launch of mobile poetry archive leads to "April madness"

Never a huge fan of April Fool's Day - I think I took it personally as a child because my birthday was not long after, and resented the implication - I have slightly edited this press release from the Academy of American Poets, and am bringing it to you a fashionable two days late.

Gotcha...

April 1, 2008—When the Academy of American Poets announced the launch of a mobile version of their poetry archive in March, no one could have predicted that poetry would become the concern of Fortune 500 companies across the nation. But this is just what is happening, says Rich Richardson, CEO of Tercet, a Duluth-based import-export firm.

"It started in a very benign way with an all-company email," Richardson says. "Our comptroller forwarded 'Birches' by Robert Frost. This poem touched many of our employees, leading several to spend their work hours looking for poems on Poets.org."

Says Richardson: "Once they had a taste for lines like 'They click upon themselves/As the breeze rises,' there was no stopping them."

Richardson says he began using SmartFilter, a tool for blocking websites, to combat his employees' Poets.org usage. "Unfortunately, this did not keep them from getting their poetry fix on their mobile devices," says Richardson.

Tercet's CFO, Abby Abramson, says the widespread internet searches for poems during business hours will not be tolerated beyond National Poetry Month. "Despite the obvious personal benefits of reading poetry, we can't condone something that decreases productivity," Abramson says. Abramson estimates that employee interest in poetry could cost the company $2.2 million in lost revenue by the end of the fiscal year.

"Printing out Elizabeth Bishop's poem 'The Moose' and posting it in the cafeteria is fine. Reciting 'The Moose' to your spouse on the phone during work hours then using Poets.org to find more poems about animals is an abuse of our employee policy," says Abramson.

Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, sympathizes with the concerns of Tercet's management, but her responsibility is to the poetry readers. "We believe that poetry expands the possibilities of daily life, as imagination alters reality,” says Swenson. "If that possibility is blocked, you may have a revolution on your hands."

That revolution may come during National Poetry Month, when the Academy of Amercian Poets launches the first national celebration of Poem In Your Pocket Day. Poetry readers across the country will be carrying a poem in their pocket and sharing it with co-workers on April 17, says Swenson. "I would hate to hear that Tercet's workers were being penalized for acknowledging those 'unacknowledged legislators of the world,' our poets."

Happy April Fool's Day.


Nice work, eh? They must have had fun writing that. And imagine naming your child Tree - that part's real.

no Lisa Simpson - or is she?

Wow, as you might say. You guys know I don't really follow American politics until I'm put in a position where I have to - but I've just read a long article in the Washington Post (via the Huffington Post) all about the blog (or "blogette") kept by the Republican candidate John McCain's daughter, Meghan. Now I am practicing stroking my own hair, but it isn't as smooth as Meghan's, so I fear it may not do me any good. And anyway, "blogette"? Yet somehow...

I mean, even her blog has staff! Baroque Mansions only sits five comfortably in one room, so that's a non-starter for this place, you'll be either pleased or dismayed to know.

Anyway, here's a taster:

"Some time back, McCain posted to her Web site a detailed explanation of her campaign trail makeup regimen, including her approach to maximizing lash 'density' by blending two brands of mascara, and her technique for priming lips with concealer before applying Benefit brand lip gloss.

'I just decided to do it 'cause a lot of girls were asking,' she says. 'And then I was dutifully punished on the Internet for writing about makeup.' She starts to giggle. 'But I got a lot of good response and Benefit actually sent me an e-mail being like, "We love that you love Benefit!" Yeah. So, I was like, "Yay"'. "

She's 23. She studied art history at Columbia.

And get this:

"The Web site is not affiliated with or funded by the McCain campaign, according to Meghan and a campaign spokeswoman. McCain says she didn't want to have to cede 'creative control' to her dad's staff.

So how does she pay for it?

'We don't talk about it,' McCain says firmly. ' 'Cause, like, once I answer one question it leads to 50 others.'

But, because she is the candidate's daughter, her press requests are routed through the campaign and, at one point, Brooke Buchanan, the McCain campaign's traveling spokeswoman, comes into the room to keep an eye on the interview.

'Hey, girls,' Buchanan says. She perches on the arm of Bae's chair.

'Did you change your hair?' one of the blogettes asks her."

