happy birthday Mark Twain

like me - writing in bed - but he doesn't look very comfortable...

172 today! Some age. Mark Twain built himself a magnificent house in Hartford after he got famous, and lived in it for over twenty years. I used to cut through his grounds to get to school, dawdled past the beautiful carriage house and fantasised about the lucky keepers who got to live in there, and felt Clemens generally as a benevolent presence in my childhood. His birthday message today is rather sombre, given the doings in the House of Baroque: "Let us endeavour so to live," he wrote, "so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."

And many happy returns.

a postcard from limbo

I'm talking about the state of suspended animation - the floating island between heaven and hell, not even bad enough to be all that interesting - not the novelty dance from Trinidad, amusing as that would be. Anyway, that would do my back in , which would be hell, so there we are.

And never mind that Limbo itself was voted out of existence by the Vatican a few years back! The concept, see, exists purely now as an essential paradigm within Western consciousness, whether one thinks one believes it or not, mwith the inevitable result that one will find oneself involuntarily transported to its shores from time to time, regardless.

This is different from any visit home I've ever had: one of a kind. One to remember. We're not doing any of the usual things, or not in the usual way anyway - I mean, me in Marshalls trying on shoes isn't exactly a novelty, but me lying in Dad's guest-room bed all morning for two consecutive days, in my sister's apartment, is. It's the first time I've ever, in over a hundred years, been back twice in three months.

I kind of like it. With her smoker's voice and my laryngitis the two of us sound like Marge Simpson's sisters.

And the coffee here is all-you-can-drink, unless you go into Starbucks and have a double (tepid) espresso, in which case you do have to lay off for a few hours.

The dogs are ecstatic to have me & Sis in the apartment during the day; one of them is trying to cut my toenails with his teeth as I type this, in between trying to eat my phone. Yesterday we went shopping. Today Mama Baroque flies in from Down South, where she now chooses to spend her winter months, and we will have lunch or something; no idea after that. I was hoping to find a pair of boots...

Tomorrow, the memorial service for le Duc "and beyond!" In the morning Sis & I will go get our nails done. Classic displacement activity, and another thing we've never done, not together on a visit anyway. The service, the reception. It's all very weird. Dad's not here - but for the moment, equally strangely but less drastically, neither is Mom. Life, eh.

Meanwhile, a look at my Google inbox reminds me that I've been commissioned (for no money - poets are such goddamned stiffs) to write a poem on the subject of "four calling birds" in preparation for some Christmas extravaganza being put on by Roddy Lumsden the week after I get back to London. Calling bird ideas welcome! (To be honest, I always find that those twelve long days of Christmas are another kind of limbo. But let's not go there yet... or maybe that's my idea. What do they call, precisely? And what does colly mean?)

are poets professional writers?

The time zone I'm now in is midway, morally at least, between London and Los Angeles. I know many of us are following the American scriptwriters' strike with keen eyes, waiting to see how soon they'll have to get better writers in for most Hollywood movies. What I hadn't realised, as I battled with the elements up there above the Atlantic yesterday,* was that the UK's poets have come out on strike in support. Read more at NewsBiscuit...

But seriously, folks!

It so happens that the poets of the UK are in process of organising themselves. In my Academi newsletter last week there was an item about the digitalisation of the magazine archives at the Welsh National Library. Newsletter recipients were invited to put their names on a list of writers refusing to authorise the use of their work in the project, as no provision had been made to pay the authors for this "new use" of copyrighted work. I think the protest is being mobilised by the poet Oliver Reynolds; the following letter from the Western Mail seems to be written by him, though I'm lifting it from the Academi newsletter:

"The National Library of Wales is currently digitising 90 Welsh periodicals and magazines. This project, Welsh Journals Online, aims to provide “free, online, searchable access” to complete runs of such titles as Barddas and Poetry Wales.

Set up by librarians and academics, the project does not seem to have consulted creative and professional writers or the bodies that represent them.

The project is receiving more than £840,000 in public funding. The Library, though, has not allocated any money for the people who wrote the articles, reviews, stories and poems that make up the magazines. Instead, it hopes that rights holders will allow their material to be used for free.

Writing is work. Professional writers are paid both for their work and for its re-use. In not making provision for the payment of copyright holders, the project is seriously flawed. Until this matter is addressed, writers who want to keep Welsh writing on a professional basis will not allow the National Library of Wales to digitise their work."

I wrote to Oliver mentioning the British Library's archiving programme, and of course the work the Poetry Library at the South Bank is doing with digital periodical archives. He wrote back to me thus:

"I have had a chat with Chris McCabe at the P Lib - and their scheme was far more mindful of the implications of what they were doing than NLW. On a list of FAQ about the NLW project on their site it says that material can be downloaded and printed. I would have thought that does "constitute new use of the material".

Now. Am I missing something? I'm happy to support the rights of writers. I really am. But there are a couple of strands here that I think may need unpicking before I'm convinced I really support this protest. One is whether poets can really benefit from this "fair pay for a fair day's work" organised labour mentality. And the other strand is the question raised by the whole digitisation issue, the availiability of original work by artists to be downloaded; we're familiar with this in connection with musicians. It's not going to go away, so it does behoove writers to develop a stance on it, I suppose.

But are poets "professional" in that strictly financial sense, which translates ownership of copyright automatically into shekels? I can't see it. I can remember telling my parents, one day when I was little, that I wanted to be a poet. I think. And they told me that all those poets you read in the books, the dead white males, they all had other jobs - they had to earn their living doing other things. I got my head round it and lo! here I am. Am I wrong, missing a trick? Most of the "professional poets" I know make their money from teaching, doing residencies, writing other things, or - as it happens - are supported at least in part by their partners. It certainly isn't something a single, sole-bill-paying parent could reasonably aspire to. They don't make their money from writing poetry. And even were they do protect with the fierceness of a mother lioness the copyright on all their published works, they still never would. Whcih is not to say they shouldn't, but merely that it is a point of principle, not a pecuniary one.

Given that even the specialist poetry press barely pays for the stuff in the first place - given that it is virtually without, or is even beyond, monetary value, I think this withdrawing of services pending remuneration makes no sense. It's a sideways thing. Nobody ever really said they wanted those services in the first place. Poetry is the dead cat of writing.

As to the intellectual property element, the fact of downloadability, well, the library is archiving magazines, not republishing individual works by individual authors. The fact is that anything, whether it says it's downloadable or not, is downloadable, if only in the form of a screen grab, and that's that. Once the eords exist in the order you've put them in, they simply exist: they could be copied with a pencil into a copybook, typed out and xeroxed, photographed and reproduced. Are these writers saying they don't want their words to be visible on a screen? Why?

In any case I just can't see that re-paying writers for work which is being reproduced within its original context - and for which they have already been either paid either once or, critically, not at all - is an idea that's going to go far. If anything, you'd think the library should pay the magazines for permissions, and the magazines would then pay the authors. But even that seems untenable.

Note that I'm not being paid for writing this blog. It's mine, I just write it. Even were I to write it for Comment is Free (say), I'd be getting paid less than writers who write for the paper Guardian. I have heard, incidentally, of commissioned articles ("commissioned" being, I think, crucial) by "professional" writers getting "spiked" onto CiF, whereupon their authors then become eligible only for the CiF fee - which is, at an hourly rate, about enough to cover a first draft. (Interesting question: which is smaller? The CiF fee or the kill fee they'd have been paid if the piece hadn't been used at all? Now this is worth looking into.)

The issue of whether writing as an activity has an intrinsic market value is an important one and isn't going to go away. To this extent, writers are right to protest (although, on that basis, I should not be blogging). But can this apply to purely creative writing? Only, I think, once that writing, the body of work, has a clearly established market value. Even a novel, once it's published, has that. But a single poem lodged, otherwise out-of-print and never intended to be anything but, in a back issue of a magazine?

And is it different if it's a review? Really?

Are these poets protesting against a real abuse of their position in the marketplace, or are they protesting against a state of affairs they think is unfair? I'm not sure what I think. There is a big part of me that thinks, Chidiock Tichborne asked to be paid for his Elegy; but then maybe I'm just inured to the evil system. It certainly would be nice to just write a poem and then be able to fire it off somewhere with the aim of paying the Virgin Media bill. Maybe the poets are right to protest.

Ideas, anyone?


* and it was no joke; the worst element I encountered was a nasty little glass of Virgin wine that got knocked over by an empty plastic food container as I struggled to eat my "meal" in six inches of space, and saturated the entire left leg of my only jeans with its redness, wineyness and general nastiness. I realise this may only sound as bad as "Islington poet drops virgin olive oil on toe whilst wearing sandals," but let me assure you it was not pleasant.

in which Ms B is three thousand miles away

And that's just the jet lag. It's Thursday, isn't it?

