the placebo effect: how depressing is it, really?

Or: the truth about great expectations

This week's revelation that placebo pills "work just as well" as the seratonin-uptake-enhancing Prozac family has been a bit of a shocker for anyone putting their faith in the efficacy of modern medicine. I mean, we always knew it was a shibboleth; but where knowing is one thing, and being told is another, this business of being shown seems a step too far!

Or is it?

Inrterestingly, the Boston Globe ran this fascinating piece the day before the SSRI story broke:

"SCIENTISTS AT CALTECH and Stanford... provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90... The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines."

In this instance the scientists were testing the neural responses of the participants, and guess what! Their brains responded differently - that is, physically - to the same wines when they thought they were more expensive. (It doesn't record what was happening with their taste buds. I know to my chagrin what a cheap cabernet can taste like.)

The Globe article continues, rather trenchantly:

"Expectations have long been a topic of psychological research, and it's well known that they affect how we react to events, or how we respond to medication. But in recent years, scientists have been intensively studying how expectations shape our direct experience of the world, what we taste, feel, and hear. The findings have been surprising - did you know that generic drugs can be less effective merely because they cost less? - and it's now becoming clear just how pervasive the effects of expectation are.

The human brain, research suggests, isn't built for objectivity. The brain doesn't passively take in perceptions. Rather, brain regions involved in developing expectations can systematically alter the activity of areas involved in sensation. The cortex is "cooking the books," adjusting its own inputs depending on what it expects."

Now, of course, this is what behavioural therapy is all about, as my darling friend Ms Rational Self-Determinism would be quick to tell us (though I personally think that behavioural therapy is fine as far as it goes). But what about those times when even positive, thinking, exercise, routine, having something to look forward to, etc, can't help us? Don't we need a little something extra to recalibrate the enzymes? (And no, I don't mean that cheap cab sav.)

Hmm. This new research appears to be telling us we don't. It's all there inside us. Even if we can't find it.

Mark Lawson in today's Comment is Free makes the cogent point that, instead of lamenting that SSRI's "don't work" (sic: plainly, according to their users, they do), we should be celebrating the idea that the placebos work just as well:

"Depression, at a basic level, is a loss of belief in the usual ways of getting through the day: habit, optimism, energy, hope. Exercise might be a better solution than drugs, but a bottle of vodka worse. If faith in a pill works, then the confidence trick involved is entirely benevolent except for the false profits of the drug barons. Instead of damning Prozac, we should be cheering placebos."

In other words, we really do respond the way those wine-tasting Californians say we do, and we should be jolly happy about it.

Look at it this way: people can walk through fire and report no pain. Someone I know just ordered Paul McKenna's wait-loss kit, trusting to hypnotism to help her go down a couple of stone. And childbirth groups have long worked on the basis that young women respond better, with fewer physical traumas in labour, if they know what to expect and how it all works.

A careers consultant - not the most hippy-dippy type of professional, I'd have thought - told me just two days ago about the power of "visualising. " The way he put it was this: the brain has a tendency towards normalisation, towards sanity. Whatever your thought patterns are, your brain will say to itself, "this is sanity: this is a reflection of how the world is." He said, if you want to change something, you simply start by telling yourself it's the way you want it to be. You repeat the words to yourself before sleep. You visualise it as a reality, with images and sounds and even smells - just like one of those compelling daydreams you have predicting certain disaster in whatever sphere of your life, only this time you put the energy into daydreaming something you actually want, not fear. And you conjure up a positive emotion to associate with it. He says after several weeks of this your brain will start to rebel at the disjuncture between what you tell yourself and how you behave, and your behaviour will fall into line with what your brain now perceives - critically - as its expectations.

His example was a person wanting to, say, lose weight or stop smoking, but you could use it for any situation I suppose.

This in itself, as I told the nice man, is very like a party game we were doing on New Year's Eve, called Cosmic Ordering, where you write a letter to the cosmos telling it what you expect it to deliver to you in the coming year. Ideally you write it and give it to someone else to hold, and just forget about it: the work in your unconscious is done. Apparently this is not like a letter to Santa: you don't have to promise to be good. Better in fact if you don't, because it's not about hoping for it, it's about simply expecting it.

Failing that, you could read one of the rash of recent articles all about how depression is good for you. Or you could just stay on the Prozac: after all, it works just as well as a placebo.

a tale of two Maurices, and others

Speaking of pictures, and things people make: among the pictures I recently had framed were two original (i.e., taken from some falling-apart book) prints by one of my favourite illustrators, the French artist Maurice Boutet de Monvel. I first saw his work at the age of about 13 or so, when my mother had a calendar of pictures by him. The pictures on the calendar must have come from his book of manners for children, La Civilité; they incorporate text within them - that is, they're framed around the text - and the text says things like:

"Mademoiselle, now it is my turn," said one. "No, Mademoiselle, I don't want to give it to you," said the other. "Because you were naughty." "Not at all, Mademoiselle, it was you who started it." Soon the two of them are fighting with their nails like bad alley cats. Their brothers are obliged to separate them, and their mothers are desolated to have such low children.












That one, and another, I loved so much I saved, and had them framed years ago: and now I have two more, which are lovely and delicate but not quite as funny. The books themselves were beautiful, in the manner of the age. How exciting to be a child and be given one of those books! (And even better still in French. I've never seen the original of the above-quoted picture. The colours are badly washed-out on mine.)

Do click on this link and go to a lovely blog post about Boutet de Monvel. Look at the sequence of pictures, see how de Monvel's children slowly come alive, and think of pictures in children's books today. This makes clear his importance, and points up - though a look through his book Caldecott & Co yields nothing - how influential these delicate, witty and humane drawings must have been on that other great Maurice: Sendak.

And incidentally, there are a series of books I loved more than anything when I was a child, by the wonderful, undersung Edward Eager. His books were illustrated by NM Bodecker. I loved those light, lively drawings, and the picture at the top of this post - which the above-linked blog says is in its own right a highly influential picture - is clearly the source for Bodecker's charming children.


















(Half Magic: the first book I ever bought with my own money, on my own, when I was six. I still have it.)

the stuff Lizzy makes

Lizzy's so great. Here she is, in the Woodstock Pub with Marc and Ivan. Wouldn't you want some lucky toddler you care about to play with building blocks made out of reclaimed wood, and hand-painted, by this woman? At the very least you should go to her website and read what she says about her blocks. I mean, really what you wish is that the toddler could play with her. I should know: I'm one of the people she used to throw things at when she was little! And look how Ivan's turned out.

And if you don't have kids, or don't want blocks, you could always get one of her bags. And you may as well do like the lady says: bookmark her site, and keep checking it, because it's going to change and grow just like those kids.

(She's also a very good photographer, goes rally driving, can drink more than most six-foot guys, and knows how to fix a boat.)

elegantly dressed New York

Or: in which Ms Baroque wishes she was in New York (like she didn't always). Or: in which Ms Baroque has nothing to say and little time in which to say it. Sorry. But there is a whole series, on this wonderful New York photography blog, of pictures of a snowfall last week; the guy has a way of photographing Central Park, making it look like a nineteenth-century engraving. Or: in which Ms B wishes she was more attentive to other people on the Tube (and in which "more attentive" probably means "more sympathetic")...

an everyday tale of north London

I was on the 393 this morning, with my takeaway double espresso, going to Highbury & Islington tube. I was sat there reading a friend's unpublished poetry collection in proof. The guy next to me was reading his college notes, which were on screenwriting theory, and were actually strangely interesting (and well written). The man standing in front of me was reading the American edition of an enormous, and very fat, book called American Visions of Europe: Franklin D Roosevelt, George F Kennan and Dean G Acheson.