See? She really is just a normal kinda girl. Srsly. And, blogged up, her family really do start to sound like the Simpsons:

"There's sprightly, 96-year-old Roberta McCain, who not too long ago told C-SPAN that the Republican base was just going to have to hold "their nose" and vote for her son. There's the senator, 71, who famously spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. There's Cindy, 53, John McCain's second wife, who was addicted to prescription painkillers for several years when Meghan was a child, and who in 2004 suffered a stroke. There's Meghan's brother, Jack, in the Naval Academy, and her other brother, Jimmy, a Marine who has served in Iraq. There's her little sister, Bridget, whom the McCains adopted from Bangladesh as an infant, and who was, in Dad's 2000 presidential race, the object of a smear campaign insinuating that she was the product of an illicit union."

And then there's little Lisa, the little PR genius.

The Post again:

"McCain is a political outsider with an insider's access, and on her Web site she notices the things political junkies never would, like the 'really cute' shoes Chelsea Clinton wore when they met. She posts photographs of her own shoes and of the shoes she encounters on the trail, including those belonging to such fashion luminaries as Dick Armey and Henry Kissinger.

'Because I love shoes, and who doesn't want to know what kind of shoes Dr. Kissinger wears?' she writes on her blog.

We didn't know we wanted to know, but now that she mentions it, we kinda do."

Hmm. You couldn't make it up.* She may never even need to fall back on that education, ya think? (Make sure you click on the pic.)

* But if you did, don't forget that foundation!

"it's unsustainable..."

In continuation of my "it's all going to pot" theme of recent weeks (in tandem with my ongoing "we're in the dawn of a New Renaissance" theme of recent months), here is a bagatelle from Clive James, on the subject of our collusion in the destruction of what should not be destroyed.

He's specifically writing about a recent fracas involving an aide of Ken Livingstone (winningly known as "Ken Aide") who apparently had the nerve to write some saucy emails to a girl (I know! Go figure!) and got rumbled by the ever-bloodhound-nosed Andrew Gilligan. Well, some people are saying that if you want to be on the safe side these days you'd be better off sending a letter. But, as Clive points out, they're closing post offices even faster than they can lose letters! So are we to do?

"GK Chesterton used to argue," writes James, "that the best reason for moving to the city was that in a village everybody knows your business, so you couldn't lead a private life.

"He'd find it hard to say the same now. You can be in the biggest city in the world, and every phone you pick up, and every computer you sit down at, is a direct pipeline to universal publicity for any thought you dare to express.

"Plato would have been envious. He devised a legal body called the Nocturnal Council, but if its members suspected you of impiety they only wanted to discuss it with you for a few years. And Plato never dreamed that his hideous Republic could be established except by coercion.

"We seem to be volunteering for ours."

(In a sub-plot, as it were, the article also makes great play of the ways in which we are abusing the English language these days, as in the creeping of the language of business into every sphere of public life - so that we forget, strangely, the values that used to form the basis of public life. It is, strangely, a form of totalitarianism. As Nat King Cole might have sung: "It's unsustainable...")

James also says, with a beautiful commonsensicality rarely found these days:

"Pinching private phone calls and e-mails ought to be a crime, but somehow it isn't. And it probably won't be. There are too many laws as it is; too many of the new laws are useless; and a law against printing anything you can find would probably be seen as an infringement of free speech, even though the unrestricted theft of private messages amounts to an infringement of free speech anyway."

The key here seems to be the last half-sentence: when's the last time a point like that got made by someone in government? To be honest, I can connect this easily to CCTV cameras, ID cards, SATS tests, Google, the information you get in your website stats, mobile phone technology (soon to follow us down into the Tube), to name but a few things. And all at a time when people see nothing ironic in a TV programme being based explicitly on total lack of privacy and even brazenly titled "Big Brother"! (A friend of a friend recently said, "I feel like Winston Smith...")

Ta to Francis Sedgemore for the link.

international women's day

You know the Baroque: I'm not really into these international this-n-that days, with the possible exception of International Pirates Day (Q: Why are pirates called pirates? A: Because they arrrrrrrrr). And I won't be going to any International Women's Day events nor will I listen to any Women's events on Radio 4, or whatever they do. I think I saw something about an all-women poetry reading which I won't be attending; I'm a little wary of anything where people get to feel smug about how misunderstood they are. (I'm be home watching Ghost Club.)

