I do so love a crystal ball*

Oh la la! Mme Arcati has hit, or should I say delicately tapped, the nail, or is it the earring, on the head. Just what was this French state visit about again? Let's ask her.

The future - it may look orange...

While we're on the subject, of course I remember now the other post I never did last week: the one where I quote the tweed-suited one's hilarious astrological description of Julian Barnes.

"In his new book (a memoir really) Nothing to be Frightened of" - Madame writes - "Julian Barnes reveals as a literary performance, the full extent of his fear of death (or thanatophobia) - why, the poor poppet wakes up at night screaming and chewing his pillow at the prospect of eternal extinction. No more book awards! No more cool reviews from John Walsh in the Indy! Oh woe, cruel world! Fashionably, he is a devout member of the Literary Godless Religion (Christopher Hitchens is its current Archbish; M Amis one of the vicars) - "I don’t believe in God, but I miss him," Barnes writes, largely because the divinely-inspired painted prettier pictures on church windows, so far as I can tell. He tells us he's a melancholic person.

Mr Barnes will be appalled to learn that he is very true to his horoscope..."

Sorry. You know I can't resist this kind of stuff.

And while we're linking: even a quick look at Charles Lambert's blog is enough to show me just how incomplete my reading list of last night was...


* as the actress - oh, never mind.

undone

Posts:
the one on Tim Lott's article last week about the Orange Prize. It was gonna be a good one, too. I had lots to say, much of it both trenchant and funny at the same time... I can really see what he was saying, too. But in an email I wrote: "lots of worth in here but he shoots his own foot a few times - the subject is just too difficult to be dealt with in terms of numbers, & "what is men's writing?" ( tho wd obv be VERY silly prize) has shockingly many easy, top-of-head answers! Many of which are never called men's writing!! (eg Roth, etc) So. But in the end of course anything which aspires to the condition of "art" rather than just "fiction" must transcend these limitations. I do think a lot of women's writing fails to do that & that must ultimately be Lott's point. But then, is like asking black writers to write as if they were no colour. Can it be done? Should it?"

the one called Being the view; and the viewed

something about Carla-Bruni-Sarkozy-how-sarcastic-can-we-get-etc and her little black patent leather shoes, the remarks in the Indy - "as if she'd taken holy orders" - and the Guardian - "A French schoolgirl crpossed with Jackie Kennedy" - and the creepy way she started reminding me of Princess Diana, in the cynical & outrageous hypocrisy of her dress. Who does she think she's kidding? And yet they all bought it! Her shoes were on the front page!

the cookbook one

the one about how Fresh & Wild in Stoke Newington Church St is selling small white loaves from the Spence - for you non-locals, a bakery about two blocks up the road - for a pound more than the Spence sells them for! When I asked a rather gormless skinny guy in there why this was, he lamely wavered something about transporting it, & then something about the price of flour going up - even though all their other loaves were the same price as ever. When I mentioned all this to the Spence, they said: "We take them the bread every day! They don't have to do anything!" Ladies and gentlemen, do NOT buy Spence bread from Stale & Tame, please! (Alas, I fear the people who are buying it are the very people who are not reading my blog. "Like a Bridge Over Troubled Waters...", methinks.)

fix up link lists in sidebar, they are a total mess and out of date, and both my linkees and you, readers, deserve better.


Books:
Little Monsters, by Charles Lambert

The Anomolies, by Joey Goebel (yes), cover designed by up-&-coming graphic design genius Greg Stevenson

Torture the Artist, now out in proof, from the same author and designer, from Old Street Publishing

Collected Critical Writings of Geoffrey Hill (I may be some time)

Ted Hughes' Selected Letters

In the Sixties, Barry Miles (warning: naked Ginsberg - bloody hell, I didn't know my stomach was so strong!)

The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce (Civil War ones esp.)

Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, by Charles Nichols

Them and Us: the American Invasion of British High Society, by Charles Jennings (I need to actually get a copy of this first, but it has my name written all over it, wherever it is)

City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the Forties, by Otto Friedrich

Los Alamos Mon Amour, by Simon Barraclough (I will however buy this in 13 days at the launch)

Gogol in Rome, Katia Kapovich: I have to get this book. To find out why, see the summer issue of Poetry London


Household tasks & chores:
Mount Everest of laundry is now Himalayas of laundry.

have bought DVD/VCR player (several of you will be pleased to hear) but am too shagged to set it up

dishes

ring cleaner and beg her to come back

er - light bulbs?

buy new lightshade for living room. Find nice lightshade for living room.

where can I get a lamp rewired?

in case cleaner comes back, buy Cif and bleach and spray-for-polish

change the beds.

do the ironing; or at least get the new iron out of the box and put it away, so as to pretend that there was some point in spending that £17.98 and arguing the toss with the asinine kids in Curry's - and throw away the one I bought in Morrison's for £4.49, which no, of course it doesn't work, hello-o.


Writing things:
one review, for Poetry London, due now

send some poems out

edit about three new poems

no, edit about ten new poems

maybe edit first and then send them out!

another review, for The Dark Horse

my secret essay I'm (not) working on

2,000 words (600 down) on Anthony Hecht for the Contemporary Poetry Review

furthermore, I am slowly resolving to take part in the annual Fest that is NaPoWriMo, aka National Poetry Writing Month in America. April: as you can see, truly the cruellest month, bleeding/rhyme words out of dead sounds... But somehow it is increasingly seeming like a potentially good idea. You have to write a poem - no matter how crap - every day during April, which is National Poetry month in the USA. I will not be pinning them up on the walls of Baroque Mansions!


Other:
birthday present for Cat Lady, birthday day before yesterday

call Sis and beg her to go to Mama B's house to look for that picture of Grandfather for the cover of my book!

send Infamous back to LoveFilm

pay British Gas

relax; have weekend! The herbalist has given me herbs to soothe my nerves and improve my energy balance, whilst settling my stomach, but he also tells me he thinks I should try and operate for a bit at 85%, instead of 105%. "Don't over-commit yourself."


And so to bed. Mlle B is out somewhere-or-other with her friends, all being teenagers, and I'm too knackered to watch a DVD in the living room anyway. To bed: I can overheat my lap again with the laptop. And fall asleep over it with the light on. Again. I like to fancy that it gives the Mlle a sense of purpose, coming in and turning it off when she gets in.

infamous indolence

To say it's been a slow weekend in Baroque Mansions would be to do a disservice to the Ice Age.

There have been sleeping, eating, and the cooking necessary to have the things to eat; there have been lolling, slumping and more eating; and there has been more sleeping, followed by some eating and lolling. Ms B never left the house at all between 4pm on Thursday and about 4pm on Saturday, except for a doomed, misguided attempt to go for a walk which left her (well - the car - not hers, of course, but even so not even a very competent attempt at a walk) pelted and battered by inch-wide raindrops and then a hailstorm worthy of Good Friday itself - oh, wait. It was Good Friday.

Saturday brings us, recovered from the pelting, to the thrilling heights of Morrisons, where I discovered that 6pm the day before Easter Sunday is not the time to find a nice leg of lamb.Thus my lamb in white wine, lemon and egg sauce became a delightfully plucky and inventive lamb-&-lemon meatballs in white wine, lemon and egg sauce. There were also rice, an entire Savoy cabbage, some very beautiful grilled courgettes, and a bread & butter pudding made with brioche rolls (2 extra free), cream and 100g of dark chocolate.

Later that day, when the kids and auntie had gone, I ate the last meatball, the leftover vegetables and the rest of the pudding standing up at the counter, and drank the rest of the cooking wine, a cheap Orvieto.

DVD: Infamous. Very interesting but I'm not really in the mood to write a movie critique... Toby Jones deliciously over-the-top as Truman Capote, I will say - but as for what's her name from Truly Madly Deeply playing Diana Vreeland? Just NO.

Yesterday woke up remembering that I had three egg whites left over, plus the rest of the double cream, and there was a girl in the house whom I knew it would be very easy to thrill with a sudden meringue... it's so hard nowadays with one's own offspring. Mlle B, who was "too full" to eat even a morsel of the bread-&-butter pudding (Duh! Like that stopped anyone else), simply doesn't like meringue. For this reason alone it is always great fun to make it when this particular friend is there, so we can offer Mlle B some and, when she refuses, shake our heads pityingly in unison.