I wish I could say there'd been someone talking to Peter Gabriel on their mobile, but alas, it's only Stoke Newington, not Primrose Hill.

(Very busy: very much hoping I get to do my Elegantly Dressed Wednesday post later... )

okay, while we're on the subject of Tilda Swinton

What is that dress?!? Dear God in heaven. (She says it's "comfortable.")

Oh no, but wait, this really is funny:

"She said she was surprised people didn't know she's funny. 'I'm funny all the time', she says. 'I'll have to work on that'."

in which Ms B wants to be a brand

Overheard at random two minutes ago, on a TV programme about Charlotte Church: "...getting her associated with people who would help her develop herself as a brand..."

les is more (baroque)

Les Murray, Australia's largest and most cantankerous poet and one of my favourites, is in a bit of a kerfuffle. Asked to write a blurb for someone, he replied to the publisher that he was tired of being asked to provide free services, and proposed a deal wherein if the publisher would look at a certain manuscript by Mrs Murray, he would gladly write the blurb.

The publisher has taken umbrage, and there have been words.

The Age, in Australia, reports:

"Contacted yesterday, Murray dismissed the letter as 'a joke' and said his intention was to say no to the publisher, 'but I said it in a baroque way'. Told it did not read like a joke, he replied: "It reads like, 'Piss off,' actually.

For 40 years, he said, 'people have been preying on me for free services and this is only a desire to stir trouble'.

Anyway, he said: 'Blurbs are nonsense — they're all hyperbole and hype'."

Of course, I hate to have to point out that I myself have recently been in the ignominious position of approaching people for blurbs - or "endorsements" - and it is a hideous, gruelling business. All you can do is be businesslike about it. I feel for the poor sod whose publisher was trying to get the blurb from Murray, but at least he wasn't asking directly...

But you know, I have heard Les Murray read, and he was wonderful. He's very charismatic and a good speaker. I love his work. He's made his career out of more of a plain-speaking thing, the humble guy (with a chip on his shoulder) and all that, but maybe he's turning more baroque as he gets older. Maybe I should write to him, one baroque to another, and try my luck. I just need to think of some sort of proposal...

Hat tip to Mark Granier for the story...

nb: I am in love with that picture. Isn't it great?

to be a kid again

Mlle B, just back from staying with friends for a couple of days over half-term, tells me that their 6-year-old daughter has an iPod, and talks for ages on the phone to her friends, and asks if she can call them on their mobiles... she also tells me that CBBC has loads of special kids' reality TV shows on it, featuring primary schoolchildren.

Give me a break!

But meanwhile, an evening spent watching Mlle B's TV (I know; what has come over me?) and I'm a) brain-dead; b) creeped out after watching CSI, Waterloo Road, something really stupid called Ghost Whisperer and the trailers for some vampire programme; and c) sick unto death of the trailers for that godawful Elizabeth: the Golden Age film. I don't know how the teenagers stand it, day in and day out. The good news is that one clearly manages to keep oneself very well insulated in the normal run of things! And now, to sleep, perchance to dream. (Ay, there's the rub...)

the ghostly presence

A strange dream last night, in which I'm looking at my reflection in a shop window or similar... but there is another reflection of me, lurking behind the one that's moving, smiling, etc. The one behind is sad, or at least very still and expressionless. So, I'm looking at two reflections of my face at once, in the same window, and they are separate. I deliberately try out some different facial expressions: the front face makes them, the face behind doesn't.

As to how we construct indicators in dreams: in both these reflections I have the kind of glasses I used to have: not the big round metal NHS ones I had for years (yes, children, it's true), but some smaller ones I used to have before that.

Also: I think this dream is in black-&-white. The quality of reflection off glass is perfectly rendered.

not Vincent Price

(not)


"To leave is romantic, to return is baroque." -Anton LaVey

I saw this quote on 3 Quarks Daily. I collected it for my Baroqueness files. I looked up Anton LaVey. Oh dear.

And he was born on my birthday! I'd love to be able to think of him as a sort of lovable Vincent Price character, but I'm afraid it is not possible. (Though, for coincidences, here's another: Vincent Price died on the very same day as my grandmother. I have to say, it was a comfort.)

However, of mild amusement is LaVey's listed list of influences. Spot the odd ones out...
Ayn Rand
Aleister Crowley
Friedrich Nietzsche
HL Mencken
Jack London...

further proof that we are in a New Renaissance

I rest my case.

the Jarmans are coming

Funny: I woke up this morning thinking about Derek Jarman, for some reason. Then on the way to work, in the Metro, I read an interview with the filmmaker Isaac Julien, who is curating a Jarman exhibition at the Serpentine, featuring a film he has made over the past - I think - 18 years. He credits Jarman with inspiring him with his vision of film as a kind of poetry, rather than as a kind of narrative structure.* (Julien has filmed a version of Derek Walcott's epic Homer-based poem Omeros, but I haven't seen it. He clearly really is interested in poetry; and perhaps also in people called Derek...)

I tried to look all this up on the Metro's website so I could get the actual quote, but it is an appalling Heat!-style fiasco, bearing no resemblance at all to the paper. Lots of celebrities and football and, natch, no Jarman.

Unfortunately the film is also full of Tilda Swinton, and I don't know. Something about her always makes me want to pinch her, to see if she can move her facial muscles spontaneously.

* i.e., an extension of the novel. This is interesting in another way: I remember at the time, it was all Jarman/painting, all about the visuals. The Caravaggio one obviously accentuated this association. Was Jarman irredeemably a creature of the eighties, like Peter Greenaway (don't make me), or would his films still stand as interesting art? And would it shed a light on the film-as-poetry thing? Ideas and responses welcome.

I know: he has come to stand for something else, so that the films are now almost beside the point, but I'm not sure what that thing is. Human courage, maybe. Aliveness: he certainly had that. He was writing to the Times the week before he died. I've read parts of his journals, he was a terrible misogynist.

two small applications of science

One:
The sky has been such amazing colours this week - every night, orange, as the lights are reflected back to us off the clouds. Tonight the clouds don't cover the whole sky. There's a band of plain air near the horizon (such as it is; the city horizon, I mean) which, in contrast to the orange, looks a thin green.

Two:
It occurs to me, I spend my whole life on upper floors: I live on the 2nd floor, and work on the 1st (that is, 3rd and 2nd if you're American). At my desk I'm constantly feeling some sort of weird vibration somewhere under me, which has the strange effect of making me feel jittery, as if it was coming from me; no idea what it is. But I suddenly realise I'm never anywhere near the ground unless I'm out. The doll's house was just rattling, I could hear its tiny little objects rattling around inside it. A doll ghost?? So exciting! I even opened it up to have a look, but the rattling continued - only slightly less, with my hand on it, absorbing some of the vibrations. Then I realised it must be the washing machine in the flat below, on spin.

not in the mood for blueberry pie

Oh, do you know, there is very little bookish to report tonight. I've been at work, and sleeping. Last night I had dinner all by myself in my favourite local Turkish restaurant, which once upon a time when I had more time I used to call my home from home - & there I spent a fine hour or more with some imam bayildi, bread, and 2 glasses of white wine, working on an essay. It's not a book review, and not commissioned, so it's a secret essay for now, because I will write it and then try to place it, and I can't disrupt my tiny new ideas. But I have hopes for it, if I can make it work the way I want it to.

I did the same at lunch time today, but not with nice food, but tomorrow of course I can't, because I will be at the bank, talking about my bank account yet again. I don't know how the bank employees do it: it is so boring.