It's odd: I'm writing this on my laptop, in a bed I've been in before - but not here. I'm at Sis' apartment. The last time I was here, in September, I was on a different bed, and the last time I was in this bed it was in the guest room at my father, le Duc de Baroque's place. It's a great bed, antique cream-painted cast-iron with brass knobs at the corners. (Puts my own new Ikea effort rather in perspective, no matter how in love I may be with my new mattress!)

Dotted around the walls are old pictures, including a magnificent old photograph of some ancestor or other, in an oval walnut frame with convex glass, and an Adirondack-framed sampler that reads "God Bless Our School." The Colonial rocker with the gold wheatsheaf painted on the back is in the nook by the window. The bookcase from le Duc's den is in the little alcove here, full of Sis' books. It all looks very cosy and lovely. And it feels as weird as hell.

And I can't go & make some coffee without waking up the dogs. (But who cares about them!)

Incidentally, my greeting from the little mopheads last night (or "at 4.30 this morning" depending which time zone you inhabit) surpassed all expectation. Tai in particular was jumping up so furiously (all the way to my thighs!) that I thought he was going to go over backwards - even though I don't have John Ash's Selected Poems with me this trip. (He did seem very interested in my cherry Strepsils.) And they very gratifyingly did that "bark-till-you-scream" thing I find so amusing.

elegantly dressed flying

Today Ms Baroque will be on a plane (reading matter: Hecht, Fainlight, and The Lost Luggage Porter by Andrew Martin); by tonight she will be in New York; by the early hours she will be back in Connecticut, getting jumped on by her sister's library-book-eating little pedigree dogs.

There will be a rather large ducal memorial service ("I have to call the soloist, we go into rehearsal tomorrow") on Saturday, followed by a sojourn in the soothing Catskills... let's just say I know a couple of nice coffee shops in Woodstock.

Postcards will be sent, possibly with pictures.* Elegance is of course paramount. Return is scheduled for Friday week. Wish you were here.

* nb. Oh my God, I almost forgot to pack the camera!!

the death of wit: what is it for?

Children's television is going downhill, we hear. No kidding. To coin a phrase. Apparently this is because of ever-falling budgets - and indeed, the BBC has cut its children's programming budget by 10%. Our kids are now to be fed a TV diet of cartoons, reruns and cheap American imports (including, presumably, the now-pc Sesame Street).*

How can we expect the kind of high-quality programming our children need - and they do need it, because they will get something in any case and we need to prevent them getting the stale, content-free, mind-numbing alternative - to materialise if the money isn't there to make it? Why must they think the whole world is like either a reality TV setup, or a celeb opportunity, or an ersatz American school, or computer-generated?

So. Not like grownup television, then. Nooo... Of course, everyone knows of the handy coincidence, that reality TV is so much cheaper to produce than, let's say, a new sitcom or drama - but that's okay, right? And everybody also knows that kids don't watch kids' TV anymore anyway, except for CBeebies. As long we we have Big Brother, the X Factor, Wife Swap, and the latest Stephen Poliakoff... oh, sorry, where was I - I must have dropped off -

I was away, so I missed writing about Jeremy Paxman's famous MacTaggart lecture in August, when he asked "What is television for?" He threw down the glove - and it seems the challenge is being taken up in the negative: "it's not for this, it's not for this..." It reminds me of the hero of the opera I wrote with my best friend in 6th grade, whose catchphrase went, "I won't marry you, I won't marry you, I won't marry yooouu..." I can't remember who, if anyone, he did marry. Maybe we never finished the opera.

In yesterday's Guardian Peter Fincham dusted off Paxo's question and sent it to lots of people for an answer. It seems none of them have answered it in a practical way. No one can say "Ban Big Brother, scrap the next top bimbos, do away with Extreme Makeover or whatever it is, and bring back The Good Life, Father Ted, the Forsyte Saga (not again - ed.), Tiswas, The Old Grey Whistle Test and LOTS more things like Life on Mars. We want intelligent quiz shows,** proper news, stories that ARE stories, and maybe some new Slaters to duke it out with Ronnie & Roxy. We want documentaries like that one about Ancient Egypt that the Baroque kids loved so much. Make everyone watch Dennis Potter's famous final interview again, and try to learn something from him" It's still, in other words, mostly a load of blather because nobody really wants to rock the boat. The bottom line really is the bottom line (cue line of fat arses).

The people who say we can get by with bad television*** (except for Poliakoff - he, presumably because he is its main beneficiary, with his affectless exercises in po-faced turgidity, thinks British TV is doing never better! and excelsior! into the ever- glistening future!) seem to think it is because we don't really want TV any more. The kids are all watching streamed movies, Smack the Pony and X Factor on catch-up TV, anyway.

Shame on us.

Meanwhile, the good news is that the original episodes of Sesame Street - one of the most pioneering and enduring programmes ever made for preschool children - are now available on DVD. But watch out. They're only suitable for adults, and that's according to the current Sesame Street producers. The concerns involve the irresponsible behaviour modelled by both humans and puppet characters in the early days.

Picked out for particular opprobrium is the spoof of the sainted Alistair Cooke, who used to present Masterpiece Theater on US public television: a character called Alistair Cookie, who presents Monsterpiece Theater, who initially smokes and then, cookie-monster-style, eats his pipe. Other examples of "bad role models" include the character Bob, holding a girl's hand and taking her home with him (to meet his wife and drink some milk, asd it happened); Oscar the Grouch, who spreads gloom and misanthropy with no recourse to counselling, therapy, group hugs or prozac; the scapegoating - and possible unreality - of the Snuffleupagus; etc, etc. Even in the real-life sections there are worrying trends.

Have a look, here. All those teats. And drinking unpasteurised milk, from non-EU-approved buckets! And as someone or other has pointed out, it's even full-fat.

Of course, Life on Mars adressed all this head-on with its idyllic view of the (sexism-n-racism -n-all) 70s. Yes: we all miss the days when you could just live. Be yourself. Deal with what you're dealing with, not what someone else will think of how you're dealing with it, whether it's going to make someone lots of money, or whether it might make you famous.

* Then again, I remember being horrified years ago when the first Harry Potter books came out in America with the "Englishisms" edited out - so that Hogwartrs is referred to as a "high school." and even slang terms are Americanised. Given this as a comparitor, I think we should be grateful that the UK TV bosses are happy for their sprigs to imbibe all that Americana, instead of sticking to a more local flavour. At least it shows someone is capable of not taking everything literally.

Hmm, or maybe we should get Gordon Brown onto it. How will we define, and forge the "new Englishness" if our kids don't have a cultural model for anything further east than California?

** Not me, okay. I don't watch quiz shows. But you know what I mean.

*** Okay, Bleak House was tremendous, exceptional. And in the summer I liked Debbie Horsfield's True Dare Kiss, with Dervla Kirwan et al. But week on week, not that I watch much anyway, there is nothing to watch.

at least they're not idoits

I'm just shamelessly stealing this post. Kris from Stoke Newington, one of my favourite bloggers and definitely someone you want inside your tent pissing out (as the saying goes), has lately taken to recording conversations she overhears. I'm jealous, I'm envious, and I'm thinking I don't spend enough time on the buses these days...*

She writes:

On the 73, approx 11:00 am today (and no, American friends, there is no Thanksgiving holiday here).

Two school-girls on the bus. Let’s call them “Little” and “Large”: -

Little to Large: “I was with Hayley and Chelsea and I floored him. I fucking floored him and he didn’t do nuffink. Ask my grandad.

Large, shouting down her mobile: “WE’RE ON THE BUS TO KING’S SQUARE, THEN WE’RE GOING OUT WEST”.

Little: “Give me that phone”. Now down phone: “You fucking wanker, next time I see you, I’m gonna scratch your face up”.

Large, taking phone back: “YEAH, OUT WEST, BUT WE’RE GOING TO KING’S SQUARE FIRST”.

Little, looking out the window: “OMG! There’s my school police officer. Tap on the window”.

But what I really love? The labels she's given it: antisocial behaviour, idiots, London.

