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.

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!

what a difference a word makes

The banana split boat hasn't sailed, has it? Some reader of mine, somewhere, must have missed the storm in a sundae dish over the anonymous poem found in the House of Commons - or somewhere - nobody has actually said where it was found, or how - was it lying upon the stair? Anyway, somehow everybody got to know of it, and very funny it is too:

"As I was going down the stair, I met a man who wasn't Blair.
He wasn't Blair again today. Oh how I wish he'd go away!"

And no one knows who wrote it! It's a complete mystery - a government scandal! A couple of ministers have completely denied that it's anything to do with them, but then, they would say that, wouldn't they.

Of course we're all jolly glad whenever anyone isn't Blair, and we hope it stays that way, but you have to admit that it's a fine thing for Parliamentarians to be taking to their pens like this. It may be only doggerel but revolutions have been started with less. And it pleases me, partly because the original upon which it is based ("As I was going up the stair/ I met a man who wasn't there./ He wasn't there again today...") was told me many many times by my dear Papa, le duc de Baroque, back when he was about ten times bigger than me.

However, the real genius of the piece comes in when my brand-new favourite-ever politician, Austin Mitchell MP (Great Grimsby - fancy a weekend away, anyone?) posted this delicious, and far superior, bagatelle on his blog: the cherry on top. Poetry truly lives in the corridors of power! Austin's whole site is well worth a read. Take these snippets from his "House Diary":

"These are the times that try men`s socialism. Polls disastrous. Morale low. New chums wondering if ritual suicide might be helpful. Blairites in the ascendant with crazed proposals to force the disabled back to work (assuming the Poles leave any jobs) or proclaiming the virtues of wealth, Mandy announcing that Gordon has forgiven him, and Tony sucking up more jobs in his flibbertigibbet progress to the throne of Charlemagne II.* ...Oldie of the Year lunch. Hockney harangues me for voting for the smoking ban, announcing that it will be the death of reflection."

Even his home page is fun. And did you see the picture above? He has something I want.**


* Flibbertigibbet is one of my all-time favourite words.
** & I don't mean a house - although, yes please... (edited in: on reflection I think I mean a nice big empty room, with a polished floor. You could have a vast abode and not have that! But mainly it's the Friendly's sign, of course.)

modernism: what is it?

I got involved in a long conversation this morning about England's perceived failure to produce convincing Modernist works - a perception I tried to counter, first with the statement that, although Pound and Eliot were American, England was the place where they were able to do their work. But the argument persisted - not a new argument either, as it happens - that England is prone to "mimsiness" and tininess, and that its Modernism - lacking conviction in its own identity - attempts to blend with a pastoral sensibility that it simply can't fit. Further countering this with reflections on Ben Nicholson, Stanley Spencer (though I forgot his name, of course; this is the kind of thing that can happen when arguing a point over bourgeois coffee and sausages) et al, it seemed I had hit a wall, a wall of formalism. That is, a tendency of English modernist artists to become preoccupied with form over intellectual substance, which of course is in keeping with a kind of pastoral anti-intellectualism for which England remains so well-known even now.

I know: this all sounds very silly. (nb. Do, please, scroll all the way down that link... it's all a bit post-modernist & intertextual, though I can't promise any lines from "Oh My Darling Clementine".)

But the more we went into the topic, the more European Modernism looked like an extreme position people were forced into by circumstances of world war, genocide, revolution - a degree of hardness only arrived at through extremes of heat and pressure - a dependence on intellect, perhaps, when all else has failed - or desperation for a plan in the face of catastrophe - or possibly simply the need to look forward when the past has been destroyed, which the mind will compensate for by rejecting the past.

The discussion ranged to America, which I said had benefited culturally, along with England, through its ability to take in refugees from Europe, who then continued their activities here, enriching the native soil incalculably. I posited that if Europe's intellectual and artistic life had contracted during the War, those of England and America had correspondingly expanded, and that this was arguably the best thing that could have happened to America's cultural life.