Then several hours of saying I was going to write my stuff, and not, followed by almost being late to the cinema because I'd actually forgotten how to leave the house: it was a delightful, if suitably leisurely, French gangster film circa about 1960 give or take, called Le Doulos, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, a lot of menacing shadows and an all-but-forgotten family of performing overcoats. Then an asparagus risotto.

Work tomorrow. The meringue is finished, there's no meat in the house, I never had to resort to white sliced, the place is Armageddon of laundry, and as I write this - at 11.26 - I have not yet been outside today, either. In the few hours left to me I have all the writing I was going to do over the preceding five days to do, plus the laundry.

PS: Does anyone want a signed, limited edition of The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis, fine, no d/w? Numbered 176 of 1,000. It's very large... offers accepted.

truly madly

Anthony Minghella will be, I suspect, as troubling in death as he has been for me in life: I always wanted to like him. He had such an engaging face, such a cheerful smile, and his films always looked so beautiful. The opening shot of The English Patient, over the dunes that look like skin and the curves of a body, has stayed with me all this time, whatever I thought of the rest of the movie (and don't get me started; it would be disrespectful in the extreme at a time like this; Ondaatje's novel is a great book). "Minghella" - it's fun to say, very pleasant in the mouth. And "Anthony Minghella" is a fine, tactile name; his parents must be proud of it (it is clear that they are proud as punch of their boy, poor things). The news of his death at age 54 has shocked us here in Baroque Mansions. I lost a friend aged not much less than that and you wouldn't wish it on anyone.

The ice cream industry on the Isle of Wight will also now be a sadder thing than it was, too; that has got to be a sad thing. (I've always seen Minghella's ice cream van origins as somehow intrinsic to the sugariness of his vision: the English Patient's starkly doomed trek across the desert - to say nothing of the tart-with-a-heart-of-gold's cappuccino run in Breaking and Entering - has always seemed to me to have a custard base, although it may seem base to mention it now. I think in fairness and kindness we can say that is just what the man was like, and lots of other people liked it too.)

Whatever you thought of Minghella's films, it is impossible to deny that the British film industry has lost an industrious champion. When Minghella was appointed Chairman of the BFI in 2003, he told the BBC, "We're not getting enough movies made here, our studios aren't busy enough, we don't have enough studios."

One can only agree with this. It would be nice to think that someone will be inspired to respond to this sad occasion by pouring money into new ventures, maybe by new writers, producers, cinematographers, directors, representing a broad sweep of contemporary outlooks, or even - against the grain of our modern society - inner visions. I know a couple of marvellous unproduced scripts, and I have a couple of very heavyweight biographies I'd love to use as props. Bergman's autobiography, maybe.

Some reports are saying Minghella has had a heart attack and others are giving no cause of death. I for one, lying in bed for the second day running with some kind of weird gyppy tummy, think we should all watch our smoke and fat intakes (hoping that will sort of cover the salt bit). Please, all you Type A men out there. Take it easy.

Now, some sober reflection.

the death of the reader of criticism

"In McDonald’s deft polemic, The Death of the Critic" - writes John Mullan in the TLS - "it seems just right; for there has been something comical about the eagerness of academics to scorn the notion that some books are better than others. The analogy is characteristic of McDonald’s tone, a kind of humorous exasperation that runs through his book. 'The critic' has never had a good name, and McDonald admits that when he told people what his book was to be called, 'they immediately assumed I was writing a celebration' of the critic’s demise. But this is a polemic in favour of the critic as a 'knowledgeable arbiter'. In McDonald’s account, it is a reason for sharp regret that no one cares any more about 'the critic', that no one outside universities reads books of literary criticism."

Er - [sic].

Or is it that the critics - and their critics - are so blinded by the light emanating from their ivory towers that they can't even see us, their readers?

Anyway, Mullan continues: " Nowadays, there are more critical responses than ever, but critical authority has been devolved from the experts. McDonald surveys the rise of blogs and readers’ reviews, of television and newspaper polls and reading groups, under the heading “We Are All Critics Now”. He argues that the demise of critical expertise brings not a liberating democracy of taste, but conservatism and repetition."

I think this is a potentially fair point. But most critics have historically also been conservative and repetitive, because very few have been great. You can't create greatness; all you can do is let it happen, and hope you recognise it when it does.

There's a post about this on Alfred Corn's very interesting weblog which, if anything, points up indirectly the ways in which blogging has probably not changed the critical climate all that much; it has just created another arena.

