the show's the thing

The poet Anthony Hecht quotes, in a book-length interview with Philip Hoy of Waywiser Press, something a student of his once handed in. The student wrote:

"Because of limitations and setbacks of technology during the Elizabethan period, Shakespeare, as well as his writing contemporaries, was left with the responsibility of presenting the main theme and emotion of a dramatic work through the words of his characters."

The main difference between me and Anthony Hecht (aside from the obvious things like him being Anthony Hecht and having a beard and me being, well, me) is that this just makes me laugh.

And, to be honest, I think we should thank our lucky stars: imagine what life would be like if that had happened to, say, Anthony Minghella.

the flavour of the moment

Two nights recently: foxes fighting. Were they fighting? Maybe I'm naive, but it did sound like you should find a dead animal in the morning. Terrible. The wind, still wuthering in its scary way around the windows: right now round my bedroom window, and for the rest of the day it will be around my window at work. It's been going on like that for over a month and I just want it to stop.

A headache. Cold. Loud clanks, they must be putting up scaffolding somewhere nearby, in the wind. Today I will wear my big coat, yesterday I regretted the cropped-sleeve jacket bitterly. No matter how many scarves. Will try to read more Hecht on the tube. My Millions of Strange Shadows should arrive today or tomorrow (thanks to the wonderful Munn Books), and this weekend will see my idea beginning to acquire an actual shape. It's only 2,000 words, but it is a bit daunting writing about someone so austere, so major and so - both when he was alive (I imagine) and metaphorically, now - unforgiving...

Last week in London Bridge Station I saw an Amish family! A father, a mother and a grown daughter (yes, it does seem unlikely that her name was Arietty) - all in very obviously homemade clothes, the women in that cloth cap or bonnet, and their (bad, lumpy) dresses made of cotton - thin blue checks on an anaemic white ground. They looked far less than amused - they must have been hating London Bridge Station and it is almost impossible to imagine what can have brought them there. A death, maybe.

Tired, hungover - never go for a drink with my friend Helen - always tired. But generally happy as a pig in shit. I know it's a disgusting saying but I have always loved it, for some reason, those lovely evocative pigs in their sties. The wind! Must get up and out fast so I can go get some coffee beans at the deli and of course also a coffee for me to drink. I'l be fine then. For local readers, this information: Lemon Monkey gets all their coffee from Monmouth Coffee Shop, and that is why it is the best coffee in Stoke Newington.

This is proper blogging, isn't it - just wittering on about nothing, as if you care. Well, and now, up and out. Can I do it in fifteen minutes?

double elegantly dressed Tarzan

Here, in a quick lunchtime posting, is the elegantly dressed Baroque offering for this week, chosen topically because of the comments thread in my last post - the one that mentioned my great-uncle-by-marriage Burne Hogarth. (To you English who don't understand extended families, this means he is my cousin Stephanie's grandfather and thus a reasonably close relation, as these things go - that's a kind of elegance.)

Drawing, in that it defines silhouettes and surfaces and light, shadow and colour, to say nothing of contours, is just as much a kind of clothing for the human form as is the little spotty beach cover-up our man is wearing above. We can see this from looking at nude paintings from different centuries, and seeing how the shape of the body seems to change with time. Certainly things like diet and exercise change, but anyone who has ever thought about it also knows that there are visual conventions and local ideals of beauty. There is, thus, no such thing as a real nude on paper or canvas. Voila! Elegantly dressed.

We were discussing, as I say, how Hoag's drawings for the Tarzan comic strip in the 30s and 40s changed the way comic strip artists draw the body. This influence was extended into the classroom when, in 1947, Hogarth co-founded the School of Visual Arts in New York.

"The School of Visual Arts was a magnet for that next generation of comic book artists mentioned above. Hogarth's considered approach to the adventure strip was made to order for comics. Al Williamson, George Woodbridge, Wally Wood, and a host of others drank from the well. What was so special about Hogarth's approach is that he had thought deeply on the elements of action and the tensions it produced and translated his thoughts into a rigorous approach to foreshortening and shadows. He was able to pass these methods on to his students in the classroom and, in 1958, to the readers of his first book, Dynamic Anatomy," says this website.

I love his drawings. They are intensely beautiful, always. And talk about dynamic! Just look at that one at the top.

But that's enough education. Here's some more elegance for you:

translating style

Edith Grossman, the Spanish translator, a feature in Bookforum:

"Grossman submitted a twenty-page sample translation of Love in the Time of Cholera to Knopf and was chosen. 'I knew this Colombian writer was eccentric when he wrote me saying that he doesn’t use adverbs ending with -mente in Spanish and would like to avoid adverbs ending in -ly in English.' She remembers thinking, what do you say in English except slowly? 'Well, I came up with all types of things, like without haste."

in the dead of winter

On this day in history - the death of William Butler Yeats. The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted. In 1887, 15-inch snowflakes fell in Montana. The Space Shuttle Challenger blew up, and I was in a hotel room in Lyme Regis watching it. In 1953 Derek Bentley was hanged for a murder he did not commit.

On this day in history Horace Walpole invented the word "serendipity" - what could be better than that? In 1813 Pride and Prejudice was published. Stendhal's first book was published. Galileo may, on this day, have unwittingly been the first person to see the planet Neptune.

The death of Charlemagne. Japan invaded Shanghai. Antarctica was discovered. The first locomotive ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In 1807, Pall Mall was the first street lit by gaslight. Fifty years ago, Lego was invented.

Colette was born; David Lodge was born. John Tavener and Robert Wyatt were both born (one year apart). Jackson Pollock was born. In 1457 Henry VII was born, and on the same day in 1547 (note the chiasmus) his son, Henry VIII, died.

And, I now find, this very same day in 1996 saw the deaths of both the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and my cousin Stephanie's grandfather, Burne Hogarth, whose famous Tarzan revolutionised the art of drawing muscles in comic strips.* Two events I certainly knew about at the time, of course, but never connected.

Wikipedia is strange...


* I have seen cartoonists get tears in their eyes when I mentioned his name.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, though I have been far from the news (at least, after lying in bed listening to a special feature between 7.30 and 8am, the result of forgetting to turn off my alarm - and very fascinating it was too); I never even bought a paper. But here is Linda Grant with a wonderful remembrance.

And here is Antony Hecht:

The Book of Yolek

And here is Roger Mitchell, with magic effects by Michael Donaghy:

The Story of the White Cup

the laurels of unrest and other mundane matters

Ahhh... it's that moment in the week again. The moment when you have lugged the shopping (from Fresh & Wild and the Turkish shop, because once again you have managed to completely miss the supermarket - every supermarket - because you didn't leave the house till quarter to three, and then spent two hours drinking coffee with your friend) up the hill, and have opened your organic Bergerac and left the lettuce to get crushed by the Adriatic salami, and put the first load of laundry into the drier, and have checked your email and realised how late it really is, how late, and nearly Monday morning already and all that.

Picture it. Baroque Mansions is in semi-darkness, only one light on. Mlle B and her friend who is spending the night have not yet arrived. The whole place is quiet. Even Mozart is not on. The balcony door is open and the sky is dark, but the moon is round the other side, by the kitchen. What could have been stars ("The elderly and frail," according to Anthony Hecht, "Who've lasted through the night/ Cold brows and silent lips,/ For whom the rising light/ Entails their own eclipse") are in fact planes, loads of 'em, flying in all directions, unimaginably full of real people; and equally full of unseen characters are the three tower blocks over by Green Lanes, and all the little Victorian houses whose tiny orange lights form the horizon.