But today is a day to realise that:

Convictions for reported rapes in the UK have plummeted from from (what we then called "only") around 30% in the 1980s to an appalling 5.7% now - the lowest in Europe. More women are reporting rape than ever before. Most are raped by people they know. And juries are reluctant to convict if the victim had been drinking. (It's worth knowing this, girls: go to a party and you have no protection in the courts if something happens later.)

In some countries rape qualifies as "adultery" for which the woman can be punished.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, aka "Mr Reasonable", has even made his famous remark about "some aspects of" sharia law being "inevitable" in Britain. Yeah, right. Here in Baroque Mansions we deliberately stayed away from that one. But it's just civil matters, you know. Still within UK law. Well, sharia is not fair to women, either as law or, more importantly as the sensibility under which people live (as we, under British law, live within its sensibility; come on, this isn't rocket science); I saw this even in my limited capacity working for years in a Muslim neighbourhood. Sharia courts are far more likely to rule in favour of the male-dominated sensibility, according to the religious texts. Read this. Really: read it.

Let's not forget about the case (in 2002) of Amina Lawal - she was sentenced to stoning (to death) in Nigeria because she had a baby two years after separating from her husband! The male partner in question was not prosecuted, "for lack of evidence." Oh - and her defending lawyers won on appeal (she is now remarried) on a sharia-based defence that it is apparently possible for an embryo to lie dormant for up to five years, thereby "proving" that the baby "must be" her ex-husband's.

Also, in the UK! The Department for Work and Pensions has recently ruled that it will pay additional benefits to Muslim men [sic] who have up to four wives! Yes! Just as long as those marriages were contracted in countries where polygyny is legal. Even though polygamy is illegal here.

Er - don't you think it's funny that they're not talking about paying the benefits to the women?

Worldwide, women are still paid on average 16% less than men. Apparently the pay gap is even wider for highly educated women. (Get that! Mind you, I suppose Martin Amis and the footballers have pushed men's average hourly pay right up.) In Britain they get 17% less. In Japan apparently they get 49% less. (Yes, that's a 4.)














Of the 1.2billion people estimated to live in poverty, 70% are women and children. In the developing world a woman dies from pregnancy or childbirth complications every minute.

AIDS is rising faster in women than it is in men:

"Women now make up nearly half of the 37.2 million adults aged 15-49 living with HIV worldwide.

In sub-Saharan Africa about 60% of those with HIV are women. And among young people aged 15-24, 75% of those with HIV are girls and women. Only a quarter are the boys.

Over the past two years alone, the number of women infected in East Asia has increased by 56%.

In Eastern Europe and Central Asia the number has increased by 48%." (figures from here)

According to the UN, for women to be "adequately represented" by their governments, 30% of government representatives should be female. Thirty countries have reached this figure (including Burundi, Guyana and Rwanda) and only three countries - Chile, Spain and Sweden - in the world have achieved gender parity. In the UK 18% of MPs are female. In the USA, only 14% of seats in Congress are held by women.









41 million girls in the developing world are being deprived of an education. How will they ever get into parliament, so they can make it illegal for men to infect their wives with HIV?

it's a good thing poetry makes nothing happen

In the Telegraph:

"The Board of Deputies of British Jews is considering making a complaint to the police over a newspaper interview with the poet Tom Paulin in which he is reported as saying that American-born settlers in Israel should be shot dead.

Paulin, who appears regularly on the panel of the BBC2 arts programme Newsnight Review (formerly Late Review), allegedly made the comment in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram.

The interviewer wrote that Paulin, a consistent critic of Israeli conduct towards the Palestinians, clearly abhorred 'Brooklyn-born' Jewish settlers. Paulin, a lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford, was then quoted as saying: 'They should be shot dead.

'I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them'."

Phew!

"Earlier in the interview, he was quoted as saying: "I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all'."

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.

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 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.

stay-at-home secretary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GLBTGI Friday in Stoke Newington

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

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

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

"What?" I not surprisingly said.

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

Can you imagine. Where to start.

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

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

Oh, great, then.

