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.

"these foolish things..."

At last! My long, no-longer-apocryphal article, "The Tawdry Halo of the Idle Martyr: MacNeice's Autumn Journal," is finally published! Feedback, if I might be so bold as to quote, includes remarks that it is "really, really good" and that I've "selected FABULOUS quotes"! (Thanks, guys; the fivers are in the post.)

You can find it on the Contemporary Poetry Review website.

I begin:

"In 1963, after Louis MacNeice’s premature death of pneumonia, Philip Larkin wrote that “his poetry was the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn-mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the news-boys were shouting . . . he displayed a sophisticated sentimentality about falling leaves and lipsticked cigarette stubs: he could have written the words of ‘These Foolish Things.’” "

I was very happy when I discovered this quote from Larkin, because that quality is the thing I most love about MacNeice - and I don't see it as trivial, either. Ever since I read it, the song has become one of the foolish things that remind me of MacNeice (sorry: I really like Bryan Ferry's version...).

Now, my piece is just one part of a whole MacNeice issue celebrating the dear man's centenary; go and check it out. (Once again, I had wanted to write something aobut him on his actual hundredth birthday, but that was September 12th and I was busy going to the US Post Office, the airport, and home. Bit distracted. MacNeice would have understood.)

masochism*

Why do we do it to ourselves? In school we used to call it "term papers" or "research papers" and they were part of why we all thought the teachers were torturing us.

Somewhere along the line I developed Stockholm syndrome, bought some little plastic index-card boxes in different colours, and started to use strategic term paper topics as a way of deepening the dialectic with my teachers (eg, for the ex-Marine who never taught us a single work by a woman in a whole year of advanced-placement English, 20 pages on "the theme of androgyny in Virginia Woolf's Orlando").

But now, years later, here we are, arrived at a point in one's life where the to-do list goes like this:**

1. 3,000-word (I nearly wrote page, there - tells you something) review by Saturday, 500 words already written, ne of the two books not thoroughly read yet - basically, 12 hours to master something completely new, which looks hard yet interesting, personally challenging but, you know. Do-able.

2. MacNeice article (8,000 words) is back with edits I have to go through. Plus I read something last week I really want to work into my argument, so I'll do that too, I think (realistically) by photocopying the relevant pages of the source book and bringing them with me. Mysteriously, there is a bit where the editor has written "Fragment - please finish" and it doesn't look overly familiar. So I guess I must finish that.

3. interview with Ruth Fainlight, much still to do in terms of editing the conversation and adding quotes from poems etc, and maybe asking a few more questions to flesh out specific bits. It'll be great when it's done!

There are little piles of books and papers, like spontaneous eruptions from the coffee table, sideboard, window ledge, everywhere. One pile for this review; another for MacNeice; another for Ruth Fainlight; a pile of papers for the ms; a pile of magazines I have to read; another of books I want to read (poetry); and, under the coffee table, too much to mention but it incudes the pile of nonpoetry books I want to read. There's a novel I can't find, too.

Not only do I not have a study, I don't even have my own desk - and the living room is also my bedroom! There is simply nowhere to put things to get them out of the way or even keep bits of work together nicely. Tell that to the people on the Saturday Guardian magazine.

4. Small matter of sprucing up my manuscript for Salt... speaking of which I must make sure I have the up-to-date version of that file on my laptop before I leave.

Then when I get back to work it's going to be all scheduling and editing and words and liaising with the authors and deadlines and rabbits out of hats and basically my life will go back to being like one big holiday in Newcastle carrying coals with coalmen and busmen.

This little rant is just procrastination. You know it is. I'm about to go back to bed, I mean the sofabed,*** to read a "statement of poetics" and some other things (as well as the book, of course; I bought a very satisfying little notebook the other day for taking notes in).

Do I love it, really?


* there, that'll bring the punters in.

** Actually, it also goes: go to Post Office & post prizes to winners, change up money; pick things up at cleaners; do three loads of laundry; print off insurance policy papers; pack; get new black printer cartridge while out; go to the coffee shop because Skippy, who works there, is going back to Australia forever while I'm away so I must say goodbye to her today!; try and ring my brother; teach Urban Warror's girlfriend to knit; oh and the Tall Blond Rock God is coming over later, possibly with his friend the Boy Who Writes, who will want feedback on the two poems he left with me last time, which I have not yet developed any feedback on. Book a cab for the morning. Watch a DVD of "Swing Time," which finally arrived from LoveFilm; see if I can put LoveFilm membership on hold while I'm away; make list of useful phone numbers (eg, the caretaker) for the babymummy, who is staying here while I'm away (long story). Keys. And dinner. The only thing I think I don't have to do today is mind the baby.