* Edited in. Wait. You don't have to be on a bus. Mlle B is sitting here watching America's Next Top Goddamned Model. Lots of sounds of girls weeping, sounding heartbroken - they probably broke a nail - and then inspirational, or exhortational, blather from all the weird people who run it. I'm not listening. Then, from the wall of sound, emerges the sentence, spoken by a voice neither male nor female but merely vapid: "Okay girls, and we're gonna do do four sides of your personality."

books of the year - no, really

Reading the Observer's books of the year list - presumably designed to boost sales etc, as well as giving all the oiks a chance to see what the "real writers"* are reading - I'm struck as usual by the same thing that strikes me every goddamn year.

This year I'm wondering if participants are actually briefed specifically not to mention poetry! It's only a whole genre of literature, one widely considered to be a pretty major, important genre. But it's an internally-focused genre, and we are nowadays suspicious of that kind of thing, as you'll see below.

Andrew Motion, our poet laureate, chooses the letters of Ted Hughes. A gargantuan tome one must read if one is at all interested in - er - letters? (He says it allows us to see the range of Hughes' interests, as well as the generosity of his spirit. I'm all for this. But I think I discerned the range of his interests from reading his poems, actually, along with his essays on poetry.) This choice would be fine and great, as far as I'm concerned, if practically anyone had chosen any poems, or poems by living, non-Nobel-winning poets. But they haven't, so I'm looking for an example here. Motion is our poet laureate, so couldn't he be encouraging us to read the little blighters themselves, not the spinoffs?

Salley Vickers wins my heart a little by talking about how unputdownable Paul Muldoon's The End of the Poem is. I know that technically this is spinoff material too, but these lectures are brilliant in the same way his poems are, and it really is one of my books of the year (of which more presently).

The poets on the list who choose non-poetry books are:
Gerard Woodward
Owen Sheers
James Lasdun
Jackie Kay
John Burnside

The thing that strikes me about all these poets is that they all write novels, too - or memoirs: in any case, these are poets who write something besides poetry. Sheers in particular has said he feels the poetry was a way of getting into writing novels, which just makes me want to never read any of his poetry.

This brings me to Ralph Steadman. His entry is actually great, in its way, pointing to the very phenomenon that renders everyone nowadays so suspicious of a mere innocent little art relying only on words - so I'll quote it in full:

"I took two challenging books to read in a cabin on Lake Huron in Canada in September: The Idiot by Dostoevsky (Penguin Classics) and District and Circle by Seamus Heaney (Faber). But what instead caught my eye was a 'reader's proof' lying on the coffee table of The Cult of the Amateur (Nicholas Brealey) by Andrew Keen. He has had the temerity to point out that our search for instant wisdom through, say, Google and Wikipedia provides not necessarily what is most true or reliable - merely what is most popular. I read it in one sitting then went outside to fish for our supper, firmly believing that the poor fish that swallows my squirming worm on a barbed hook is infinitely smarter than the idiot on the other end holding the rod."

See? He actually took a poetry book with him on holiday! (Heaney. Oh, I hear you say. A Nobel-winning, obvious choice.) But he didn't even read it. (And, like, wasn't the whole thing about District and Circle that it could have been a little more challenging?) Oh well...

More excitingly, Toby Litt chooses an actual book of poetry! He read it! He liked it! He was overjoyed to find it at all, which says something. But it's by Celan: long dead. A new edition, and wonderful that someone's publishing it, so full marks to Litt for that. Shame he felt the need to apologise for Celan having "a reputation for obscurity" - but brave to admit to liking it, I suppose! Now, if we can just get Litt reading someone who might still be in a position to pick up their royalties...

And now to the finale. Even Benjamin Zephaniah has written novels for young people - and plays - as well as poetry. Maybe the editors simply can't see that there are poets who write only poetry (and, maybe, poetry criticism, as so many do, of course). Lots of people who've never written a thing but novels have been asked to contribute. And people who write journalism, and people who write biography. I really don't get why a non-non-poetry-publishing poet couldn't have been called on to give his or her book of the year.

The way this list has been compiled, I mean commissioned, really does reinforce my bugbear about the bookshops - the big chains, the empires - and the newspapers - the weird symbiotic hegemony that makes up whatever passes for the"Establishment"** - not even wanting "living" poetry to sell.

Anyway, Zephaniah has, like Toby Litt, chosen a book of poetry! As his book of the year! It is Derek Walcott's Collected.

Oh, I hear you going. Right.

Well, why not. But you know, Walcott, though another Nobel-winner, is alive, and not a novelist, and that is really something. And it sounds like he read the book.

It was a year in which not much reading got done in Baroque Mansions, as it happens. Maybe more of a Year of Movies, what with one thing and another. Could I choose just one? Maybe not, but fortunately I don't have to. I haven't read any big important books on the Holocaust, or memoirs of anyone important, or anything like that.

Various friends wrote books which I loved, for example Annie Freud's The Best Man That Ever Was and Isobel Dixon's A Fold in the Map.

I read Alison Weir's biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, at least half of it.

I read The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene, and it was gorgeous and delicious. Images of it still float through my mind.

Persuasion was great when I was ill in the spring.

Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers, by Antonia Quirke, made me laugh when I needed it - a fresh, funny, fun book

Fanny Brawne's letter to Fanny Keats were incredibly moving and surprising, & both girls came alive in a way they never have before, unsurprisingly. The most surprising aspect of the letters is why they are not better-known!

I read John Ash's poetry for the first time and loved loved loved it.

I read, still in the A's, Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and found it engrossing, fascinating, exhilarating in places, but unconvincing.

Kenneth Koch's long poem The Art of Poetry was sent me by a friend, and brightened things up considerably for a spell. I was going to write something about it here but then realised that all my mooted passages to quote were merging into each other, and that what I really wanted to do was simply quote the whole poem. Sixteen pages, if I rfecall correctly, and under copyright. but great joy and happiness.

Autumn Journal by MacNeice (of course; sorry to bring it up again) coloured a huge part of my mind for much of the year.

The End of the Poem by Muldoon is an absolutely spot-on choice, idiosyncratic and erudite, off-the-wall enough to invite the reader really to engage with its conclusions, "challenging" in the way that is really only invigorating.

The Speed of Dark by Ian Duhig, a slightly more recherché volume than some but one which nonetheless anyone should be able to read and appreciate, seems to have started me on a little journey of my own, back into the Middle Ages - a slightly different one from the one I loved as a teenager, but recognisable and much-loved - kind of like moving back to your old neighbourhood but in a different street.

Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra - if you were looking for something to encourage people to read contemporary, vibrant poetry written by someone who's young (enough!) and not scarily academic or whatever, I'd choose this. This is my nod to market forces. After all, they've given it a second cover treatment in less than a year.

This is almost all the books I read this year. Fortunately, I'm not trying to sell books. The way I read, I don't read whole books so much as the poems or essays that are in them. This can therefore only be a partial list. And what it's a partial list of is my intellectual life of the year.


* we will just pretend we didn't see Katie Melua on that list.

** a friend of mine, a graphic designer, is working on a commission for a cover for a novel. The publishers needed hisinitial concepts in in time for their meeting with Waterstones.

poetry in church, but not church poetry

Last night's reading was part of a series Oxfam have been running to celebrate the launch of the Life Lines 2 CD. Which you can buy in any Oxfam shop or here. We were picked up at St Albans station and taken to the church where the reading was being hosted, by a 35-year-old local poetry group called Ver Poets, and as the car approached the place our jaws dropped slightly.

What a shame it was pitch black out - but the stained glass windows gleamed very effectively in the dark. The church, St Michael's, is guarded by giant yews, and dates from 948, when they built it with bricks and flint taken from the ruins of the old Roman town. Verulamium.

It's a trip outside London! Nothing in London is that old, the Great Fire took care of all that. But in this little building, even many of the "later" changes happened in the 12th century. The lovely round arches, so early there was no trace yet of a gothic point. It has a gorgeous 15th-century timber roof, and in the choir the ceiling, behind the black beams, is painted red. The walls are white, the pulpit is oak and Elizabethan.

We felt like we'd just wandered into an Agatha Christie story. Outside, behind floating clouds above the yews, there was even a full moon. Definitely a step up from that sweaty little room under the Poetry Cafe! (Sorry guys. You can work hard but you can't make it better.)

The church is built on top of where the Roman forum was, where they tried and condemned the first English martyr, Alban (now of course St Alban). Layers on layers of people, of our doings, and it is hard, even for me, now to realise that Alban and the Romans stood there on that spot just like us, no more "lost in the mists of time" or exotic or even just dead than we are now. They were just like us, only (to borrow two lines from MacNeice) "it was all so unimaginably different/ and all so long ago."