There are of course things still to do; you can't rest on your laurels just because it is Sunday evening. There's the laundry; and the new potatoes and overpriced organic chickenburgers (which Mlle B has just thoughtfully rung you from her father's house to say she is not hungry for, as she had her "lunch" at 5pm); and the bed slats to nail to the useless Ikea bed frame so they will stop falling down the whole time, with the nails so thoughtfully given you by your friend, the Cat Lady's, husband, because you also missed the hardware shop; and the washing up, plus all the other stuff you have to do, which is frankly rather a lot, and you are thinking your nails will have to go hang, though (you are hoping) not in the form of hangnails...

But - as the parenthetical quote above shows - you are a Person With an Idea. Oh yes. More than one, even! But one is an idea for your 2,000 words on Anthony Hecht, and it is a surprising and fun one, and one you can do, if only you can get hold of that one book you don't have... but it is still four days till payday. But there is a Borders gift card in the house, which could have some money on it. Only by going to the till at Borders can you ascertain this, and only at Foyles will they have the book.

However. There is Darian Leader, whose books I liked, to read on why we have completely lost the plot with our relationships and emotional lives; and there is James Wood on what makes a fictional character real (i.e., convincing, or surprising, or successful) (which could also apply to living people); and there is Sarah Crown's interview with Edwin Morgan, who at 87 didn't win the TS Eliot prize last week - even though his barely intelligible recorded reading was FAR more compelling than any of the live ones (though some of those were good). The result was far too depressing even to write about.

In fact, I think we'll leave Morgan with the last word, shall we? Substitute "January" for "February" and "Hackney" for "Hertfordshire" (and "American" for "Canadian" - but you get the idea. And "pedant" for "wolf," I suppose) and it could be the Baroque weekend exactly:

Lock the gates and man the fences! The lone Canadian timber-wolf has escaped into the thickets, the ditches, the distances! Blow the silver whistles!
The zoo-born sniffs the field mist,
The hedgerow leaves, liberty wind
of a cold February Friday.

Saturday trudging, loping, hungry, free but hunted,
dogs tracking, baying, losing scent, shouts dying,
fields dangerous, hills worse, night welcome, but the hunger
now! And Sunday many miles, risking farms, seen panting,
dodging the droning helicopter shadows,
flashing past gardens, wilder, padding along a highway,
twilight, sleepy birdsong, dark safety – till a car
catches the grey thing in its rushing headlights,
throws it to the verge, stunned, ruptured, living, lying,
fangs dimly scrabbling the roots of Hertfordshire.

language: it's a toss-up

...could they by any chance be related?


Or: is this what they mean by sub-editing??

I know languages evolve, but really. There's evolution, as in emerging out of the primordial porridge, and then there is turning back into porridge. I like porridge, but I know which kind of evolution I'd favour. I noticed two tiny things lately and wanted to remark them, but never got a chance.

1. The standfirst on an article in the Guardian:

"From Jonathan Swift to Joe Klein, writers have gone to great lengths to hide their identities and cannily exploited the ensuing public speculation. John Mullan on how anonymity is often a sure route to notoriety."

How, you ask, can something "often" be a "sure" route? It's either a sure route or it isn't. Otherwise the poor sap who does it will be left agitating: "is this going to be one of those times when it's a sure route? Or isn't it? Ohhhhh, I just can't be sure!"

2. From the body of an article in the Times - anonymously written, from what I can make out, and thus almost certainly sure to achieve notoriety, at least here in the Halls of Baroque:

[The new Risk & Regulation Advisory Council] "is intended to protect us from the cotton-wool approach to risk. It should control the wilder excesses of health and safety legislation, such as the legend that children must wear goggles to play conkers... This council's first targets are superbug scares and the terror of Reubenesque plumpness [my italics]."

Now, I had assumed that the particular kind of plumpness that comes from eating hot salt beef, saurkraut and melted swiss on rye, with mustard and a kosher dill pickle, was no more or less terrifying than the normal kind. Am I that out of kilter with the popular imagination? See, this is the kind of worry sloppy language can cause. And now I want a Reuben and you can't get one here. But it would only make me terrifyingly fat.

(nb. In trying to find this piece again I googled "reubenesque," (go on, click it: best fun you'll have all day) and made the horrifying discovery that everyone - simply everyone, dahling - says it. There are hundreds of pages of links. It is a whole new word! It's almost as if Rubens had never existed, poor mite.)

big in Japan!

I can't read this page. Maybe we're not big. I have a feeling we're still rather small, but if I get offered any inappropriate TV commercial voiceover work I'll let you all know.

...by any other name...

So, we launched the pamphlet Ask for It By Name, from Unfold Press. The poets: Simon Barraclough, Olivia Cole, Isobel Dixon, Luke Heeley, Liane Strauss and Roisin Tierney.

It's "A well-stocked anthology of fresh produce from six prize-winning poets. Behind the bottles and the butter you'll find Mussolini cheating on the tennis court and meet the shark from Jaws in a Yorkshire millpond; glimpse the love of woman for orang-utan and make it across the Spanish-Italian border; spy on the hobbies of cowboys and drink deep of the Molotov cocktail of love..." (from the back cover) £5/€7,00.

It's a beautiful thing, a squarish pamphletty book with a lovely yellow spine, designed by Lynne Stuart, who turns out to be a Hackney resident! I found this out when we spoke last night! Of course she is.

Anyway, the event was like a who's-who of the most thrilling echelons of the London poetry scene, and (though I hadn't realised this beforehand) it was also Burns Night! So the estimable brother-in-law of Simon Barraclough, David Adams, broke the ice well and truly with an extremely rousing recitation of Burns' To a Mouse. This is a poem you just never seem to read all the way through, at least I haven't in ages, and my God it was wonderful. Also wonderful to invoke the man himself into our event. And in the right accent.

The event was attended by five of the six members of The Like Of It anthology, which overlaps with Ask For It By Name by one member, Liane Strauss. (The other common denominator is the word "It": can this be mere coincidence??)

(nb. If you would like to buy a copy of The Like Of It, you can either click on the link above, or you can email me. There have been endless problems with the distribution of this book, for reasons which are far too tedious to go into. However there are several spare copies nestling cosily in a corner of Baroque Mansions, wirth "free postage" written on their happy smiling faces...)

The evening was a success, then! Hurrah! The room was packed, and although Ms B and her companion missed the free bar (like, what are those other people? Hyenas?? We arrived by 7!) and Ms B never got one morsel of the snacks (having distinctly seen an entire platter of pork pies arrive in the room) I think these facts merely testify to the gargantuan appeal of the book, and the gargantuan appetites of the guests. Hungry for poetry. Hungry for life. Hungry for, well, anything. A hunger that can't be named...

in which my mouth is a battlefield

Maybe it's the battlefield of Gettysburg, speaking (as I think we weren't) of the 1920 picture of my grandfather with the two old warriors... There isn't a speck of it that hasn't been pummelled, scraped, bayoneted, shot, punched, hacked at, or twisted into an unnatural position. It's full of blood. And like all good battlefields, it has a very nasty crater. I think the process of collecting up the wounded could take some days.

The instructions they gave me go like this:

Eat soft food. (Like, that's if I eat anything... and there I was going to have beef jerky.)

NO alcoholic refreshment. (There goes the medicinal brandy, then: even at Gettysburg I think they got a swig of that.)

Rest, but DO NOT lie down. Sleep with the head elevated. (Fun! I'll get a lot of sleep, then!)

Do not rinse till tomorrow. (Ugh.)

The dentist was talking a lot about the desirability of blood clots. And to think I'm missing the Pen Pusher Eight launch party for this!

Anyway, I'm exhausted. I'm just going to go and... er... recline, with my upper body elevated. Jolly japes! Soup, anyone? (You make it.)

