elegantly dressed thoughtful dressing and the comfort of things

Today was an arrangement in black and grey, both inside and out. For some reason this morning, after a gruelling night's sleep featuring more than one dream of open sores on shoulder blades (!), following which I woke up at 5am, it seemed extra important to look put together and pretty. But no actual colour. Just a soft colour blank. Grey lacy tights, a black pencil skirt made of something slightly shiny, a grey jumper with angora in it, clear sparkly earrings, and my salt-&-pepper coat and grey knitted scarf. The sparkly shiny things and all the textures were critical. (Three years ago there was a death, and I spent a month wrapped in pashminas, mainly a black one with embroidery.) You know, who says clothes don't matter. I was so bleary I could hardly see, this morning, but I could see in the ladies' room mirror that I hardly even looked like myself.

As if to back me up, these words from Joseph Brodsky, from beyond the grave - found on my fave new blog, Linda Grant's The Thoughtful Dresser: "I'm not going to recoil from the superficial," he wrote. "Surfaces, which are what the eye first falls on, usually say more than their contents..."

By the way, the Thoughtful Dresser has had a poll: who is more important, Chanel or Dior? As usual I let my heart rule and voted for Dior. Chanel won the poll of course and it is true - she gave us the little black dress, the sun tan and Chanel 5 - but I wouldn't be true to type if I didn't love Dior more. It occured to me only as I came home this evening that I owe her my silhouette (sans coat; the coat's a little more Dior, if you had to choose).

Have not had a thought all day long, to entertain any of you bunnies with. I sat at my computer and spaced out and looked sad, and people came and asked if I was all right, which I had been, more or less, until they asked.

I'm supposed to be thinking about a recalcitrant centrepiece poem that's playing me up, about a medieval atrocity where 1,000 villagers were burned to death in a church at the behest of Louis VII, who was partly trying to show off to impress his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. I think she was only about 18 but she was already deeply scary. Today may not be the day for that.

I've ordered some books on the internet:

1. Anthony Hecht talks to Philip Hoy, research for my Hecht piece

2. Silence (pron. the French way), which is either a translation of or a disposition on a C13 French roman, Le Roman de Silence, which has been sweetly and kindly given to me as a gift to write about, and jolly interesting it sounds too, if only I had an idea in my head

3. A book of knitting patterns by Bronwyn Lowenthal, whose lusciously vintage-looking handknits are available, at prices I can't afford, in boutiques around and about. See those fingerless mittens? Yes.

My house is all torn apart with this room-moving. There's an enormous chipboard panel - the end of a bookcase, turned Art, covered with graffiti and drawings and rave flyers and an old NY state licence plate, and a CD, and there are holes punched in it one of which has a baseball perfectly embedded in it like a meteor. It's leaning on the pink couch. It's enormous. I've been asked to keep it. It has three-inch bolts sticking out the ends. As it is the end of an ex, erstwhile, no-more bookcase, the files it housed have been piled helpfully, by the Urban Warrior, in front of my wardrobe door.

The Ikea website is shite. It won't let me buy my bed. It keeps telling me my card has been declined, but my card is fine. To be fair the customer service people did get right back to me, but she says that their website is incompatible with: a) Vista, b) Macs, and c) Firefox. But £340 of my money is apparently now in a "holding account," meaning Ikea hasn't got it but the bank thinks - for the moment - that it's been paid out, meaning I haven't got it either. So I tried again, on the pc, in Explorer, and not on Vista. Did it work? No.

I could start the green bloero jumper for Mlle B. This knitting thing is good, you know, but it also alarms me somewhat because it makes you kind of non-, or pre-, verbal. (I know, I know. Chance would be a fine thing. When will it start working? I hear you all cry.)

All I want to do is go to sleep. I will put some washing on first.

all hallow's eve

Happy Halloween. Today is John Keats' birthday, but because of what is happening right now I can't do him justice. Sorry.

Here is the last poem Keats wrote. It wasn't October, it was February. I can't help thinking of him lying in his sickbed in Rome, knowing he was dying, giving in to the famous despair of his last weeks; it is very uncomfortable thinking right now, but here's his poem.

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.

More later.

Dina

I've just learned that my old friend Dina Rabinovitch, one of the most inspiring and fun, and incidentally most practical, people I've ever met, whose youngest daughter was little with mine, and who helped me through the worst time in my life when my marriage was breaking up and I was fighting for my children, and who has spent three years writing and campaigning about breast cancer - who kept writing and speaking and campaigning even after she was too sick to do it, and who did more even sick than most people ever do - died last night.

It's a shock. How can it be a shock?

I only had an email from her the other day.

Please go to her website. Buy her book. And read it: it's a good read. Give money to help build a new cancer trials unit at Mount Vernon. Read more about Dina in today's Guardian. Read her last column for the Guardian, published only a week or so ago.

And if you're reading this and you knew her, let's take this time to remember her before she knew she would ever have this relationship with this awful disease. I remember her young and hopeful, and so pretty, writing wonderful short stories. She had the most beautiful, clear voice, I loved listening in our writing workshop when she read her things out. I remember when she met Anthony, and telling wonderful stories about her life, always telling the stories - "listen, this happened to me," and it always went, unspoken: "so it's happened to other people too." (Except maybe not the story about how she met the love of her life - that's unusual.) Raising her children. Laughing. Shopping for shoes.

I remember once, I'd read in the paper a study that said hair dye could cause bladder cancer, & I was flipping out a little bit, saying maybe I should stop colouring my hair, what would happen over a lifetime of getting your roots done, etc etc. Dina told me not to worry about it, just keep dying my hair. She quipped - and it wasn't even really a quip because she meant it - "What do they expect us to do? Go grey??"

We laughed. That little remark made me laugh for years after, it was so funny.

Until. See, how little did we know.

But I still think she would say we should get our roots done. You can't not live - and that's what she was saying, and what she always said, and what she did.

I'm so sad. And I'm so happy I knew her.

England made me

I can picture my Welsh ancestors turning in their stony graves at the sight of that headline! But I think my English ancestors would like it. More precisely, in any case, is this: English made me. And because English's poetry is so intimately tied up with what English is, I can even say that English poetry made me.

Here's Bryan Appleyard, celebrating English poetry in The Liberal:

"If Hamlet can be seen as one big poem, then so, in a sense, can all of English poetry. It is a conversation with itself. Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ – indeed, perhaps the whole of his work – is another way of articulating the spirit of Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘The World is Too Much With Us’. Robert Browning’s dramatic meditations are refined and internalised by Ezra Pound; the Gothic arches of ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ becoming the broken psychic concrete of the Cantos. John Clare’s open-eyed, innocent, wondering, exact gaze is also that of Ashbery.* And – slightly quirky one this – Clare’s line “I am the self consumer of my woes” could, to my ears and mind, prefigure Bob Dylan.

Eliot understood this better than anybody. ‘The Waste Land’ opens with a line – 'April is the cruellest month' – that sardonically inverts the mood of the first line of ‘The Canterbury Tales’ ('Whan that Aprille with his shoores soote'), as if to remark that all poetry is one, and that in the end is the beginning. Less explicitly, Auden had only to set pen to paper for the whole history of English poetry to come flooding onto the page in his infinity of rhythms and nuances. His great but neglected short poem ‘Like a Vocation’ expresses this eerie feeling of looking around to see where the voices are coming from:

But somewhere always, nowhere particularly unusual,
Almost anywhere in the landscape of water and houses,

The voices are, of course, those which Peter Ackroyd has called English Music."

There is a Zeitgeist at work, here - the current national self-examination, which seems to be cropping up everywhere. People are asking, "what is Englishness?" Often it's a quotidian, multicultural Englishness, and sometimes it's a divisive not-Scots-or-Irish-or-Welsh Englishness. But the Englishness that includes Blake, and Robin Hood, and Wat Tyler, and John Clare (see above), and the greengrocer who got in trouble for insisting on selling his carrots by the pound, is my favourite one. It's the Englishness of a thousand years of English poetry.