In the kitchen there was a very tiny arched doorway; I filled it, all 5'4" of me. I wished the circumstances were better for wandering around and having a proper look. It must be the most amazing place to go to a Christmas Eve midnight mass - but don't even get me started about Christmas.

The place was very full, by poetry reading (and indeed probably, these days, church) standards, full of people who had paid money and were keen to hear some poetry. We were to be reading with a Bishop. Walking in, looking around, taking the measure of it, and seeing printed in the programme the rather random set list I'd provided weeks ago, I quickly realised something had to be done. Out must go the poem about the guy who shacked up with his nanny. Also out, the satirical one about Adam and Even and the nature of "meaning" as fractured through Wittgenstein. "Dinosaur Opera" just felt too silly. And I think there was something else. The sonnet called Our Passion I had to read, as it's the one on the CD. It's full of bitches and crones and geezers, all kissing. In church! Ew! But I changed what I could, sitting there while the Bishop chatted to me before the reading. (I liked him tremendously. His poems were also funny and accomplished, and he read them, of course, beautifully.)

Even as it was, I read a rather sweet thing I thought would go down well, and it did go down well. It's beautiful: The Bog of Despair. Three people told me later they had loved it. But the line about the used condom hanging on a tree branch on Hampstead Heath kind of escaped my memory till I was right up on it... it did get a little laugh, though... you just can't win.

(Todd Swift, after the reading, talking about the audience and the august surroundings: "well, you read about a rubber full of come, didn't you Katy?"

His wife Sara says, "But the audience liked it, they laughed!"

Todd says: "Yes, nervously!" But no.)

Todd read well, his Houdini poem which I love - like an Oedipal version of Roethke's My Papa's Waltz. And I think he wins the prize for Title of the Evening, for his poem Auden in Snow, a description of a photograph I've never seen, but would love to, of Auden walking through a blizzard in NYC.*

I'd spent most of the day in bed, as it happens, feeling ill, drinking tea, watching The Singing Detective. The baroque throat held out until after my bit, thank God; I sounded a bit like Lauren Bacall (and they had a great microphone). A woman who'd been sitting at the back even came up to me in the break and said what a beautiful reading voice I had, such lovely intonations and shadings! It was lovely of her, but I thought mournfully to myself: "alas..." and indeed, after the break I could feel my vocal chords packing their bags and leaving.

The other readers were nice, and the audience definitely receptive, and the evening had a wonderful friendly atmosphere to it. As Su Lycett from Oxfam pointed out, the first Life Lines CD has raised £50,000 for Oxfam. And as she pointed out, that may be about enough to build a garage in St Albans, but it'll do a lot more in the places where Oxfam is using the money. So buy it - but don't listen to my bit, I've tried and it was horrible.

* We had to choose and read a poem by someone not ourselves, and were asked to make it a "classic" or something recognisable. For some strange reason, all those long weeks ago, I had chosen Part 1 of Auden's In Memory of WB Yeats:

...But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers...

smilin' through

(me, going to America next Wednesday; I really must get hold of the dvd)

My title was the name of the song and dance variety show my grandmother used to perform in, on the Chautaqua circuit, back in the 20s and 30s. An' it's what I'm doin' now.

Except I started badly, by not being able to get that weird Marianne Faithful song from The Girl on the Bridge out of my head. Agh! So on an impulse on my customary walk up to the Angel from Moorfields Eye Hospital (a miracle! my eyes are better than they've been ever since my Bad Eye Patch last year, exultate jubilate!) (via the Charles Lamb, those of you who've been paying attention), I nipped quickly into HMV. I thought, here I am telling myself I can't watch the film again: who's to say? And when I got into HMV, lo, it was another miracle. For there, the last one left, was The Girl on the Bridge, starring Daniel Auteuil and Vanessa Paradis (looking like the love child of Johnny Depp and Tatum O'Neal), and directed by my hero Patrice Leconte, for £7.

(But get this. Ridicule, which I also badly want to re-watch (starring Fanny Ardant and the magnificently sexy Charles Berling), is going for £20. What is that about!? I know it's marvellous, as in being a marvel. I do own it on video; I just can't be arsed lugging the poxy little TV from the kitchen, and then there's nowhere to put it down so I'll have to balance it on the edge of the bed, and you know. But it is a great movie. Leconte, almost alone I think of people who are making movies today, makes movies that are like poems. Strong words - and I'm sayin' 'em - remember, Bergman is dead.*)

So now I really can't get that song out of my head. I might as well be humming Jacques Brel for all the cheerfulness it's imparting. It doesn't help that in the song, Marianne Faithful sounds vaguely like a circus dwarf. I'm sure that's why they chose it.

So then, today. What had I thought of out of the blue the other day? And then, amazingly, saw it written about in today's Independent Arts & Culture Review?

Fitzcarraldo, that's what.

Well. So, after I went to the opticians (Otto, and I think I won't write up the whole saga after all; I've never felt the inspiration on me; suffice to say that I started the project of getting these new glasses in mid-June; it is the new assistant, John, who has managed this for me) I walked the length of Upper Street till I got back to HMV. Pavlov's dogs, or what. But all they had in there was a boxed set of Herzog and Kinski, five or six films for £18, and it all seemed a bit too Christmas-presenty - for which, read self-indulgently expensive. But I might have to go back and get it for myself for Christmas, that's how I usually manage these things. I remember Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre Wrath of God, Nosferatu, Woyzeck. I mean really. On Amazon.com it's going for $80.

When they were making Fitzcarraldo, when the safety director learned that Herzog actually intended to pull this boat up a 40-degree muddy hillside, he quit. That's how insane it was. And, in the movie at least, all based on the equally insane premise of building an opera house in the jungle - which regular readers will know is an idea that would go down a storm in Baroque Mansions - they did it! They dragged that thing all the way up, and across, with no special effects. I do think I should see this movie this week. Steamships are nearly as heavy as airplanes, and hearts.

(And here's a great thing: "Similarly, Klaus Kinski, almost gave up his life during the filming of Fitzcarraldo. Known as a temperamental actor, he constantly argued with Herzog and he threatened to leave the film set before finishing. Kinski was a constant source of tension as he argued with Herzog and other members of the film crew. Moreover, he seriously upset the indigenous extras. In his documentary film My Best Friend [sic], Herzog tells how one of the indigenous chiefs offered to kill Kinski for him. In addition, Herzog relates how he himself threatened Kinski and told the cantankerous actor that if Kinski proceeded with his threat to leave the set, that Herzog would kill Kinski and then commit suicide." I think I saw the film in about 1986 or '87; I was in love with Klaus Kinski after that.)

So then I went to Borders. No Fitzcarraldo at all, which makes me think it may not be available separately. They have Ridicule for £19.99. Clearly the standard. Why? Because it's in colour?? So unfair.

But guess what. L'Homme du Train for £4.99. More Leconte. I love this movie. These movies by this man are about the meaning of life itself, and gorgeously shot. Come on.

See how easily the bug bites? I also wanted to get Le Dernier Metro. Young Depardieu, and a classic. But it was also £20, so noooo.

I got some wonderful things for my boys, but I can't say what they are. It's not Christmas yet. They are things I would love to own myself, but also perfect (I very much hope) for them. Let's just say some of it's the best television ever made. And there's a detective, and he's musical. The Urban Warrior won't mind if the cellophane's been taken off.

* nb., Herzog has a new movie out. And not forgetting Wong Kar-Wai.

winging it in the Charles Lamb

I'm in Elia St on the Charles Lamb's free wifi. I've always said if the dear man were alive today he'd have a blog, he was just the type. Strangely, tonight the pub is strewn about with "Happy Thanksgiving" banners, the mantelpiece mirror is covered with huge saccharine cut-outs of pilgrim and Indian children, and the menu is full of corn chowder and pumpkin pie.

I guess nobody in my family is probably giving much thanks today - though, as was said to me the other day, my father "is at peace." Which is more than I can say for me. But these things happen and holidays come and go, do they not, as regular as the seasons. And the whole point is that they happen regardless of everything else. And Ms Baroque pretty much gave up on Thanksgiving, as it happens, as soon as reaching the Shores of Albion: hurrah! No more most boring day of the year! No more White-Witch-like Christmas Without Presents. The day on which, whilst not being allowed to eat anything till 4pm and while the grownups were all watching some football game, the most amusing thing you could do was walk to the main road and stand in the middle of it, just to prove that there was really no traffic.

Of course it was le Duc himself who deprived me of my lunch all those Thanksgivings. I can see him now, bringing an enormous platter of turkey into the dining room (and again on Christmas). Anyway, families, eh. I'll be flying over in less than a week to greet the deadness of my dad. It's not good.