So it's a new, virginal me lately (except for the coded reference to Richard Branson: what a bastard. He's appropriated a whole word of the English language! Shakeapeare, Milton, they gave us words - he's just taken one away.) - I've been writing and writing, except for when I'm working or sleeping. It's half term. My friends are mostly away, I think - I'm not sure, because no one's called me to say what they're doing (except for two of them, to both of whom many thanks!). Certainly Ms RS-D's phone isn't even ringing before it goes into voicemail. Mlle B is away. I can't be bothered to go to any poetry readings. I'm in a different zone. I think I have one new poem that's pretty good, and I'm reading lots of Ted Hughes (hmm, hence the strange mood, I hear you say - and I do think it will be a while before I can look at a sheep* in the same way again, after the dreadful shocks of Moortown Diary), and working on other things, and other poems, and dreaming a lot.

It's very strange with no kids.

I thought I might go see a movie tonight but there was literally nothing in London that I could bear the thought of going to. Not on my own, anyway, all the bloody, violent ones. And that Wong Kar Wai - his English début! (and what for, you might ask.) It just looks too painfully, unbelievably - well - just dreadful. God Almighty. I might have to do a whole blog post on it, but I won't see it. I'll have to write about it without having seen it, which of course Oscar Wilde would have said was the best way, and he didn't even know about this movie. My Blueberry Nights, how whimsical is that. Jesus. Bloody Norah, as you might say.**

And, no: before anyone says anything, it might not be better than I think without having seen it. Look at the cast! I don't even know what he could have been thinking of. Don't even get me started. Just do yourself a favour and rent In the Mood For Love.


* Warning: seriously. Dead lambs doesn't even begin to cover it.

** Oh! Delight! From the Guardian:

"If My Blueberry Nights is a love letter to US pop culture, it's also a valentine to its star. The film marks the acting debut of singer Norah Jones who headlines as Elizabeth, the self-styled "girl with a broken heart". Jilted by her New York boyfriend, Elizabeth lights out for territories in search of herself (or possibly some more blueberry pie). Along the way we get to see her smile, and cry, and pull an exquisite little frown that paints heartbreaking lines across that porcelain brow."

I wish I'd written that... Oh, but if I had, I'd have written it about Jude Law. And I can't wait till the Richard Curtis one comes out with Kenneth Branagh in it. Two Bores in a Boat. With a blonde girl called January.

elegantly dressed call centres

This is not who I was talking to yesterday at Virgin Bloody Media. She's not who I was talking to at the bank. She's also not the pre-recorded machine I had to talk to three separate times - the one that, when you refuse to "key in your 16-digit card number," because it's fiddly and long and you know it's just the precursor to keying in your entire birthday and street address, digit by painful digit - says to you in its fake machine-voice singsong jolly way, emphasising all the wrong words, "I'm sorry, I seem to be having some difficulty with this call!" (When I finally railed back at it, "No - I'm the one who's flipping having 'difficulty'! You're not real!" my colleague burst out laughing. I should add that it was about 6.45pm, and he was putting his shoes on after an after-work yoga session, looking very chilled out, whereas I was going apoplectic by that stage.) Nor is it the next person I spoke to at the bank, who kept putting me on mute - so I couldn't just tell her what the source of the problem was, I just had to sit there fuming while she checked inessential facts, over the course of about a 20-minute conversation that got me precisely nowhere. Nor is it the one after that, who finally worked out what the problem in fact actually was. (He also had the advantage of having slightly better English than the other two.)

It seems that the nice guy at the actual branch, where I had spent my entire lunch hour transferring money and generally trying to get my affairs in order, had made a mistake - which has resulted in yours truly being without a bank card for the next 7-10 working days. There's nothing anyone can do about it, apparently, even though it's not my fault. This isn't him, either.

It isn't any of the three people I spoke to (increasingly heatedly) at Virgin Media this morning, with the net result that I still can't pay my bill and I still can't get my internet turned back on at home, nor can I do anything to prevent the likely disconnection of my phone or my telly, because they are completely inflexible, as well as, in fact, quite snotty, and in one case seriously misinformed. The money is in my account, and I have done little for the past two days except try to pay the sodding bill - which has only arisen in the first place as a result of a) the inflexibility of Virgin Media and b) my erroneous assumption that reinstating my direct debit had worked. Silly me.

I feel that this nice lady is well-informed; you can tell by her watch strap and belt. And look at her lovely pockets! She also isn't any of the supervisors, who although they are not allowed to come on the phone and are clearly not authorised to make any allowances or discretionary decisions, must exist. There is never anyone you can go to, is there. It's just a behemoth, which is a huge clunking stupid creature.

Not a very elegant pose to strike!

And not at all like this kind telephonist, who is in the very act of helping someone speak to the person who can help them.

Edited in: Well, I found the person who could help me, and her name is the Cat Lady. I rang the Fiends of Hell last night with her credit card details and got my services switched back on - all I have to do now is go back to the bank for my Billing Account meeting tomorrow lunchtime, re-establish this direct debit ((possibly by ringing Virgin again, I don't know), and take the Cat Lady out for a coffee on Saturday and pay her back.

She told me she's going to be watching her bills very closely - but by then it'll be too late! Does anyone want anything off Amazon?

and by the way...

... to the person in Finland who googled "baroque concentration"? Thanks for your interest, but it's shot.

oh, goody

I can't wait. Branagh and Curtis, together at last.

On a small boat.

more ghosts

My 4am reading: an essay by WG Sebald on Nabokov, from a posthumous collection called Campo Santo. And five minutes reading Sebald is worth 50 minutes reading another writer: the connections he makes are always both delicate and robust, and his insights are deep. About Nabokov - another writer I have always revered, but haven't read enough of - have loved from afar, as it were - he writes:

"Nabokov repeatedly tried, as he himself has said, to cast a little light into the darkness lying on both sides of our life, and thus to illuminate our incomprehensible existence. Few subjects therefore, to my mind, preoccupied him more than the study of spirits, of which his famous passion for moths and butterflies was probably only an offshoot. At any rate, the most brilliant passages in his prose often give the impression that our worldly doings are being observed by some other species, not yet known to any system of taxonomy, whose emissaries sometimes assume a guest role in the plays performed by the living. Just as they appear to us, Nabokov conjectures, so we appear to them: fleeting, transparent beings of uncertain provenance and purpose. They are most commonly encountered in dreams, 'in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence,' and are 'silent, bothered, strangely depressed,' obviously suffering severely from their exclusion from society, and for that reason, says Nabokov, 'they sit apart, staring at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret'."

There's more, from both Nabokov and Sebald, about how a writer is like a ghost, how you can be a ghost in your own past - or am I extrapolating? - and about the creative act of writing itself:

"To set something so beautiful in motion, according to both Nabokov and the messianic theory of salvation, no gaudy show is necessary, only a tiny spiritual movement which releases the ideas that are shut inside our heads and always going around in circles, letting them out into a universe where, as in a good sentence, there is a place for everything and everything is in its place."

ghosts of myself

While doing some other things at the weekend I came across something I didn't know even existed: a fat sheaf of poems I wrote when I was a teenager. I know there are some around the place from when I was younger than that, and there are definitely stories I wrote in primary school; there are also essays, and once I even wrote an opera! (Well. It was two pages long, and I wrote it with a friend. Not like the precocious kids I know nowadays, they all practically have deals.) But these are the real deal, written when I was still demonstrably a kid, but old enough to be "serious" about it. When I read Collected Poems of this and that poet, I've always felt a little bit sad reading their juvenilia, because I don't have any. But now I have! Not only that, but in the strange manner of things that come back to you through time, many of these poems are as familiar as ever, in that their first lines or whatever are very fresh to me.