In the end the position we were arrived at was that it was largely the modernists, pace Eliot and Pound, who were the right-wingers, and that one reason Modernism as a movement could never really take off here was the inbuilt English dread of any kind of orthodoxy of thought: the contrariness of a nation of eccentrics whose motto is "A man's home is his castle," and who feel inclined to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously. Which basically, both the Modernists and the fascists did.

(Cue image of a load of toffs in the thirties, laughing uproariously at Oswald Mosley's funny little ways and lack of a proper dinner jacket, or somesuch. And I know: in Cable Street they weren't laughing. But ultimately, did this laughter help to prevent I Was the Son of a Cable Street?)

Of course, this was morning-coffee talk and exploratory to boot: so I don't really want anyone telling me I'm anti-Modernist or whatever: I've read my Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport with the rest. Remarking on how strange the turns this conversation had taken, we were content to leave it there in favour of more coffee and the day itself. But imagine my interest later this evening on reading a comment by the "New Formalist" poet Mark Jarman, in reply to a post about the use of the term "New Formalism" on Alfred Corn's weblog, that "the dirty secret of Modernism... was and is fascism."

Now, it is clear to me that this post of Alfred's raised some old Poetry War hackles and that - given the commenters and the disjointed nature of some of the rejoinders - there are possibly some personality issues at play here. However, as surprised as I was by the turn of my morning ruminations I was more surprised to see them said outright, like that, right there.

Is there something everyone else has figured out ages ago, except Ms Baroque? Or is this whole train of thought completely spurious? And is it really true that, as arrived at over the cafétiere this morning, we should be celebrating this particular pigheaded local obtuseness that insists on taking people down a peg or two instead of humouring all their intellectual conceits?

ministers of the inferior interior

Bryan Appleyard can't get too worked up about MPs' expenses. He says their pay is poor, and of course I can see what he means. The fact that it's nearly double (say) mine is meaningless in the wider scheme of things, and the fact that it's more than three times the national average means - well, what does it mean? How many times over the average must one earn for it to seem like a good salary? Probably about ten. I know if I were on £62K I'd probably only be complaining that I was broke.

But Bryan hits the nail on the head with his response to the Second Homes Scandal, with an observation that did hover ghostily over the margins of my own imagination, but failed to materialise into the following:

..."one stares at the list of second home allowances with sickly fascination. The sideboard and the rugs, the food mixer and the coffee maker, the nest of tables. It is simply outrageous they haven't included a hostess trolley and hardboard panelling to conceal any remaining period features. For this is a home circa 1962 when Barry Bucknell and Fanny Craddock were on TV, prawn cocktail and goulash were on the menu, people set fire to their liqueurs and Ikea was just a distant dream. Happy days."

He's so right.

And now maybe we'll drop it, shall we... I have my readers to think of, after all.

newsflash: MPs "made to feel as if they're crooks", in which Ms B resorts to the use of capitals

I don't mind telling you, my trusted readers, that my TV cost £350: I wanted a flat screen - it's a smallish room - but not by some make I'd never heard of. I bought the cheapest Philips flatscreen I could find. My previous set, which lasted years, till the picture turned green, was an ex-rental set from Radio Rentals. My stereo arrangements are ad hoc and involve the computer...

My kitchen is rented.

My wardrobe cost about £150 from the Place That Must Not Be Mentioned, and I had to put it together myself. My desk came from a junk shop.

Why do I ever even watch the news?? For I now know some of the contents of the House of Parliament's famous "John Lewis list" - the list of prices that are the most an MP can claim for his (or her) "essential expenses," i.e. those pesky costs associated with having to have a place in London and another in the country - which, by the way, you can claim on expenses for the mortgage or rent payments for. John Lewis may be "Never Knowingly Undersold;" but nonetheless it is a jolly expensive shop. Anything you buy in there you can easily get something just as good as for half the price elsewhere. But nonetheless, MPs can claim: £700 for a wardrobe; £750 for a TV; £10,000 for a new kitchen. Watch the papers tomorrow for new details of what you are buying for your MP. (Edited in: here it is.)