(PS - I can only begin to imagine how Martin Amis felt. But ast least they were making his mouth look better. Mine looks like the surface of the flipping moon.)

poet of the everyday, and work

So, Studs Terkel is 95! And he's written another book! I was raised on his books, where ordinary people told their stories of living through extraordinary times. Of course, the ordinary is extraordinary, and most people are just that if you give them space to be. You should read this article - it is stuffed full of anecdotes and soundbites (the yuppies at the bus stop; New Labour, "baby mandarins;" "the United States of Alzheimers": "do I have to be 94 years old to remember these names?"). I want to be just like him, and fortunately he has given us a brief guide to how he does it:

"'I have, after a fashion, been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us,' he writes in his latest book, Touch and Go: A Memoir. 'For lending voice to the face in the crowd ... My curiosity keeps me going. My epitaph is all set: Curiosity did not kill this cat. I took a vacation once - it involved a beach - and to tell you the truth, I had no idea what to do with myself. It was torture. Work is life. Without it, there is no life'."

On the McCarthy years: "He was later blacklisted for having signed numerous leftwing petitions. 'Don't you know communists are behind this?' he was asked. 'And if the communists are against cancer does that mean we have to be for cancer?' he replied. He owes his survival through those rough times in no small part to Chicago and its working-class culture. 'If I was in New York or Los Angeles, I would have been dead meat,' he says. 'That's why I love Chicago - it has always been and still is the City of Hands. Horny, calloused hands.'"

Do read it: the story of the couple at the bus stop is great.

(Edited in: I wrote this this morning, and when I was sitting at work later there was a sudden and relentless sound of sirens - then a helicopter - so we went to the window, just in time to see the police blocking off the intersection across from our building for the march. 22,500 police marched across London for a better pay deal - like, one that might reflect cost of living increases, which Ms B is rather big on, and which might give them parity with the nurses and teachers. It took them over an hour to walk past us, in their white baseball caps. Studs would have loved it.)

particle-beam velocity and the interior world of romance

The excitement!

Ms Baroque has a lot of friends, as many regular readers must realise. Some of these friends are doing wonderful things all over the place, and achieving great recognition, and many of these have been rhapsodised about on this blog in various degrees of shameless puffery. You know I'm never embarrassed to shamelessly puff (as the actress said to the bishop...) my friends. However, even within that context I have just received an email that made me excited.

Because this one is about Liane Strauss, my very dear friend and one of the most exceptionally talented poets I know of. Her work itself is exciting, thrilling in the same way as riding a roller-coaster is. Its sheer verbal and logical momentum - or, as Clive James says, its "particle-beam velocity" - sweeps you along almost centrifugally. (How's that!?) I have my own personal reasons for being happy to see Liane's work getting the exposure it deserves (not least the fact that she takes her inspiration for titles from Radiohead, and that I was sitting next to her when she first workshopped a lot of these poems);* but my reasons for posting it here are that you should read it.

Her poetry is always, first and foremost, poetry - this is a good thing. The momentum builds out of the words themselves, heady and hyptnotic - not out of some complicated structure of information she's trying to hit you with, as so often happens... As Mallarmé said, "you don't write a poem with ideas, but with words." Liane's poems bear out this truth both implicitly and explicitly.

And they're often funny.

Check her out here:

"One of the pleasures of building this section of the website," (writes Clive James) "is to have been plunged into the poetic world of the late Michael Donaghy, whose alumni are disproportionately represented on my guest list. If he gave them water to drink during seminars, there must have been something in it. Among the leaders of a pack that seems to consist almost entirely of leaders, Liane Strauss has got something going in her poetry that it took Donaghy himself adequately to describe.... Her work is helping to provide the dazzling evidence that there is a new school of poets in London for whom the Atlantic has simply disappeared" (etc).**

Clivejames.com also features Isobel Dixon, Olivia Cole and Simon Barraclough, as well as other poets,*** and many examples of James' writing (there are several articles I want to bookmark) - altogether a site worth a visit; see my sidebar.


* I will confess here in public that, when it got workshopped, Lady Suwō made me cry.

** I am getting quite a bit of feedback lately to indicate that I too am a member of this "school", though my work is nothing like Liane's. How exciting!

*** I say "other" - the list includes the great Les Murray...

more bagatelles of happiness

The other day I wrote a rather flippant post disparaging "happiness," and my most scientific regular reader took issue with the article on which it was based. Like the estimable Francis Sedgemore, I am more than capable of calling myself "happy" or "content" when in fact kvetching about everything that swims within my ken, and can even take a certain pleasure in feeling morose or bored; I would never disparage the concept of "happiness." But the article was about a slightly different thing, which is a growing tendency (particularly in the USA, as opposed to Britain) to pathologise states of being that are less than, well, shiny.

Anyway, I really just wanted a chance to use that picture of the young silent-movie shmuck staring gloomily into his glass of absinthe.

God knows, too, that I know how debilitating full-blown depression can be! For the sufferer and for the people around them. But that's not what we're talking about here.

The example below, from Spiked, may elucidate the matter. But the original post was really only a bagatelle, so let's not worry, eh? Just be happy...

"‘In my mother’s generation, shy people were seen as introverted and perhaps a bit awkward, but never mentally ill.’

"So writes the Chicago-based research professor, Christopher Lane, in his fascinating new book Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness. ‘Adults admired their bashfulness, associated it with bookishness, reserve, and a yen for solitude. But shyness isn’t just shyness any more. It is a disease. It has a variety of over-wrought names, including “social anxiety” and “avoidant personality disorder”, afflictions said to trouble millions’, Lane continues.

"Lane has taken shyness as a test case to show how society is being overdiagnosed and overmedicated. He has charted - in intricate detail - the route by which the psychiatric profession came to give credence to the labelling of everyday emotions as ‘disorders’, a situation that has resulted in more and more people being deemed to be mentally ill."

That psychiatric profession - you know, it must be crazy!

stay-at-home secretary

Jacqui Smith and Margo Leadbetter: are they by any chance related?

Well, the Labour Party is finally safe for the People - I mean real people, nice people, people who need people, people like us - the kind you'd invite round. Phew! It's taken years, but it's now official, and just in time for the Renaissance. Get out the fish knives, we're going to have a dinner party.

According to the BBC, "Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has admitted she would not feel safe walking around London after dark." The article continues: "Asked if she would feel safe walking alone in the Hackney neighbourhood, Ms Smith replied: 'Well, no, but I don't think I'd have ever have [sic] done'." What, even when it was safer? You have to wonder what it is that's changed - oh, wait, it's her.

So I guess she's never been to the pantomime at Hackney Empire. Or to the gastropubs of London Fields. Or to the Istanbul Iskembecisi in Dalston... But it gets better!

"In the interview with the Sunday Times, Ms Smith was asked why she would not feel safe on Hackney's streets at night.

She replied: 'Well, I just don't think that's a thing that people do, is it, really?'"

(Pause.) Laughing yet? It's not even over:

"She was also questioned about how she would feel if she was walking through the more affluent area of Kensington and Chelsea after dark.

'Well, I wouldn't walk around at midnight and I'm fortunate that I don't have to do that,' she said." But Jerry was putting on one of his Count Basie records again, so she had to go and tell him to stop.

Ms Baroque has always loved printers

... they can do anything. She also loves the smell of ink.

go on, make me happy

Ms Baroque loves nothing more than a rhetorical question (and a pun, and I've just thought of one about Scarlett O'Hara and a rhetorical question). Well, here is a passage that could only swell my heart with joy (little did its author - Eric Wilson, in the Chronicle of Higher Education - know it), being as it is completely made up of the little darlings. How apt is that?

He writes:

"Why are most Americans so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste? What are we to make of this American obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?