I'm not going to make many claims for the quality of the poems. I was no Millay writing "Renascence" at 17. But they are reassuring to me, because for one thing they're not as bad as all that: they show promise. For another, though they are full of awful stylistic tics, the voice is recognisably that of me. And some of those stylistic tics I've only managed to shake off within living memory. The good news is that while I was writing like Nikki Giovanni I was reading much more demanding stuff. And it shows.

The other good news is that I already had an ear, I was using assonance and dissonance and some crazy rhymes. I had some rhetorical devices, and ambition: there's a long numbered sequence in there. Mallarmé would be pleased to note that I was writing to the words, not to the idea - though there are certainly ideas aplenty. I was already doing that mixture of soulful and quirky. I haven't even read it all yet. And was it Brodsky? No - Auden, said that you spot a promising young poet by the fact that, however awful their work is, they are clearly in love with words, and experimenting with technique. He said the content can come later.

In the bit I have read, there are two lines in one of the poems that, not only do they sound like me, I can tell you which poem they sound like: it's not going in the book, it's called "Hullaballoo", and although I've always had a soft spot for it I've never felt it quite worked. Here are the two lines:

"While some stay home to tend the goats,
Some go to work in camel coats..."

The rest of it is execrable. But here's another good bit:

"Quiet oasis in this LOUD* desert
of time interrupted by the clatter
chatter**
of this metal pretender box, carefully woodgrained
for the pseudo-elegant effect,
whose pictures, constantly, mean untiringly
nothing.
They shatter me anyway:
oasis a mirage glimmering."

(See, there's me just gearing up for an adult lifetime of ranting on about substandard TV! I love that "constantly, mean untiringly/ nothing." Fine work.)

Or:
"& now I find you gone
I find I've lost a limb
or else I'm out on one"

Or:
"The sun in kindness throws me
handfuls..."***

Most interesting of all, though, is the subjects I was writing about. Some of these poems, given a spit & a polish, could be by, well, me. I clearly have my lifelong obsessions, the things I'm working through and never stop thinking about. Or - as one of them is the ghosts of the past - that never stop thinking about me. (Oooooo-ooooo-oooooo...) They really do presage the whole "Me and the Dead" theme. Here's a whole poem, not that it's that good but I think it is interesting, & surely we can afford to give some indulgence to a 10th-grader:

"You cannot see Connecticut tonight.****
It is covered by mists which are
impenetrable.*****
The Yankee ghosts are home to roost,
sitting on the past,
covering up the present,
floating across the streets
with absent-minded nonchalance
as if the years which intervene
did not exist.
You cannot see Connecticut tonight,
so shrouded in its own debris it is,
so hidden in the drifting mist
of the builders of its houses
that you cannot see
at all."

Well, bless. I think that mini-me did a good job! E'en this very summer I wanted to draft a poem about exactly the same thing: those mists in the woods. And the ghostliness of the whole place, only I now think they're Indian ghosts more than settlers. That particular conceit, of the ghosts being so thick you can't see for them, I actually thought dated from a dream I had when I was about 23, but apparently it was already in place.

Here, for comparison, is the first stanza of the title poem from Me and the Dead:

"Safe in the past where nothing more can happen to them,
they occupy your streets and your favourite buildings
in their ribbons and wigs and silver-buckled shoes.
You often look at pictures of them : they were
more beautiful than the people you know, so serene
in the bright clear colours of the past, with intelligent eyes
and effortless skin tone. You feel a kinship with them.
Reading their letters again you want more, more.
You prowl through their houses ; you run your hand
lightly along the wood, leaning on their door-jambs :
door-jambs with a quaint look, that to them were modern."

And now, good night! When I wake it will be the future. ******

* See, I was reading old Ez...
** Note nasty stylistic tic!
*** See, I was reading Mayakovsky. Sometimes I still write lines that sound like this.
**** See, I was writing my IPs!
***** But then it falls to bits. Come on Kate.
****** Alas, not quite far enough into the future. Another hour or two would do me fine.

Sunday shadow puppets

I went out for a walk in the late afternoon sunshine; it was sort of glowing all over the buildings. Avoiding the trendy bits and the nasty old (I mean good ol') High St, with its betting shops, takeaways and filth, I walked the back way to Church St, through the neighbourhood with its huge square houses. To get to the neighbourhood you go to the end of my road, down a little road with a bridge over the train tracks and a row of Hassidic shops (challah, buns, cakes, kosher wine, groceries, household items), & past a church I've never been in, and then you turn. The houses are very big, very square, made of some kind of pale stone, very unyielding. They all seem to have budleias in their front gardens - budleias and rubbish.

This was the hour when the whole street, the whole neighbourhood, smells of gefilte fish. I used to love that stuff when I was little and if I only knew someone now would would make me some I'd be very happy. I hear it's an art, but then so is chicken soup with matzo balls and I can make that.

The light was golden (as schmaltz? Or is that too schmaltzy?) when I went out, with the sun shining straight into my eyes; I walked round the churchyard of the old 1560s St Mary's church, with its moss-grown crypts and those awful memorial stones that are the size and shape of coffins or mummies, just as the light was beginning to pinken. The ground was a clutter of old sticks, broken slabs, dirst; one gravestone had a single, dark green strand of ivy growing straight up it. Most of the graves are too eroded to read, but some of them date back 200 years.

But once you're in the park you get a horizon (ignore the fact that it's Green Lanes) with a sort of castle jutting out into it (ignore the fact that it's the climbing centre); over there, and over the houses with their chimneys, the sunset went an intense, violent orange, melting upward into the usual pale blue. The trees were black cut-outs against it, and a jet trail hung motionless in the sky beside a faint white crescent moon. A duck flew up from the pond. It was exactly like this:




















I sat on a bench for a few minutes till the light went a bit more.

Except for a couple of very short, where-are-you-when-will-you-be-home conversations with Mlle B, I have not spoken to a soul all day. Well, scratch that: I spoke to the girls in the Spence, ordering coffee and telling them that Fresh & Wild is now charging £2.59 for one of their small white loaves (£1.40 in the Spence itself - they laughed and told me they even take it down there hemselves - nobody from F&W has to lift a finger!). But aside from that, I have been on my own and silent since yesterday afternoon, & life is but a dream. It's hard to believe I'm even in this scene, somehow.

Strangely, hanging all those newly-framed pictures seems to have contributed to this dream-state, as most of the pictures are things I have either had for ages, or have had all my life, or have been given by friends and relatives, or have inherited from my father le Duc. In short, they all have very personal significance, as well as being interesting to look at. But then, hanging them if I weren't in a dream state they may not have had such an effect. And no one has even seen them yet.

Coming back there were a few more people about in my road: an old man in his long black coat, stooped over a cigarette in the street; a tall, red-headed girl in her long navy blue (why must they wear navy blue?? It is simply ugly on everybody) skirt, looking impossibly grown up and impossibly young at the same time. Two tiny boys, in their yarmulkes, playing: one by the front gate, and the other running away pell-mell as fast as he could, while the first one shouted - screamed, really - Eins! (pause) Zwei! (long pause, jumping up and down, then hilarious burst) Dreeeeeiiii!! And with that he rushes into the house.

By now the pink fairy dust is settling and the blue is arriving. Sounds are sounding more normal, less enchanted, and soon it will just be plain old night, with traffic and harsh lighting. The fish smells even more delicious. I've been walking for an hour and can hardly tell the difference between life and dreaming: I've been living since Thursday almost entirely in my own internal spaces, and sleeping badly so I'm never sure if I'm awake or not. And I'm home.

I knew it all along

Jacques Prévert in an interview before the first showing of Les Enfants du Paradis, for which he wrote the screenplay:

"Cinema and poetry are the same thing."

the culture of distraction

Fortunately I would have had no idea who this silly girl was, if it weren't for the good old New York Times.