We in Baroque Mansions are (to put it mildly) DISMAYED to find that, while one has been scrimping on one's own expenses - the VCR doesn't work because I'm too thick to understand what cable to get for it, and anyway it's about 15 years old, and there is no DVD player; the old G4 still has no working hard drive, British Gas are chasing me for £98, the rented carpets are fraying, the living room ceiling light has no lampshade, my nicest lamp needs a new fuse (I think) and my other pineapple one needs rewiring completely; it took me three goes to fix the bloody Ikea bed to stay up with the slats all relatively stationary, I'm perishing for a new duvet cover, every pair of shoes I own needs re-heeling, my best tights just bit the dust, I have no curtain in my bedroom, and the front has come off one of the kitchen units - as I say, while all this is going on, I HAVE BEEN PAYING for all these MPs to have the flipping best of everything! In their second homes! AND their basic salary is nearly £62,000!! Fucking hell. If I got paid anything LIKE £62,000 I think I'd be able to buy my own sodding furniture. God damn it.

Oh, and then there's the small matter of having not paid into my work pension all those years because I needed the money, annoyingly, to live on. And before that, all the stay-at-home 3-babies-in-4-years years when it wasn't legal for the Baroque name to be put on the then-Mr Baroque's pension fund, because I wasn't (sic) "working."

I know. It's not exactly news... Except that at the moment it is, and one doesn't really like having one's nose rubbed in it.

And now they're worried about being misunderstood? Poor lambs.

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?

the diaspora, the cultural chasm, and the Waste Land

We are all part of it. Everyone, everywhere, is dreaming of home. (Freud told us this, anyway, but do we listen? No...)

Years ago I wrote a poem I want to use one day, if I can get it to work well enough: The Diaspora of the Snail. It begins:

You should have more respect for the snail.
He is a hermaphrodite. She is a hermaphrodite.
You should admire the artiste of the trapeze
who hovers forever between two points and never falls,
and cultivate compassion for the undercover agent
who can never be one thing or the other...

It even contains the line, further down, "We are all members of the Diaspora." Prescient or what! (Well - what. As I'm the one who said it this time it is clearly just a thing I say.)

I also said, speaking of multiculturalism and mixed marriages way back in the eighties - back in the day when it seemed important to dwell on my then-much-fresher "Americanness" and the "Englishness" of my Fulham-born then partner: "Every marriage is a mixed marriage."

It's only an issue if you want it to be, if you let it take over from the real issue, which is that each of you presumably had something to offer in the first place.

Which brings us to the little matter of Margaret Hodge, our Uncultured Minister, and her remarks that the audience at the Proms is all white, and that therefore it is not an "inclusive" event.

In yesterday's BBC: "The Proms attract too narrow a section of society, culture minister Margaret Hodge has suggested in a speech.

She praised "icons of a common culture" from Coronation Street to the Angel of the North and said culture could 'enhance a sense of shared identity'. But the Proms was one of several major cultural events many people did not feel comfortable attending, she said."

Go on, read more: the "institutions" she praises, the "inclusivity" of Coronation Street! The utter vacuousness of her perfectly well-meaning argument.

The Proms, which is a month-long festival of music and as such is by its very nature diverse, was started a hundred years ago, with the specific aim of enticing the non-concert-going public into concerts. The feel was informal, tickets were cheap, programmes not intimidating. The idea was to bring music to the people - in other words, to be "inclusive."

What is Margaret Hodge suggesting? She has rather ominously failed to spell that out, though when she talks like this - "But she acknowledged that culture could also be divisive - citing the examples of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which Christians said was blasphemous and Behtzi, a play which depicted sex abuse in a Sikh temple and was cancelled after protests.

'Just as culture pushes the boundaries it can make some people proud to belong, it can make others feel isolated and deeply offended,' she said" -

I don't know. I just feel kinda... offended.