Surely all this happiness can't be for real. How can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe — not only the collective and apocalyptic ills but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existences, those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns? Are we to believe that four out of every five Americans can be content amid the general woe? Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss? Aren't we suspicious of this statistic? Aren't we further troubled by our culture's overemphasis on happiness? Don't we fear that this rabid focus on exuberance leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to wastelands of mechanistic behavior?"

Perhaps a bit of this will help...

And then, go on, read the whole article. It has Keats in it. If you like it he's written a whole book, called Against Happiness.

stuff and the empty plate

It sounds nice, doesn't it. Empty... Dinner plate, dental plate, tectonic plate, platelet - all of these, and also the other one, the plate I can't seem to get anything off of this week. The one that should be one-way, you empty it and it stays empty, not this strange magic re-filling one where you can never just move on to the next thing. Oh GOD! Maybe it's the New Renaissance. It's Simon Barraclough's new anti-para-conspectivity. Nothing ever goes away.

This week-and-a-half was always going to be fuller than full, with two book reviews and some other things, to say nothing of the Stoke Newington School GCSE Options Evening. (And having now had that one, let me tell you: figuring out those options was like doing a bloody GCSE.) But it was going to be manageable. (Someone said to me the other night, when I was complaining about it: "Oh come on Katy! I've seen you with a pile of books this high, that you had to review in a week, and you were sitting there drinking wine!") I'm wondering if last week's flu, impacted wisdom tooth and gum infection, and subsequent antibiotics, as well as some other minor medical items I won't bore you with here, have taken their tiny little tolls. I'm scattered. I'm stressed. I'm awake at 6 in the morning.

An editor has sent me a list of 19, count 'em, queries about a review!! 19! Some are little but some are big. One means trying to substantiate my reference to a book I don't own and thus can't look anything up in. As an editor myself I can only admire him, I'd have done the same, and as to the polite comment that he even thought I might not be over my virus yet, one can only hope that's what it is. But the book, laid out to the publisher's margin and font specifications, turned out massively over-extent in proof. Everything I touch at work ricochets back to me, unfinished or not quite right yet. I'm now scared to send anything off! Yesterday I even managed to delete an entire email I had just written & had to write the whole thing again. So everything that was supposed to be off my plate last week, both at home and at work, is still here, needing tweaks and checks and redoing, but now it's Friday and I have this week's things to do! And next week I really have to do something else, and that one's hard. Then there's the admin, all backed up both at home and at work because I've been too busy messing everything else up to touch it.

I have to return my new mobile phone, I ordered it over the internet and it is a complete disaster. And sort out Mlle B's account. But that's 20 minutes on the phone and a trip to the post office, which takes out reviewing and/or work time. And I haven't had a chance to go to the Abbey National and find out how I got so overdrawn overnight, but it seems I have. It's just a little too far away. And I haven't had much in the way of lunch breaks, what with the rain, and the extra work, and having to leave early for the parents' evening... No, no. Even after a week of anti-para-conbiotics I still have a toothache. Maybe I'm grinding my teeth in the night, during those rare moments when I'm actually asleep. (Also, I keep missing the last pill of the day, because I fall asleep in the evening without meaning to - it's like Apollo's cloak falling over the sky in Fantasia - and then I wake up later and stagger to bed and forget to take it. I'm just so tired.)

And the bed slats keep falling down, bloody Ikea bed, I've tried wedging them in place but they just fall down again. Jesus! Nobody can live like that. Maybe nail them into place along the outside edge. And I have to go buy a train ticket to Norfolk, Because that's where I'm going in two weeks' time and I'm paranoid about train fares - they start out cheap and, like mobile calls, suddenly rocket - but if I queue, I'll be late for work or miss the post office or not have time to get any groceries, or let another editor down or something, and I can't do it on the internet because I'm overdrawn and anyway then you just have to queue anyway to pick up the ticket.... I shouldn't even have been writing this. No, this can't all be me. It has to be something in the stars. Maybe the stellar plates have slipped.

elegantly dressed Canadians

Many apologies to the ever-elegant Quink, aka Ben Locker, who set up this whole conceit of Elegantly Dressed Wednesdays in the first place. I fear I have been remiss - in fact, I know I have. But here are Clara and Ed to the rescue.

Regular readers may remember them, snapped mysteriously on their wedding day, and may also remember the mystery of the usurping handyman - the one who got run away with. Well, I for one was relieved to find out that it was not Clara who ran away with him. No, I believe she stayed with Ed. It was her mother - my father's, le Duc de Baroque's, Aunt Ida - who ran away to Canada with the handyman, Washington Sutherland, and that is why Clara and Ed are, in fact, Canadian.

Wouldn't you stay with a man who knew how to dress like this? Look at his spiffy long cardigan, his nifty centre parting, his glasses! His wonderful bow tie! And she is just the sweetest thing going.

The caption written on the picture reads: "Clara and Ed. Not their baby," because they never had one. I think the rather cross child they're holding looks a bit like Ben Locker's baby.

in which Ms B reads something she likes

It's only short. And it's all I've read. I haven't even read the rest of the poem (now you know what it's like here - but if you're Sara-Mae Tuson, don't worry, you'll get your review on time! Trust me...). It is one of James Wilkes' book reviews, of which I am a big fan. I saw him read some of them at the Poetry Society lately (at New Blood, I think), and he was my favourite reader of that evening. He makes up the titles, authors, publishers - they're marvellous. Here is one about, though he may not have known it at the time, me! From Intercapillary Space.

He writes:

"Dear Blog, hello. In urban cammo trousers I am nearly elfin, blotchy, Palmeresque. Two books balance in my cargo pouches. One advances in baroque sweeps, the other its undoing, cuts away. Hello pigeons. Will you be my archivists? Hello plane trees. Will you be my audience? All shake their heads with masterful disdain."

ten poets and a bottle of plain water

Last night I went to the TS Eliot Prize reading, a huge annual event where the ten poets each read from their shortlisted books prior to the following night's announcement of the winner. Of course, this year's shortlistees are more familiar to the public now than they might have been, because they each read a poem on Radio 4 last week; although I didn't hear them, I know others did because they told me about it. And a couple of them were new to me.

Here is the shortlist, arranged (I hope) in the order they read in:

Matthew Sweeney for Black Moon (Jonathan Cape)
Alan Gillis for Hawks and Doves (Gallery)
Sarah Maguire for The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto)
Fiona Sampson for Common Prayer (Carcanet)
Edwin Morgan for A Book of Lives (Carcanet)

Sophie Hannah for Pessimism for Beginners (Carcanet)
Ian Duhig for The Speed of Dark (Picador)
Frances Leviston for Public Dream (Picador)
Mimi Khalvati for The Meanest Flower (Carcanet)
Sean O'Brien for The Drowned Book (Picador)

Peter Porter, the chair of the judges, started the evening with a reading of Eliot's 'Death of Saint Narcissus' and then made way for the evening's compere, John Walsh. He did a creditable job, in language far more flowery than that of the poets... Then the readings, but unfortunately Edwin Morgan - a living legend - is too frail at 87 to have attended. We heard instead an absolutely riveting recording of his voice, reading three poems. It was hard to make out all the words but his cadences are so wonderful, and the words you could hear were so good, that it was pretty much my favourite reading of the evening. There was much buzz about it in the foyer.

There were several good readings, though: it's always a big treat to hear Ian Duhig, and Frances Leviston - whose book I haven't even seen yet, let alone read - read a very interesting poem about a fortune teller. The Belfast poet Alan Gillis was new to me, and also worth having a look at his book I think.