Our Charles Lamb was someone who understood the strangeness of family dynamics. His sister Mary went crazy one day and, after some horrible chasing-round-the-table-&-screaming scene, stabbed their mother. Fatally. She also put a carving fork into their father's forehead, but the father survived, thanks to young Charles' efficacy in finding the right medical help (as well as an asylum for Mary and a funeral for their mother). The penalties for murder back then didn't really bear thinking about, and nor did the "asylums" - Mary was sent to a private asylum for a time but Charles managed to get her out, and off any trace of a murder charge, and she lived with him until he died. Which wasn't very old, poor thing - 59 - possibly hastened by the stress of his life. He worked in the accounting offices at the East India Company (see, the "famous authors" - even the "dead white males" - weren't all grand), and wrote a wonderful essay about the excessive jubilation he felt when they called him in one day and gave him a pension. (I mean, one he could live on! That's not going to happen to me before the age of 59. Apparently raising the next generation, unlike working in - say - Macdonald's, isn't pensionable.)

Anyway, he and Mary got on happily enough, but she had periodic fits and had to be sent to the asylum - there were a succession of them - but in between they had weekly soirées where she played whist and he had his friends round - including Coleridge, etc. He wrote his wonderful essays, and poems and letters, and she wrote most of the famous Lambs' Tales From Shakespeare. Charles said of his sister, "We are like tooth ache and his friend gum boil, an uneasy kind of ease, a comfort of rather an uncomfortable sort."

And imagine knowing what the consequences of one of Mary's attacks might be! I sometimes think of that: what it took to take her in. And he never married, never had children.

His essays are funny and lovely, but I love his letters even better. Many of the letters act as first drafts for ideas later kitted out in the essays - the best among these I think are the one where he left work and the one about Coleridge's shocking book-borrowing habits. (That one is actually rather affecting, such was his love for his troublesome friend.)

And there we are. The pub has only been called the Charles Lamb for about two years, clearly named in honour of being in Elia Street - which is clearly named, as Elia was Lamb's nom de plume, in honour of Lamb having lived around the corner for a time. I love it round here. But it's too dark, and I'm not going to eat the Thanksgiving food.

And now the bar guy has taken away my glass - why do they do that?? thus removing all trace of an excuse for sitting here. Home one goes.

the war on the streets: are the kids alright?

Suzanne Moore writes about Etem Celebi, on Comment is Free, in much the same terms as my post last week when the news first came through. And for the same reason: her daughter went to school with him, and in fact with my Blond Rock God:

"My daughter comes home cold: 'A boy I know got killed today.'

Lots of people knew and liked Etem. My neighbours' son played football with him. I don't imagine he was was a saint but he certainly wasn't some underworld mastermind. Most teenage boys act harder than they are, don't they? They have to. Unless they withdraw into their rooms smoking skunk, listening to angsty music, waiting till the next time they get mugged. But those ones that kill each other, they are not part of our world are they, our grownup, middle-class world?

Even the bruschetta-munchers of our gentrified high street have gone quiet this time..."

I've had some conversations with Mlle B about this over the past few days: there was apparently a school assembly, but the real news is bubbling up from the park, after school, and the playground at lunchtime. Mlle B lists for me her friends who were friends with Etem, who's the most upset, what people are saying. Etem was well-known among the kids, a big personality, and a familiar face even to those who didn't know him.

We talk about how the famous X Factor star Leona Lewis has now said she never met Etem - as if his friends would just, at the moment of his death, invent a random celebrity for him to have been mates with. (And, of course, it is obscene that such a friendship got him any more column inches: the fact of bieng London's 23rd teenager to be murdered this year should have been enough.) I wonder if Lewis is distancing herself from the idea of "gangs," following press speculation about Etem's death being retaliation for a gang stabbing - what with her CD in the charts and all. "That's just stupid," says Mlle B scornfully. "She grew up in Hackney. If you grew up in Hackney you just do know people in gangs."

And this is it: the children, the ones to whom this is life and death, are not glamorising the phenomenon. The word "gang" to them seems not to have the same power it has to the media, and even to the middle class grownups in their midst. We, the grownups - the ones who write and read the media and browse the home section of the Sunday papers with half an idea of going down to Habitat and getting that lamp - think "gang" means sometihng dark and mysterious and furtive, and above all "other." But the kids know that, as has ever been the case, allegiances are fluid. It's hard to have that mystique when you've known someone since you were both six.

Then again, and I'm sure I've written about this in the past, it became clear to me when my eldest son was about 12 - he's now 18 - that the boys are living in a different world from ours. They walk the same streets, they go into the same corner shops, they cut through the same park. But my world is essentially safe, essentially nice ("look at those curtains! Wonder where they got them? Hmm, shall I nip into Fresh & Wild?"), and full of people who are also essentially safe and nice, standing at the bus stop or whatever. Theirs is all about not getting your phone stolen, not getting beaten up, not getting in trouble, not pissing off the rudeboys, not getting happy-slapped: not, in other words, attracting the wrong kind of attention.

Without wishing to sound at all histrionic, I can say that my eldest - known in Baroque Mansions as the Urban Warrior - reached a point where he just found getting mugged boring. It was all kids on kids, and the etiquette seems pretty much to be that boys don't mug girls. So even the girls of 14 or so have an easier time than the boys. In the end some group of boys would say to my kid, "give us your phone," & flash something that could have been a knife, and he'd get his phone out and say: "Just leave me the fucking SIM card." And they would.

He has developed a peculiar hybrid style of dress and manner that reflects his environment. He can talk like a rudeboy and not get hassled; he can fight; and yet he's white and long-haired and, actually, pretty hippie-looking. He used to get a bit of bother for being too posh when he talked, but now he just isn't. Posh, that is.

Anyway, the kids are great. I get the clear picture that the teenagers of Stoke Newington are supporting each other through this, that there is no "them & us" going on. One of them is dead, under the worst circumstances, and they all know they're in it together. And tucked away in the predictably tedious comments on Suzanne's piece, I found this, from her daughter Bliss, who went to school all those years with both Etem and my Nat:

"Well let me start with the obvious,I AM SUZANNE MOORE'S DAUGHTER.

But no this doesnt mean im biased, in fact the opposite; I often disagree with what she writes and if you are a regular reader of her's you will know we dont have a perfect relashonship.

How ever I feel she is right to say the in-sensitve , narrow minded , 50 somethings are almost oblivous to what is really going on.
If you truly believe that these young boys (many of whom have got me through hard times or even just made me laugh in the corridor) deserve what they get then I am forced to say WHAT KIND OF PARENTS ARE YOU? Would you say this if your own son had been shot,point blank in the local chicken shop- surely a unique love you have only for your child is practicaly unconditional?!?

Dont get me wrong I am not dis-agreeing that gun-crime has got to a war-like state , and NO WAY am I saying its ok (considering i have lost two close firends ) but where do you belive these boys are getting money to buy these weapon? Surely it couldnt be the middle class' drug problem?

The fact that goverment claim to being doing more for safer neighbourhoods seems to have wiped thier hands clean of the 23 gang-related murders this year, where in fact this superior attitude the majority of you seem to have is destroying the left overs of our perfect western society.The class gap is now larger than ever with so called "hoodies" being neglected by the health,education and federal "systems".

I am asking you please lets do something about this NOW before a school corridors are empty ....

Bliss Moore (16) x"

le Duc de Baroque

April 6, 1928-November 20, 2007

I've done all the things today I probably shouldn't: I went for lunch, as planned, with a friend; I met someone else for a much-needed - as it seemed - drink in town, and got home way too late to a stony-faced Mlle B, who said at the door, "You took your time!" though it hardly seemed to me that I had. Well, I have no idea what I'm doing. I just have to look for a flight.

I said to Mama Baroque this morning, when she rang me (at 5am her time, on my mobile; I barely needed to pick up the call, really), "I am going into denial NOW, and I am not coming out till I am on the plane." She said to me, "That's FINE. Just get your sister to let me know when you're coming." I said, "I said, Ma, that I'm going into denial, not hiding: I will call you."

And ever since then I have felt as if I were drunk: up until someone took me into Le Beaujolais in Litchfield St, and plied me with wine, whereupon I felt sober, up until it all went out of hand.

Ain't it always the way. The whole world's insane. I've noticed a tendency to be very short with everyone today, and if you are one of those people then I apologise.

Oh and I am reading tomorrow night, at the Poetry Cafe, at 22 Betterton St WC2, if any regular readers feel like coming along.


