Anyway, a woman called Susan Jacoby has written a book called The Age of Unreason, and here is what made her decide to write it. It was September 11, 2001...

"Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

'This is just like Pearl Harbor,' one of the men said.

The other asked, 'What is Pearl Harbor?'

'That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,' the first man replied."

Actually: note how the NYT has to carefully embed the real answer into its article - just in case its readers might not be able to admit to themselves that they don't know what the hell Pearl Harbor was...

with apologies to the Poetry Society

I hope I'm not coming over unusually bad-tempered this week. I already managed to annoy one person I had no intention of annoying and in fact hadn't thought it was really possible to annoy, as well as a few other people, and then capped it by going off nauseous and sick, my head spinning in its own "bad, bright whip of flow" - so if I offend, please pardon me.

But this thing that has come into my inbox - what is it?

"Rooted at opposite ends of Britain – one in Devon, the other in Fife – Alice Oswald and Kathleen Jamie have much in common. Still in their early forties, both have combined motherhood, and very private lives, with extraordinary success as poets. Alice Oswald has won not only the T.S. Eliot Prize but also the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, while Kathleen Jamie is one of only two poets to have won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize twice. Both have won the Forward Poetry Prize. Each of them combines an intense love for, and close attention to, nature, with imagery that is at once precise, and utterly new - for Alice Oswald, eels in the river Dart are ‘bright whips of flow’, for Kathleen Jamie, a corncrake is ‘a votive statue hidden in the grass’. And while Jeanette Winterson describes Alice Oswald as ‘the rightful heir to Ted Hughes’, Richard Mabey considers Kathleen Jamie’s work ‘as close as writing gets to a conversation with the natural world’. Long-standing admirers of one another’s work, they meet, and read together, for the first time."

Can we just pause for a moment here. "Rooted (geddit!?) at opposite ends of Britain - one in Xxx, one in Xxx - [Male Poet] and [Male Poet] have much in common. Still only in early middle age, both have managed to combine fatherhood and the intense demands of paid employment with extraordinary success as poets..."

Is it just me?

Then the fatuous list of awards won - and to be honest while I wouldn't sneer at any of them once my book is out (and I become a real boy!) I do wish we could sometimes talk avbout something besides awards ("how big is yours?") - and then the luvvie mutual congratulations at the end.

To think of going along to witness two mutual admirers mutually admire each other and then read their poems! You would have to pay me handsomely. And, come to that, why are Poetry Society members going for free? It doesn't sound as if this is being done for the audience, or for the sake of the poetry, at all. In fact, it reminds me faintly of this unforgettable bagatelle from my friend James Marcus...

valentine's day, on which I love the java jive and it loves me

(as long as I lie still and don't try to eat anything)

Well, children, Ms B never made it through her day. One bite of sausage had to be spat out unswallowed, with a grimace, and halfway through a meeting - well, I won't tell you what it was like. Not nice. And so dizzy! So I left, and came home, where I have lain ever since like a dishrag under my beloved falling-apart eiderdown (known hereabouts as the Father Ted blanket, because one exactly exactly like it once appeared on Father Ted, and we bought it from a vintage shop in Islington where I know they get that kind of stuff in). The baroque temperature is a bit high, and the baroque head still spinning, but I ate some lentil soup will no ill effects (you'll be pleased to know). I guess I'm not going to brave the Tim Wells lot at the Camden Head tonight...

On my way home, because I was feeling very strange and weird, but for some reason coffee isn't bothering my stomach - only food is - I stopped at Giraffe to get a coffee to give me strength to go the rest of the way. (Lame or what.) Nice Italian guy in there, with his row of slips along the counter with the orders printed on: the usual. On one of them sits a black coffee, nicely full. The slip says "americano."

I asked for my coffee. While he was making it, the senior waiter comes, picks up this cup ad holds it in front of him, and says: "tell me where the customer's going to add the milk in this!"

My guy goes, "wha - ?"

"Tell me where the customer is going to put the milk." says the head honcho, menacingly.

My guy stammers something which I think might have been, and I hope to hell was, to the effect that "americano" bloody means "black coffee", and no, it doesn't have milk in it, because if it did it would be a white coffee and not an americano. Trust me, I have looked it up. And I hate receiving an americano only half full (which is not the same as when you ask for a double espresso, as I often do, or even a double espresso topped up with jut a bit of hot water, which can, strangely, taste even stronger than an espresso and also lasts longer) almost as much as I hate having to answer the daft milk question every time.

Head honcho puts the coffee down and walks off, muttering something unpleasant.

My guy puts my coffee on the counter, and tips the offending now-stone-cold wasted americano down the drain. I hand him a fiver. He goes to the till and calls out a request for "the key," but there is no response. He asks again for the key. No one comes. After about seven seconds he comes back and hands me my fiver. To my raised eyebrows he replies, "next time, madame." Then he looks at me kindly yet sharply and says, almost-but-not-quite bitterly: "Happy San Valentino Day!"

And if that hasn't cheered you up yet, try this little bagatelle:

good morning world

The ghostly fog of the past few days seems to have lifted; at least, I can see out the kitchen window this morning. But it's just damp and grey. Yesterday I took the Oxford Tube to Oxford (of course) and it was very beautiful then: low frosty mists rolling along grass, rolling alongside the coach - first in Hyde Park, among the black cabs and cyclists, and then again once we got further north. On the way back in the evening the Oxfordshire hills were beautiful, with a blood-orange sunset behind them that went on for ages, the sky just getting imperceptibly more mauve... and the aura of a thousand years hanging over them. Travel is all tantalus, isn't it. Smoke and mirrors, there is Roman Britain over the crest of that hill, and here you are in your seat! Even were you standing on the hill you couldn't be IN it, which is what I think we want when we go to places like that.

I didn't really have any time to myself in Oxford itself, just five minutes in which I nipped into the Oxfam Bookshop, where I bought Byron's letters, letters and essays of Wilde in a lovely old Pelican edition, and a large Collected of Yehuda Amichai for too much money. Then there was, at least, a very fast walk - I was with two tall guys - struggling to carry all these books, plus of course my laptop etc - through a golden Oxford, the air sunny but still with a trace of uncertainty round the edges, scurrying past the Bridge of Sighs, and blossoming blossom along the river, sighing as we passed, and then the bus. Too tired to stay on by mtself. I read the Amichai on the way home.

Naturally, leaving at that time, there was traffic. Then in London there was traffic. Then at Victoria there was an accident or something and we were all advised to get off at Hyde Park Corner - me with my bags of books, plus laptop, vibrating slightly all over because of the coach. Oxford Street was heaving, it was pure hell, with shrieking gangs of unbelievably stupid and unpleasant girls, and nothing could move at all: it took me an hour then to get to Warren St, where I gratefully sank into the Tube, and got home at 8pm having been travelling for four hours. The vibrating didn't stop for hours.

Today, a gantlet of meetings, and things I need to a) organise and b) edit, to say nothing of c) do, which I can't because I will be in these meetings. And I've slept five hours.

February 14th: the birthdays of my friend Sinead, and my first high school boyfriend. I might go to the Camden Head tonight, where Tim Wells and Niall O'Sullivan are reading.

elegantly dressed retirement?

Ectoplasm, I think. It's the look of the future. Here is a haunted courtroom in North Carolina, taken on a CCTV camera. Apparently when the security guards were alerted they rushed into the room and straight through the ghost.

I mean, you just don't want to have to worry about appropriate office wear after you're dead!

Yesterday my colleague told me that when my predecessor was working late in the office on her own one time (it's a Regency building) she heard footsteps across the room and then the sound of paper shuffling. Needless to say, she was the only one there.

Apparently at the top of the building there is also a perfectly preserved, abandoned garret complete with ancient wallapaper. Two strapping blokes I work with went up there to have a look and came back down terrified! They reckon it's probably the same chambermaid...