Appleyard again:

"Hamlet is a weird drama made magnificent by a torrent of peerless poetry, and I have always thought of it as a long poem whose cosmic structure seems to pivot on the words 'We defy augury'. Shakespeare is the greatest playwright on earth, but he is heaven’s poet. And the list of his poet-compatriots – Chaucer, Browning, Dryden, Wordsworth, Clare, Donne, Auden, Tennyson, Keats, Pope, Herbert, etc. etc. – closes the case. We are a nation defined by and consisting of poets. To deny this is to deny England."

* I love this remark.

what a carve-up, now and then

...or: what are we talking about when we talk about Raymond Carver?

It seems I've missed something, though the name "Lish" does sound familiar; maybe it's just one of the many things Ms Baroque has heard over the years and simply - er - paid no attention to. (It's why I'm not a gossip columnist; I'm forever wailing, "why doesn;t anybody ever tell me anything?" only to be told that they did, I just didn't notice.) However, according to Morgan Meis in The Smart Set, for many years "the Carver/Lish problem has lingered at the corner of the collective literary conscience like a dirty secret." The "problem" is the massive extent to which Gordon Lish, Carver's editor at Knopf, made Carver's works his own.

It does seem, according to this article, that Lish (it's coming back to me now) was not only responsible for some of the stylistic tics we most associate with Carver ("he says, "she says"). He took passages out, he added passages, he pared and pared until, as Meis says, "The stories are a revelation in pecks and silences. Stripped down, punchy sentences did just that: They punched your guts out. The human landscape of his stories was so rich for being so bare. It seems impossible that literature can be this honest, this true. But there it is." This was the genius of Ray Carver, the laconic, shy, the man who never dared think of himself that way, for whom those final, drink-free years were famously "gravy" - or was it?

Now, this is all very interesting. There is clearly an issue here beyond a mere Carver/Lish set-to. Rumours are rife, in the tiny corner of the poetry world which I inhabit, of poets stripped almost bare in the editor's zeal for an ever-more-perfect text. I've heard of poems over a page long cut to only a few lines, though that could be apocryphal. Do most writers mind when this happens? Is there just enough consultation, collaboration, implication, that they feel it was somehow done with their consent (if not total approval)? Do they feel sullied by it? Do they feel it's not their work, or that they are somehow frauds? Or do they not really mind? After all, it's their name on the title page. Has Carver's wife (now widow) Tess Gallagher, herself a poet of note, ever been edited in that way?

It might not be such a deal, in other words, except that Carver himself felt uncomfortable about it; and so, we now find, does Tess Gallagher. She is now republishing his stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, only in their original, unedited form. She is un-Lishing them, as it were, upon the world.

Well, it got me thinking, so I took - the first thing that sprang to mind - the facsimile manuscript of The Waste Land with me into the bath (where I'm told it now looks very Pseud's-Corner-like, sitting there on the side) , to remind myself of the extent to which Pound had shaped that poem. What you see is rearrangement of sections, a very boring & discursive first section taken out (by Eliot), and lots of gentle stripping, as of layers of wallpaper. Pound took out the line, early on, in relation to Phlebas the Phoenician, "these are pearls that were his eyes," and pointed out lots of lines where the cadence (as he put it; excellent word, why have we forgotten it?) came straight out of "Prufrock." There are even marginal notes from Eliot's first wife, Vivien.

In other words, what we see is not one editor putting his own stamp on another person's work - though of course Pound is all for the short, sharp shock, and he does strike through some of Eliot's more egregious sonorities - but the poet, the trusted advisor, and the poet's wife, all having a good hard look at an ambitious piece of work. Pound and Eliot were in any case busy setting up a mutual advantage society, and I mean that in a nice way, writing about one another's work and helping each other get on to an extent almost unbelievable in post-millennial London. Eliot had no problem at all with the process or ("il miglior fabbro") with the result.

In other words, not much use to the present conundrum. But I'm wondering if Carver's "non-writerly" persona, and I'm stabbing in the dark here, got all tied up with his natural diffidence, and he brought scruples to bear that wouldn't normally matter i]to someone more, say, cynically career-minded? Or did Lish really do something to him?

More analagous might be the case of John Clare, an unsuccessful farm labourer who wrote poems under haystacks when he was supposed to be working - wrote them in a language of his own, a rural, "uneducated" language that was then smoothed out and totally re-punctuated by his publisher, John Taylor (also, by the way, Keats' publisher). Clare used dialect terms, onomatopoeia and unconventional phrasing to create vivid, intensely emotional poems, which were then smoothed out, rendered "polite" and touted around London as the work of a so-called near-illiterate.

This seems not to dissimilar from the "naif" marketing Carver was given. Look at the photo above: the rough-hewn man of the people, gussied up in a carefully rough-hewn jumper and posed rather slickly against some rough-hewn shingles... if you look at his pose, it seems almost impossible. His arm is so far back, on the edge of that chair, and his head is so low down on his neck - no one would sit that way! They wanted him to look darkly and handsomely mysterious yet rough-hewn. (Oh, and he does.) But the thing is, he was also a serious, professional-minded writer.

Jonathan Bate has recently done a lot to redress this view of Clare with his marvellous biography and a new edition of the poems, taking them back to Clare's original intention, with minimal, sensible editing for clarity and consistency in punctuation. They are, of course, pretty rough-hewn - but artfully, deliberately so - and are far more beautiful than the ones that Taylor edited.

Interestingly, Clare's final work was never published at all till the twentieth century. The fashionable world had tired of him. And though we may want to thank Taylor for publishing Clare in the first place, the lionisation - the being hailed and taken up, like a pet, and then dropped - had an extremely ill effect on Clare's already perilous mental health (though much of his strongest work was written inside the asylum, where he was, if I'm correct, given much freedom and mainly not unhappy).

So where does this possibly competely spurious comparison, without dwelling too much on the feelings of Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher, bring us? I think it brings us to a place where it will be a huge critical advance to see Carver's original stories, and to decide whether Lish made them better, worse or just different. It will then be for future generations of readers and critics to make of it what they will.

note to self

Kathleen Ferrier singing Mahler for 28 minutes. Silly me, what was I thinking? But the really silly thing is my idea that the new Radiohead might be a bit better! Maybe I'll start with their track, "Down is the New Up."

I've done two separate things to my leg, taking that bunk bed apart.

polite life

Okay, I know I've gone a bit quiet lately. I've been busy. Even now, at not-quite-9 on the last Saturday morning before the clocks go back, I'm dragging furniture out to the landing and practicing the exact shade of wheedle to put in my voice when I ring our long-suffering friend of the family, the one with the estate car. And that's to say nothing of - well, the things which I'll say nothing of. Just think: team awaydays... bonding drinks (and yes, we made the jokes, it turns out we're a rather puerile team)... South London...

Well, I won't tell you what happens when you try to put a Baroque south of the river. It's like being in Australia: the water doesn't go down the plug hole the wrong way round, but it was strange suddenly to realise that the big thing at the end of the road was Tate Modern, from the back. And there's virtually no view of the Post Office Tower from anywhere down there. And the trees are smaller.

Anyway, I was drinking orange-&-soda in the pub in Southwark - the hair of that dog could have killed me - except for the last two, where they put some vodka in (but you could barely taste it). The team wrote a poem, one line each, and I brought the whole thing full circle with a killing last line. As this is a decorous, perfectly judged and always exquisite blog I can't tell you what it was about, but I made sure it had a tidy little rhyme scheme, and my colleagues did their bit with a pretty consistent iambic trimeter.

So it''s been a journey. And then, in between manky outgrown socks and what to do with all the little robots, I see that someone has broached* the halls of Baroque using a Google search on "humorous earrings."**

Oh, puh-lease.

Never, again, okay? (Except that I've just repeated the phrase, so now it will happen again. Sigh.) I learned that lesson the hard way, back in the eighties when my then sister-in-law gave me a pair of Fimo Christmas puddings on earring wire. I had to wear them on Boxing Day, and I think she may have had little parcels wrapped in real wrapping paper, with infinitesimal ribbon bows, swinging from her ears. (This would have been in Chesham, which is in Zone 152 or something; strange things happen out there at the end of the tube line.) This is not the kind of thing a girl like me forgets easily.

So, and especially with the clocks going back and numerous temptations looming in the form of Jack-o-lanterns, Christmas trees, fairy lights, little skeletons that really dance, and sweet angels in real frocks, let us just establish the ground rules. (You can see I've been on an awayday.) There is no place for humorous earrings in polite life.