Then the Guardian asks for comments from various "cultural" personae, and I'm afraid I didn't feel that Kwame Kwei-Armah (né Ian Roberts) was being very inclusive at all.

I had all this as a teenager, anyway, and got very bored very quickly. Remind me sometime to tell you all about Shanti School, "the peace that surpasseth all understanding," and the Racism Awareness Workshop that nearly turned me into a racist. You know? So Ian Roberts changes his name to reflect the heritage of his ancestors, and then says things like this rubbish:*

"The arts are monocultural, but far more importantly, the overwhelming majority of people who are buying art seem to have monocultural tastes. "

What?!? Unlike him, then. And even if that meant anything in English (duh), it would still not be true. What exactly is "monocultural" when it's at home? Oh - maybe it's at home. Who are all these people buying art? And what the fuck is "art"? Does it count if I buy a CD by a black musician - is it multicultural if he's playing jazz or soul or hip hop or reggae? And what if he's playing a cello?

And how racist is it if we assume that BME - black and minority ethnic - audiences don't want to listen to anything besides "black and minority ethnic" music? Is it true? By pandering to it are we encouraging silo-ism and letting the kids down? Is it not just another apartheid? Do white audiences have to like black art but not vice versa? Or is there some way of defining art that isn't about ethnic origins?

(On the record: I like, and own, lots of music. Bhangra, for example, though I can't stand reggae. I was in love with all the Bhundu Boys in the eighties. I like pop/ethnic fusions, I think they're very rich. I've recently discovered the Caribbean poet Kei Miller, and found his book to have much more poetic underpinnings in it than a more "establishment" middle-class white woman I reviewed at the same time. I think the most exciting novel at the moment is by a Dominican writer in New York, Junot Diaz. Our best friends when I was a kid literally were black. My nieces are Jewish and my cousin's kids are half Indian - and a quarter Russian. I just had an email from my friend Tamsin who is half-Welsh, half-Thai - which made her the perfect person to present a Thai cookery programme on S4C! Is Eminem multi-cultural? Kiri Te Kanawa? Am I?)

Eh?

He goes on: "It has taken me years of confidence building to be in an audience that is exclusively white and not feel alien. "

Er - ditto. Actually. some of us just feel alien anyway. It took me years to learn to sit in a meeting full of men and not feel alien. And not let them treat me like a little girl. And I was embarrassingly old before I realised that many people I just thought were very helpful, friendly, jolly fellows were actually hitting on me! I was alien!

Many working class white people would also feel alien at a classical music concert. This is what the Proms aimed to address. Surely alienation is the same emotion regardless of why you're feeling it? We should be teaching kids to read music, and playing them Mozart, not sitting around letting them waste their little multi-coloured brains.

And here it is: the one little thing that neither the Uncultured Minister nor the born-again African has seen fit to mention.

The music itself.

We're all the diaspora, and we're all dreaming of home. But unless it IS someone's home, it will only be a hotel and nobody's home at all. It's the music that can make it our common home, you idoits.

Oh, and I'm thinking of adopting the ethnic name of my native great-grandmother. It'll help me with my cultural identity and my sense of self - what Kwei-Armah calls his "true identity." (It occurs to me here that if my kids went off and found some "true" identity that came from 200 years before I ever got to them, I'd be more offended than a lager lout at a Sikh play! And also that if you gave Kwame one little "g" in his last name he'd almost sound Northern Irish... Funnily, the head of Shanti School, Linda, Linda something, was half African and half Irish - but guess what. It wasn't Christmas that she celebrated in December, it was some other thing. Anyway, back to great-grandma...) She was called Catherine Evans.**


* But read Candace Allen's very moving account, which is the main article. She mentions the music. And she realises it is something that can bring people together, and she also sees people for who they are, not for what they look like or where their ancestors came from.