The Bloomsbury Theatre seemed more inhospitable than ever - what an awful building that is! They had double-booked a whole row of tickets, so there was mild seating chaos, and the weird, glary spotlighting in there nearly brought on a glaucoma attack. By the break my left eye was sore. (I'll use this as my excuse for accidentally dropping my water bottle cap off the balcony! Apologies herewith to whoever I blinded underneath. You can;t take me anywhere.) And there wasn't even any sparkling water at the bar - I had to drink plain water all evening! The ignominy.

But these are small prices to pay, I suppose, especially as a fellow Salt poet of my acquaintance informed me before things kicked off that he has invented a new kind of perspective - I think it might be called "antiparaconspectivity," though I might not be remembering it right - though he was quite tired from inventing it all afternoon, and hadn't written up the manifesto yet, so he couldn't tell me how it works. But he assures me it's going to be great! The New Renaissance is truly upon us. And it broke out at a poetry reading.

And then I came home through rainy Euston to a long phone call and a very patient teenager.

Who must now be awoken from her enchanted slumber.

GLBTGI Friday in Stoke Newington

Did you know it's GLBTG month this month? Did you know that GLBTG means Gay Lesbian Bisexual [and] Trans-Gendered? Yes, they all go together and they have their very own unwieldy Initial Thing going on! I guess I did sort of know that. But what ever happened to, you know, words?

And is it just me, or is there a big fat difference between "bisexual" and someone with collagen lip implants and a sex change operation? Am I just prejudiced? Or could it possibly be somehow objectifying, to lump everyone except mom-&-pop heterosexuals like me into some enormous amorphous category like a huge, ungainly sack squirming with unbeloved kittens?

Anyway, that aside. You must be wondering how this fascinating news filtered into the joyously straight, though admittedly sometimes quite camp, Halls of Baroque. (Not that we don't love that Oscar Wilde in here! Oh no. And that EM Forster. And that Anthony, though I wouldn't say so much for those Johnsons. Boring married couple. And that Madonna! But who was the girl she kissed again? Not Tracey Emin, was it?) Well, here's how: Mlle B came home last night and said to me, as I was washing up a baked-bean-encrusted saucepan and an egg-besmirched frying pan so that we could cook some chicken slices with spinach and a bit of basmati rice (henceforth to be known as CSWS/BOBR): "Hey Mummy, you'll never guess what we're learning in singing."

"What?" I not surprisingly said.

"We're doing that song 'you spin me round like a record baby'," she said. "It's for GLBTG month."

Can you imagine. Where to start.

1. It's for WHAT?
2. Whose idea was it to learn that bloody annoying song? And who recorded it in the first place all those years ago, anyway, as I seem to have successfully blocked that out?
3. Is that really the best the gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans-gendered community can offer our children? I mean really??

Answers:
1. As above.
2. Somebody or other's. And it was that weird guy, Pete whatsit with the lips. Who was on Big Brother.* "That's why," she says: "Everybody knows who he is."

Oh, great, then.

"You can't imagine what it's like to have to listen to that song over and over and over on a loop, for the whole afternoon! It's soooo annoying. But we're hoping to perform it at the Hackney Empire, there's this Hackney-wide event, right, and all the schools are participating and we're putting ourselves forward, with kids from each class in my year! It'll be soooo cool, and we're doing a rock version, anyway, not the disco version."
3. "Oh lighten up, it's like a joke, yeah, it's just supposed to be a bit of fun."

Yeah, but you could have sung an Elton John song even.

Stony glare.

You don't want me to go into one of my rants, do you.

"Not particularly. Anyway," she concludes. "It's not like we're not doing other things as well - we're covering GLBTG Month in every single class."

Oh good! So she will be reading Baudelaire. Or maybe covering the theme of androgyny in Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Phew!*


* I've resisted the tempation to link to him and the so-called 'Respect' [sic] 'MP' [sic] George Galloway in their lycra leotards - but only because I don't even want a picture of that man linked to this blog.

** (Somehow, I think not...)

patron, my arts

The indefatigable George Szirtes on the Arts Council cuts - I mean the New Renaissance - here.

And before anybody says anything, NO, the arts were NOT "market-driven" back in those days, as capitalism didn't yet exist - which surely goes to prove that you can produce good art outside the markets, and that "lots of people liking it enough to pay for it" isn't the same thing as "it's good work," or "it's worth having."

Back then they had a customary private patronage system. Show me a private patron and I'll write some pretty sonnets...

SAD and me

That is:
sniffling and dripping; or
shuffling and drooping; or
Sopranos all day; or
sore eyes and dyspepsia; or
sullen and drawn; or
skint and desperate; or
Sense and Densibility (favourite movie quote: "You are my density"); or
sleeping and dreaming; or
sore throats and dreariness; or
slopping around dolorously; or
scribbling against deadline; or
swotting and dredging; or
sweating and drafts; or
sorry aching days...

Too bad these initials don't cover:
impacted wisdom tooth, or
nasty gum infection, or
weird neverending virus, or
antibiotics no wine (apparently with these things if you have like one drop you can't even stand up, and it causes nausea and vomiting), or
crippling period pains, or
book review due, or
more books arriving, or
back at work, or
never cold enough (to kill the germs, I mean), or
when's groundhog day?

On the plus side, the Urban Warrior has had his hair cut off - all of it! A number 4 all round. I've not seen it yet but Mlle B assures me it makes him look entirely less greasy. Frabjous day! And I just made him a hat!

And actually, things aren't that bad. The tooth on the bottom that was hurting is apparently fine, it was just referred pain from the wisdom tooth. And a week without a single glass of wine could save me - oh - 3,000 calories. That's almost a pound.

"you don't have to slash with the sword of truth..."

Do you know this quote? It finishes up, "You can point with it..." I forget where I read it but it went straight into my brain.

Update!

I know it's a ton of verbiage today. It's because my eyes stopped watering. But I'm going to the dentist in the morning, so I suspect they'll be watering again; at least dentists don't give you a fever, but I've had the toothache nearly as long as the cold (Nov 23rd and counting). I'm living on Nurofen.

Meanwhile, a librarian called Dave Lull, who lives on the shore of Lake Superior (I think; I looked him up), has sent me a rather superior link.

W. Martin, in the Boston Review, says this about Michael Hofmann's Poetry piece on Zbigniew Herbert (which I discussed earlier today):

"Even now, a generation after the imposition of martial law and almost four years after Poland’s accession to the European Union, readers, critics, and editors here remain riveted by a Romantic illusion reluctant to engage Polish poetry as art rather than as something to be venerated, and content to keep hooting the same praises sung during the Cold War at the same three or four poets, and for the same reasons. This helps explain the declaration by English translator and poet Michael Hofmann, in the May issue of Poetry, that Zbigniew Herbert is “as near to sacred to [him] as anything in or out of poetry is.” What’s troubling here is not that Hofmann voices what so many admirers of Herbert think anyway—that the poet’s works are like scripture and therefore untouchable—but that the consequences of his faith-based criticism are so damaging."

He continues; I won't quote any more. Phew! I knew there was something I was trying to say...

The ever-clairvoyant Madame Arcati has done it again.

“Ten of America's 43 Presidents were born with Mars in Leo, a statistical anomaly that far exceeds chance,” wrote Wolfstar in 2005. Hillary Clinton has Mars in Leo" (Arcati writes).

But s/he continues, worryingly (the forward slash is necessary, for as well as being clairvoyant, Mme A is also a Mysterious Being): "Her big problem astrologically is her Moon in Pisces: no US president has ever had this placement: it betokens self-sacrifice, even a sense of victimhood, characteristics at odds with the carnivorous and opportunistic requirements of the US presidency – certainly being married to leg-over Bill has drawn on her capacity to delay gratification."