And here, for your delectation, is a picture I found on a site for a York ghost festival. Don't ask me.















Apologies, by the way: I know this is a short, crap, rushed post!

laughing and clocks

George Szirtes is such a nice man. Here is a paragraph from his blog, about a strange subject: women's laughter. He writes:

"One of the loveliest of sounds: a woman laughing in another room. I don't know why it should so fill one up. Maybe it's childhood, the half-understood happiness of your mother, or maybe it is the deeper, almost archaic sound of delight in sheerly being-here-and-now. I have written on women's laughter before, the bubbling forth that comes so naturally to them but which is nothing particularly to do with humour since often it is without perceptible object, just a muscle that runs through the entire body, a kind of physical relief or, rather, release. Laughter like that sounds benign, pleased to be alive."

Strange to be a woman and read that. I read it and I wondered if it applies only to the laughter of women you love, but I think he means any women, generally. Do I laugh like that, I wonder? Maybe: I often feel I laugh out of sheer pleasure, rather than at a joke. Like he says. (When I'm feeling sheer pleasure, that is.) Maybe in any case the whole function of jokes is to simulate - and indded to stimulate - that feeling. That would explain why so many jokes - that is, why most of humour - is rooted in some kind of unhappiness, anxiety, tension, awkwardness, failure. Why so much of it is about death, for example. It takes our fears, our unhappinesses, and uses them against themselves, to create a sort of simulacrum of happiness.

But is all this a bit airy-fairy or sentimental? I've never really felt like the kind of girl whom, for example, the Victorian paterfamilias would have found "such a comfort" to have in the house, the soft, confiding, softly-laughing type; though it's certainly possible that I might sometimes laugh like a tinkling stream from another room.. (Except that in my case most of the time there is no one to hear it, inviting comparisons with yet another old chestnut, if not the entire chestnut tree, as it falls in the chestnut forest...) The following paragraph somehow resonates more familiarly:

"In a passage I have just translated from Krasznahorkai, two men are waiting for a dreaded appointment, an official summons whose purpose is not yet clear. They are sitting on a bench outside a door ready and impatient to be ushered in. The corridors are tiled, there is only the piercing buzz of the neon light, the whole place is dim. There are two visible clocks. A clerk comes and goes, glances at one of the clocks before disappearing again."

But as I say, George is a kind man; and possibly he is doing a lovely thing here, perceiving a general tendency and inviting one to consider that one has this quality without even knowing it. It could be beautiful. And where he says, "Now if suddenly they were to hear the sound of a woman's laughter down that corridor, a light, luxuriant laugh without guile and viciousness in it, it would be as though the light had brightened a little and they could go through the door awaiting them with a certain resolve," I wonder what would achieve this effect for, say, me.

Children's laughter? Maybe. There are certainly individual people I know whose laughter would have this effect on me, as being somehow more efficacious (or infectious) than most; & some, but not all, of these people are practically still children... but is it the same thing?

Then he says: "Light, light, light."

I think that might mean: "write, write, write."

(Sadly: some of Ms B's posts have amused her so much, if she says so herself, that she laughed like a drain for days. If not weeks. Not this one, of course.)

the whole problem with poetry

Behind the scenes at British Vogue with Lynn Barber:

"But this high dependence on advertising makes for what seems to me a shocking cosiness between editorial and advertising. Newspapers are always careful to keep a firewall between the two, but Vogue has an 'executive fashion editor' whose job is to check that advertisers get sufficient editorial mentions to keep them happy, and Alex [Alexandra Shulman, the editor] has to apologise if they get left out - 'I seem to spend my whole life apologising!' she laughs. 'But Vogue makes most of its money out of advertising - and it does make an awful lot of money - so we've got to have a good relationship with our advertisers. They're not going to place £100,000 a year and then say, "Feel free not to use any of our goods" - life's not like that. So although there is this feeling sometimes that creatively it's not pure, well - magazines are a business, you're not sitting there writing poetry'."

Thanks to Linda Grant at The Thoughtful Dresser, for the link - I hadn't seen a paper at all this weekend...

about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters*

Ted Hughes again, from the eye of the storm:
( 9 November 1966, to Richard Murphy):

"Everything back here is more or less in one piece - usual corruptions, usual family coup d'états, usual shatterings of fragile sentimental treasures, usual heaps of loathly ashes in the flower-beds, place nearly burned down with the bonfire, children regressed to unrecognisable savages, usual wild tales - not the entertaining sort that travellers bring back but the consequential sort they return to. However, the proverb now in power is 'Retire from trouble and sing to it'."

Retire from trouble and sing to it. Of course that is just what poetry is. There's another letter, written several years later to his daughter Frieda when she was at school and had to write a play about Cleopatra (I know! I can just see that at Stoke Newington). This letter feels incredibly important to me. There's one point where he's been talking about the reading she should do - Plutarch's Lives, mainly - and then he's talking about writing it, and the scenes she could put in if she wanted to. He says Shakespeare wrote 50 scenes at least, and all he ever read was the Plutarch. I just love that!

I remember, back in 2007, writing resentfully of the fact that even the few poets asked by the newspapers didn't choose books of poetry for their 'Books of the year'. Even the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, only came as close as choosing Ted Hughes' letters. "Ted Hughes' letters!" I thought. "Why can't he choose someone's poems! He's the bloody Poet Laureate! And he chooses flipping letters! I don't care if they're from Ted Hughes!"

Well, please allow me to say this now. It's still the first half of February, and this is my book of the year.

There will be more. The whole reason I'm reading it is because I've been commissioned to write about it, so I don't want to peak too early, as the saying goes, but it will be an in-depth piece and obviously more than just a "review." We know the book is good, and important, so I'm hardly giving the game away by saying that!

* You can never have too much of a good thing - so here. (nb. Ignore the commentary.)

it's so romantic

Overheard, two colleagues trying to identify some pub one of them had in mind for a Valentine's Day triste - I mean tryst:

"Have you ever been to that place, it's on both sides of the street, because of the arches..."

"Is it right near Heaven? I'm sure I've been to a place like that around there."

"Oh, I know the one you mean! Yes! That's it. You always see someone vaguely famous slumped against the window."

forty five years ago today...

... the elephant in the room; the ghost in the cupboard; it's getting to be a long time ago, isn't it. I hate to dwell on this though. I've lost all sight of Sylvia Plath as a poet; I find her work very hard to read, though of course the best of it is dazzling. Maybe that's it: I'm dazzled by the glare.

But then again you can't ignore the date, especially if you're deep in Ted Hughes' letters.

I find the picture above very unsettling. It has the look of the pictures of my childhood, and my mother even had one of those old-fashioned-looking hairdos at the time (but not coiled plaits; a rather elegant french twist, thankfully, with no fringe). I think there is something ghostly about this image, even if the story hadn't been what it is.

let's do the time warp again

I may have thought the patient had died, ladies and gentlemen; but if so, the corpse is about to get a darned good burial. I've just seen the first episode of Ashes to Ashes, in which the Bad Cop DCI Gene Hunt from Life on Mars is resuscitated for another trip through time - this time to the wilds of London in 1981. Double creepy! I was here! Remember that weird orangey-red lipstick? The clothes are looking horrible, yet strangely normal, and the locations are looking fab.

But the problem is, once you see it on telly it really does start feeling like it was just yesterday. How odd that you can't just step through somewhere and be back then. (Oh - and that's what time-travel stories are all about...)

And with a sultry (yet, in this episode, mainly rather hysterical; I'm hoping that will change) female time-travelling sidekick, it's looking like Gene Hunt's going to get to be the Bad, Sexy Cop this time round. Is that going to be fun, or tedious,or is it an eighties hommage á la Moonlighting?