** Is that okay?? I really DO have to listen to TONS of anti-Welsh jokes every day of my life! I mean, I could get a complex. Shut up or I'll hit you with my leek.

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'."

framed on a Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

meanwhile, back in America it's fistfighting versus poetry

...and some interesting parallels:

"For all the Barack Obama-J. F. K. comparisons, whether legitimate or over-the-top, what has often been forgotten is that Mr. Obama’s weaknesses resemble Kennedy’s at least as much as his strengths. But to compensate for those shortcomings, he gets an extra benefit that J. F. K. lacked in 1960. There’s nothing vague about the public’s desire for national renewal in 2008, with a reviled incumbent in the White House and only 19 percent of the population finding the country on the right track, according to the last Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll. America is screaming for change."

Now let's see how much of a change we get (of course it isn't just America that'll feel it: it's everybody).

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.

patron, my arts

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

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

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

The ever-clairvoyant Madame Arcati has done it again.

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

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

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

never so badly... er...

art, casting its glow on the deep complexities of society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's say, the visual arts.

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

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

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

Nope. I'm not seeing it.

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

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

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

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

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

God, Terry Eagleton, Christmas shopping and Jeremy Irons

Oh my GOD, dear readers! You have no idea. Or maybe you have. It's not an easy life, is it. Well, anyway, I seem to have done quite a bit of damage today; in fact the odious Damage* is one of the few films I seem not to have bought, in my perigrinations across the internet and the Angel, Islington. I have managed to do all that while in the throes of a terrible cold, which is leaving me drained and wan, and then the word "drained" only reminds me of Dr Strangelove, which I might go and buy on Amazon now I've thought of it; I'm sure the Urban Warrior would love to own it. I wonder if it's one of the ones that cost £20? (answer: no. It's £5.97. I find these prices very hard to resist...)

Yesterday, before I went to the cinema for my splendid Dippyfest, I read the piece on Terry Eagleton in the Observer. I was gripped, fascinated and amused. Parts of it blew through my brain like a fresh wind, and it did make me laugh out loud a couple of times.

I know my colleague Elizabeth Baines is annoyed at Eagleton's assertion within that piece that writers of fiction are somehow not as worthy to be public intellectuals as, say, ideosyncratic Marxist philopher-professors.** What Eagleton in fact said was that:

"I have no idea why we should listen to novelists on these matters any more than we should listen to window cleaners. I don't know where their status comes from. When someone like Ian McEwan stands up and says, "I believe in individual freedom," you know, it's like: 'Hallelujah, put up your hands all those that don't,' but such words do not respect a much larger problem."

I think that the second, McEwen, half of this sentence strangely goes some ways towards defining what he means in the first half - though I'd say it would be a pretty interesting window cleaner who'd be able to put together 10,000 words of Horrible Horrorism. However, Eagleton goes on:

"The implication from Amis and McEwan - and from Hitchens and Richard Dawkins - is that civilisation and atheist rationalism go together, and I think that is a very dangerous argument to make. The debate over God - Muslim or Christian - is for them increasingly becoming code for a debate on civilisation versus barbarism. I think one needs to intervene and show the limitations of that."

Now, this is where it gets interesting, because - put starkly - I think this analysis, its one paragraph, is correct. I haven't read Dawkins, it just looked too boring, but I did read most of Hitchens' book. It is just rank polemics; there isn't one sentence of it that proves what he's saying unless you already believe in his basic premise. You could go through with a red pen and substitute the phrase "human nature" for "religion" and the thing would still stand up.

Back to Eagleton, there's more in this vein:

"He suggests that the question 'do you believe in God?' is akin to asking someone whether they believe in the Loch Ness monster.** Dawkins, he says, seems to imagine God 'if not exactly with a white beard then at least as some kind of chap', whereas even in the simplest sense, 'for Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is... He is the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.'"

Anyway, I'm leaving you there, just as I left Eagleton when he started talkimg about Iraq. Just because I never trust these people when they start talking about Iraq. You might as well be listening to a taxi driver.