So that's it! Needless to say, the Baroque Moon is lodged as firmly in Pisces as it is possible to be lodged. No wonder my kids never listen to anything I say. And I'm sure my Mars is nowhere near Leo. It's a mystery how I even get up in the mornings.

secondary orality, and I don't mean a trip to the dentist

Ever wonder what it would be like to descend into a second Dark Ages? I'm not saying literacy is crashing with the house prices, but take a look at this, on the decline of reading, from The New Yorker; I also think there's a connection with what I was saying about aesthetics in the previous post.

Actually, my title here reminds me of one of my favourite-ever cartoons. Funnily enough I was talking about Johnny Hart's B.C. recently, but this is from the equally wonderful (though slightly less - well - you know) Hagar the Horrible. It was set in Viking times, and all the characters are big rude burly Vikings. But there's one skinny bookworm kid among them, Hagar's son Hamlet. In this cartoon he's sitting on a rock looking at a huge book. Another Viking kid comes up and says, "Hey, Hamlet, what do you want to do when you grow up?" He describes his own dreams of looting and pillaging. Hamlet looks up from his book and says, dreamily, "I'd like to be a dentist..." This seems like the punchline until the other kid says, "What's that?" and Hamlet replies, to the blanching horror of the other kid, "Dentists pull out people's teeth..."

..."if the change is permanent" (it says in The New Yorker), and especially if the slide continues, the world will feel different, even to those who still read. Because the change has been happening slowly for decades, everyone has a sense of what is at stake, though it is rarely put into words. There is something to gain, of course, or no one would ever put down a book and pick up a remote. Streaming media give actual pictures and sounds instead of mere descriptions of them. “Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium,” Marshall McLuhan proclaimed in 1967. Moving and talking images are much richer in information about a performer’s appearance, manner, and tone of voice, and... his response to her is therefore likely to be more full of emotion. There is nothing like this connection in print. A feeling for a writer never touches the fact of the writer herself, unless reader and writer happen to meet. In fact, from Shakespeare to Pynchon, the personalities of many writers have been mysterious.

Emotional responsiveness to streaming media harks back to the world of primary orality, and, as in Plato’s day, the solidarity amounts almost to a mutual possession. “Electronic technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement,” in McLuhan’s words. The viewer feels at home with his show, or else he changes the channel. The closeness makes it hard to negotiate differences of opinion. It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer. It is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side. With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants to the New York Times, for example, may vary sentence by sentence. A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."...

...

"The reader is also alone, but the N.E.A. reports that readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theatre, paint, go to music events, take photographs, and volunteer. Proficient readers are also more likely to vote."

It also reminds me of what Joseph Brodsky and others have said about language and totalitarianism.

It also reminds me of my kids, and their strange inability to think abstractly or laterally. Not that I'd call them illiterate...

Meanwhile, yesterday's email brings news of a petition to save Dedalus Books from the slashing of their Arts Council funding. And then today's brings news that the London Magazine, an institution going back in one form or another for 270 years, has lost its entire grant. The editor, Sebastian Barker, has resigned.

Everyone knows that the arts are suffering right now because the money is needed to build the disastrously over-budget East London Olympics. I know this issue deserves a whole post to itself, but in context of the article I quote from above it seems like a good idea to connect these things together.

Maybe our money wold be better spent if they also concocted a plan to give a book to everyone who attends the Games. (And now I must go call the dentist. I fear they won't have to pull very hard...)

words both with and without borders

Here in Baroque Mansions we've always been fascinated with book groups, you know, where everybody reads a book and then you go to someone's house and talk about it - or, as so many people report, talk about everything but the book. I've even felt envious of friends who are members of book groups, though I think that was more envy of the social aspects, or of the kind of life where that would seem a viable idea of what to do with your time. I've always been afraid of the books you'd have to read. Random current novels, that sort of thing. One a month. Any kind of thing, just because someone else in the group likes it, and they'd be saying, "you never know, you might discover something you love!"

Not likely.

But here's a book group even I can love.The wonderfully named Words without Borders has a bi-monthly online book club forum, with features on a particular book or author in translation. This month's club, which will include interviews with the translators etc, has just started. The subject is the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, whose Collected Poems came out last year. (I wanted a copy; still haven't got it; damn.) The discussion has just been kicked off with an excellent biographical introduction by my friend James Marcus, and with an interview with Peter Dale Scott, one of Herbert's earliest translators, by Cynthia Haven.

Now, last year I was pretty shocked when I read the eminent translator Michael Hofmann's review in Poetry magazine of Herbert's Collected. Hofmann absolutely slates the new translation, by Alissa Valles; it is possibly the single most damning review I've ever read. I've just read it again and I find it hard even to think what I think about it. I realise as I write this that Alissa Valles is the poetry editor at Words Without Borders, so I know I probably shouldn't even mention it, but I always think it's better to know about the controversy rather than just wade in and not get what's going on. Much of his outrage seems to stem from a sense of grievance on behalf of the husband-and-wife team who have been translating Herbert for years, and who didn't translate this Collected; and from a sense of outrage at the literary-world wrangling that went into the commissioning of the book, with Andrew "the Jackal" Wylie, of fame (though thankfully not of "Fame"), coming into it.

But Hofmann's article is very interesting for other reasons and in other ways. First, it explicitly discusses at length the question that always plagues me: what is translation for, what can it achieve, how much does poetry suffer under it? It provides some real insight into how a translator approaches his work. Also, in his discussion at the end of all the egregious things Valles is supposed to have done wrong, he gives a sort of masterclass in sloppy diction. I think workshop poets everywhere, and many published poets in many locations, should read this and then go and look again at their own work.

I don't intend to say that Valles' translation is no good or that she is some kind of living exemplar of the sloppiness that I, too, hate in so much contemporary writing; I think Hofmann comes across as too unreliable a narrator for that, with - frankly - his complete inability to see anything good in Valles, or to exonerate her from what were surely editorial decisions. (I also disagree completely with his whole extraordinary section about "choice - the great false god of our consumer age" and how a great poet should, be definition seemingly, have ony one, equally great, translator; he trashes utterly Valles' perfectly equable, I thought, assertion that a poet should have many translators.) But I do think that in the pained quivering of his delicate instrument we can learn how perfection might sound. It's like being given a cup of tea by one of those few people in the world who taste tea leaves for a living.

One thing Hofmann doesn't give much insight into, overall, interestingly, is Herbert's poetry. He's too busy writing the poetry equivalent of the letter my friend Christine wrote to Homerton Hospital last summer. As a rant, it is a fine rant. But a rant is what it is.

No, if you want a real flavour of Herbert, I'd go to the equally distinguished Charles Simic's review, over at the New York Review of Books. He is much more forgiving, by the way, saying: "Herbert has been lucky in his translators. Alissa Valles's renditions here, despite an occasional awkward phrase, inevitable in a book this big, are admirable." Simic gives an excellent review of Herbert for an audience he supposes is more likely to think "Miloscz" or "Szymborszka" in response to the phrase "Polish poet".

(One thing that amused me in Simic's essay was this: "Another poem, 'What Mr Cogito Thinks of Hell,' debunks the popular opinion that hell is populated by despots, matricides, those who lust after the flesh of others, and so forth. Actually, it is a bit like Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, for Beelzebub is a lover of the arts who boasts that his choirs, poets, and painters nearly equal those in heaven." It has a delicious beauty... no doubt Leonardo is down there, and they are having a Renaissance.)

And here is his description of Herbert's own tea-tasting sensibilities: "He later attributed his reluctance to fall on his knees before the mighty not to his bravery or strength of character, but to his sense of taste: an inability to bear the regime's execrable rhetoric, its torturer's dialectic and reasoning without grace. In other words, aesthetics saved his soul: beauty played a subversive role in his refusal to become one of the corrupted."