Anyway, the bones of this post were drafted last night after I got in from reading, and I think I was a bit tired. I'll go back and reread that TLS piece. Not sure what to do if this post subseqwuently makes no sense, because I'm rather fond of my picture-searching effort.

"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.

you mean the book had a sad ending?!?!?

Now they tell me.

But here's a book review to warm the cockles of your heart. The headline caught my eye on My Yahoo: "Not Another Captain Corelli's Mandolin' - I thought, how clever! Does it mean, "this is not another Captain Corelli's Mandolin?" Or, "Oh my God! Not another goddamn Captain Corelli's Mandolin!" I had to find out.

Of course, being the almost purely prejudice-driven creature that I am, I've spent years inveighing against the good Captain and his stringed instrument, to say nothing of his sentiment-infused relationship with Penelope Cruz, purely on the basis of Nicolas Cage's bad Italian accent, the novel's sales figures, bad prose, plucky villagers, and a certain grim predictability... though John Hurt was a boon, I have to say, and so tragic - and of course I liked the idea of the opera company - oh, but where were we.

So, this headline! It turns out to mean - but no - you can read it for yourself. Meanwhile, a picture of Louis de Bernières playing a mandolin. Now there's edifying.

us and the dead; or, an entire world in your pocket; or, don't let a mobile phone ruin your movie

Well done the Guardian, for their series on Great Twentieth Century Poets: starting tomorrow they will be including free booklets from the likes of Eliot, Plath, etc, with our morning papers. It would have been nice for the list to be a little less obvious than "Eliot, Larkin, Plath" - maybe "Stevens, Auden, Bishop," or even "MacNeice, Bunting, Stevie Smith" - but it feels churlish to complain.

The series was heralded on Saturday with a plea from Sean O'Brien for the common culture we're losing to the Big Brother generation:

"What saddens me is that, when my friends' daughter reads Eliot, material that had remained until recently common property among educated people - for example, biblical allusion - is a closed book to her, a difficulty that seems to offer her attention no reward. She is by no means alone.

"There are many for whom this problem seems trivial. The word 'relevance' looms - that contemporary fetish, so often brandished to mitigate ignorance and justify a failure of curiosity. I would argue that my friends' daughter and many young people like her suffer a loss of liberty when the past is in effect closed down and the present becomes the measure of all things. Such young people have, in effect, no history, and this being so, their own significance is diminished. The problem is not whether Shakespeare or the Bible or TS Eliot is 'relevant' to them, but whether they can see themselves as part of a continuum, a community extending across history."

Of course, this is precisely what we are losing. I know many even quite well-educated people who have little frame of reference outside the right-now: in the arts, particularly, this becomes scary. We will lose access (talk about 'accessability'!) to the roots of our own culture.

It has been pointed out to me in relation to this that "there's so much more present than there used to be," meaning the good old Information Highway (do we still say that?). My friend is an avid reader of novels, blogs, websites, the news, etc. He's no slouch. And he doesn't get the notion that we're losing anything by not getting the past.

Meanwhile, Information Highway firmly in mind, the Boston Globe takes another slant on the same problem, in an article about the forgotten virtues of plain old boredom (as in, what did you used to do when you were stuck in a traffic jam on the plain old Interstate Highway?):

"Marcel Proust describes his protagonist, Marcel, dunking a madeleine cookie into his teacup.

"'Dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake', Proust wrote. 'And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory . . . I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal'.

"Marcel's senses are recalibrated, his experiences deepened, and the very nature of memory begins to reveal itself. But it is only through the strenuous process of clearing his mind and concentrating that his thoughts begin to unfurl completely, immersing him in memory. Had Marcel been holding a silver clamshell phone in his hand instead of the delicately scalloped cookie, perhaps he could have quieted the boredom with a quick game of cellphone Tetris. And had Proust come of age with an iPhone in his hand and the expectation that his entire world fit in his pocket, he may never have written his grandiose novel."

What seems apparent to me is that many people, even in the creative professions - where, let's face it, one might hope to find elastic, intuitive minds - are lacking the ability to make connections - to see something as being "relevant" in the light of something else - to contextualise, in short. Because they've forgotten that we're only a part of the picture. And, with so lilttle white space around them, they've lost the ability to go inside themselves and find their own context.