* Jeremy Irons was largely rehabilitated in my eyes by his performance in The Merchant of Venice. I thought he had been before that, but looking on IMDb I can't quite see why. He was a bit wooden in Danny the Champion of the World, and hopelessly miscast, I thought, in Lolita. Or maybe that was part of the horror, if not horrorism, of that film. The story doesn't berar contemplating without Nabokov's prose, in any case. Help me out here, guys.

** Basically Elizabeth is forgetting, in caring what TE says about this, that at bottom it isn't what you do for a living that makes the difference: it's whether you make sense. Even Eagleton, even now, is making more sense than Martin Amis. I say this who, after a lifetime of watching Amis turn himself into a more and more unbearable ponce, thought Ronan Bennett made no sense at all. Even Martin Amis is thinking more deeply than he is.

*** Here in Baroque Mansions we used to have the DVD. Nessie does exist, and Ted Danson gets the girl. She's a Redgrave: it must be real.

cup poems from Guantanamo

poet Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, with his son, kept his sanity through poetry - but has since been rearrested and disappeared

Remember the old Soviet days, when poems and novels were smuggled out of the USSR in suitcases - when prisoners wrote poems about freedom and then had to scratch the words out of the dust on the floors of their cells? Remember apartheid, the way the black writers of Africa were denied their voices? Remember how unjust that was, how we reviled the governments that did that to their prisoners?

I interviewed Irina Ratushinskaya once, when she gave a reading in London after the publication of her book of prison poems, and she told me how she had written them in her head, transcribed them infinitesimally onto scraps of toilet paper and then slipped them to visitors. She was a tender little thing, solid and no-nonsense but very young - maybe younger than her years, for having spent several of them locked up.

Well, it's happening again. Locked in solitary cells, forbidden even to write letters home* under suspicion of every word being a coded message, the prisoners of Guantánano Bay - most of whom, remember, have no known terrorist connections, have never been tried, and are thus technically innocent - are writing poems, any way they can. They write them in toothpaste, etch them on the edges of styrofoam cups, horde scraps of paper, they write them in between brutal interrogation and torture sessions, and give them to the only people they're allowed to see: their lawyers. Thousands and thousands of lines of poetry have been confiscated and classified by the US military.

One of those lawyers, Marc Falkoff, was so struck by two poems he'd been given that he thought of asking other Guantánamo lawyers if they had ever been given any poetry. They had. And this time - in a delicious ironic disjuncture, because this perpetrator is in fact the Land of the Free itself - the government has no option but to allow the poems to be published, under Freedom of Speech.

According to the CBC:

"Falkoff said the poems have been translated from Arabic to English by a limited pool of translators granted security clearances by the U.S. military and some of the poetic cadence may have been lost in the process.

The poems were cleared by U.S. military censors, who screen any material sent out of the Guantanamo Bay prison."

Funny old world, eh?

However, "Many poems did not make it through the Pentagon's security screening.**

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, described the detainees' poems as 'another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies against whom they are at war.'"

In a refreshing paean to the power of prosodic device (their English teachers would be so proud) US military officials say: "poetry ... presents a special risk, and DoD [Department of Defence] standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language". The fear, officers say, is that allegorical imagery in poetry may be used to convey coded messages to militants outside," according to today's Independent.

Almost makes you want to go away and write some allegory, doesn't it? However, the poems are gut-wrenchingly far from being allegorical: take this poem by Jumah al Dossari, a 33-year-old Bahraini who has been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years. He has been in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and has tried to kill himself twelve times while in custody.

death poem (mp3)

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”

Here is a sound file of some "cup poem" fragments by the Afghan/Pakistani poet and religious scholar*** Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost. He was released by the Americans, and has subsequently been arrested by Pakistani security - and disappeared.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that in these sort of contexts the phrase "religious scholar" usually seems to mean "ultra-rightwing Taliban-supporting lock-up-your-daughters back-to-basics scholar" - and in this case, the poet was, before his arrest, editing three Taliban-friendly magazines, though he had no connections with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda itself. I would just like to stress that I'm not supporting the Taliban here! Far from it. The poet in question would himself probably not like me even having the ability to write this in his support. What I'm supporting is the US government not becoming like them.***

The book - Poems From Guantánamo: the Detainees Speak - is published by the University of Iowwa Press this month, priced to sell at $13.95 (just under £7 at current rates), with additional content by Ariel Dorfman, and quotes from Gore Vidal, Adrienne Rich and Robert Pinsky.