Sorry. That's just how it is.

* Note: not decked

** Many apologies, incidentally, for yet another mention of these blasted Google searches. I know it looks unforgivably and inanely solipsistic, not to say showy-offy. But look at it this way: even if I were that self-regarding, what would it profit me if all I had to show for it was that my main inspiration in life came from reading my stats? You see? You're feeling more superior already, aren't you.

elegantly dressed oh my God, where am I, what day is it?!?

If you were wondering where yesterday's Elegantly Dressed Wednesday post was, look no further. It was lost in a dream, and here it is.

I was looking for something else - it's always the way, as in dreams - and instead the fates have chosen to unearth this picture of Edward Gorey, elegantly reclining amidst a pile of elegant cats.*

Ms Baroque, on the other hand, spent most of yesterday narcoleptic under an enormous duvet, with nothing poking out except some curls. Has it worked? We shall see. But however that may be, Gorey's elegantly creepy drawings were a huge inspiration to me in the most darkly whimsical alleyways of my youth, and I'm glad to see that in my compulsive sleep phase I'm still on the wavelength.

When I did go out, though, I buckled, and bought a coat. There was a token attempt to find something cheap; I started in Primark in Hackney. In the end, though, there was nothing for it but to buy the one I had loved all along, the one with the enormous collar.** I think Gorey would approve.



















* They don't look like mousers, do they.

**Get this. I tried on two coats in Monsoon. The first one, before I could get one that even remotely fitted around my shoulders and arms I was in a size 18, and even that was no good. The one I actually bought is a size 12. Needless to say, neither of these is my real size. If there's anyone reading this from the UK fashion/retail sector, maybe you could tell me what that's about.

the purpose of baroque

Someone in Regina, Saskatchewan, has reached this blog via a Google search on "what was the purpose of baroque." What?! This is doubly hurtful to me, as Ms Rational Self-Determinism, my best friend, who is nonetheless in her own way rather baroque,* also hails from Saskatchewan.

It's as the man said: if food is useful because it sustains life, what is life useful for?

There.

However, if we're going to get technical about it, we could say that baroque is "exemplified by drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur;" this fits me rather well, don't you think? Does it need to have a reason for being that way?

And, in musical terms, that in relation to the dominance of imitative counterpoint, "different voices and instruments echo each other but at different pitches, sometimes inverting the echo, and even reversing thematic material." This also fits me quite well, I think. It explains why my sleep can sometimes be fitful. That, and the pretty dresses, and - er - the El Greco... but it's bedtime now...

As it happens, when my friend said I was baroque, at the time I did tell him that no, I was more rococo. And that's a chocolate shop in the Kings Road.

Sweet dreams, all.


* as measured by the words of my sainted friend Simon, when I asked him how he could tell I was "a baroque poet:" he said, "the gold angels are usually a dead giveaway."

James and Wilde - the most beautiful odd couple of the gay nineties

A rather silly review from The Scotsman - or at least it seems to me to sillify itself, by getting the emphasis wrong. There is a new book out. It is published by Edinburgh University Press, and I badly want it, and it costs only £65.* Its very title reads to me like a sweet shop in words: Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture. See it here.

Now, one of my most treasured books - currently on loan with a trusted friend, ahem - is the correspondence of Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson.They were firm friends, by letter mostly, due to the vagaries of Stevenson's travels. As the introduction to that book puts it, although you might expect a person to love Stevenson's adventure stories, and you might also expect a person to love James' intricate psychological tales of moral downfall, you might not expect one person to love both. BUT, as the intro points out, James and Stevenson were two of the great sylists of their period, and they had the greatest admiration for one another. Their letters are both interesting and touching, and when word reached London at the end of 1894 that Stevenson had died, Henry James was so desolated he could barely speak.

As it happens, the end of 1894 was also the beginning of 1895, a year that would change Henry James' life. Or, rather, fail to change it. In January that year his one play, Guy Domville, opened on the stage. James was desperate to gain the kind of popularity that other writers had, and make more money, and generally be more of a 'success'. He wrote a play, partly because, as he saw it, if Oscar Wilde could do it, so could he. He was a great craftsman, and the play was beautiful, and the night it opened he was famously booed off the stage.

As a 1948 review of another book I now want, called The Legend of the Master (ed. Simon Nowell-Smith)* tells it:

"It seems to have been a fairly good play; in 1930 (35 years later), the London Times called it 'that beautiful, harshly treated play . . .' The producer of Guy Domville was sanguine, though James, with his usual misgivings stayed away opening night. Instead, he went to the Haymarket and saw Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, which had just opened. James considered Wilde's play crude, bad, clumsy, feeble, vulgar—but it appeared to be a complete success—'and that gave me the most fearful apprehension.'"

The story of the booing and hissing is famous, and still mysterious. James was traumatised, and never wrote another play. But on January 23rd he wrote this wonderful passage in his notebook:

"I take up my own old pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will."

(That passage, by the way, is the basis of one of my very favourite ever poems by myself, called 'The Master and the Future', written in the voice of Henry James. My own mother tried, and failed, to parse the main sentence of the final stanza, so well did I get his style.)**

The Scotsman piece is all about Oscar Wilde being a plagiarist, as if that were interesting, and maybe he was; he was certainly a butterfly, and I gather they are collectors. But it even finishes with a heartsinking list of famous quotes from Wilde called 'Talk on the Wilde Side', and I can't help thinking the silly reviewer is missing the point.

More fruitfully, there are mentions that the two men men were fascinated, or even obsessed, by one another,*** jealous of each other's gifts - nemeses - and that is very interesting. It is as it should be. They were two of the premier fops in a great age of fops. And I love fops. And they were both terribly, terribly serious: one in a shallow way which is also deep, and one in a deep way which comes perilously close to shallowness in the wrong light. I knew James loved to hate Wilde, but I had no idea it went the other way too. I want this book!

Here is its table of contents for your delectation:

CHAPTER 1
'I have asked Henry James not to bring his friend Oscar Wilde': Washington Square and the politics of Transatlantic Aestheticism

CHAPTER 2
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies: Plagiarism, Appropriation, and the Reinvention of Aestheticism

CHAPTER 3
The school of the future as well as the present: Wilde's impressions of James in 'Intentions' and 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'.

CHAPTER 4
"Wild thoughts and desire! Things I can’t tell you - words I can’t speak!": the Drama of Identity in "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "Guy Domville"

CHAPTER 5
Despoiling Poynton: James, the Wilde trials, and Interior Decoration

CHAPTER 6
"A nest of almost infant blackmailers!": the End of Innocence in "The Turn of the Screw" and De Profundis

* It's been suggested to me that they might be knocking them out at £5.99 in Tesco. If anybody sees one, be a darling and pick me one up, will you?

** Originally published at a much more promising £3, but I think that's by the bye, now, don't you?

*** n.b. It is fully parsable.

**** in the same manner as TS Eliot and Groucho Marx, actually. I love these stories.

guidelines for a Buddhist mother

Dina Rabinovitch in today's Guardian, on how it feels to be a mother and have cancer:

"'Just take each day as it comes,' the doctors say. In our fortysomething world, with kids who need packed lunches and walking to school (on days when I may not be able to get out of bed, my husband might have an 8am meeting, and all the older children have morning exams), not to mention the not yet extinct notion of a career, what exactly does that instruction mean, I ponder? Because, honestly, what works as a guideline for a Buddhist monk doesn't make tuna sandwiches on days when you can't face food."

This is vintage Dina. I remember when she was writing about the family courts, about the judges who thought they knew enough to set out the shapes of other people's lives - for example, the lives of working mothers. What she wrote then felt exactly like my experience, and even like the conversations we had on the subject - with the sole proviso that I felt she was being too reasonable! Well, reasonable still, she is still writing about how things really are, in a world of daily feelings and practicalities.

Her fundraising is also about practicalities: money for a very practical, very tangible new cancer trials unit at Mount Vernon.

Click here, go and give some money - and if you're a UK taxpayer you can give even more through Gift Aid.

And buy her book! (Buy it here, or - if you want more fun than that - from the lingerie section of M&S!) It is, if it ever could be, written on such a subject, a delight. It's a delight because of the company of the heroine. Go on.

the pun - mighter than the word?