This is not, of course, to be confused with the fascists' dishonest invocations of "beauty" or "aesthetics," not that you would, but it can sound dodgy when people say these things! But as Keats so usefully wrote of beauty, it is truth - "and truth beauty" - just so we're clear. Words do have precise meanings, though Hofmann also mentions, wonderfully, "the infinitely ramifying nature of language," and it may be that true beauty lies in the joining-together of moral truth and precise language.

Particularly interesting to me in Simic's piece are two things: one, his discussion of Herbert's "Apollo and Marsyas," about the satyr who was flayed alive by Apollo for daring to challenge him to a music contest (which he inevitably lost) - a much finer poem, I think, in all senses of the word, than Robin Robertson's much more - well - sadistic poem about Marsyas, which is so well-known here (in the UK) and now.

And two, the poem "Two Drops." Which Herbert wrote when he was fifteen.

And when you've done all that, do go and have a look at Words Without Borders! It's an impressive site, with educational resources and an impressive masthead. Read the interviews and James' piece. Leave comments.

See, with all this going on, who has time to join their local book group?

how do you get this thing to work down here?

Sorry, and sorry if it's you, reading this: but imagine my joy on discovering that someone has arrived at Baroque Mansions on a Google search for "milan kundera interview james joyce".

This reminds me of one day in the seventies when my Uncle Pete was accosted by some man in the street in New York. The man rushed up to him and shook him earnestly (as it were) by the hand, saying over and over again how he was my uncle's biggest fan. Now, my uncle was a successful painter but not the kind with a random fan base. (He was a tall man of, shall we say, rather distinguished proportions, with frizzy white hair and a beard, and he always wore Levi's overalls with a blue chambray work shirt and one of those large denim jackets, the kind with the corduroy collar and the flannel lining. He had only one hand. And he had very piercing dark eyes with bushy eyebrows, and a large hook nose.) Anyway, the man suddenly said, "I've read everything you've ever written, Mr Hemingway! Tell me, when is your next book coming out?" The man asked for an autograph, and my uncle kindly gave him one. "Ernest Hemingway," he wrote.

The sad thing is that, although the House of Pseud would have been greatly enriched by an interview (no doubt conducted in French) between Milan Kundera and James Joyce, until we get the funding structure in place for the ability to raise the dead (I'm developing a pilot around Leonardo di Cap - I mean da Vinci - remember, to kickstart our new Renaissance), it ain't gonna happen.

It's a lovely thought, though.

never so badly... er...

art, casting its glow on the deep complexities of society

We could be on the verge of a new Renaissance - just like the one they had in 15th-century Italy. Hurrah! And it's not even an overstatement, according to the culture minister (who he? ed.), but is "exactly true."

"Exactly!" That makes it practically scientific! Leonardo da Vinci would love it. Let's resurrect him.

Apparently it's all about changing from a "target"-driven arts funding establishment to an "excellence"-driven one - so says a report about to be published by the government, written by Sir Brian McMaster, an ex-director of the Edinburgh Festival (hereinafter known as "The "Edinburgh International Festival"). It all sounds like a jolly good idea, of course. Excellence! Let's have some more of it. It even sounds a bit like Excelsior! But what is it? How can you tell when you've got it?

Let us see if the words of McMaster himself shed any light on this mystery. In the Guardian's article on the report, he says that 'the society we now live in is arguably the most exciting it has ever been', and the arts 'have never been so needed to understand the deep complexities of Britain today'. He argues for a new 'appreciation of the profound value of the arts and culture'."

In case you are in any doubt as to what those meaningless strings of phrases might mean, the culture minister is on hand again to clarify it for us: it's 'the reclamation of excellence from its historic elitist undertones'."

So: just like the Renaissance then! Will we shake off the shackles of the mediaeval Church and rediscover the intellectual and cultural glories upon which so much of our civilisation is based? Will we discover perspective?

Will we discover how to mix any two pigments, I mean tenses, to create a tense that previously existed only in our own imaginations? Or will "the society we now [sic, & model's own italics] live in" continue to be cut off cruelly from how exciting it "has ever been"? Or was it not so exciting back when it wasn't happening yet? And will the government fund a study to find out how badly the arts used to be "needed to understand the deep complexities of Britain today"? Or, in the past, did they not really care how jolly complex we would be today?

Or should, if we're going to fund people out of the public purse (you know, the one with your money and my money in it) to write reports that could decide if this clarinettist or that theatre director is going to have to retrain as an electrician, should we make sure they know what art is, what it's actually for, and - er - how to construct a sentence that isn't complete gibberish? As a poet, as a poet who may yet come to have a stake in all this excellence-based funding malarkey, I'd like to think that the people who thought it up could recognise excellence in my art if they tripped over it. But let's just stick to the basics for now.

Let's say, the visual arts.

Sadly, the article fails to give any concrete reason - that is, a reason based on some empirical evidence from "today's" art world rather than from its own theoretical posturing - why we might be on the brink of something as amazing as Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Giotto, Pisanello and Botticelli (i.e., all the Ninja Turtles) all at the same time. We'll have to imagine that for ourselves. We've rediscovered the diamond-encrusted skull! Er - I know... And we've made a very referential video of a renaissance-type bowl of fruit, filmed it rotting, and speeded up the film so the flies buzz, ike, really extra-fast... I mean because in today's busy society, the gallery-goer might not get that a bowl of fruit is about mortality unless they can see it rotting before their eyes - kind of like as if it was on TV, yeah, that's it - 'cause, you know, we never let fruit rot these days. We just stick it in the fridge and then we throw it out.

So yeah, its gonna be just like a new Renaissance, only we gotta get the policies right. Then the people can produce something really "world-class" (the culture minister's term, not mine!).

So, let's see. We'll have Hirstonardo, Quinntelangelo, Taylor-della-Wood, Eminanello... Let's see.

Nope. I'm not seeing it.

Or - just to get serious for a minute - does the minister's use of that word "world-class" betray something else at the root of all this, something about export markets and the revenue from BritArt...?

I totally - don't get me wrong - me and all my mates down the pub totally applaud an excellence-based arts funding strategy. But if that's really what McMaster and his friend want, why are they still talking as if it was all about targets? Why do they think that merely "world-class" (clearly in market terms) is the same as the greatest art ever known the history of the Western world, which by the way is not going to be possible to create in our culture of today, which persistently worships mediocrity? Sorry. Deeply complex. Our deeply complex culture. Why are they using phrases like "society today"? You know and I know, and my mates know, that these people are still carrying their mental ticklist, they'll say "but how many people went to the gallery", and they'll still think poetry's "elitist".

Around about this point, are you wondering what Orson Welles (henceforth to be known as Wellesavaggio) would say about all this? So was I. (I have it on good authority that this isn't a Greene-scripted line, btw, despite the credits, funding conditions, etc, but came, ad hoc - if that isn't too elitist a phrase - from the Great Man himelf.) He'd say: "in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

But enough of movies. Words not mentioned in the Guardian article - though the report, Supporting Excellence in the Arts, might be worth a read and a giggle - include any variant of "beauty" or "beautiful"; "artist", "education", "life", "challenging", "intellectual", "aesthetic", "drawing skills," etc etc. Or "patronage".

But don't laugh too much. It's published on Thursday. Better to start grinding your lapis lazuli, things could go mega.

2007: the definitive list

It's over. What did we really read in Baroque Mansions?

None of the books we set out to read at the beginning of last year, that's for sure! Lowell's and Larkin's letters (heretofore known as The Three L's) languish unloved in their pink dustwrappers. A list of the books I meant to read but didn't might be more instructive, but it is just random, and I'd hate it to look as if I didn't really want to read that Günter Grass memoir, for example...