*** Not as luxurious as it sounds. I'm too tired to fold it up.

a few bits and pieces

1. I hope you haven't all forgotten my fantastic first-ever competition! There will be prizes, however modest; and please don't be put off by the sight of Chase Twitchell glowering all over the cover (what is that about!). Deadline Monday. Do join: it's a pilot, there will be more.

2. Thirty years since Elvis died. Today. I remember it well, that sense of shock you have as a kid that the world has somehow changed, and you can't imagine it changing in that way - but it does, and you soon do... I don't actually think he's still alive.

3. I thought I wrote an exceptional elegantly dressed post for Non-Working Monkey's blog yesterday. Did you even go read it?? Where are the comments? She's going to come back from her hols and think no one cares! To say nothing of me, spreading the EDW joy around the blogosphere like a complete trouper. Go on...

4. You should check out this blog called Georgiasam. I'm trying to work out who it is: any poets with kids called Georgia and Sam? Anyone from the former USSR called Samuel? Or could it even be a carefully coded EastEnders reference...? Whatever: this is a person who's clearly not afraid to mention - oh, wait, but I am. You'll have to go read it.

5. LRB Bookshop last night, the launch of the new Salt Essays series: Fiona Sampson, Tony Lopez and John Wilkinson. I had to literally drag myself out of bed to go, and show up with a large coffee* instead of the usual lashings of free wine, and I'm glad I did. Fun, nice evening. Wilkinson however (this is on georgiasam, by the way) has some funny ideas about the tired, moribund English (sic) poets (eg MacNeice) of the mid-century as against the fresh, vibrant, "egalitarian" ones of the NY school. He describes LM's poem Death of an Actress as a "slightly mocking and superior treatment of popular culture and its ephemera" - apparently this would be a bad thing - and its first line, "I see from the paper that Florrie Forde is dead" as holding "the unmistakeable tone of the old bore at breakfast dismissively shaking the Times..."

He compares this with "Frank O'Hara's genuinely democratic spirit" in relation to The Day Lady Died - * admittedly, this is a great poem. I love Frank O'Hara.**

Well, bu does it even make sense to try to place these two poets comparatively in relation to pop culture? They're so different, with such different projects, with such different mackgrounds and legacies and agendas and hopes and dreams - and, you know, such a world of difference between London (or Carrickfergus) and New York, I don't see how this is even a valid comparison. It's an incredibly reductionist reading, though I say so wot am no academic and so can't fight fire with fire - and it is so like a boy to think you have to choose. All this claim-staking, all these soap-boxes - as an elderly friend of mine said last night, "as if they were politicians!"

How we larfed.

I did get a copy of Wilkinson's book, though. Not only was he charming and interesting in person, he also reminded me hugely of a boyfriend I went out with for ages, in and after high school - who later went on to get his PhD on one particular kind of irregular verb in Homer.

* The proof that I needed it is in the fact that I had no trouble sleeping.

** He's very dangerous to copy, though: I've almost had to turn him off in me like a spigot, because that insouciance of his is so infectious - but the genius is a thing apart. London is full of people writing just a bit too much like Frank.

acoustic

I'm typing this at a little table outside one of my favourite cafes, in Newington Green - a place called (don't ask me why) Acoustic. I love it here, you can sit and type for ages and no one bothers you. They make great coffee and the food is delicious. Sort of English/Mediterranean.

There are four builders at the next table eating all-day breakfasts: one is huge, with an orange T shirt under green overalls; one's young and lairy, with a hoop in his ear (and , sweetly, a collapsible yardstick and a giant fat pencil sticking out of his trouser pocket); one's kind of thin and cute, and the fourth looks like a science teacher, but a fun one. I think I heard, across the way, a European accent. But he's in his fifties, he's not your current wave of young Polish immigrants.

Ohhh, they're all German! They're talking German. Even the lairy one! I'd taken him for Chat'am Man. I can see him now, all dolled up 60 years ago. The thin guy and the science-teacher guy (longish, but groomed, grey locks falling over his obviously-non-English brow) look like intellectuals.

Well, that's nice. I like an intellectual builder. I have respect for builders. They make our houses. (I recently rewatched the first episode of the first series of The Sopranos, and it was as amazing as I remember it being all those years ago. In one scene Tony Soprano takes his (then very young) daughter, Meadow, into the huge, ornate Catholic church, sits in a pew, and just gazes around quietly. She sulks, "what are we doing here?" And he talks about his two great-great-great-uncles - or whoever it was - who came from Italy, stonemasons, and how they built this church. They made it with their own hands, them and the men who worked for them. The camera dwells lovingly on all the aspects of the church: its stonework, its carvings, its crucifix, the light. Tony gazes around. Meadow begins to see it: her face changes. It is marvellous, in the Biblical sense. Tony says: "Of course, nowadays, you find me two guys who can fix the fucking grouting in your bathroom.")