I think it is. I always have. Why settle for only one meaning when you could have two or even three for the same money? I had an English teacher, Mr Something-Italian-That-Began-With-an-A, who used to thunder from the front of the room: "The pun is the lowest form of humour!" I used to laugh like a drain, till I gradually realised that he wasn't even trying to be funny. I'm not sure what I was even doing in the vicinity of his apartment, but I have a distinct if hazy memory of trying to argue the toss with him on the subject of puns while standing on his doorstep trying to fend off his annoying little dog.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I think puns are pretty much the highest form of humour - using the most parts of the brain to the most effect - except for the final, highest-of-all form, which is the distillation of heavenly essence and doesn't even need to contain a joke (in the same manner as that in which the greatest Sumo champion might beat his opponent without ever laying a finger on him).

And that is why I was so happy to find a bagetelle of great sweetness on Maud Newton's blog: a small piece on Edmund Wilson, "excoriating" Nabakov's punning.

Maud writes:

"Reading Wilson’s Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s, I was amused to discover a review — dated September 9, 1944 — excoriating Nabokov’s puns. (The book under consideration is Nabokov’s study of Nikolai Gogol.)

'The reader is also annoyed by the frequent self-indulgence of the author in poses, perversities and vanities that sound as if he had brought them away from the St. Petersburg of the early nineteen-hundreds and piously preserved them in exile; and, along with them, a kind of snapping and snarling on principle at everything connected with the Russian Revolution that sometimes throws the baby out with the blood bath — to be guilty of a species of witticism to which Mr. Nabokov is much addicted and which tends, also, a little to disfigure his book. His puns are particularly awful. In writing English, he has not yet acquired the sense of how horribly “the government specter” and “Gogol’s spa’s were not really spatial” are calculated to grate on English-speaking readers.'"

Bliss. The government specter. Click on the link, there's a beautiful picture, too.

25 ways of being Ms Baroque

1. try to get the boys over here at lunchtime.

2. make them sort through some of the stuff I've cleared, but chance would be a fine thing; I'm sure the Urban Warrior isn't even in bed yet as I type this, he was going to some squat party. And the Rock God, I never got him on the phone till 7pm, and he informed me he's been sleeping all day! He'd been up till 4.30am but that's still 15 hours of sleep. I haven't even seen him in two weeks, his dad doesn;t speak to me, and his dad evidently thinks that's all okay then.

3. try to figure out a way of getting all the stuff down to the charity shop. Try to make the pile even bigger before I do that. I know who I might call, a longsuffering friend with a car, who I think reads this blog...

4. can't ring the bank today, it's Sunday; a friend told me I need to register for online banking and he was right. I need constant access to the fiasco.

5. tomorrow, then: transfer some (more) money from the savings; try and salvage something of the wreckage of my current account. Once it's salvaged, try and keep it salvaged. I used to be draconian with money! I think I just got tired...

6. oh: go to the supermarket! There's nothing for lunch.

7. but have a bath first.

8. make the Sunday lunch - I wanted to make a cheesecake yesterday but I never got to the shops. I never even left the house! I fell asleep for three hours on the couch and woke up to watch "The Quiller Memorandum." George Segal surprisingly cute in his youth, but for a thriller it has a deeply "where's the story?" plot - could be one of those sixties jokes. Anyway: so what am I going to make? If I don't use the oven I could still do the cheesecake but it won't be ready for lunchtime, of course. Something cheap. Maybe with sweet potatoes. Sausages. Spinach.

9. I need a 4.5mm circular knitting needle for the little crop cardigan I promised to make for Mlle B. I've been trying for two weeks to get to the little knitting shop in Cross St, and still no luck. It will be nice in there, I'll really like it. But it won't be today.

10. logistics. The thing I'm doing - the Big Decision - is, I'm clearing out the boys' room and I'm going to have a bedroom. The price is that my boys will no longer have a room in my home. But they're the ones who pissed off to live at their dad's, right? Without even saying anything! They just gradually stopped ever coming back. And I'm sitting here with no bedroom. Several people, including Mlle B and one boy, have told me this is by far the most sensible thing for me to do. It's a small flat, for pete's sake. I don't have the luxury of leaving a room. Even for my kids. Who by the way I fought tooth and nail for. If it weren't for the fact that even this place takes up half my income, & I'm in a decent job, it'd be easy feel as if I'd failed somewhere along the line. Anyway, I need:
a. shelving put up
b. their stuff taken out: bunk bed, two chests of drawers, a big broken chipboard bookcase, plus their things...
c. and done something with, and I can't count on them to do it, and I have no car
d. a blind put up, ever since a mad, silly friend let her wild kids run loose in my home last year and the curtain pole got pulled down
e. a bed
f. rearrange everything in the whole house to accommodate newfound space
g. sonmehow do this without throwing the whole ecosystem out; it's like a nine-square puzzle in here. It's not something you can really do on your own.
h. oh.

I want to do this by Christmas. I'm assuming that the sensation of being in one's own deeply fluffy bed, with too many pillows and a brand-new duvet cover that doesn't have green acrylic paint on it, will be absolutely splendid. I'll probably get addicted to it.

11. pay British Gas and Virgin Media.

12. ring O2 and see about an upgrade so Mlle B will have a phone again; not that it isn't kind of nice having a holiday from her racking up the calls...

13. edit manuscript for Salt. There are many things to think about and a big, centrepiece kind of poem which is just coming together now; but it's a little strange. I mean over-the-top. Nobody's seen it yet, of course, except me.

14. finish wonderful Ruth Fainlight interview, which seriously is going to be a Great Thing.

15. send poems out - I never seem to do this enough, and I know why. It means looking at them in a cold, analytical way, like children whose faces are never clean, and who are not even precociously cute.

16. this year I am determined to get the quinces and the vodka and to make the sublime and mysterious quince schnapps of memory! I've been saving up giant pickle jars. And the quinces are coming in now.

17. I need a coat. Shaming, on saying that, to hear Mlle B say, "um, excuse me Mummy, but don't you have, like, tons of coats?" Do I? So why don't I have anything I can simply wear to work in this weather and be neither freezing, with exposed forearms, nor broiling hot and dripping sweat in the tube? I have a wonderful Nicole Farhi coat it has to be below freezing before you can wear. I need to weed them out, that's what. My staple black suede jacket of many seasons will fall off me soon. The rips are just getting embarrassing.

18. it's hard to get a coat if you can't even get out of the house on Saturday.

19. it's hard to get a coat if you're completely skint. And Mlle B needs one too.

20. further expenses looming in the near future:
a. go to USA (le comte has been given weeks, not months, though I note with some pride that he seems to be taking the extended option)
b. Christmas
c. a bed - and indeed blinds, shelving, a rug, lamps, etc - the accoutrements of a bedroom, in short
d. a handyman
e. everything else, as usual

Strange, this bedroom idea: like everything else nice I've got lately, I'm getting it in a way that makes me more depressed than not having it. Except the boys are gone anyway. Anything else on my part is just sentimentality.

21. we delicate Baroque types don't always do very well on our own. Which is odd, really, since that's where I appear to live. I did put in a few calls to friends yesterday, but nobody rang me back. Then it was the rugby, I guess, which reminds me: my commiserations to those of you who care about it. And then of course I pushed everyone for this Sunday lunch thing, which is now like a millstone round my weary neck and looks like no boys will be coming, and even if they do they'll leave me with all the dishes. My aunt informs me she plans to bring her dog.

22. as I never got out I never got my things to the cleaners. Though how will I pay the cleaners.

23. And I don't have a pair of black shoes I can wear to work, and I'm getting really sick of having to be so creative all the time with the tights, the brown shoes, the not-quite-black, the fishnets. I'd love a pair of nice, smart, funky black shoes I could just put on in the mornings.

24. A very kind friend sent me a photocopy of "The Art of Poetry" by Kenneth Koch. The pleasure was too intense the other evening when I started to read it, so I will now go and read it in the bath. Fifteen pages of New York School bliss.

25. work tomorrow.

The inevitable paradox has come. Futurism is a thing of the past...

...Vorticism has come. "Its official mouthpiece is a cerise magazine called Blast."

Yeah, well.

One can't afford to get sentimental. Great, though, isn't it?