Anyway, roll on this Guardian series, though it would be nice to see it backed up with recommendations of a few currently-living poets... you know: the canon of tomorrow...

selling poetry like it's something people want

Great news for Salt Publishing - who, as regular readers know, is going to publish my first poetry collection, Me and the Dead, this summer. They have just won the Neilsen Innovation of the Year award in the Independent Publishing Awards. According to Director Chris Hamilton-Emery, they are "not quite sober yet."

According to the Independent Publishers' Guild, Salt has won this award "for finding new ways to increase sales of its poetry and short stories despite tough market conditions, through online marketing, partnerships and brand development. 'Salt is bucking the trend in poetry by growing its sales'," says the IPG. "'Its innovation in lots of small ways adds up to a major achievement'."

The awards were set up by the IPG in association with The Bookseller and London Book Fair.

With its sales on the increase, improved distribution and a new US Sales and Marketing Director, Salt is showing the industry that poetry can sell. You just have to believe people want it.

Hurrah! May their innovation continue and their revenues increase.

the new cure for depression

Okay, this has made me weep with happiness. It is John Crace's "Digested Read" version of the impossible, and impossibly trendy (or whatever), and impossibly ageing and pretentious Hanif Kureishi's new novel, Something to Tell You. I confess: I liked The Buddha of Suburbia when it came out. It was fresh, and fun, and I was only young. And Daniel Day-Lewis in My Beautiful Laundrette? That was the Zeitgeist if ever anything was. But it was, like, a really long time ago. And what was that awful thing - oh, Intimacy. Bloody hell, I've never read such boring, trite prose in all my life. I threw it across the room.

Anyway, here is just a taste of the joy, which is like limpid honey, and will pour like the very sunlight itself into your winter-starved soul:

"As I do often these days, I begin to think over my struggles. I am a psychoanalyst, a reader of signs.

My patients include countless celebrities and I deal in delusions - none more so than those of the middle-aged novelist who clings to his sad autobiography, mistaking his characters for grotesques, drugs and explicit sex for transgression and clunky, name-checking nods to political events for gravitas.

Even I have secrets; dark, terrible secrets that torment my unconscious and spiral me into page after page of solipsistic diarrhoea on the unbearable angst of a west London literary colossus. Unbearable for you, that is. For me, they are the very essence of Thanatos and as Ruth Rogers shows me to my usual table at the River Cafe, I find myself ruminating on my drug-taking, tattooed, bisexual, mixed-race, single mother, council-flat living, anarcho-syndicalist sister, Miriam, for whom my dear friend, the eminent theatre director, Henry, has conceived a passion...

...I was separated from my wife, Josephine, and rarely saw my son. I was alone, distanced from the world by my all-consuming ego. What was left to me, save constant references to Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Plath and Emerson?"

ten writery bits

Just to clear it up: that says "writery," not "wittery." But it could as well be either, I agree. Anyway, I never even left the house yesterday, and I did get rather a lot done.

1. Have finally finished transcribing, editing, typing poetry quotes into, fleshing out, etc, a long interview I thought I would never finish, with (the very patient) Ruth Fainlight. The editor in question is calling it "an important document" - which it had better be! It's taken long enough to see it to fruition. In all modesty I can say I think it is a jolly entertaining read, but that isn't really modesty, is it. Though it was mainly Ruth who was so entertaining. There will be champers all round in Baroque Mansions when it finally sees the light of day.

2. Spent the afternoon - after that - gathering piles of paper from all around my house and putting things in folders, the bin, etc, and propping the folders up with two bookends I found in the bins at the end of the building. They're cute: they look like little books. My new study area looks very cosy. Now, if only I could get that blasted G4 working again, that the hard drive blew out! (There seems to be a website where I can buy a hard drive for about £35, and put it in myself. I'm sure I can do that. I just hope it's the hard drive that's the problem. Any geeks out there who care to talk me through it?)

3. But where do you buy light bulbs for a lava lamp from? (Answer: not Morrisons.)

4. Have finished reading - ta da! - Jane Holland's wonderful new unpublished manuscript, Camper Van Blues. If she can brag all the time I can certainly brag about her. Right, Jane? It's marvellous. I'll say no more. The cheque, is it in the post?