My oft-ranted prosody rant, based on the similarities between literature and carpentry, goes like this: "you wouldn't cobble together a chest of drawers without even knowing how to use the tools in your box, and then expect either for the drawers to close properly or for anyone to be impressed." Of course, even stanzas are named after rooms. (The question there is whether, like Swinburne, one might prefer the soft furnishings, or whether one is interested in the joists and girders* of which the thing is, in fact, composed.)

Well, it's all joists and girders now. I've slowed down, what with all this sickness-&-recuperation stuff. (I know, we don't mention sickness-&-recuperation in polite society, but it is almost all that's going on at the moment! It's now been well over a year that I've felt like this, all washed out. Monday I lay on the sofa all day and kept crying.) Six weeks after my operations, my nails are still shot, I almost forgot about the stuff that takes the flyawayness out of my hair (which is, this week, almost straight), and I wear the same few things every day. Still can't do anything up that presses anywhere near my belly button which has had, of course, work done behind it. I'm spending an alarming amount of time on my own: I find I don't like noise... even long conversations can be draining. I'm listening to almost no music, and then when I do, it has to be either Mozart or Chet Baker. I've gone acoustic, you see.

I AM acoustic.**

What a strange summer. It's kind of like being on a liner in the middle of the ocean - it looks like Stoke Newington, but is somehow cut off from land. I did put into dock for a couple of weeks, back there, but overdid it badly even there and have now had to put to sea again - if that isn't a too-tragic mixing of metaphors. I'm sure you can be acoustic at sea.

Aside from Mlle B (and her friends, The Girls), I almost never see the kids. They are, well, not to put it too bluntly, teenagers. I didn't even know where theUrban Warrior was, I was trying to ring him for a few days, and then it turned out he was at the Big Green Gathering. Now he's in Cornwall and needs a train ticket home, but has no photo ID so they won't let him collect a ticket in Penzance even if I pay for it on the phone. But do I care? Nope: acoustic. He's with his girlfriend's entire extended family: let them sort it out. The Tall Blond Rock God came over, all thin and etiolated, with his friend, who recently lost in the park his rucksack, which contained his Allen Ginsberg and the cigar box that held his writings. I cooked them a big meal (&, bizarrely, had to lie down twice while things simmered) and gave Writing Boy my Ginsberg (and Rilke; he's just the right age).

Of course, it's easy to be acoustic if you're never quite awake, and can't move very fast, don't seem to have your career anymore (I mean work, not poetry, though I'm not writing any poetry a t the moment), and hardly ever have a face-to-face conversation that doesn't begin, "could I have a black americano please."

However:

1. I'm going to a herbalist in Highbury next week to try and sort out my energy levels.

2. I'm going to the GP next week too.

3. I'm nearly done with my Epic Louis MacNeice piece, which now feels like the Gone With the Wind of my career:*** (Let's see... who will play Louis? Are the McGann brothers all too old?)

4. I am, however, going to America in two weeks - insane! And even aside from my scattered and irresistible family, there is a list of people I want to try to see in New York. You may even, reading, this, be one of them. I'm determined to do it even if it means I have to hold court in Port Authority.

5. And even though I'm tired as fuck, my brain seems to be working better than it was. Hurrah!

6. Nothing lasts forever. Or does it?

7. I wonder if the intellectual builders are acoustic. One of them looked at me.


* "Oh, that's easy," said the Irishman to the foreman in the famous joke. "Joist wrote Ulysses and Girder wrote Faustus..."

** Comparatively! I know.

*** You know, it took three years to make and they had to sack two directors, and Vivien Leigh wasn't their first choice of Scarletts, either. (Bette Davis was, but fortunately she was all booked up making "Jezebel;" much better, I somehow feel.)

my weak

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

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

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

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

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

The Rising Sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's not think about the money.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

elegantly dressed words

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


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

Autumn Journal, section XV

scapegoat and saviour: auden again

Louis MacNeice: he couldn't do that now

The centenary continues: here in Baroque Mansions we still blow the candles out every night. Faber's new Auden Collected is finally out,* and Ian Sansom has had a bet each way after reading it.

It is interesting how the centenary this year has been like an opportunity to rake open all the old festering resentment towards him for defecting to America in 1939. I've always taken Auden's greatness so much for granted (more on this later in the year, as MacNeice's centenary gets nearer) that I wasn;t even aware of how much anti feeling there is. (And of course some people's only reason for ever saying something nice is so they can pause meaningfully and then say, "but...")