(hat tip Jilly Dybka's Poetry Hut)

argh, late for work

The autumn issue of Poetry London is launched; it seems your correspondent has not totally disgraced herself with her review of Presley and Merwin.

The Oxfam Life Lines 2 CD is also now launched - and available from all Oxfam shops for a paltry £4.99 - and Ms B is correspondingly told that she sounds fine on it: like herself. As long as she doesn't have to listen to it that's fine with her. (No, no: I will get up some courage over the weekend!) The reading last night was splendid, once the speeches were finished.*

Danny Abse started the evening off, reading in his beautiful voice - one of the beautiful reading voices that seem to be disappearing, as no one any more seems to have the particular tone necessary for that kind of modulation. Anyway, he stood there all small and handsome and white-haired and really very old now, with the largest pair of reading glasses I have ever seen, and to be honest by the end of his first poem I was all choked up. It was a lament for his cousin Sidney who lied about his age to join the Army in 1940, & was killed... but also much more than that. Stunning poem, and a wonderful beginning to the evening. Especially after the speeches. And most of the rest of his poems were very sexy, which everybody liked.

Elaine Feinstein read about her husband. A fabulous set from the performance poet Attila the Stockbroker; Abse himself was a treat to watch, sitting in the pew ahead of me chuckling at Attila's fevered rants. See, why is it too easy to assume that people will only like things that are kind of like them? Attila for his part finished with a paean to Abse and Feinstein which I found touching.

I should say that these two very different poets - the erudite Welsh doctor and the Clash-inspired agitprop crowd-pleaser - both seemed to embody, in their readings, fulfilments of our need for spoken baury. This sounds pretentious: but what I mean is that words are lovely, they are malleable and made up of elements like sound and meaning and carry little frieghts of association, and so are different ways of speaking - sentences themselves, and rhyme, and rhythm - are exciting - and both these poets demonstrated all that last night. They were both unafraid of seriousness and also of humour.** It was the best reading I've heard in some time. Maybe since Ciaran Carson a few months ago.

Young London newlywed and Jack Wild lookalike*** Wayne Smith started the second half with a fab little set, well-delivered and wryly amusing - clearly nervous to be in a church instead of a pub (this had also bothered Attila)... Sujata Bhatt had come from Germany, and read some haunting imagistic poems about lizards that I really liked, and John Hartley Williams - currently poet in residence at the Wordsworth Trust - finished the evening off - beginning with a rousing poem called "Near Dove Cottage," about a polar bear. His hair so snowy white and his eyes so glittering that he even looked like a (very cheerful) polar bear.

Now what? I'm reading for Oxfam in St Albans on November 24th. Ages away. Something tells me I should get down to work and send some poems out into the world...

My Bookaholics Guide to Book Blogs has arrived (thanks, postal strikes - that only took two weeks). I must look at it! Ditto the new Poetry Review. It is proper autumn now, the leaves are yellow and are swishing around my feet when I go outside. And cold. I need a coat, but am so skint it's no joke, and the buses were so useless last night I finally had to get a cab from Kings Cross - a shocking £20 to Stoke Newington - and even then, only got in at 1am.

I feel as if I hardly even remember my kids.****

I have a huge spot on my lip.

Now: what to wear today.

* Seriously: out of ALL the senior people at Oxfam, they don't have one who can do public speaking? Instead they sent along a trustee who said she finds poetry very relaxing to listen to while she's ironing, or falling asleep, and who droned on for so long, in a hideous monotone, that we were falling asleep. Furthermore, her excitement at all the good work Todd Swift has done to bring poetry to Oxfam seemed a bit odd as I have never seen her at even one of the Oxfam Marylebone readings over the past four years. You have to wonder. When she finally shut up my friend turned to me and said: "So, is your poem for ironing to, or falling asleep to?"

** There was one point, though, where Attila ended a satirical poem by breaking out of the satire and making, agitprop (that word again), the point (which was I think about asylum seekers and everyone in the room already agreed anyway) that he had been making with the satire. It was very disappointing that he hadn't trusted his satire to do its work - it was more effective.

*** editing in: I was going to say this originally but for some reason fastidiously didn't like to; however I now see that Tim Wells has put a picture of the Artful One on Facebook, entitled "Wayne Smith," so I suppose it's now all right. If Wayne doesn't like it he can blame Tim.

*** I had a small but heartfelt conversation about this with someone the night before; you just can't be in two places at once, and you can't do everything! I must try and get them all here for Sunday lunch...

not quite so much rank please, if you don't mind, my good man - it's so depressing

One of my secrets is out. Anne Enright, the Irish novelist who just won the Booker Prize, is a writer I've had my eye on for over a decade (not that the Baroque eye is anything much to have on one; I'm sure she never noticed the difference). There she's been the past few days, beaming like a very intelligent sprite in all the pictures, holding up copies of her book, The Gathering (is this title maybe too similar to A Gathering Light?). So exciting!

But what are these headlines? "'Depressing Irish saga' wins the Booker," says one. ("Hmm, that Madame Bovary, why can't she just get a life!") "Rank outsider wins Booker"(in that one I note she isn't even smiling any more. I'd be nonplussed too).

Now, this particular "rank outsider" has written four novels, one of which was shortlisted for the Whitbread and won another award (the Encore), and a prizewinning book of short stories. It just kind of makes you wonder what you have to do... I wonder if winning the Man Booker has catapulted her out of the outsider ranks.

Now, Ms B can hardly be blamed for the fact that barely a novel gets read in Baroque Mansions these days - I'm busy with other things, and fast becoming as timeless as the apocryphal Grandfather clock - but Anne Enright, let me just say, is a fab writer. She is a refreshing antidote to polite English domestic fiction, and her style is so quirky and light and full of real feeling that I am sure her new book is not simply "depressing". ("Come on, Nik - that Raskolnikov: we need a character the reader can relate to - we need someone I can like! How about it?")

Her first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, was published twelve years ago and I can still remember my excitement at the time. I loved her strange mixure of truthful emotion, lightness of touch, startling prose and just enough of the otherworldly to move things along.

I think the Irish Arts Minister, Seamus Brennan, has a better handle on it than the newspapers. He says, "She has fused tragedy with humour to deliver a novel that is compelling and at times haunting."

This extract from the Telegraph confirms my instinct:

"Some days I don’t remember my mother. I look at her photograph and she escapes me. Or I see her on a Sunday, after lunch, and we spend a pleasant afternoon, and when I leave I find she has run through me like water. 'Goodbye,' she says, already fading.

“'Goodbye my darling girl', and she reaches her soft old face up, for a kiss. It still puts me in such a rage. The way, when I turn away, she seems to disappear, and when I look, I see only the edges.

I think I would pass her in the street, if she ever bought a different coat. If my mother committed a crime there would be no witnesses – she is forgetfulness itself. 'Where’s my purse?' she used to say when we were children – or it might be her keys, or her glasses. 'Did anyone see my purse?' becoming, for those few seconds, nearly there, as she went from hall, to sitting room, to kitchen and back again.

Even then we did not look at her but everywhere else: she was an agitation behind us, a kind of collective guilt, as we cast about the room, knowing that our eyes would slip over the purse, which was brown and fat, even if it was quite clearly there."

PS - There is an interview with Enright in today's Guardian, all about how the book "is not as bleak as everyone has been making out." Good! It looks very interesting.

food, glorious food - who is to blame?

Why have we been reduced to talking about food as if it isn't food? It's all "products" and "fatty foods" and "reduced-salt intake" and so on, and it frankly sounds about as appetising as - as -well, as somebody said to me this morning: "these nutritionists talk about food as if it were excrement."

The BBC website (article: "Not that naughty but still nice") makes it all sound even more fun. Get this:

"Taking fat or sugar out of food is not necessarily as straightforward as it sounds.

The product may simply not sit together properly - it is hard for instance to make ice cream bind without sugar, or pastry and chocolate without certain quantities of fat...

Take too much fat out of cheese and it won't do the things that consumers like it to do, such as bubble, melt and go brown.

Worst of all, it may end up not tasting like cheese, and researchers are agreed that if these products are to work, and genuinely reduce the nation's waistlines, they must be virtually indistinguishable from that which they are supposed to emulate."