5. Have received my copy of the new issue (40) of Magma magazine, guest-edited by the indefatigable Roddy Lumsden, which launches tonight at the Troubadour in Earls Court. The issue contains - as Rob MacKenzie has already posted* - two poems by him, plus a review by him and a review by me. (My poems got lost in the ether, apparently blown away by a cruel wind of fate.) My review was a very hard one to write, and I hope very much that it's all right. Phew. I've had to say I didn't think a book was all that it should be, and trust me: it is just as hard for me as for the author of the book! I've sweated blood.**

6. I'm reading Katia Kapovich's second collection, Cossacks and Bandits, and enjoying it. It's fresh. I'll be reviewing it in Poetry London, with other titles, so that's all I'll say for now.

7. I bought five folders at the weekend. They now have things in them, hurrah! That's five piles of crap that used to live under the (beautiful, Ercol: God how I love it) coffee table.

8. I also had the great luck to read (again) a certain unpublished play in draft form, for comments. More anon. It is ineffably beautiful, and weepingly funny, and has Oscar Wilde in it, and I feel certain it will see the light of day.

9. Plus there is another book, a non-literary one, I am reading for a friend, and it is also a charming read, but golly, all this takes time. I have till Thursday on this one. More anon. They already have a publishers contract.

10. Finished my lunch now. Have you noticed how most of my writing life these days seems to consist of reading? I know.


* Though this post is nothing at all like Rob's blog, it was partly inspired by it, as I realise I am always wittering on about other things, anod not about my writing. But then, most of this stuff is not my writing. Rob is going to read all of Paradise Lost in a month, as a result of reading Claire Tomalin's article in Saturday's Guardian. (It really was rather thrilling.) And that's the difference: Rob read it and decided to read Milton. I read it, reminisced about what Milton I have read, and then tried to think if I could somehow get a blog post out of it in, say, under 15 minutes. In mitigation, I do have Paradise Lost on my iPod.

** Ew!! Not like in La Reine Margot, thank Jesus.

in brief: Alan Sillitoe at eighty

Brief seems fitting. Alan Sillitoe is a man of few words, seemingly saving them up for where it counts: the page. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was the first really-English - that is, so English that it was a phenomenon here but I'd never heard of it in America - book that I read when I arrived in Finsbury Park at the tender age of Connecticut-suburban-19. Was it a Pan paperback? A Corgi? I remember the writing, and the faintly illicit-looking cover, and the grimness of the story, and the feeling that I had arrived in an unknown country. Adulthood.

I can remember, years before that, being shown the The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner at school. Impossible to comprehend in its bleakness, its utter foreignness: but I remember it vividly. Did we read the story? Maybe.

Yesterday's Guardian celebrates Sillitoe's achievement and places him in the context of a time many of us can't remember:

"The 50s and early 60s - the era of the Movement and the Angry Young Men - was an age of literary declarations and anguished symposia convened to address the writer's 'dilemma' or test the depths of his ideological commitment. Always reluctant to theorise about his art (questioned by the New Review some years later about 'the state of fiction' he professed to be 'totally uninterested ... One either judges, or one writes, and I only care to do the latter'), Sillitoe did, however, make one significant contribution to these collections of writerly opinion. Working men and women who read did not have the privilege of seeing themselves honestly and realistically portrayed in novels, he told readers of Stephen Spender's assemblage The Writer's Dilemma in 1961. 'They are familiar with wish-fulfilment images flashed at them in cliché form on television or in the press, and the novels they read in which they do figure are written by novelists of the right who are quite prepared to pass on the old values and who, unable to have any feeling for the individual, delineate only stock characters.'"

It occurs to me that if I never tell anyone my age I won't get the fuss made of me when I'm eighty... I guess I can live with it.

a tale of two Maurices, and others

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

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












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

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

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


















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

an everyday tale of north London

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

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

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

not in the mood for blueberry pie

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

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

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

It's very strange with no kids.

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

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


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

** Oh! Delight! From the Guardian:

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

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

more ghosts

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

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

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

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

good morning world

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm afraid the patient has died."

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

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

The Guardian continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

veritable psychological peaches

Carl Jung, puzzled

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours faithfully,
C.G. Jung'

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

Do read Sheila's whole post: treasures galore.

a fauvel for our times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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