Sis tells me It's a lucky thing I wasn't there today when they went to the funeral home. The guy there asked them what they would want done with the "cremains." When she told this to my brother on the phone later, he said, "how about a crebox?"

Then the guy in the funeral home says something like, "well, that's enough of that, why don't we talk about merchandise..." (or something) - and my nephew leans over and says to Sis, "do they do commemorative mugs?"

anything goes in poetry

Poetry readings again. George Szirtes writes, on his blog:

"There is the history of reading aloud as entertainment for a small circle, an act of intimacy, as it might be to children or to a lover or as a couple reading passages to each other in bed or over the table, or maybe a small group of friends. I hesitate to call this entertainment simply because entertainment suggests amusements and distractions and this is the opposite. It involves trust and close attention, because the material read might be of the sort that starts thoughts, memories, feelings and ideas, and the level of communication is such that one might say to the other: Wait a minute! Read that bit again! The noise is quiet and low, capable of being broken, the whole moving like a fugue in chamber music, returning, reiterating, nothing detachable."

I think he's got something here. And as far as the intimacy analogy goes, I can say I long ago became aware that my style, in reading to an audience, owes more to my years of reading aloud The Runaway Bunny or My Naughty Little Sister than anything else. This is probably a good thing: if you think about it, you realise that in reading to a child you are more than anything trying to get, and keep, the child's attention, and make the child happy.

George talks about three traditions that feed into poetry readings; the above is only the first. The experience he describes might be an ideal: I've certainly been to enough readings where nothing of the kind ever happened - but that may be partly the reader's fault, in not addressing the audience properly - not being intimate enough, not allowing the spaces to open up where the listener can sit.

Now, I must have missed something in the Guardian while I was in America in September. In the letters page on the 22nd, when I was back and landed enough to read the paper, Laurence Inman wrote a letter about a reading Auden had given in 1971:

"He explained at the beginning that he would be taking breaks to get his breath back. 'I have been a heavy smoker all my life.' He took four such breaks, sitting on a chair at the side of the stage, staring at his feet, which were shod in carpet slippers."

It's not exactly Anything Goes, is it.

Maddy Paxman, in the next letter, describes her late husband Michael Donaghy's famous readings very, if you'll excuse me, tellingly - saying he managed "both to convey the shape of formal structures within which he wrote and to give the poems meaning and sense. His performances were often described as though the poems were being told into your ear."

Michael had a beautifully modulated voice, never mumbling and never shouting, and with no pretentious poetic pauses. He could read blank verse for both line and sense. And he memorised everything. I'm not sure I ever even saw him hold a book on stage.

Maddy continues: "This must have been especially so when, one night in America, the lights in the auditorium failed and he continued with the 'reading'."

I think Michael's model for reading - if mine is bedtime stories - was the pub raconteur, or someone more urgent than that but certainly no more removed from the context of daily life: poetically his model may have been an ancient mariner but in terms of delivery, he was far more low-key: the intimacy George Szirtes is talking about. Donaghy's poems are certainly often narrated by people with a story they have to tell you. Any poem can, of course, be that story.

Certainly, if the reader gets this aspect right, and the reading is working, even poetry that might not be up to all that much on the page is forgiven, because the connection that's been made - the space created by the reader in which the listener can situate himself, as if in a bubble - creates another space, which is for the words, which become hyper-effective.

On another note: if you're going to go check out George's place, do make sure you catch the video of WC Fields playing ping pong. I feel able to face even a grey November Monday morning after that... God I love WC Fields.*

thanks to Tom Gauld for my utterly unauthorised scanning of his wonderful picture - one of my favourite things ever

* Scrap that: make it "a grey, soaking wet, rainy November Monday morning." I think I'd need to rewatch It's a Gift from start to finish. But I'll settle for the ping pong. (And I do have some extremely nice new tights on.) Thanks, George.

oh my god, you're such a culture vulture!

(Don't you hate that expression??) Or: "the South Bank Experience - that'll be £££, please"

There is nothing cultural here to report. Ms Baroque has, this weekend, singlehandedly put together an Ikea bed (double) with only a minimum of bruising. The bit where you have to hold up footboard, headboard and side bits, and slot ends into one another was quite interesting, not to say slightly soul-destroying, but once the bed was done and I was in it my soul felt miraculously intacto.

It is eight divine inches wider than the old one. But it's not really cultural.

My reading this weekend has been confined to half the Guardian review section, of which I remember nothing except that Baroque in Hackney was once again not featured in the blogs column, and a few Pont cartoons. Pont is wonderful and I love him distractedly; but I feel I must save him for an Elegantly Dressed Wednesday. Perhaps I'll scan something in.

I tried to go to the Louis Bourgeois exhibition at Tate Modern, which would have been a major cultural experience; but upon arriving, in unexpectedly freezing winds, on the south side of the Wobbly Bridge, I was reminded of something I have written about before and thus should have remembered: the art-going middle classes. Damn their eyes. And their cagoules, and their rucksacks, and their spoiled posing toddlers and their cameras and their Museum Guides and their half-baked opinions.

Actually, looking over my old entries here, I see I have not yet in fact written about my hatred of the Tate-going millions. I can't believe it! This is a rant which, if you know me, you have surely experienced in the flesh.

Some brief highlights:

• the two suburban, middle-aged couples at the next table to me in the members' lounge last year after the Kandinsky exhibition last year - an exhibition which left me so cold it alarmed me. One man of the party was lecturing his three companions about the "code" in Kandinsky's paintings: that he colour-coded the notes of the music score, so that if you know his "code" you can tell what the music sounded like, that he "painted." I wrote at that time that I found the Kandinsky exhibition almost unbearably whimsical - and tiring in its quasi-figurativeness - but it was nothing compared to that guy.

• any two women who conduct their semi-informed conversation about the work in question loudly enough so you can't get away from them no matter where you are. Or worse yet talk about their own artworks. Or, as happened to me at the historic Picasso retrospective at MoMA in 1980, when I was a mere slip of a gel, get trapped in the line going through the entire exhibition next to you, and spend their whole outing describing in detail the movie they saw the day before: Airplane.
  

• Anyone who thinks that a slide can be art, and that you can somehow take your kids to the Tate one day and pretend you're at Alton Towers, and be somehow "doing" "Art."

• people like the two guys in front of me yesterday who, on a crowded staircase, got to the top and just - stopped dead in their tracks to decide what to do next. This also happened to me at Victoria the other day when some French woman tourist with a huge heavy suitcase did just this in the middle of the rush hour, and to be honest I was scared for a few seconds, because I was right behind her and was afraid of getting crushed - or knocked back down the stairs - by the implacable swarm of other people.

• People who take endless photos of each other standing in front of works of art

• Small children who are clearly so used to being the centre of everybody's attention that, at the first sign of a camera, they start leering unattractively into the lens in look-at-me postures, while their doting parents look self-consciously proud of having such genius offspring...

Well, my companion and I decided not even to try. The poor spider alone, which I love and had so been looking forward to seeing again, was overrun like a jungle gym at playtime.

And don't even get me started on that crack in the floor. Someone stepped in it and got hurt the day it opened.

Heading to the Royal Festival Hall we fared no better: the crowds were intense and there was some awful "inclusive" jazz being played so loudly in the foyer, accompanied by dozens of poor dancing children clothed in gigantic windsocks, that conversation was impossible. In the end I literally ran out the door of the RFH.

Straight into the RFH shop, which is now large enough to need separate premises. What is happening down there?!? They're selling welcome-mat-sized bits of carpet like the carpet in the RFH itself - admittedly an iconic design, okay, I grant you, in a kind of Modern-Design-Fascist-Heritage way. But seriously - they have notebooks with that design on. In different colourways. They have wrapping paper with it on. Go off sick for a few measly months, try going for a nice afternoon and the whole goddamn river's turned into a theme park of itself! The bust of Nelson Mandela was just looking tired and ironic, I thought.

And in the window of the RFH shop? An Ercol coffee table exactly like mine. Only the finish on mine is much more beautiful (I checked when I got home). It is my favourite coffee table in the whole world. I got mine in Past Caring last winter for £35, & was happy for a whole month. Some idiot or other down at the South Bank will pay £400.

It's enough to make you take to your bed. Which is just what I have done.

further from the beasts

The American philosopher Richard Rorty, who died earlier this year, writes in Poetry magazine:*

"Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses."