Got that? The key word is clearly emulate.

Do we understand? It's no longer even real food we're talking about!

But never fear: "One particularly promising avenue is the mushroom."

"Hurrah!" I hear you cry. "I love mushrooms!" But don't get excited. Apparently, "It produces hydrophobins, air cells which protect the fungus from water, but which appear to have the same material properties as oil. And yet they have no calories."

That's all right then! We'll all hold out for that. And while I can only applaud (as a person whose moderate enjoyment of food has often led me into dress sizes I'd prefer not to talk about) the verdict of the food researchers who this morning announced that "individuals can no longer be held responsible for obesity" - the rationale being that cheap fatty carbohydrates are cheaper, and that we all (sic) drive cars and no one walks anywhere any more - I do still think there is probably a little that individuals could do. I'm complaining about the way we talk about food, but we could all do with just thinking about it a little.

Now, let Ms Baroque remind you. She ate no fat at all (beyond what is found in a chicken breast) for four months, on medical instructions. This was a Bad Thing, and left her vitamin-deficient as well as run-down.

But anyway, here's what worked. Use the merest drib of olive oil in your pan. Slice, don't chop, the onions (it's just nicer), and cook them in it. When it dries out too much, pour in some white wine. (You know me; I even used rosé sometimes. It was fine.) When you're ready, add your garlic, a bay leaf or two, your meat - chicken breast, white fish, or even - now I'm back on normal food - a pork chop or whatever, and, once it has browned, add more wine. Cook till done.

This method uses about a teaspoon of oil. The key is not then to put lashings of butter on your rice, or eat half a camembert with it. Don't encourage your kids to eat crisps, and look for cakes - such as the Dutch ginger cakes you can get - that are naturally, and meant to be, low in fat.

Also: fat-free or low-fat yogurt; fruit; Marmite without butter on your toast. Frozen yogurts or sorbets instead of cheap ice cream. Baked sweet potatoes, that are actually nicer without butter.

Also: get a range of your food groups in. I love the food groups: cereals and starches, meats & proteins, fruit & vegetables, milk & dairy, and fats, oils and sweets.

Alcohol is not a food group. I have to say, I do wonder if my almost-complete abstention did me some good during those four months. Of course, that was largelydown to never going anywhere. Things are different now...

Anyway, come on, guys! It may have all turned to food science - but it's not rocket science.

loopholes and arseholes

"The Clean Airwaves Act assumed that fucking is a participial adjective. But this is not correct. With a true adjective like lazy, you can alternate between Drown the lazy cat and Drown the cat which is lazy. But Drown the fucking cat is certainly not interchangeable with Drown the cat which is fucking."

This delightful point is made in an interesting article on swearing and censorship in The New Republic - of all places - which fits right in with the zeitgeist here in Baroque Mansions.

Alas, nothing is concluded, and the article seems not to come down in any sort of condemnation of the Clean Airwaves Act - it is The New Republic, after all - but the point at the end, in the words of Caliban, is salutary: "You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."

And now I must go and actually do something...

something old, nothing new

"Pornography, kissing policemen and erotic pictures" - it sounds delightful, doesn't it? We'll soon have something of the kind in London, in the Barbican's new exhibition, "Seduced" (advance booking, timed tickets, over-18s only). But in Paris, of all place, no...

An exhibition of contemporary Russian art, planned by the state-owned Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow to be shown in Paris, is now being meddled with by the Russian Minister of Culture. Apparently it would bring disgrace on Russia if some of these pictures were seen in Paris, especially the one above. "It is inadmissible...to take all this pornography, kissing policemen and erotic pictures to Paris." he said. I'd like to think the Minister, Alexander Sokolov, was at least blustering, shaking his whiskers about; but sadly, I expect it was more like a dry statement, possibly in a press conference or else a release, maybe drafted by a poor harmless press officer, and utterly dull except for its content.

The picture above, titled in English variously as "The Age of Charity" or "An Epoch of Clemency," singled out particularly by Sokolov (let me ask: is it just possible he used to be a policeman of some kind?), is by our "something blue" - a Siberian art duo called Blue Noses. Read all about them here, in the blurb for a show at Matthew Bown Gallery; and here, on Matthew Bown's extremely interesting Russian art blog.*

In fact, this picture reminds me of not only one, but two other pictures. The first is cited as the inspiration for the image by the artists themselves, Alexander Shaburov and Viacheslav Mizin: good old Banksy's Kissing Policemen.

" 'We were inspired by Banksy's iconic image of two constables kissing. We wanted to do the same but in Russia,' Mr Shaburov said, in the same Guardian article as quoted above.

"The image had nothing to do with gay people, he added. Instead, it was an absurdist fantasy about what might happen if everyone showed mercy and tenderness to each other. 'Given the fact the state has banned it, we haven't quite reached this point yet,' he noted."

The second thing it reminds me of is one of the most surprising pictures I've ever seen in my life, and it came straight out of Stalinism - from the cover of a Stalinist propaganda magazine called USSR in Construction. Of course the import of the picture is completely different - it depicts a peasant embracing a soldier with a passionate kiss on the mouth - and the fact may simply be that the sexualisation of contemporary culture makes this picture more surprising to me than it would have been to some babuschka in Archangel in the 40s. But the fact also remains that USSR In Construction was a miracle of progressive art that was simply, for some reason, allowed to happen, even in one of the largest-scale dictatorships of the twentieth century.** There's a display in Tate Modern, and I wrote about it here.

This bring me to the third thing this fracas reminds me of, and it's not a picture. It's a sad truth about the nature of progress in culture. Right now in the USA, even a poem - Ginsberg's "Howl" - that was cleared of obscenity by the courts, in the 50s, can't now be broadcast on the airwaves because it would contravene all sorts of codes and laws about "decency."

Plus ça change, and maybe we've always been more alike than we wanted to think. Clearly the "old" item in our little rhyme is the political censorship of art, which we can now see flourishing on both sides of the Superdivide and under the so-called Free Market. "Let me to the marriage of true minds admit impediments..."

I for one think the picture above is completely successful, poignant and sweet. I can't wait to go to the Barbican and see the Mapplethorpes.

* Not wishing to digress: Matthew Bown has also reproduced another of the banned pictures, which does in fact look a little more politically-uncorrect to me... interestingly. Have a look here.

** Mind you, Stalin was notoriously capricious when it came to art, and especially writers: he tolerated, for sentimental reasons, Pasternak (eg), whilst simultaneously sending thousands of other artists to the gulags. USSR In Construction was not allowed to persist indefinitely.

Quand J'Etais Chanteur

Who knew! Did you know Gérard Depardieu had a new film out? See, this is what happens when you lose touch.

Anyway, a kind and wonderful friend* saved me yesterday, by the simple expedient of suggesting we catch a movie and then just saying, "meet me at the Renoir." The film's English title, bravely continuing the tradition of mangling titles in translation, is The Singer - as opposed to the wonderful French title, Quand J'Etais Chanteur (see, the beginning of a story's already in it...).

Reader? Go to the Renoir. Pretty much now. The man is magnificent, he is a genius - in fact he is, in this film, a mountain - Massif Central - a volcano, that never explodes - he is everything. (to me.) There are several fine performances, but in the middle of them all is this mountain, Depardieu himself, giving what some are already calling the performance of his career (Martin Guerre! Jean de Florette! Monte Cristo! Cyrano!), and I am almost inclined not to disagree. I can certainly see this being the defining performance of this part of his career. The weather, the light and shadow, flit across his face - a split second changes everything - as if he were a landscape in himself. He is simply awe-inspiring, as a god must be.

The film itself is fine, understated, slow-burning, subtle - unlike me - things we've almost forgotten, except that the French, thank God, do remember. (This summer I lay, as regular readers will know, on my couch for a long time watching rented movies, sometimes two or three a day - I had an excuse, I was ill - and, aside from Scorsese, the ones that stand out in my mind now are the French ones). The story, roughly, is this: GD is an overweight, middle-aged, lonely dance hall crooner. There is a complicated scenario with his ex-wife, which I won't give away except to say it makes him even lonelier. Then he meets a young woman...

(She, Cécile de France, is marvellous - the ex-wife is also marvellous, these are ace performances. Everyone catches all sorts of emotional subtleties. As in real life, people's emotional lives aren't simple.)