Sansom's review in Saturday's Guardian begins grippingly:

"WH Auden is to blame for everything that went wrong with English poetry. Absurdly overpraised when young, he remained naive and immature both as a person and as a poet, his preciosities and youthful good looks becoming vile and monstrous. He was dictatorial in his approach and his opinions, imprisoned by his own intelligence, intellectually dishonest, atrociously showy in diction and lexical range, technically ingenious rather than profound, pathetically at the mercy of contemporary fashions and ideas, facetious, self-praising, vulgar and ultimately merely quaint."

Well! I don't know about you but I was rather shocked. Great paragraph, though. Maybe I'm just a bit delicate, what with the gall bladder and everything. Sansom continues, reviewing the book in a responsible and conscientious manner, until the end: "if Auden is the scapegoat of English poetry, and he is and deserves to be, then he is also its saviour." Still a bit harsh, you might feel, though I know people who utterly deride Auden. I don't understand it (just as I never understand people who deride James Merrill for being arch, of all things: you might as well write poems about dinner parties as anything else), but this review brings me closer to understanding that it might have to do with leaving the second half off the quoted sentence. Then again, the conundrum is troublingly encapsulated in a stanza claimed by Sansom to be "Auden's most perfect stanza":**

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

This stanza is not what I was expecting to see after that sentence. It is one I have always enjoyed, and it is utter Auden in its cadences and tone. Yes. But is it most perfect Auden? Isn't there something bathetic about those reindeer? They are very much reindeer viewed through the window of a very English imagination. I have never once read it without somehow, somewhere, feeling a naughty urge to giggle. Is this stanza, in its perfected Auden-ness, telling us that we must learn to expect irony with every meal? Can we never do without it?

After all, we know Auden could write movingly about love, death and hopelessness. It may be that claiming this as the perfect auden stanza is another way of shrinking him down to size - rather like those reindeer, who always seem to me very small, for all that the herds are vast.The Auden tone is usually at least a little bit complicated. At his best, including in the above stanza, he is also strangely (even if very fast-) moving.***

So after all, do I really want this book? Sansom hasn't really told me if I should. He has told me I should read Auden, which I can do anyway in my Collected Shorter Poems, Collected Longer Poems, Letters From Iceland, The Shield of Achilles, or The English Auden. (To be honest, I sometimes wonder if the reason I found Auden so daunting for so many years was because he came spread out through so many books.) I might be afraid of collecting him up all in one place: would it make him appear somehow smaller, more easily comprehended? Would that be a good thing? But the edition itself gets a rather short treatment. What is it about this Collected, aside from the fact that somebody thought they ought to do it as it was the centenary, that should make me want to have it? I mean, have to have it?

I didn't think all of this through instantaneously. But after I read the review I did a curious thing. I went onto amazon.co.uk, and dawdled through a few book searches and things, as you do. And then I bought the magisterial new MacNeice Collected. (But anyway that's understandable: I bought it for the picture.)

(Disclaimer: this whole post needs editing and if I get a chance I will do it. Words cannot describe how tired I was when I wrote it. Though it does approximately get at what I think.)

* a watched pot that boiled.

** I was sort of expecting to see this, which even now always somehow surprises with its final rhyme:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

*** Would I be happy if I'd written it? Yes.

not really dead

Eleanor of Aquitaine - just resting for a bit

The Grumpy Old Bookman writes: "Madame Arcati has two stunning interviews with Molly Parkin, part 1 on 13 April and part 2 on 18 April. Surely, few writers can have lived life with such energy and commitment."

That'll be me, then. Since my return to The World I have managed to achieve not one thing in my writing life. I read Joan Wyndham's teenage wartime diary, Love Lessons, which is not very long and is about as taxing as - well - as lying in bed reading something light for a little while. I've written half a blog post about it.

I've written, in instalments, half of a post about Life on Mars, now about two weeks out of date. In the intervening time I have watched two episodes of Doctor Who and thought I might cleverly incorporate the Doctor into my Life on Mars time-travel post. But it's half done and I don't mean the half where it makes sense.

I bought Poetry London and flipped through it thinking, "what kind of poems does Maurice Riordan want for this journal? I mean, that I write? Oh, I'd have to write some new ones. He wants different ones. Oh, and maybe not by me." Which was just silly, except for the part about having to write some new poems.

I went to the launch of the new Poetry Review issue: an exclusive little do in Borders, Charing Cross Rd. I had to sit down a lot and went home at 8pm when they all went to the pub (I say "they all" - I mean about five of the fun people of course, ring-led by my friend Jane "Are you two sisters?" Holland, ex-snooker pro, poet, jobbing writer and hard-as-nuts mother of five, count-'em, five kids)... It was great to get out in the world, & I had some lovely chats with people, including someone who was at the last thing I went to, the night before I got sick. I was shaking when I got home.