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

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

Stony glare.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

a book for what ails us

Blake Morrison, in today's Guardian, talks about the powers of literature to heal. In reference to an initiative around Merseyside called "Get Into Reading" he describes what sound like miracles - patients on less medication, people improving as people, people recovering from bereavements and - of course I like this one - vocabularies improving. Participants include the homeless, the bipolar and the bereaved, as well as people in chronic pain and those with cancer and other long-term illnesses.

The key to this initiative, as with any initiative I think, is the vision of the woman who set it up - in this case, Jane Davis from the University of Liverpool's Reader Centre. I have been professionally involved, no matter how tangentially, with more badly-thought-out initiatives by people who had no idea what they were doing than I care to mention. The debris of these schemes is everywhere around us, often in the form of non-functioning human beings. Indeed, Morrison's article describes, depressingly, people being sent to the local library by well-meaning "service providers" only to find the place empty save for a few leaflets and self-help books on depression.

In fact, according to Morrison, it is precisely the books on depression - and anything else self-consciously "positive" or "life-affirming" (my words) - which will do least to help someone in extremis. It is the example, and the company (as it were) of the author's darkest moments that can most help to lead the reader through his or her own darkness, and safely out the other side. Groups cited were reading Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy.

Morrison quotes Ted Hughes defining poetry, for example, as "nothing more than a facility for expressing that complicated process in which we locate, and attempt to heal, affliction - whether our own or that of others whose feeling we can share. The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain - and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world."

It's both interesting and refreshing that these schemes are so effective specifically with poetry. There's a story of one old woman who refused to talk or listen to anyone, but who softened gradually while poetry was read aloud. And it's equally interesting that the reading lists for these successful groups are probably more demanding than your average A Level. Dumbing down really does make us dumb.

Meanwhile, in Comment is Free, talking rather more glamorously of the power of award committees, etc, Mark Lawson happens to mention that literary fiction is failing because the marketing departments don't like it, and that its traditional haven - the library system - has been given over to DVDs and - again - those leaflets. This would seem to run counter to the insights of Blake Morrison's wonderful article.

Do we think it would be good to see some lateral thinking, as several local authorities are named as falling down on this score? (And even they are the GOOD ones, as most would never think of trying to harness literature and the inner life in aid of the work of the social services.) Tower Hamlets Council, while I was working there, revamped its libraries into "Idea Stores" which look glitzy, with big glass windows, but when you look inside them you can't see a single book (though their website says they carry "a wide range of stock including best-selling [sic] books, CDs and DVDs"). They had banks of computers... leaflets... you know... not an idea in sight.

And yet - and yet - Morrison also describes George Eliot getting over the loss of her husband by reading Dante with her friend John Cross. She subsequently married him. Would that have happened if she had met him down the Idea Store and looked Dante up on Wikipedia with him sitting on a couple of tall stools, cans of diet Coke at their elbows? "Her sympathetic delight in stimulating my newly awakened enthusiasm for Dante did something to distract her mind from sorrowful memories," Cross later wrote. "The divine poet took us to a new world. It was a renovation of life."

Anyway, no literature can cure the cold I have had since November. Every time I think I'm getting better, I wake up one morning with a terrible throat or no voice or a hacking cough. I'm writing this lying in bed, unable to swallow properly, with eyes that feel like they're popping out of my head, which in the case of my left one may in fact be the case. However, deadlines demand that I try a "writing cure" - maybe THAT will fix me.

world gone insane

Reality TV and the courts: who can tell the difference? The worst part of this peccadillo seems to be the woman's husband spouting on on all the talk shows... Very interesting. If the offence had been less sexual in nature - that is, less embarrassing for his own masculine self-esteem - would he have said those things? And this had the complicity of the courts. And look what her lawyer said!

Er - and look at these figures. Which one are you? How long, do you think, before we'll all be on probation, or wearing tags, or going back to prison for conducting an innocent workplace conversation with a salami? since when are some kinds of food simply "bad" and others by virtue of their very existence "good"? And you know I love my vegetables. I just hate petty fascists.

"Ban unhealthy foods from hospital vending machines"? Imagine: you're waiting for your aged relative to come out of the operating theatre, or your wife's been having a baby. You're stressed out and overtired. You go to the machine for something to give you a lift and it offers you - an apple or a pear. Give me a break. (What they need, in fact, is better quality chocolate.) There is a time and a place for everything and if anyone wants to talk about food in hospitals they could start by trying to get decent food provided to the fecking patients. I saw not one piece of fresh fruit when I was in hospital this year, you were lucky to be offered a little sealed plastic pot of tinned fruit cocktail once a day. And let's not even start on their total lack of commitment to providing food that's appropriate to the patient's medical condition!