The papers are talking about its black comedy, its surreal weirdness, and its soundtrack.

So hurrah! Dennis Potter it may not be, but it is cracking good fun, it's put together with cleverness and sophistication, it's original, and it actually has a bit of the Zeitgeist about it. As I recall that was a word we used to like, back in 1981.

I take it all back...

framed on a Saturday

"One day we'll get out of here, Wanda"

Today isn't a day in which your Baroque correspondent looked at a newspaper, or kept abreast in any other way with current affairs. She did go to a dinner party, and admittedly in the home of someone pretty high-powered in domestic affairs, but aside from her sparkling anecdotes about Ted Hughes' letters, and Charles Lamb and his mad sister, the thing did not stray far into the Public Good. I guess there was some talk of Michael Portillo.

The main thing Ms B did today, beside getting her roots done (and not before time) was to take eleven - count 'em - pictures to the framers'. Got it? That's an Ikea sofa. A week somewhere hot. A week, in fact, of pay. Eight lots of getting your roots done. But the pictures are largely sentimental in some form or another. And they're also great, in the sense of being good, and are going to look lovely, and it means that the Mansions of Baroque will once again settle down into a state of balance, of being as they should be. It is very hard to settle in a place without things on the walls, and that is all there is to it. Some of these pictures have been waiting years. Some of course, have just come from le palais du Duc, and were getting brown and foxed in bad mounts. Some are amusing French nursery pieces from c1900, and some are original abstract ink drawings etc. which were getting increasingly - no matter what care take in the domestic environment - wrecked. Some are kitsch, and some ineffable. One is an engraving of a monk looking lasciviously down the bodice of a lady, and it will shortly have a dark red lacquered frame which I think highly suitable. The frames I chose are a mixture. Most of the pictures I got either for free or for a pittance (eg the monk, 50p at the William Patten school fair). They will all be ready next Friday. Whereupon I will expire.

But did I replace the wrong printer ink with the right printer ink? So can I print out all this work I'm doing? No. Because I barely had time to rush back to get my roots done. Well, never mind. And thank God for the dinner party, because back here we're on porridge.

Let's see. Other than that, a Ruth Fainlight poem which I hope to have time to write about on the morrow, evoking a trail of feminine literary history akin to the Kiss that goes back generations. Nearly finished work on our interview, which I only conducted a year ago yesterday - which is clearly nothing in some scales of time. I mean, a species of dinosaur would hardly have had time to reach land! I wonder if 'Selena Dreamy' really thinks I have no scope?

By the way. Some weeks ago, out of sensitivity to the issue, I unpublished my post about Stoke Newington School maybe giving some of their Christmas show proceeds to the fund which had been set up for the parents of Etem Celebi, the boy who had been through school with my kids, who was killed. Well, I heard tonight at dinner that the teacher I wrote to has been mocking, or is it complaining about, this email she has received. AND in hearing of the kids! Because that's where I heard it! - although in two months she has not, unfortunately, found the leisure actually to respond. And she was a teacher I liked, though I was well aware that she had also said things to the kids that I thought were inappropriate. Well, I guess I'll take it a bit bigger.

"I'm afraid the patient has died."

'All this emphasis on bonnets and re-doing of period dramas is demeaning and patronising. It's as if the film-makers think all the viewers can cope with is something they've already heard of before."

So says Nicola Beauman, the founder of Persephone Books, which re-publishes little-known, out-of-print books, mostly by women, and mostly out of copyright - which means (duh!) mostly "costume dramas." (I have long thought Persephone makes lovely volumes, as objects, though I've never read one of them - which is as much about me not reading much fiction these days as it is about anything.)

The Guardian continues:

"...many of [the 75 books published by Persephone] are, in her eyes, prime candidates for adaptation ("except maybe the cookery books"). Hence her bafflement at the BBC's recent production of Sense and Sensibility, which has, of course, been brought to the screen very successfully before. News that there's another version of Brideshead Revisited in production doesn't thrill Beauman either. 'I don't understand how they get away with it,' she fumes."

Now, she is a woman after my own heart. I love this. I've had several conversations lately with several people that sounded just like this quote - about the Dickens glut, the Austen glut (& I love Austen: but did we really need another Sense & Sensibility so soon after Ang Lee's film - and did it really need to be so similar to it??), the stupid heritage-industry feel of it all, the constant low-level boredom...

I know I don't watch much TV anyway. And I know they did Jane Eyre recently, but if I recall correctly it was also horribly bowdlerised. And it seems to have no bearing on anything. I don't think this is just about TV, as such: it's about the loss of a living culture, in which the people who make the decisions for us (yes they do) operate out of fear, rather than from having their fingers on the pulse.

Or is fear itself the pulse? Are we all so uncertain what anything means that all we can cope with is endless Dickens, Harry (not Dennis, of course) Potter and Austen? Whatever happened to things like that wonderful series of Cold Comfort Farm? (We don't want another; they can find something else to film.) I remember when they filmed Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April, with Josie Lawrence in it: lovely. (I do love her books.) Why can't they make Decline and Fall? Why, if they want costumes, can't they film something by Henry Green?

I know. I love the books and don't need the mini-series. But this debate is not about that, it's about the way we think about our culture - as opposed to "society" - and its artefacts, what we want from the past and the future, how we discuss these things among ourselves in the larger group. Here's a question: as Brideshead did sum up the early 80s so scarily well, their pretension and snobbery - and ersatz nostalgia - what would sum up right now? What are our qualities, if you were a cultural critic? Are we not allowed to be cultural critics any more? Why can't they film Brave New World? (Because then our children would understand the meaning of the "inclusion room" at school. And they don't wear frilly dresses in Brave New World.)

But if you want chiffon and some flowers, wouldn't it even be interesting for someone to try to do justice to, say, Mrs Dalloway? (She's younger in the flashbacks.)

veritable psychological peaches

Carl Jung, puzzled

It seems I missed Joyce's birthday, being too busy in Southwold to take note. But Sheila O'Malley of the Sheila Variations has done the work so I don't have to (though I did, so I did, totally mention and quote our man yesterday, or was it the day before - he must be in the ether):

"Carl Jung read Ulysses," she writes, "and was so moved and disturbed by it that he wrote Joyce a letter about it:

'Dear Sir, Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don't know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn't help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,
C.G. Jung'

My favorite thing is that Joyce was so proud of this letter (and rightfully so) and he read it outloud once at a dinner party, and Nora snarked after he finished: 'Jim knows nothing at all about women'."

Do read Sheila's whole post: treasures galore.

elegantly dressed TS Eliot

I love this uncharacteristic picture; almost everything about it pleases me: the filing cabinets, the white cuffs and handkerchief, the way he's leaning forward, the way he looks like he's carved out of very beautiful cherry-wood, the way he looks like my grandfather, the burnished throne desk. It makes me smile - though I realise I may be more used to that than old Tom. Bless him. And it is Ash Wednesday today, for about another 40 minutes, after all... and would it have been worth it... oh, I think so.

the world turned upside down

After last week's shock announcement that the Home Secretary needs a bodyguard to go for a kebab, and thinks (yes she does; she said so) that "no one would" go out and about in Hackney after dark, we now find that our new Housing Minister Caroline Flint is shocked at the number of council tenants who don't have jobs. Funny; one might be reasonably shocked by these sorts of things, but of course the big difference between her and Labour Ministers of old is that she thinks all these jobless tenants are just a bunch of lazy bastards.