Met another delightful poet and editor, Raul Peschiera, chez my friend Clare. Raul's international poetry magazine, The Review, is currently being revamped: watch this space. I borrowed an old issue containing an early interview with my friend Michael Donaghy, interesting because it predated his 2000 collection Conjure: he was just talking as a poet who'd had an amazingly successful first book, and had published a second, and to whom the next collection was always moot. And Conjure was going to be definitively great. He sounded a bit stressed about it at the time but of course he needn't have been. Oh, dear me... Incidentally, Michael was the last person I knew who had gallstones. He was dead six months later, though it is not connected.

I ascertained that Baroque was not quoted in this week's Guardian Review.

Got a couple of rejections. Am waiting for others.

Didn't work on any articles. I read a bit of poetry by one subject. I talked a little about another.

Had a dream about a large blue china jug I have - from a Victorian commode set - in which it had been given to me by my dad, and through him by MacNeice. This is because Jonathan Wonham had written on his blog about a crystal vase which is the only extant "personal" effect of the 12th century queen and overachiever Eleanor of Aquitaine, who acquired it through her grandfather William IX of France, who had got it in the Crusades. (Wm IX was, incidentally, the first troubadour poet, and the court of Eleanor was the first flowering of the cult of Courtly Love, until Henry II arrived and put a stop to all that nonsense. I think he didn't quite get the measure of what he was marrying. And you can't even say it was because he was English.) The crystal vase is in the Louvre, saved by the fact that Eleanor's first husband, Louis, presented it to the powerful and visionary Abbe Suger. In my dream the blue jug was floating in the air, very prominently, and an indistinct voiceover suddenly became very clear and loud when it said: MacNeice.

It's a message.

But interesting as that is, I didn't work on my articles.

I drafted, one evening, for a little while, a bad poem, which will need a lot more work (preferably at a time of day when my brain works) to be any good at all. It's about listening to the recordings of Ezra Pound, which are now available on the web.

Just the one, mind.

And I spent what very little time I could just - about two hours, I think - being a bit of a vegetable - which reminds me, I am so sick of chicken I could scream, and I've gone off fish completely. I don't care if I never see another mussel.

Yesterday, exhausted to the point of emotional desperation by my few little social sojourns (all copiously backed up by minicab support, and involving little alcohol and even less food),* I had no choice but to take Mlle B into the West End, so great is her need for school clothes. I know: at this time of year! But shoes give out, shirts go grey, and they always clamp down on uniform in the summer. It was awful, hours and hours of it, and when we finally staggered into the flat Mamma was good for nothing except the bunging of a chicken (organic, M&S, which we were fortunate to have at all - I had grabbed it one day just because M&S is right in Victoria Station; and lo, the supermarket itself proved beyond me this weekend) into the oven, in between lying on the sofa.

And now it's Monday. I could weep. I've done nothing and I haven't even had a chance to rest.

Maybe Molly Parkin's had times like this too. Maybe this is what "energy and commitment" are really about.

So much for easing myself back in, eh. Now I have to finish this, have a bath, do some "working from home," wake up the Tall Blond Rock God and go to the doctor. No, not that Doctor. I wish. And then to work.

* And I thought I better had: you never know, you might meet someone. Otherwise I really will spend the rest of my baroque life sitting here all alone in an empty flat. But no: only one cute guy and he was married.

I went to a friend's birthday party on Saturday night, in Stoke Newington - this was where the whole thing fell down. I was delirious before I even arrived. And there was no one there I'd never met before, all couples from years back & school parents. Everyone was telling me how extraordinarily well I look! This despite my eyes spinning round in opposite directions like those psychedelic toys I had when I was a kid. I think they meant, variously: "You're not dead," "you've lost weight," or "I like your earrings."

the laptop of the gods

The day's a washout. I can't think about anything. I also can't describe how upset I am, & all because I left a bag on a 76 bus this morning. It was a pink patterned shoulder bag, of the kind that comes free in the magazines - in fact, it's the best one that ever came free in the magazines. In it were - get this - a DVD I was returning to Amazon; a copy of last week's New Yorker containing an article by Milan Kundera on "world literature" which I was only half finished reading, and on which I wanted to write something, and which is no longer up on the New Yorker website; my payslip; a letter about my council tax and another one from my landlord (so, lots of addresses, then - but fortunately no actual bank details); and my laptop.

Oh yes - my beautiful 12" iBook - my half-written article on MacNeice, maybe a CD of poetry being read by poets (so no great loss there) - my working environment, my settings... just - the laptop. My computer.

It happened because my eye was hurting. See, with a sore eye, why was I even taking the flipping laptop? Habit. I was sat there debating with myself whether I should nip ("nip") down to Moorfields and get it checked out, as no one had seen my eyes since a week after the lasers. I was trying to analyse the quality of pain , to make the triage decision. I was probably not thinking very well, because my eye was hurting and I had a headache. So it just so happened that, as the bus pulled up to the stop just over the hump of Stamford Hill, I suddenly decided I must go to the hospital, and jumped off. My bag was at my feet. I was thinking about other things. I was late, there were kids and people crowding my space... I just jumped off.