One could have said "when their memories are more amply stocked with" almost anything, but he is saying something here about language. He's not saying "human" as in, "nice, warm, cuddly, absolutely lovely, really, and, in fact, made in the image of God," nor is his statement as invitation to meditations on the Nazi love of Schubert. Note also that he says "cultures," not "languages." He's saying something about a continuum of meaning that runs from "being human" through thought and language, to the accoutrements of that language - words - to "verses," which are the highest application of those words as themselves, not simply in service. At least, that's how I read it.

Try it with "ergo" inserted after the semi-colon.

I've been having a running conversation lately about editing, or writing, as being a soldier for language - my friend is a sub, & feels passionately about his role of making things correct. Within the construct of the conversation I, by writing poetry and - equally - poetry criticism, am said to be on the front line of the Battle for English - actually taking new territory (not through the merits of my work, you understand, as my friend hasn't read it, but by virtue of the activity). I'd like to think it's true. I'm fighting for our language so you don't have to.

Continuing, or rather preceding, his previous statement, Rorty (discussing his reading in the light of knowing he was dying) writes:

"I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends."

This uncompromising, observation-based assessment (with its marvellous poetic/philosophical compass in the middle) has the same kind of beauty as a poem itself, of course.

* (I keep thinking I might not renew my subscription... and then I keep renewing it. It's hardly worth not.)

wildfire, or don't fire: a life lesson in tragedy

News comes through - as so often, in the form of a chance remark on the phone - that "someone's been shot in Stoke Newington." Regular readers will know that this is nothing unusual: there have been two, or is it three? shootings in my own road since I moved in less than three years ago. "But," I always say, "it's nothing to do with our road. It's just (sic) the people from the estate behind."

But then, if it's on the BBC, it means the person died. I check the site. It was a teenager: the 22nd teenager dead by knives or guns in London this year. A 17-year-old Turkish boy, mixed up with the wrong crowd, trying a bit too hard maybe, dead in the road down by the Smalley estate. A chill. Shocking.

A few minutes later, on the unrelated business of simply wanting to talk to my kids, I call their dad's house. I talk to the middle one, who's almost 17: the Tall Blond Rock God, as he's known hereabouts. He's in shock.

"Did you hear?"

"I think so," I say. "What are we talking about?"

There's a good long pause, five seconds or so. "You remember Etem?"

"Nobody knows what to think," he says. "Everyone's really upset." He sounds strange. He's been talking to some friends; information is being gathered piecemeal, and speculation is rife.

"Smalley Road estate," I say. "Which one is that?" It's the one we cut through to get to the house they live in with their dad.

"They reckon the people who did it are from the Stamford Hill gang," he says. Oh, that'll be the estates behind me, then. Jolly good. "Yeah," he says. "Why do you think I don't like coming over there much?"

I think about it. One mean, nasty estate on one side of the main road; another on the other side. To get here he has to walk between them. "That's right," he says.

When I was looking for a place to live everyone said I should buy a place: "you can't rent," said all my equity-minded friends (with their ten-year-old £80K mortgages). "It's just throwing money away!" When asked what on earth I was supposed to buy on my (single-income, remember) budget, every one of them said, "Oh, there are loads of ex-council flats available! You could afford one of those, even in N16."

Yeah, right.

The Urban Warrior, my older one, is more philosophical, talking about other people he knows Etem was friends with, including one who was done last year for all sorts of egregious things; he sounds pretty hard. I don't want my kid to sound hard. But he's bought his hardness dearly, and he knows how to work the streets. He's hard because he can't help being part of it, because he's a teenage boy. The only alternative is to sit in your room like his brother.

And even if Etem was mixed up with the gangs, if he was dealing all the stuff I'm hearing he was dealing, if he really did think that was the way he had to live (and I'm told he was one of the kids who beat up our friend Matty in Year 5) - which I don't know - would that make it any less of a tragedy? No. It's just that the tragedy started ages ago. And that, in fact, is what tragedy really is.

PS - Editing in to say I couldn't stop thinking of his poor parents all last night and have just, thanks to Dave Hill, read this piece in the Daily Mail which is just even more upsetting. Of course, the Mail has published a picture of him when he was little, I do recognise him. What a waste, what sadness upon sadness.

Nobody deserves this: not Etem, not his family, not his friends, not (really; not if they're kids; they deserved a break and we didn't give them one) the kids who shot him, not their parents. Not my kids and not all the ex-schoolmates who are now trying to come to terms with it.

modern - "not Ms" - baroque

It's Edward Burra, apparently. Hat tip to Todd Swift at Eyewear, where he carefully distinguishes the painter from me.

However, solipsistic to the last, I do feel that Jane Stevenson's summing up (in the Guardian, of course; gallingly, isn't everything?) of "modern baroque" is still useful in the context of moi:

"inclusive, protean, humorous, unafraid of bad taste, entranced by games with perspective; a modernism that finds Harlem dudes in camel overcoats more interesting than all the log piles in the world."

Burr's appeal has never, to me, been obvious; but you can usually get me with discussion of technique, and after reading Stevenson's review I am more inclined to have a serious look. He also sounds like a delightful person (oddly, rather in the manner of the otherwise utterly un-baroque Charles Lamb). And here's an interesting thing:

"Because of his working method, with the paper flat on a table, he [Burra] could never really see how the picture turned out until it was framed, which makes his vertiginous, highly expressive use of pictorial space all the more impressive. Though he could draw accurately from a life-model, and did, the figures in his paintings were subject to an expressive distortion...."

Something to aim for, then?

family, spamily

Speaking of family matters, I've just had a spam email from someone called Jesus Monroe. Monroe is a family name of ours; I'm wondering if Jesus could by any chance be related?

(nb: the email was a bit rude...)

elegantly dressed mystery

click the picture to make it bigger and better

Ever since July, when I was given this cache of pictures, I've wanted to do a little series about Clara. I'm starting here, not with the first picture that made me realise she was special, but with the best of the lot - and the most mysterious (... or is it..?). I love it because of the contrasts, of course; and the contrast between the contrasts in the people and the lesser constrasts in everything else (as if the camera just knew); the way they seem to be suspended in nothing, as if they are all that really exists; and the fact that it looks like a still from a play. What was happening? Why the doctor's wife? Why is Ed's brother so impossibly handsome?? (and why couldn't he have just moved forward one inch?) The doctor's wife is wonderful.

Clara is the first hint (to me, I mean) of the little industrial/farming village of Sidney, in Delaware County, NY, containing something beyond its presented self. You'll see, later: Ed, too, is a sweet, otherworldly thing in his hornrims and long cardigans. A picture I didn't post up today, but thought of doing, features my dad, holding a black dog, sitting next to his marvellous bicycle in 1938 - and just out of frame, sitting on the proch, some unknown person with huge, sturdy, working-man's knees and the beefiest hands sitting on them that I have ever seen. The wrists themselves are poignant. My grandfather worked in a factory that made airplane parts for Boeing; my dad's Uncle Kenneth had a farm.

Sidney is a town at the northernmost edge of the Appalachian mountain range, and in many ways it's like the southern end, or was: people were poor, lived by their hands and the land, made things they couldn't afford to buy (which resulted in the equivalent of folk art: patchwork quilts, crocheted bedspreads you could never buy, they are so intricate), listened to the same kind of music as down south (I remember being tortured by the music my grandparents' listened to, and the TV shows! Hee Haw, Lawrence Welk. But the thing is, it was totally authentic. I couldn't realise that at the time.) Nobody ever read books; well, I remember Reader's Digest condensed omnibus editions about the place. There's another photo, of Grandma ironing in an apron, with an open door behind her showing the beyond of telegraph wires and trees. I remember lying awake on summer nights up there, listening to the freight train whistles as they rattled through on the other side of town: long, incredibly lonely-sounding whistles.

Well, I'm sure I'll get to these other pictures, and they are wonderful. Aunt Ruby in her sensible dress and her kitty-cat glasses. But they are how we always thought of that place. Clara is something else. Look at these people! They had wonderful hats. They knew how to stand. And they're on probably the same porch the man with the beefy wrists would later sit on. It might be Grandpa; it definitely isn't Ed.

In green, Clara has written all around this picture's border: Me; Ed's brother; the doctor's wife; and "Ed. He is the dearest boy ever lived."

Now, I can't remember who she is or why she's related to us. Sis, you reading this? I can't remember her last name, which I think was kind of long, or hyphenated, or Austrian-sounding. And there is a rumour that she left poor Ed and ran off to Canada with the handyman.

baroque blood

Less of the "old", I say! Surely poetry is the only art left to us where you can be "young" till you're about fifty? I've got years of it left! I must remember to hold my stomach in. Or maybe I'll wear my tweed jacket and do a Miss Marple. It'll be okay if I wear it with platforms. And I'll do the rubber egg number (as the actress said to the bishop) (see, I'm old enough to love that saying).