The number of council tenants without jobs has risen, from 20% in 1981 to 55% now. That means of course that where most council tenants previously were trotting off of a morning with their dustcarts, chip vans and nail files, nowadays they are less cosy to look at and think about. According to Flint, that's reason enough to take these people in hand and make sure they're at least looking for a job - sinisterly, even to make sure they're "employable"* - before they're allowed to have a council home.

After all! The likes of us aren't paying perfectly good taxes to support the likes of them, are we!

"She told the Fabian Society on Monday: 'The link between social housing and worklessness is stark. I am concerned about what has been called a collapse in the number of people in council housing in work over the past 25 years.

'We need to think radically and start a national debate'."

Okay - so let's start the debate. First of all, I move that the word missing from her statement to the Fabians is "causal." There is no evidence that being given a council home has in any way encouraged these people to become, or to remain, jobless.

In 1982 the unemployment rate famously topped 3 million, or one in eight people. It was going up, at the time, not down. Remember why Thatcher was so thrilled when Argentina invaded the Falklands?? In 2007 the unemployment rate was around five per cent, or one in 20 people. Spot the difference. I'm not even sure what the population has done in that time, but the actual number of unemployed people now is around 1.5 million, or half what it was in the early eighties. Does that sound to you like a huge segment of the population has just decided not to work?

As it happens, in 1984 - three years after the date the Minister is concerned about - yours truly here was party to the purchase of a flat in Wimbledon (I know, I know - I was a child bride, I liked being near the Wombles) for £29,950. The combined salaries involved in the mortgage - from two young people both, at that time, working in shops of one sort or another - came to roughly £16,000. In other words, we were earning more than half the amount the flat cost.

Er - compare that to now. On a salary of over four times what I was earning then, I am unable to afford to buy a flat. Well - okay - I have kids, I'd need a bigger flat, and I'm only one adult in the equation, not two. However. The average price of a home in 2007 hit around £200,000. Even in nasty old Hackney you can't even buy a garage for twice the combines earnings of two shop assistants.

The Telegraph puts it this way:

"To put current house prices into perspective, the median weekly wage, according to the Office for National Statistics, is £447 – equating to £23,244 a year. Average house prices, then, have reached a remarkable 8·6 times average earnings."

Now, you may recall that many council properties have been sold off under Right to Buy. Many of those places now fetch the same prices on the open market as other properties, despite the fact that councils deprived of the rental income can't even afford to keep up the communal areas properly - such is our housing shortage - and, thus, the competition for those that remain is so fierce that there are severely overcrowded families growing up and even leaving home before they can be rehoused in larger properties. I, at one stage having not worked for nine years and finding myself with nowhere to go, spent several years in a one-bedroom privately rented flat that cost me more than a 3-bed council house would have (of course I was working; I was doing nothing bloody else). I currently, in a 'good job', spend nearly half my take-home pay on the rent of the cheapest habitable two-bed flat I was able to find (in good old Hackney). (It's very nice, actually, but that is beside the point.)

Now, in this climate it stands to reason that the few council properties that do remain will go to the most desperate people in our society, those with no jobs, those who can't raise a deposit for a rented place, those who have been made homeless (the only way to get housed in inner London), those who have no other option. The ones the council has to house.

They are the deserving poor.

Of course fewer of them are working.

Caroline, wake up! Wake up! It was all a dream!

* I wonder if that means they have to speak English, too.

a fauvel for our times

Another reason (yes, I already had one: I missed the Contemporary Poetry Review staff party at the Chelsea Hotel, sob!) to wish I'd been in New York City last week: a performance to music, with screened projections, of Ian Duhig's poems based on the Roman de Fauvel, in "stylistically diverse sections [which] include examples of most types of 14th-century notated music, like monophonic liturgical chant, secular French ballades, early-13th-century two-part motets and three- and four-voice motets typical of the style pioneered by the composer and poet Philippe de Vitry."

According to no less august an organ than the New York Times:

“Neither political corruption nor the cardinal sins have gone out of fashion since 'The Roman de Fauvel', a satirical poem denouncing ruling institutions in France, was written in the early 14th century. But some of the work’s references would mean little to modern audiences.

The Clerks’ Group, a British vocal ensemble specializing in early music, offered an updated version of the 'Roman,' with colorful, witty poems by Ian Duhig, on Sunday as part of the Music Before 1800 series at Corpus Christi Church in Morningside Heights.”

A charming path to contemplation in this week of political frenzy, then - a chance to chill out to the early music in what looks like a glorious and utterly New York setting, whilst reflecting on the innately corrupting qualities of worldly power. I just love early music (and medieval literature). And these kinds of recitals and things - I just think they really know how to do this stuff in New York. The Times clearly loved it, too: they've described Duhig's poems as "cheeky," talking about what a laugh some of the jokes raised. When's the last time you read a high culture review like that over here?

I guess it leaves the TS Eliot Prize readings in the dust. And I'm missing it again in Philadelphia on Friday.

To read my review of Duhig's collection, The Speed of Dark, which was based on the Fauvel roman, click here.

"I am my own work of art"*

I long ago worked out that one of the main things I want out of life is to get through it with my personality intact. By this I mean that when I'm eighty, in the home, I want to be still making my decisions based on what I want - even if the only choice I get is what I want on my porridge (I know: porridge? I'd be lucky!) - rather than on what doesn't scare or threaten me in some way ("Ohmigod, not porridge, I can't stand that stuff ever since that bastard threw some on me back in 2010," etc). I want to be laughing and having fun in my wheelchair. Or, you know, complaining in an honest and enjoyable way about the ugly, uncomfy headrest, rather than feeling hard-done-by that I'm not in the first team of the home's salsa class. I don't want to be fuelled by bitterness - though I might accept a half of bitter (okay, make it a pint).

Of course this is what we all want, but in the course of the baroque peregrinations it has come to attention that this precise idea of intactness of the personality - of an integritas, as James Joyce might have said* - is in fact the thing that's at stake. One can't allow oneself to be weakened, to become weak, or to be made smaller, or to have things taken away from one's essence, as a result of things that have merely happened. Bigger, yes. Though I keep saying I'll do something about that. But to have one's horizons and powers and capacities shrink? To concede? Nooooo.

Well, this morning on the way to work I began reading Christopher Reid's enormous (though by his account extremely partial) edition of the Letters of Ted Hughes. Opening it at random, I read this, and it made me feel very sad:

(to Lucas Myers, 29 September 1984)
"I keep writing this and that, but it seems painfully little for the time I spend pursuing it. I wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of 63 & 69. I have an idea of those two episodes as steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself, leaving me that much less, just what was left, to live on. No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the steel doors - but I believe big physical changes happen at these times, big self-anaesthesias. Maybe life isn't long enough to wake up from them."

A more resolute artist? Not long enough? Even for somebody as larger-than-life as Ted Hughes?And can he really have been just wondering this in 1984? I ask this not to pry or to cast doubt on his experience, but because he reminds me here so much of people I've known, who maybe haven't managed to stay intact, who never really figured out what had happened to them.

* Who said this?

** Sorry to do this to you. The relevant passage from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

--To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: AD PULCRITUDINEM TRIA REQUIRUNTUR INTEGRITAS, CONSONANTIA, CLARITAS. I translate it so: THREE THINGS ARE NEEDED FOR BEAUTY, WHOLENESS, HARMONY, AND RADIANCE. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?

--Of course, I am, said Lynch. If you think I have an excrementitious intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you.

Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted on his head.

--Look at that basket, he said.

--I see it, said Lynch.

--In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time.

What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as ONE thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is INTEGRITAS.

--Bull's eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.

--Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the
synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is ONE thing you feel now that it is a THING. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible,
separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is CONSONANTIA.

--Bull's eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is CLARITAS and you win the cigar.

--The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that CLARITAS is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic QUIDDITAS, the WHATNESS of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.