My eyes are all right. Sore. They hurt but not for a reason (beyond having 20 lasers each less than two months ago). The pressures weren't exactly my late Christmas present but they were all right.

After the hospital I changed all my passwords - the last thing we want is someone going through my bookmarks, getting automatically ushered into my Amazon "store" and 1-click-buying a new fridge, eh! Not much I can do about the letters. I mean, you have to carry these things around sometimes, you just do. I needed to ring, go to the post office (if there still is one), etc, and simply had the payslip in there because I had got it yesterday at work... Lordy. It's not a crime, is it. And whoever has my computer now also has my address. But then you can't say, "now they know this flat exists," because this flat always existed, you can see it from the street. Just having my overdue council tax statement isn't going to change anything, is it?

And, and...

I've been to the bus depot. They got radio controls to radio out to the drivers, but no response. I've rung again in the afternoon, after the drivers' lunch breaks. And the girls says it's worth trying again tomorrow, just in case. So let's weigh up the Good Citizenship equation.

Ms Baroque feels sick.

in which I let fall the windows of my mine eyes; sleeping and waking

The Shakespeare was my friend's idea in the first place. Boredom was setting in; I'd fallen asleep three times trying to listen to Nigel Slater reading Toast.

She was right: I needed something a bit more dynamic than just being read to, and some first-class voices seemed just the thing. I had described to her the Audiobook I downloaded last night, thinking it might be fun to practice how well I knew the Odes: Realms of Gold. Ah, but it was poems and letters (I love Keats' letters, as it goes, in the Oxford complete edition from I think 1950, in red cloth) with narration. So instead of congratulating oneself on one's ability to follow the middle bits from the Nightingale ("I knew that!") one has to listen to: "Those were difficult years for the Keats children, who had to learn to fend for themselves following the deaths of their parents. Then George announced his intention to sail for America, leaving Tom and John to look after Fanny. When Tom was diagnosed with consumption, a common disease in those days, no one knew that John too would die of the same..." with background music from the Romantic Period.

She suggested something funny. A Midsummer Night's Dream. As You Like It. Excellent advice! I do love Twelfth Night.

So Ms Mug here goes back on the web and looks for the Best One. Won't even look at anything abridged (oddly, considering it's Shakespeare, they call it "Dramatised"). Looks for pukka cast lists and favours Caedmon audio. Plays the clips. Goes for the two with the liveliest clips. (I did leave, reluctantly, the Gielgud, as it was A Winter's Tale, but I now can't think why I did that. It seemed depressing at the time.)

So what did I choose? The Tempest. And Othello. (It's all a bit pointless. What I really, really, really want is to be happily ensconced in reading MacNeice, in preparation for the brilliant paper I want to write, and indeed am delighted to have a commission, an invitation, to write, about Autumn Journal, one of the seminal poems of the 20th century. I do need to do the reading. I need to take notes: the poem is 50 pages long. I am, or was, excited about rereading Autumn Journal in London, in the autumn, but it will soon, at this rate, be more like a winter's tale.)

So, lying on the couch with my eyes closed and the disembodied Othello on my laptop with no faces to help me keep it straight, while Little Miss B watched reality TV with earphones (what a life), I fell asleep, perchance to dream - and woke with a start just half an hour ago from a really nasty, frightening, horrible nightmare. It was HORRIBLE. The iBook was busily playing the scene between Anna Massey and Celia Johnson where they're sweetly chatting to one another about how much they love and honour their husbands etc, singing little songs while they brush each other's hair and get ready for bed. And we know what happens then. The little song was the worst part of the nightmare. In the dream I actually bit someone trying to get it to stop.

My eyes are really sore - more sore today, probably because I'm sitting here doing this. And the picture above is not quite as frightening as my dream.

not really New Year's yet

From “Autumn Journal” (Part XXIV)

Sleep serene, avoid the backward
Glance; go forward, dreams, and do not halt
(Behind you in the desert stands a token
Of doubt — a pillar of salt).
Sleep, the past, and wake, the future,
And walk out promptly through the open door;
But you, my coward doubts, may go on sleeping,
You need not wake again — not any more.
The New Year comes with bombs, it is too late
To dose the dead with honourable intentions:
If you have honour to spare, employ it on the living;
The dead are dead as Nineteen-Thirty-Eight.
Sleep to the noise of running water
To-morrow to be crossed, however deep;
This is no river of the dead or Lethe,
To-night we sleep
On the banks of Rubicon — the die is cast;
There will be time to audit
The accounts later, there will be sunlight later
And the equation will come out at last.


