus. My kids watch this.

And what, like Max & Tania and the kids have just left? To escape the bunny-boiling Stacey? Lave her alone! She's the best thing in Walford at the moment. And what about Tania's Girl Power plan to open another salon?

And this storyline with the baby-mad GP. What's it all about? So Dawn is now a prisoner of Mad Dr Whatshername and Unattractive Rob, and it's all been a plot to get her baby off her, all along? He never loved her?

Insane.

We all know blokes aren't like that.

And why does the decorator Marco or whatever his name is have to move in? Kissing people's hands!? Tedious. And are they really going to redecorate the Vic? Even more tedious.

Stacey and Bradley getting back together, good. But you just know Max & co will return after all, and the whole thing will end in tears. Mine.

I really did prefer Abby's guinea pig.

Adam Kirsch said it

The American critic Adam Kirsch wrote an interesting article, on the state of reviewing, in the New York Sun last week. I have been in a couple of conversations with fellow poets recently about the writing of reviews, and there is certainly plenty to discuss, so this piece pricked my interest. Good criticism is rare as gold-dust: reviews are so often these days nothing but anodyne descriptions of subject matter, with no context - often even of a poet's previous work - and no aesthetic discussion at all. Beyond the dichotomy of good and bad, it's as if we (as both writers and readers) have forgotten that there are other things that could even be said! And Kirsch is an important and prolific critic, so I was naturally keen to see what he'd say on the subject.

But he takes a sad little detour. Sad, because it has a knee-jerk feel about it, although ultimately I think he is right. And I suppose he can't help but venture, however briefly, down the road to Bloggersville for a quick look - it's only responsible*, after all the furore we've been having on the subject lately. He writes:

"In one sense, the democratization of discourse about books is a good thing, and should lead to a widening of our intellectual horizons. The more people there are out there reading, making discoveries, and advocating for their favorite books, the better. But book bloggers have also brought another, less salutary influence to bear on literary culture: a powerful resentment. Often isolated and inexperienced, usually longing to break into print themselves, bloggers — even the influential bloggers who are courted by publishers — tend to consider themselves disenfranchised. As a result, they are naturally ready to see ethical violations and conspiracies everywhere in the literary world. As anyone who reads literary blogs can attest, hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned. And the scorn is reciprocated: Professional writers usually assume that those who can, do, while those who can't, blog.

Well, I have to say I find Kirsch's varietal distinctions odd. I loathe this phrase everyone uses, the "democratisation" of literary discourse. As if anyone wasn't always free to say what they pleased! I always mention Daniel Defoe in this context; the only difference now is that it's free. This "professionalisation"of reviewers, along with its concomitant de-professionalisation of everyone else, leaves little room for artist-practitioners. Maybe where he perceives disenfranchisement and resentment, he's seeing writers who are annoyed at simply not being seen.

Plenty of published writers have blogs.

He does, however, concede:

"Still, it is important to distinguish between the blog as a genre and the Internet as a medium. It is not just possible but likely that, one day, serious criticism will find its primary home on the Web. The advantages — ease of access, low cost, potential audience — are too great to ignore, even if our habits and technology still make it hard to read long essays on the computer screen. Already there are some web publications — like Contemporary Poetry Review, to which I occasionally contribute — that match anything in print for seriousness of purpose. But there's no chance that literary culture will thrive on the Internet until we recognize that the ethical and intellectual crotchets of the bloggers represent a dead end."

So there you have the, or a, nexus of my interest: Adam Kirsch and I, one a professional and one a crotchet, both write for the same journal.**

The fact that it's an online journal rather puts paid to his earlier statement in the article, to wit, "People who write about books on the Internet, and they are surprisingly numerous, do not call themselves reviewers, but bloggers. " Kirsch's categorisation being based on the medium, rather than - as one might say - the message, contributes to the general confinement of the discussion to stereotype. James Marcus, for example, has had some interesting things to say from his vantage point as erstwhile editor at amazon.com, one of which was that things haven't really changed all that much.

Anyway, aside from all the squabbling (and it would be refreshing to read an article that didn't squabble about this; surely every newspaper or magazine review, and every blog, can stand or fall on its merits?), Kirsch makes some valuable observations about the limitations of form:

"In fact, despite what the bloggers themselves believe, the future of literary culture does not lie with blogs — or at least, it shouldn't. The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature, and it is no coincidence that there is no literary blogger with the audience and influence of the top political bloggers. For one thing, literature is not news the way politics is news — it doesn't offer multiple events every day for the blogger to comment on. For another, bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve. The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals."

This paragraph does irk, with its unsubstantiated generalisations about what bloggers believe, and what bloggers want. I also think Kirsch is wrong about the nature of the difference between political and literary blogs: I think that it's a market-driven issue (by which I don't mean money, I mean what people perceive that they want, and whether there are punters). It's worth noting, too, that his assertion that political blogging enjoys much greater influence, fails to take note of the constant debate that rages about whether blogging can ever "be proper journalism." (Sound familiar?) He doesn't mention scientific blogs at all, though I believe blogs are important in scientific communities. And that content is different again.