But oh yes, let's put a tax on custard creams. Or on a wonderful smoked ham or farm-reared free-range pork, or on the aforementioned Italian salami, or a ricotta, or a bottle of olive oil. That'll get us eating better! But not on the fruit cocktail in a tin. Noooo. And not on the fish fingers with orange coating.

DNA holds clues to personal beliefs. It It must be true, I read it here. Donate yours now.

By the way, I've had very little, and patchy, internet over the past two days. I did spend an hour or so going in rings around all the various voice-recordings of Virgin Media, speaking to several real people along the way - but all the real people have the power to do is put you through to the recording, and one of them couldn't even speak English, anyway. Sorry Virgin - we aren't fooled! The guy was in India. If you ring Tech Support you don't even get that: you just get a phone ringing into the void until you eventually hang up. On one of the recordings there was news that "some customers in the N22 and N18 areas" may be experiencing "some trouble" with their internet connection. Does N16 count as "the N18 area?" Where is N18? But it's all right because the engineers "expect [sic] service to be restored as soon as possible." Phew!

2008: looking better?

Sorry, this is a non-post. It's sort of a non-week. I'm not even getting my work done, and I bought the wrong kind of printer ink yesterday. I think my brain is fuzzy from eating unhealthy food.

the one into the many and the many into the one

While Doris Lessing laments that books and reading no longer seem important to us, the chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, is lamenting the loss of a common culture - the "canon" people would be reading, if they were reading. (I put it in scare quotes because I don't really like the word - and in the article I get all this from the religious origins of the word are much gone into, which may be helpful to some but I feel is a distraction from the matter at hand.) He recently wrote (according to Richard Jenkyns in Prospect magazine), "'Until recently, national cultures were predicated on the idea of a canon, a set of texts that everyone knew. In the case of Britain they included the Bible, Shakespeare and the great novels. The existence of a canon is essential to a culture. It means that people share a set of references and resonances, a public vocabulary of narratives and discourse.' This shared inheritance, he argues, is now being destroyed by multiculturalism and technology, satellite television and the internet in particular."

There it is again: the internet in particular. Everything is now available everywhere, all the time. But the fact is that, even without the internet's free instant downloads of any episide of Seinfeld you want (if you know where to look), there are now several canons (cana? canards?), at least in terms of keeping up with contemporary culture. No one can nowadays be well-informed in science, drama, film, fiction, current affairs, history, poetry, critical theory, the new series of Scrubs, fashion, contemporary cooking and local politics. Gone are the days when you could read The Spectator and The Times, and listen to Radio 4, and pass. In poetry alone the difference beetween, say, LANGUAGE and New Formalism is enough to make two distinct fields.

But it's not just reading: Jenkyns, discussing Rabbi Sacks' premise, goes on to say: "...at the start of the 21st century... we live in a world without heroes.... The middle of the last century saw men such as Churchill, Mao and De Gaulle who, for better or worse, were big figures. Two decades ago there were leaders like Thatcher, Gorbachev and... Mandela. Today, on the other hand, it appears that not one of the nearly 200 nations of the world is led by a person of truly exceptional quality. Perhaps we are fortunate to live in an age that calls for technocrats rather than titans, but something has been lost."

He goes on: "We lack cultural heroes... Isaiah Berlin used to say in his last years that there were no geniuses left in the world: no great novelists, poets, painters or composers... On the surface there is a good deal of chatter about young British artists or brilliant novelists and filmmakers, but deep down we feel that nothing very large is coming to birth... I remember in the 1970s a distinguished person passing the Listener to me and saying, about The Old Fools, "There is a poem that will last for 500 years": it was Philip Larkin's latest. It is a sentence that one cannot easily imagine being spoken today."