Interested poetry-loving local readers may care to pop along and swell the crowd...

"real magic"

We always knew it existed.

Kwame Kwei-Amah's description of a production of The Magic Flute in the townships, in today's Guardian, has reminded me of something. The urgency of art, for lack of a better phrase.

This is what we were discussing the other week, when I lost my rag at someone called "anonymous" who accused me in indirect terms of being a pretentious middle-class twat... now, I'm not going to go all populist on you - that is clearly not the Baroque way. But I am going to remind you that art, all art, not just "academy" or "safe" art, but even Dada - the impulse of art - is, as far as I can make out, wherther the artist even realises it or not, redemptive.

No one knew this like Mozart.

And there's an element of art belonging to everyone. Die Zauberflöte was written for a music hall, afgter all. And as Kwei-Amah writes:

"...the entire cast... sang the score in a fashion that was unique. It met all classical requirements, but added something extra: something distinctly black South African, something soulful. These were not young people imitating the genre; they were singing opera on their own terms. This terrific authenticity was aided by an orchestra made up exclusively of marimbas. (nb: this is something I would have to hear. Well, it's at the Young Vic.)*

...Dornford-May... explained why Pauline could sing both Carmen and the Queen of the Night, and why he could have open auditions in Khayelitsha and discover all these wonderful young singers: it was because of the strong choral traditions of the black South African churches. Many of these performers had been to classical colleges, but only after years of rigorous church choir training.

Any notion I had that this would be another blacking-up of a European narrative to serve notions of superiority was disabused. In this Magic Flute, the story has been transposed to the ritual that young Xhosa boys go through when they come of age."

Anyway, it all sounds fascinating, even though it is precisely the kind of thing that would normally drive me nuts. And here's his description of a previous production of Carmen (whose star, as he explains in the article, was also able to sing the Queen of the Night):

"Mark Dornford-May's 2005 film adaptation of Bizet's opera Carmen, called U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, was set in South Africa's largest township, with a cast made up of local talent. I was immediately struck by the authenticity of his treatment. The bleakness of the environment, juxtaposed against the joyous brilliance of his cast, made me stamp with joy throughout many an aria."

Sorry to be thin on original content, but argh.* And Mozart.

* I have tried to post the picture in the Guardian up here - it simply isn't letting me, on two computers. Suffice to say it looks very simple and beautiful, no matter my fears for the orchestration. It looks a sight better than Kenneth Branagh's portentous WWI film version, which I note here en passant seems to have gone up in a cloud of mustard smoke.

**Why is London grinding to a halt this week?!? Does anybody have an insight? It took me two hours to get to work today, and on the way home I had to walk halfway from Seven Sisters - with my glaucoma-addled night-vision - there was one point while we were sat in Finsbury Park station (see how far I got) where they annouced that there wasn't a single train running southbound on the entire Victoria line, all the way down to Brixton. Ten minutes later it was still the same. Hardly Victorious, if you ask me. Finally emerging from Green Park tube, hours later, I was met by the sight of a bus bearing, on its front, the legend not in service.

a literary haunting

This evening I got lost in Wanstead. Picture me, out there on the rim of the world, in Zone 4, overshooting my stop on the 101 bus, and left to wander by the roadside with only my mobile phone in hand. Across the road, nothing but an endless black barren waste - probably some sort of suburban playing field - and much further away, across the other side of that, Canary Wharf glinting forlornly in the distance, far to the west...

Dearie me! I did eventually get to my friend's house, but believe me, I got a cab back to Stokey. And you wouldn't believe how quick it is, once you're in a car.

In other news, I had an email from Norman Mailer today. I know, surprising, isn't it? I know it was really from him, though: it was signed, "the late Norman Mailer."

me and the "R" word

Sorry - many apologies to Inner Minx, and to the House of Pants, and to the Shameless Lions Writing Circle, from whom the thing originates - but the word "roar" was spoiled for me utterly, at a very early stage of my life, by Helen Reddy.

That's all I want to say about that.

However, with that proviso, I am delighted to announce that the redoubtable House of Pants has awarded me a "Roar for Powerful Words!" award, and I'm not going to sneeze at it, no matter how churned up all my bookcase dust may be.

When Ms P said she had a gift for me over at House of Pants, I have to say I hoped she might be about to bequeath me her owly-cat, who has given me so many moments of joy, when she goes away to her new Antipodean life. Of course, she's had a thankless lot of hard work persuading the Owly one even to go with her, and I realise she probably doesn't want to waste all that effort; and who knows, perhaps she'll be glad of his company. They might have a bonding moment, though I'll believe that when I see it. Which I won't, because they'll be 10,000 miles away (sob!).

Well, but so Ms P has given me this award! For powerful writing! And all I'm doing is wittering on about Barney the Owly-cat! Thinking about it, I'm not sure that recounting the story of ex-Mr B's father's nine copies of Doctor Zhivago, or describing the horror of Allen Ginsberg's underpants flying around the room, or making fun of Boris Johnson's "poetry" (sic) could really be accurately described as powerful - but we'll go with it, shall we?

According to Ms P, the award comes with a task: to list three ingredients of powerful writing. This is hard, because of course there are so many more than three. I'll try to pick three interesting ones.

1. Love words. Love them for all the tricks they can do, the highwire routines and somersaults and riding with no hands, and dressing up in Great-Aunt Myrtle's hat, and popping out from behind the sideboard. Love them also for their plain beauty; for their clarity, like a mirror in a sunny room; for their honest wooden grain and sheen. "It's only words," you say; but I say, "words are all I have/ to take your heart away." And for God's sake punctuate properly.

2. Know roughly what you want to say. I'm not saying you have to know when you start writing: good heavens no! But by the time you type "Ends" or "finis" or "I'll be dead by the time you read this" you should have got the thing into a shape where it looks as if you did. This means reading over it and taking out everything that was just tacking, holding the bits together while you figured out what to do. It means learning to see what's helping and what isn't. It means learning to admit what other people will find interesting and what they won't. And of course it will greatly help if, in the course of writing whatever you are writing, you do manage to get a sense of what you're saying. If you can't, it might be a good idea to go make some biscuits instead.

3. Don't be afraid of overstatement. And don't be afraid of understatement. Don't be afraid of jokes. Don't be afraid to be yourself; in fact, if what you have written makes your skin crawl with embarrassment or chagrin, the punters will probably love it. We are la comédie humaine! But please, do me a favour: don't be too goddamned earnest. Contrary to what Maya Angelou and her cohorts think, that's not power: it's self-indulgence.

(Ms P: There, will that do?)

Oh, here's a bonus. This is actually really, really important. Listen to how your words sound. Even most poets seem not to do this - either that or they just have tin ears. And novelists are even worse. Just because it's prose doesn't mean it doesn't matter how it sounds! You should be able to roll good writing around your mouth, it should give physical delight. Rhythm is important. So are consonants, and so are your vowels. This is not an indulgence. It aids comprehension, as well as giving your reader a reason to live.

Oh, all right, one more. Be particular. Generalise all you like, but use examples. Learn to revere the concrete. Only in romance languages is the abstract credible, and I'm not even sure it is, anymore. Our earthy bastardised English, which is so multi-textured, requires things to rub against.

Oh. And I have to award the award to five peple whose writing I think is powerful and a tonic. Here's the hard part. Of course I love you all, you know that, but the Words must have their way. Winners collect your prize from my sidebar, or from the Shameless Lions Writing Circle site.

1. Chip Dale. Of course. I've been to Oz, and the wizard is mighty and powerful. I think there might be something he'd like to tell you.

2. Non-Working Monkey. She is the Only Person I Know Who Can Use Capital Initials Without It Being Cringeworthy, and she makes me laugh like no one else, except maybe Chip.

3. Charles Lambert. He's a novelist, editor and darling, with a fab blog. I loved his recent "Taxonomies" post.

4. Erin O'Brien. I'm not sure I like the way she keeps popping up, like Endorra, on Charles' & Chip's blogs and flirting with them when she thinks I'm not looking; but she did write the "how to make a cold meatloaf sandwich" guest post that changed my reader levels forever. One day I will by her novel, Harvey and Eck, and get her to sign it.

5. Linda Grant. It may be cheating slightly, as she is a professional writer whose work I have admired for years, but her new blog - The Thoughtful Dresser - is a powerful example of just the kind of stuff I go on about above. It's the kind of thing the poor old blogosphere could do with more of, and as such deserves an accolade.