I've often specifically thought that there don't seem to be that many really interesting literary blogs, of the kind I once imagined would be two-a-penny. I mean trenchant analysis, fresh thinking, informed blogs that would satisfy a certain thirst I have for criticism.*** I see no reason why bite-sized chunks couldn't be as informative and even influential in the literary sphere as they are in the political. After all, politics is certainly no less complicated and tricky than literature; it may be more a matter of utilising one's metier.

As it happens, I've learned a lot in my one year (so far) of writing a blog. When I started I sort of imagined myself writing the kind of thing Kirsch describes, and quickly found that for some reason it is almost impossible. It is simply a different form. So, yes, the links to "proper" articles are invaluable. Space, or more properly time, is certainly an issue, especially if you're envisaging a TLS-style in-depth consideration of a writer. Blogs just aren't designed to be used that way. I should also think that most people who feel inclined to write in-depth criticism do have other outlets for it, and probably place it with a friendly editor - for money, for a wider readership, and not least because it will get taken a lot more seriously if it isn't on their blog!

Certainly a lot of bloggers post cursory paragraphs about their subject, linking to a longer published piece, and fool themselves into thinking they've actually written something. I read one last week where someone referred to "what I wrote about so-&-so" - and in fact he'd written four rather dull lines, and then linked to a very entertaining article. I've probably done that myself. I like to think if I do it that at least I'm adding some small thing to the mix with my cursory paragraph; sometimes it can be a hitherto-unseen link between two linked things. Blogs impose a pressure to post - every day, every two days.

Blogs are more personality-driven than straight literary criticism: I think of them as more analagous to a weekly newspaper column. And a lot of them are consistently better, funnier, fresher, more zeitgeist-feeling than anything in the newspapers (the sainted Michael Bywater excepted, of course; his bitter rants are indispensible; but then, he also has a blog).*** The paragraphs are shorter I think, which mitigates against long, carefully-reasoned arguments.

I've found in practice that the blog format works best for these linky pieces (and, time-consumingly, for sort of "conference call" pieces, where you can almost conduct - in the musical sense - a conversation between different articles or writers by linking to them within your argument - the links being shorthand, of course, with its own danger of shorthand thinking). It's good for personal reflections on things I've read, for anecdote, for quick reactions to news, statements, events. It works for trying out ideas, really as if it were a notebook (one that can give you feedback); it works for ideas you want to illustrate with pictures. It can develop into a sort of letter to your readers, which might - who knows! - have possibilities, as we are otherwise losing our epistolary forms. It's also good for the good old writer's diary. There are a few poets who write about their creative processes, ideas, daily writing life - and who sometimes post up draft versions of poems in progress. All this is not the same as criticism, but it could conceivably be of future interest to critics (or even biographers) - as well as current interest to other writers, students, etc - and as such is a resource.

This is all in addition to the main thing that blogs are good for, of course: short bits of information. Blog format is great for listings, news flashes, little round-ups. Interactive content, like polls or questions.

What it just doesn't seem to lend itself to is the long, carefully researched & reasoned, meticulously argued piece, with quotations and possibly footnotes, that might establish you as a serious critic. The software itself simply isn't built for it. I've certainly found all this to be true, and Baroque in Hackney has duly taken shape around these possibilities and limitations. Crucially - or shall I say critically - it has also taken its shape firmly within blog culture, rather than literary-journal culture.

In other words, I'm a writer: I (hope I) know what I'm doing.

Instead of taking the reader's (passive) vantage point, casting an ungenerous eye on blogs because they aren't doing the same thing as the LRB, it might be more useful - in the context of a shared concern for the future of serious literature and critical thought - to look at them from the vantage point of a writer. A blog is a thing to write. What is it? What is it good for? What will it throw into the mix that you, as the writer, hadn't thought of doing before? How can you use it to enrich your own ability to write about literature? How could the literary world best use blogs to enrich its culture?

Equally, what isn't it? What is it not succeeding in doing? What do we still need, even when we have blogging?

Of course many blogs are barely literate. Many more are fine, but most don't stretch their critical wings very much. These serve a purpose, for sure, but it is not the same as the purpose served by serious criticism. It can't possibly be, and never was intended to be.**** The real danger to our literary culture probably lies in forgetting to make this distinction - in fact, in failing to cast a critical eye on what is really happening.

In short, I think we agree. As with most family arguments - it not being only perfect happiness that's always the same - it turns out that this may not even be an argument at all, but a case of saying the same thing in different ways. Now it's going to be all about what we do with it...

* After all, as Kirsch says, it's wrong to review a book without reading it.

** and I'm a fan - both of CPR and of Kirsch.

*** sorry if this seems harsh! The two best things I have read recently on blogs, in this regard, are George Szirtes' gripping account of Yevtushenko at a poetry conference last week - which I wrote about, but got no comments at all on - and Jane Holland's incisive and honest reading of Annie Freud's new book. In both cases, check out also their following days' posts. Another thing you can do with a blog is have more, or second, thoughts and continue the discussion as you go.

****a swift bit of research on Wikipedia turns up the fact that he also has a pair of crocodile shoes: can the man do no wrong??

***** and if mainstream papers are worried that no one will be able to tell the difference, maybe they should raise their game a little and publish more challenging reviews.