The film looks wonderfully anxious - jarring - from the first frame the viewer is given nowhere, as it were, to sit. The colours, the lighting - the coloured lights, this being a film about seedy dance halls - are just tremendous, saturated, desperate, like liquid unreality. The open-air scenes are limpid, by contrast, and beautiful. The close-ups on Depardieu's face look as if the notes just said: "crag", and there are some wonderful little set-pieces and set-up shots. One of my favourite things in the film is this silver curtain... and there is a dance class scene (doing a step called "le New York") of such beauty that your correspondent thought she would cry. I want to go again just to look at the art direction.

Like Leconte's Ridicule, this is a film that dwells on feet. Marvellous.

There is a scene in the middle, in the volcano museum, that seems to serve the same purpose as the black-&-white film in Talk to Her or the zoo (planetarium?) in Annie Hall - and once again does it by mixing up reality and unreality so that the unreality has to break and reality come out. So see it, I am giving no spoilers here, and you will see what I mean. I'll give you a teaser, though: Ingrid Bergman's in it.

In short: I wouldn't go so far to say Ms B would start to frequent suburban dance halls or start buying CD's by any aging crooners, but I will definitely be going down to the Renoir again. The only question is how soon.

* the same one who sent me my Clinton bagatelle yesterday. Clinton and Depardieu - hmm...

vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself, etc

A kind and intensely amusing friend has just brought this story - from the New York Review of Books - to my attention. It's so good that the article itself, "Shakespeare and the Uses of Power," by Stephen Greenblatt, is just the story-within-story.

As a study in all sorts of things, the first paragraph is absolutely priceless. The first sentence alone has so much packed into it that it might just explode.

Here, let's look at the first sentence:

"In 1998, a friend of mine, Robert Pinsky, who at the time was serving as the poet laureate of the United States, invited me to a poetry evening at the Clinton White House, one of a series of black-tie events organized to mark the coming millennium."

Children, can you see all the things the author is telling us about himself here? This is a lesson in subtext. But wait! Let the story, as they say, unfold:

"On this occasion the President gave an amusing introductory speech in which he recalled that his first encounter with poetry came in junior high school when his teacher made him memorize certain passages from Macbeth. This was, Clinton remarked wryly, not the most auspicious beginning for a life in politics.

After the speeches, I joined the line of people waiting to shake the President's hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. 'Mr. President,' I said, sticking out my hand, 'don't you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?' Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, 'I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.' "

Is it just me?? But Mr Collins,* I mean Greenblatt, continues:

"I was astonished by the aptness, as well as the quickness, of this comment, so perceptively in touch with Macbeth's anguished brooding about the impulses that are driving him to seize power by murdering Scotland's legitimate ruler. When I recovered my equilibrium, I asked the President if he still remembered the lines he had memorized years before. Of course, he replied, and then, with the rest of the guests still patiently waiting to shake his hand, he began to recite one of Macbeth's great soliloquies:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly. If th' assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all, here,
But here upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions which, being taught, return
To plague th'inventor.

There the most powerful man in the world—as we are fond of calling our leader**—broke off with a laugh, leaving me to conjure up the rest of the speech that ends with Macbeth's own bafflement over the fact that his immense ambition has "an ethically inadequate object":

I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on th'other....

I left the White House that evening with the thought that Bill Clinton had missed his true vocation, which was, of course, to be an English professor.***

You have to wonder, though, how an eminent intellectual like Prof. Greenblatt could have missed what Clinton just did to him??

* Elizabeth Bennet: Do these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?
Mr. Collins: They arise chiefly from what is passing of the time. And though I do sometimes amuse myself with arranging such little elegant compliments, I always wish to give them as unstudied an air as possible.

** Don't you love this?

*** Of course...

Zuckerman's ghost in the machine

"A notorious landmark in literary misogyny:" it's official.

I've had that argument so many times - including recently, and with people whose judgement I respect. But I knew it couldn't be just me!

elegantly dressed purpose of Art

"Mozart was a keen observer of mankind, and boundlessly empathetic, but what he expressed in his music was us, not himself. Put another way, Mozart was the consummate artist, able to manipulate and cajole his listeners, to draw them in and draw them out, to create art, to construct art not for the sake of self-expression but to allow us to express ourselves."

This is Cliff Eisen, writing in his introduction to WA Mozart, by Hermann Abert (reviewed by Charles Rosen in the NY Review of Books) - a definitive work published 100 years ago, and now available in English in a masterful translation and edition. It's $55 in America - really, with the exchange rate as it currently is, hardly more expeisive than a new Ian McEwen novel.

Rosen writes:

"For his contemporaries, Mozart was a difficult composer, not only hard to play but hard to listen to. Most of the more ambitious works, they felt, could only be performed by the finest professionals, or else they would make a poor impression. Not only were there too many notes, there were above all too many new ideas and new themes, all coming one after the other in a profusion that was painful to follow. (In most operas by other composers, the second violins played the same notes as the first violins most of the time, but in Mozart they are more often given an independent line, and the violas, as well, are allotted interesting phrases.) And the harmony was often outrageous and impossible to understand (to this complaint E.T.A. Hoffmann replied that connoisseurs understood Mozart's harmony without difficulty, the uneducated public was emotionally stirred by it, and only the half-educated music amateur was bewildered)."

It seems to your correspondent here that, even without any danger of falling prey to a decadent neo-Dadaist fetishisation of newness or shockingness for its own sake, this insight could be applied to the way we experience art - say, poetry - now. I feel Mozart would never have been a New Formalist, just as he would never have been a "language" poet (though I could be wrong; it could be that a Mozart is all these movements are waiting for). Nor would he have been impressed by poetry workshops encouraging young people to express and "empower" themselves, etc.

(The marvellous picture: Mozart is sitting at the Klavier with his sister Nannerl - looking, one can't help but feel, a little like a very young Patrick Malahide - and his father, who is leaning on the piano holding a violin. A portrait of his mother hangs on the wall. This lithograph, by F. Leybold after a painting by De la Croce about 1781, was published for Mozart's centenary in 1856. Click to see it big. )

a Hecht hint and a Merrill moment

Anthony Hecht was a great midcentury American poet of the type now known as "formalist" - meaning he wrote elegant verses in rhyme and metre, though back then I'm not sure people really obsessed the way we do about labelling it as such. (New formalism: "The old formalism never went away!") Hecht is one of a handful of masters of the art of formal poetry in midcentury America (leaving Wallace Stevens, the Master of masters, out of the equation, because frankly he had other fish to fry) along with Richard Wilbur and James Merrill.

Now, I should say that I admire Hecht very much. He wrote some poems I love and am inspired (and sometimes a bit cowed) by, including the wonderfully-named "Proust on Skates." But my love for Merrill is deeper, and in fact in type it is not unlike my love for Mozart.

Therefore it seems appropriate that Harold Bloom has apparently called Merrill the Mozart of 20th century poetry; and significant that my friend and editor Ernest Hilbert has then gone on to say that if this is the case then Hecht - who wrote much about the Holocaust and his experiences in the war, and who had a hotline to some inner demons that would have many of us hiding under the bed - must be its Mahler.

And there, in a nutshell, we have it. What do you think? (Well - that is the nutshell. All I have to do now is crack it.)

Here are three stanzas from Hecht's poem, "For James Merrill: An Adieu":

But you, dear friend, managed to slip away,
Actually disappear int he dead of winter
More perfectly than Yeats. As at a show,
While we were savoring your skills, the play
Of your words, your elegant, serious banter,
You cloaked yourself, vanished like Porspero

Or Houdini, escapoing from the padlocked fact,
Monacles, blindfolds, all our earthly ties,
Leaving us stunned in the middle of his act,
The stage vacant, expecting some surprise
Reentry from the wings to a rousing Lizst

Fanfare, tumultuous applause, a bow
And a gentle, pleased, self-deprecating smile.
There comes no manager hither to explain.
Words fail us, from the weak and fatuous "ciao,
Bello," to the bellowing grand style,
As we shuffle out to the shabby street and the rain.

Let's just hope I can do something good with it. (And, do you know, I too have a poem in which Houdini figures prominently...)