Louis MacNeice

Friday round-up, I mean Roundhouse: just keep thinking about the Dresden Dolls

Work. No, that's an order.

Ms Baroque has been editing as hard as she can for ten hours a day, and the tide of documents is rising. There's no food in the house; lunch is thus costing £6 a day, to say nothing of the crucial morning coffee, to say less of the disgusting sushi-&-cheeseburger-fest in Victoria Station the other night after a (yay!) drink after work with the new pals.

On the plus side I did get the TV working again. By the time I came in and got something to eat (bowl of spinach and broad beans, with some bacon which wasn't off; a roll, taken from the freezer and put into the toaster oven; quite a large amount of Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream) it was well past 9, and I was just, starkly, unable to:

• answer emails,
  
• type out the poem I'm working on, which exists only in one incomplete hard copy and has been untouched for days
• do anything else involving a screen
  
• speak to anyone
• make the bed that needs making for me to sleep in.

I was, on the other hand, able to:

• cut my finger badly on a brand-new and very sharp kitchen knife, trying to make carrot sticks out of a carrot from Morrisons that has absolutely no flavour left in it anyway
• ring Telewest and, as I say, get the picture back on the TV - it was something to do with the SCART leads...
• watch three episodes of EastEnders
• take Jon Stallworthy's biography of Louis MacNeice off the shelf - being in possession of a brand-new commission to write about it for a special MacNeice edition of the Contemporary Poetry Review - and look at it vaguely for about three minutes whilst thinking of all the other research I need to do
• sleep on the couch for the third night in a row

The yoga teacher says my kidney energy is very depleted. Tell me about it. He asked if I'd been feeling tired lately. Ha! I said: "Exhausted": I honestly thought I might cry.* He was giving me an acupressure back massage at the time, (see, life not all bad) and when he said, "Yeah, I can tell," I suddenly felt I might cry (this also happens in the yoga class, when you lie on the floor and they're saying, "just let the earth hold you - you don't have to do anything").

(The other thing that did the same thing to me this week was when a New Work Pal, asking all those questions, says, "and do you have a new partner?" I go, "No-oo...." and she says: "OH! Why not?? I thought you would, you're so sweet!" Well, tell me about it. I know it's not me that's not sweet.)

The other day I stumbled across this bizarre and amusing thing: Baroque in Hackney automatically-translated into French (or something very like French), which it alarms me that someone might read. My favourite part was the rendering of my friend Jen Pepper's name to "Poivre de Jen". I will try and type out the insanely long URL soon, to make a link. Mean time:

"Deux jours dans être arrières au travail, donc, et se sentir comme je « n'ai fait rien » - la signification ce qu'exactement, je ne sais pas, sauf que moi ont des piles de factures et de papiers et doivent aller voient la banque au sujet de quelque chose mais ont été trop fatigués pour courir autour en mon heure de déjeuner, et n'ont pas toujours une bonne liste de magasins pour envoyer des poésies au loin à, qui a besoin faire mal - pendant deux jours dedans, comme parole, j'ai presque édité un document entier ; J'ai eu quelques grandes grosses idées dynamiques et ai commencé à les vendre autour de l'organisation ; J'ai écrit un bon début sur un amusement (oui !) la nouvelle poésie, que je pense sortirai tout à fait ambitieux mais tombe mon stylo ; J'ai finalement trouvé ma citation de Primo Levi (j'ai dû acheter le livre, encore, et étrangement il n'était pas facile de trouver) et le mettre dans l'article, que je peux finalement envoyer outre de la finale édite au rédacteur ; J'ai lu ce grand article, concernant une force de police au Mexique tournant la marée sur le crime en enseignant leurs dirigeants à lire ; et celui-ci, qui me confirme dans ma haine de Starbucks ; J'ai été dans l'encore un autre de ces arguments au sujet des ventes de poésie contre « quels lecteurs veulent » etc. ; J'ai lu un certain Auden (ce lecteur veut Auden) ; J'ai lu une pile des poésies qu'un ami m'a envoyé ; J'ai texted Dieu de roche de 15 ans en France (aucune réponse ; il est de retour samedi nuit), et suivi les autres à la maison de leur père ; et j'ai été pour après-travaille la boisson (mon premier verre de vin en 10 jours !) dans la barre d'hôtel de chardon à la station de Victoria, qui est un endroit de fab à se réunir pour des boissons, réellement. Vous obtenez ce grand sentiment démodé d'hôtel, qui est toujours un tonique ; Je pourrais avoir été Mlle Marple, s'asseyant là. La fois prochaine je prendrai le tricotage..."