So what can I remember (key word there) actually reading? I've been going on about how I read nothing all year, but that can't be right, so here goes. Previous rules apply, to wit: inclusion on this list doesn't mean I read every last sorry word. Exclusion from this list doesn't mean I didn't read it. Note that I did a smaller version of this list, but it turns out I reads (lots) more than I thought I did: I just don't remember it.

The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
Persuasion, Austen
The End of the Poem, Paul Muldoon
Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers, Antonia Quirke
Take Off Your Party Dress, Dina Rabinovitch
Amazonia, James Marcus
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, Emily Kimbrough and Cornelia Otis Skinner
If This is a Man, Primo Levi
God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens
A World of Love, Elizabeth Bowen
Anthony Hecht talking to Philip Hoy, a book-length interview
The Speed of Dark, Ian Duhig
John Ash, Selected Poems
John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Isobel Dixon, A Fold in the Map
Chris Emery, Radio Nostalgia
Ludlow, David Mason
The Best Man That Ever Was, Annie Freud
The Waste Land, fascimile edition, Eliot (I nearly wrote Pound, there - oops)
Letters of James Schuyler and Frank O'Hara
Letters of Fanny Brawne to Fanny Keats (just amazing)
The Bradford Count, Ian Duhig
Thomas Lux, New & Selected Poems
Carolyn Kizer, Cool, Calm & Collected (poems)
WS Merwin, Selected Poems
Frances Presley, Myne
Frederick Seidel, Ooga Booga
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous
Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
The Simple Truth, Philip Levine
Why I Write, George Orwell
Proust, The Way by Swann's (new trans.)
The Lyric Touch, John Wilkinson
The Lost Luggage Porter, Andrew Martin
Look We Have Coming to Dover!, Daljit Nagra
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alison Weir
Le Roman de Silence
Anthony Hecht, Collected Later Poems
Cate Marvin, Fragment of the Head of a Queen
Penelope Hughes-Hallett, The Immortal Dinner
The Bookaholic's Guide to Book Blogs, Rebecca Gillieron & Catheryn Kilgarriff
The Curtain, Milan Kundera

There were many more books I thought about, even spent days reminiscing about, but even I realise that's not the same. And maybe that's enough lists for a while. The Christmas decorations (such as they were) are still up, and there's work I should be doing.

one woman's reading: books of the Baroque year both future and past

What a difference a year and a day makes!

I've just discovered this among my files, as it were, and it bears so little resemblance to anything I could possibly write this weekend that I'm publishing it as a curio.

I (or someone kind of like me) wrote:

Four days into 2007, and long after all those newspapers did their "books of the year" sections, we're looking into the abyss of a new Reading Year. Baroque Mansions is piled high with things to read in 2007 (& I need my eyes to hold out this time; one of them is aching even now, but I think it's just an ache).

I have plans, I have commissions, and I even have a few little old hankerings. Sometimes I miss the simple pleasure of reading a novel, for no other reason than that it looked fun; of course there is still impulse-reading, and I do waste ("wa-aste?!?!?") an inordinate amount of time reading internet-things, but it isn't the same as when I used to read for... the story... and the plucky little characters...

Then there's the day job. Lots of items of professional interest are piled up in two different places around Baroque Mansions, alongside the poetry piles, the essay and criticism piles (Hazlitt, Sydney Smith, anyone?), and the odd little forlorn novel pile. Oh and I bought a proof copy of Larkin's letters the other day. I've put it on top of Lowell's letters. They're both in pink dustwrappers.

Plus, I have decided it is time to learn more about typography, properly. My happiness may depend on it. That's another pile.

It's becoming clearer all the time that I will never read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - a book I just, one day in the second-hand shop, thought looked very interesting. And a friend had liked it. But that ain't enough to cut it any more.

Several of the "book blogs" seem to list books people have "read," as if they pick up a book, read it till it's finished, and then read another book in the same fashion, for no other reason than that they "like" them. They read, or hear, about it, and if they decide they might like it, they read it. Then they read another one; and they talk about them in terms of whether they thought they were "good" or not.

I mention all this only because it sounds so completely different from how, what, and why I read that it might as well be ice skating or hill walking. Don't they dip into a hundred books, on the grounds that they feel they "should know what's about"? Don't they read books they dislike? Do they really finish everything? When can you be said to be "reading" something - is it when you take the same book every morning on the tube? Is it like going steady? (Uh oh. I take a different book every day on the tube, depending on my mood and what I was dreaming about. Plus there are usually a couple in my bag, forgotten, from previous days.) Don't they get sidetracked by trains of thought? Do they not read any criticism or non-fiction? Is it always just for entertainment - novel after novel - and never for elucidation, research, education or critical analysis? (Having said which, I do wish I read more fiction.)

(I say they; it should probably be you. I know I'm the one who's out of kilter, not you. And this is why I can never go into a bookshop on a date, or whatever, because they think it's fun to browse, and my cover would be instantly blown. I say would be - but it has happened. They don't like it.)

Ah, well. Here's the list, what I can remember. Of course there was lots more that I read standing up in Border's or Waterstone's. But, like eating with the fridge door open, that probably doesn't count.

Ashes for Breakfast, by the German poet Durs Grünbein
Atomised, Michel Houellebecq
two novels by Mary Wesley
all of Wendy Cope's collections
Auden: essays, poems, "Letter to Lord Byron"
Table Talk of WH Auden, by Alan Ansen (who died a couple of months ago)
Swithering, by Robin Robertson
District and Circle, bits of, Seamus Heaney
Rapture, Carol Ann Duffy
The Optimist, Joshua Mehigan
Samuel Johnson, by Walter Jackson Bate - bits of
"Rambler" essays, a couple of, Johnson
Belle de Jour, blog book (far less sensational than promised; am I so unshockable?)
Charles Lamb and Elia, ed. JP Morpugo, ancient Penguin
Boudicca & Co, Jane Holland (Salt Publishing)
Faber Book of Sonnets and Penguin Book of Sonnets, in tandem, over the summer
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag (Queen of Supposition and Sweeping Extrapolation) (I know, she died this year too)
Selected Poems, Geoffrey Hill, in beauteous new Penguin
Selected Poems, Greg Delanty, for an interview that never happened
title essay plus a couple, The Geography of the Imagination, Guy Davenport
Object Lessons, Eavan Boland
Harbour Lights, Derek Mahon
Almanacs, by Jen Hadfield
Gethsemene Day, Dorothy Molloy
Life Studies, Lowell
The Wounded Surgeon (Confession & Transformation in Six American poets), Adam Kirsch
Western Wind: an Intro to Poetry, David Mason and John Frederick Nims
Ulysses, James Joyce (bits of; much better than the audiobook, sweet as that was)
"The Dead", James Joyce
great chunks of Less Than One by Joseph Brodsky (I just don't really do that "I read this book from start to finish" thing)
various essays by Ian Hamilton
Immigrant Blues, Goran Simic
The Ode Less Travelled, Stephen Fry (more arch than a gothic cathedral, but technically sound enough)
I spent a most of a week reading Martin Amis' "Horrorism" article from the Guardian (horrorism is bloody right)
Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk (bits of)
The Forsyte Saga (started, twice, for reasons stated above)
Bleak House (ditto)
short stories of Elizabeth Bowen
Autumn Journal, MacNeice; about four times
Louis MacNeice: a Study, by Edna Longley
Moon Wheels, Ruth Fainlight
Selected Poems, Ruth Fainlight

Well, that's what I can remember as standing out. To a certain extent it's arbitrary: there was some Wallace Stevens, some Coleridge, some Keats, I think there was some Anne Sexton in the summer. Plus there have been reams of articles, interviews, poems etc, downloaded from the web. Plus endless magazines...

My book of the year would probably be Charles Lamb.