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by hypocrisy, political correctness and fear

Great picture, isn't it? Look at the audience, there are some fabulous kitty-cat glasses.

Maybe that opening sentence says all it needs to about how far we've travelled from those days. And, whatever you think of Allen Ginsberg, it's not to our credit.

Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the result of the famous obscenity hearing relating to "Howl." You might know it: a sprawling, angry, very influential and important poem from a decade that isn't exactly known for the looseness of its morals! A radio station in New York - WBAI-FM - wanted to play a recording of Ginsberg reading his poem, but they couldn't. Their lawyers were afraid of the crippling fines they'd incur for contravening our modern, enlightened decency laws.

According to the New York Times:

“WBAI, which is part of the Pacifica network, decided to run 'Howl Against Censorship' yesterday on the Pacifica Web site because the Internet, satellite programming and cable TV are not regulated by the F.C.C.* The show included a 24-minute recording from 1959 of Ginsberg reading his poem; an interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the original publisher of 'Howl' and the defendant in the 1957 case; and a panel on the First Amendment. WBAI's decision was reported yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle.

'Since 2004 there’s really been a sea change,' said Ronald Collins, a First Amendment lawyer and an author, referring to changes since the Janet Jackson incident.** 'Howl' has been repeatedly broadcast, but now 'it’s a completely different era,' he said. 'The F.C.C. made it clear it has a zero-tolerance policy for offensive language and images.' ”

Jesus! You'd think if they could suck it up in 1957 we'd be able to get our little pinheads around things now, when we seem to think nothing of Christina Aguilera writhing in simulated sex, wearing hardly anything, on MTV while our 9-year-olds watch after school. Have we learned nothing?**

In a statement I love, one of the lawyers who argued for "Howl" in 1957 said: "It's like déja vu all over again."

Here's another link, courtesy of Jilly Ddybka's Poetry Hut: "ACLU ‘Howls’ Against FCC Destroying the Best Poems of a Generation":

"‘Howl,’ which winds through the beat-era landscape of sex, drugs and madness, contains enough of the FCC’s banned words to crush the $4 million operating budget of Pacifica station WBAI . The fine for ‘Howl’ would have been $325,000 for each word. The FCC has ramped up its power to punish broadcasters that air expletives or indecency, regardless of the intention or cultural relevance."

* Federal Communications Commission: "an independent United States government agency, directly responsible to Congress. The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable."

** Apparently there was a furore when Janet Jackson's dress slipped and her breast became momentarily visible? Only in America could this be considered a serious problem. It happened to Richard-&-Judy's Judy over here and nobody gave a toss, except to laugh at her for a couple of days.

** Don't answer that.

in which Sister Caroline has arrived

At last. And I think her new surroundings are going to suit her!

In the process of getting these things over here I have had cause to research these Currier & Ives pictures. The famous printers produced hundreds of prints of little girls, or different types of "American beauties," as well as of pious tots saying their prayers and so on; they absolutely typify the 19th-century sentimentality about children (and, by extension, everything else, it really is pernicious); but look! I love her expression. On le Duc's bedroom wall she looked at me trustingly - now she's here she looks more than a little satisfied. And they aren't, in the scheme of things, that expensive. I find myself within a hair of buying more. I've even discovered a dealer I like. (But don't worry! I don't have any money.)

arctic sangfroid

My best friend, Ms Rational Self-Determinism (a psychotherapist) said to her older kid, about one of her patients, that "he's a bit bipolar."

He said, alarmed: "He was bit by a polar bear?!?"

peach pie

Everywhere you go in the USA, there's pie. Fruit pies. Lemon chiffon pie, chocolate cream pie, coconut cream pie, things with meringue and without meringue. Boston cream pie. Soon there'll be pumpkin pie too. And everywhere, fruit. Blueberry pie. Apple pie. Peach pie. Strawberry rhubarb pie. Cherry pie.

I love this! In America you have to try, not to eat pie. Half the people I know prefer pie to cake. It's lighter, more flavourful, more differentiated; it feels better for you (especially fruit pie; the peach pie above has no fat except for the pastry, which I rolled thin, and about half as much sugar as a cake without icing): more like real food. Fruit pies also celebrate, in a very real way, the harvest, the fact that things come into season and are there in plenty. They're much more about the earth and the seasons and how we're all part of that. Plus you can have ice cream with it and nobody thinks that's at all excessive.

Not that I don't love a good cake! Dear me, no. Anyway, the aforementioned Boston cream pie, a lifelong love of mine, is a perfect celebration of cake, the way it comes into season any time you want - and eggs. Yes, it celebrates those. And chocolate icing. As a child, if ever presented with options that incuded a Boston cream pie, eg like at the Ponderosa Steak House, I invariably chose that. Why mess around with second-best? A Boston cream pie is essentially a sponge cake, layered, and in the middle is custard - technically, a thick crème patissière - with chocolate icing, not thick frosting mind, maybe more a glaze, on top. Much better than a chocolate cream pie, which must be the most boring dish on the planet. It's the best.

Meanwhile, here's my peach pie, making use of the last usable peaches of the year, fresh from the oven. I always, by the way, make a lattice crust. So much nicer in every way. I'm just sorry you can't hear it sizzling and see it bubbling, with the steam rising, and smell its peachiness wafting through the flat.

Also the best.

It'll be gone by nightfall.

(The rest of the meal: a mushroom ragoût with red wine and marsala, polenta, a roast free range chicken, and with the pie a choice of whipped cream or ice cream, and some seasonal fresh figs. I'm limiting Ms R S-D's wine consumption this afternoon to some reasonable amount, and to proper wine. The kids can stay up as long as they like.)

The Great Illness

Le duc has not been well. His blood pressure was down to nearly nil, and they rushed him to the Emergency Room, and Sis had to spend the whole night down there and then go to work on an hour of sleep, and Baby Bro drove down from upstate to be a nurse liaison officer, as well as a kid. I mean, a large, imposing man of a kid. Actually. He is a nurse. A kind of big, macho one.

So here are some highlights from the past 36 hours.

le Duc to Sis (on the subject of him having three kids): So who's your father?

Sis: You are.

Eyes widening: I am?

Sis: Yup!

le Duc: And who's his father?

Sis: Well, his father's you, too.

le Duc: And where's Adam?

Sis: He's Adam.

(Here I'm a little confused... after all, I wasn't there.)

le Duc, to Baby Bro: but who are you?

Adam (for it is he) (thinking on his feet): Butch! You remember Butch?

le Duc, fondly: Ah, Butch! (pause.) But where is Butch?

Baby Bro (thinking fast again): Well, Butch grew up...

Or: the nurse is there, trying to make le Duc wear his support stockings to prevent blood clots, which after all seems the least of one's worries. Adam says, "You might as well not take them out of the wrappers, he won't keep them on."

The nurse looks at him. Platitudes about protection from clots. Adam says to her, "why don't you ask my father? Dad, do you want to wear these stockings to protect you from blood clots?"

Le Duc says: "No."

Baby Bro says: "Take them away; the man has spoken." The nurse departs.

Le Duc says: "Good! That's better than that usually goes!"

Or:

Le Duc, talking about being everyone's dad ("There was a third one...", he said musingly), mentions that he saw our mother the other day. He means Mama B of course, and he did see her one day when she came to get me at the Hebrew Home: there was an historic occasion on the lawn, when they mainly asked each other how they were feeling lately, before digressing onto - of all things! - Edith Wharton (that was me). Sis says, cautiously, "you did? Well, you hadn't seen her in a long time! Was it nice?"

"Oh, yes," replies Dad.

"What did you talk about?"

"Oh," he says airily, "we talked about The Great Illness."

Anyway, I think he's back in the Home now. The crisis is over and there will be a hospice care meeting this week, and I think a "Do Not Move" order which means the next time he has a decline he won't be rushed to ER.

Meanwhile, I receive a letter from Parcel Force saying they are holding my last of three parcels - my remaining picture - my Currier & Ives Little Girl print, in a sweet Victorian Adirondack frame, a survivor of le Duc's long-ago days as a young gadabout in Greenwich Village ("Quick! There are some tourists! Do something native!"), the last of her kind from his once-large collection. They want £38 in VAT and handling charges. Such is one's relief that it hasn't disappeared, it seems like a small price to pay.