In other news, six phone calls in, I know the name of my eye consultant's secretary (Bernadette) and may be closer to getting a) a new prescription for the Poison Eye Drops, in case of emergency, and b) an appointment for the laser thing I missed when I had flu (which seems delightful, in comparison, in retrospect). They are making ominous noises about me having to go back in to the clinic again first, which I wish they wouldn't. They seem to have no idea how much it upsets me every time and just sets me back all over again.

* note from future: gall stones.

HOWEVER! In a major coup and thanks to my charming and kind friend Sarah, I had better go get dressed, and make it good: because this is where I'm going tonight.

And now I must stop typing before I get blood on this keyboard.

a poet's Hackney

There's a lot of guff going around about some programme I missed on Channel 4, which apparently declared Hackney the worst place to live in Britain. I've seen several ether-arguments on the subject and indeed have refuted someone who seemed to be saying Clissold Park wasn't a crime zone (I know; Clissold Park is wonderful, and we all love it).

It's all got me thinking. Of course I love Hackney. Various of its wards were listed in Domesday; Stoke Newington flourished under Henry VIII and it is rather satisfying to send your children to a school named after a Tudor period businessman who was honoured by the king. Hackney is full of splendid Georgian houses, which mark its next big era of prosperity; in those days the rich merchants used it as a base for their country homes (rather as the Thrales did Streatham). I love looking in the windows of these houses; some of them have amazing extant period panelling in their tiny Georgian rooms.

Clissold Park itself is the estate of a Quaker businessman who got rich and built the house which still stands there for his family. He had two daughters. And I think it might have been he who ordered the creation of the New River, now partially underground and moribund, which we know as that green thing that runs along the deer bit.

St Augustine's Tower, which is the remains of the old parish church down in the Narrow Way, cheered my Saturday morning shopping trips for many years. And St John's Hackney is very beautiful, and houses the Hackney Singers.

It's hard not to love Shoreditch, just for having featured in our nursery rhymes - at least, its bells, which say "When I grow rich."

As for specific poetic associations, Stoke Newington is rich, rich, rich. Edgar Allen Poe was raised here as a schoolboy, by his foster father Mr Allen. He lived in the house where The Fox Reformed now is. That's exciting!

But far more exciting still is Daniel Defoe. His house stood on the corner of Church Street and what is now (of course) Defoe Road; it was torn down by the Victorians and the site is now, alas, occupied by Premier Cars, with whom I have had long-running feuds for being so completely useless. It seems incredible to me that those controllers are sitting in there all day, on the same site where Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe and they don't care. I could almost imagine I feel his satirical presence wafting about me, as I argue the toss with them. His gravestone used to be on display in a glass case in the foyer of the library, but it isn't there now; maybe it's been moved inside? Or is it in that Hackney Museum down by Town Hall? Apparently there is a bit of wall along the east side of Oldfield Road which is apocryphally his.

Abel Boyer, in Political State, wrote of Defoe (in 1717): "The Beneficence of his Masters, and in particular the E[arl] of O[xford], enabled him to repair and beautify his Habitation at Newington, where he had set up his Forge of Politicks and Scandal, from which, for these Six Years past, he supplies Monthly, often Weekly, the Publishers in and about Pater-noster-Row."

Abney Park Cemetery houses a monument to Isaac Watts, another great heritage I think nobody knows about. A Dissenting preacher who lived in the 17-18th centuries, in other words, contemporaneous with Defoe, he wrote about 600 hymns, many of which I grew up singing. The one I really loved was Joy to the World!, whose wonderful lyric sums up the complete ineffable joy that the Christmas story is about. There's not enough of that around. He also wrote Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past. He was the friend/beneficiary of Sir Thomas Abney, whose great house stood where the cemetery is now, and the pillars of whose front gates are still there in Church Street. He lived in the house for many years; picture him striding along that early incarnation of Church Street (with the old St Mary's church, but not the new one), in his robes and his wig. Watts' hymns have an unsentimental grandeur and a liveliness - springing from his complete engagement with the Bible as a living artefact - which certainly predates the Victorian taste for sop, and which makes me love him.

Moving along, I was amazed, and saddened actually, to discover last year (reading Jon Stallworthy's excellent biography of him) that St Leonard's hospital - that rather nothing place where we get referred for physiotherapy and chiropody - is where Louis MacNeice died, of pneumonia. Hackney, of course, doesn't care about Louis MacNeice, but I do.

None of this has anything to do with what Channel Four was talking about. But, as people are saying, there are plenty of other places where the crime is just as bad. I feel it is something, and not something small, to walk down streets where you can still feel the presence of named people who lived through words, who helped the language to live even through your own mind, and to live among these beautiful buildings and parks left us by people who lived here, just like us, before. Autumn among the chestnut trees of Clissold, or the mist rolling along the willowy hilltops of Springfield, is still magical. I'd choose the evocative chiaroscuro of Hackney over, say, Tottenham or Peckham any day of the week.