Now, I'm asking: is it that no great work is being produced, or that we now think of it differently? We've lost the ability to value things for what they mean - I think we no longer know what they mean. This is what relativism is: precisely that we no longer think our own social baggage is any more important than anyone else's, even though it is more important to us. We can't even value ourselves more than anyone else, any more. I said three days ago, apropos Lessing's Nobel speech, that we'd lost our sense of significance. I think this is what Martin Amis is (however cackhandedly) going on about. When he notoriously asked an auditoriumful of people in Manchester last week to raise their hands if they felt "morally superior to Al Qaeda" he was asking them to take a stand: what do you think is significant, meaningful, right? And few people did put their hands up. I know I very likely wouldn't have put mine up, and the reason doesn't lie in moral equivocacy. It's something deeper than that, a sort of existential diffidence. We're just really not sure.

Jenkyns goes on (of course I am very partially quoting; please do read the whole thing): "The chief rabbi is right to say that multiculturalism has been a disaster. For one thing, it is actually monocultural: it is the demand that all countries should be like America (though without America's devotion to nation and constitution). For another, it inhibits the robust and confident expression of the majority culture, although such robustness and confidence provide the best conditions for minority cultures also to flourish. The millennium dome has been so ridiculed that it may seem cheap to drag it up again, but its utter vacuity has been instructive. It would have been more popular and enjoyable, as well as more worthwhile, if it had celebrated high culture, taken pleasure in our history, and not tried to conceal whose two-thousandth anniversary was actually being marked. We should indeed assert the importance of historical memory, of ancestry and rootedness. This is something which immigrants do not share, but the answer is not to pretend that it does not matter, but to offer new citizens a kind of historical memory by proxy. That is more or less what happens in the US."

Can we get back to where the children will know Bible stories? (Or even fairy tales! I forbade all modernised, sanitised, girl-rewritten,* happy-ending fairy tales in our house; but the kids did get given them. Ugh.) I know a lot of people are atheists and don't want their children even to think of Christmas as a religious festival - really! - but this always seems a shame: all those children, cut off from our old shared story. Already in daily life I meet loads of people, many educated, with no frame of reference except a local, contemporary one (Lessing mentions this too) and it is - aside from anything else - really quite boring.

(Hat tip, as so often, to 3 Quarks Daily for the link.)

* Fairy tales have quite a few extremely clever heroines, if the boring people only knew it.

(nb. I do sometimes thank God I only write this tosh & don't have to read it. It's all so partial.)

cultural relativity continued

Is this watch as funny, or not as funny, as it seems? (Click on the picture.) Maybe it's scary. Like the dream I was having this morning which featured (among many other things) the most succulent ham in the universe. It was more lovely than any ham I have ever cooked for any Christmas Eve. But when I ate it, it tasted like chicken. I mean who really knows what anything means any more? (Maybe the unemployed philosophers, for a start.)

the death of wit: what is it for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shame on us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

at least they're not idoits

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

She writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Did you hear?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, right.

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

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

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

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

stop press! the happiness!

Sorry, I really feel I am blogging too much. I really am just about to go get some lunch. But I made the mistake of just quickly looking at the Guardian homepage, and there I learned that the lovable ruffian, or useless wastrel tosspot, who likes to think of himself as London's next mayor - yes, the strange blond tearaway himself, Boris Johnson - is a poet!

Or not. The book, published on Monday by Harper Collins, is entitled The Perils of the Pushy Parents. Lord.

Stuart Jeffries has done the hard work for us, and reports thus:

" [Ken] Livingstone will have to read the bloody thing in order to get a bead on Johnson's views on the politics of childrearing (of which more later), but you need not. This year, an estimated 170,000 books will be published and, if I suggest that this is only the 169,999th least worth reading, that is only because I am hedging my bets. A worse book might appear this year. It is a possibility.

The book concerns the Albacores, a family whose parents insist son and daughter should not watch telly. The dad, especially, is a crackpot who teaches his toddlers Zeno's paradox when they should be eating dirt and shanking each other with plastic cutlery. When Mr Albacore sees the pair watching TV, he takes action rendered thus by Johnson: "He'd zap the programme off and holler/ 'Go and read some Emile Zola.'"

As you will notice, Johnson has a gift for assonance not heard since Alexander Pope wrote the Rape of the Lock (this will be the quote they use on the paperback edition - just see if it isn't). By which I mean, there are lots of duff rhymes....

In Henry IV, part 1, Hotspur remarks: "I had rather be a kitten, and cry mew!/ Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers." If only Johnson were that kitten...

...the quality of Boris is always strained."

guidelines for a Buddhist mother

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

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

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

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

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

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