The book's web page also has an impressive list of link to do with human rights and publishing. Proceeds from the book will go to the American Center for Constitutional Rights.

* except, apparently, for ten minutes a week, heavily censored, via the Red Cross.

** and there was me, thinking Don Paterson had a reputation for editorial rigour!

*** On this note, trivial and unconnected as it may seem, I noticed that in the movie Waitress, which I saw last night, they were unable even to say the word "abortion" - though the subject came up two or three times in the film, as the heroine is unhappily pregnant by her violent husband. They just did that thing of interrupting the sentence right before the word, and of course the heroine said she could never even consider such a thing! And her doctor was keen to say he wouldn't provide the service anyway. The film, quirky and unreligious as anything, is set in the American South.

the lure of a more lurid laureate

Charles Simic has just been appointed as the new American Poet Laureate. Unlike in England, the position of Laureate in the US is for a year or two: there have been several recent laureates.

As in England, the idea is to use one's position to further the fortunes of poetry abroad in the land - or something like that. No one knows yet what Simic will decide to do. Recent laureates have interpreted the brief in a variety of ways:

"Robert Pinsky initiated his Favorite Poem Project, which energized a nation of poetry readers to share their favorite poems in readings across the country and in audio and video recordings. Billy Collins instituted the Web site Poetry180 (www.loc.gov/poetry/180), designed to bring a poem a day into high school classrooms. Most recently, Ted Kooser created a free weekly newspaper column (www.americanlifeinpoetry.org) that features a
brief poem by a contemporary American poet and an introduction to the poem by Kooser."

I've been wondering what it was that the last incumbent, Donald Hall, did. Unlike Ted Kooser he hadn't seemed to generate all that much press (or maybe I mean online debate; whatever). And look!

"Donald Hall participated in the first-ever joint poetry readings of the U.S. Poet Laureate and British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion in a program called 'Poetry Across the Atlantic,' also sponsored by the Poetry Foundation."

Well, you just never know. Maybe I've been more out of it than I thought.

Simic is an interesting choice, though. He may live in leafy New Hampshire, but his poetry opens out the definitions of "safe," in almost any of the senses one miught apply to that word in connection with poetry.

Kooser, for example, is a rural, plain-speaking, down-to-earth writer of very accessible poetry. His appointment seemed (to some, especially coming as it did hot on the heels of Billy Collins' stint as your-man-down-the-street) to rubber-stamp that kind of Mom-&-apple-pie approach, a sort of anti-urban-sophisticate, even anti-intellectual sensibility - or that's what people were saying, anyway - that is, in its way, even more tyrannical than outright elitism (that's me talking now).

This slightly corndog "look & feel" (as the branding people call it) chimed with the Bush administration's polemics in a way that felt almost sinister - unfortunately, because Ted Kooser is more interesting than that, and a better poet. He deserves better. However, the Zeitgeist that year was all about this particular schism in American cultural sensibilites, and Kooser got all caught up, in my mind anyway, with the fuss over Garrisson Keillor's middle-brow anthology Good Poems. This kerfuffle was itself summed up rather magnificently in a broadside attack on Keillor's middlebrowism* by August Kleinzahler, in Poetry magazine. The shock waves took months or more to subside. Altogether the most invigorating moment in recent American poetry.

Donald Hall, as I say, and whose poetry I like (but nowhere near as much as Donald Justice's, sorry, the man who wrote Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy), last year gave us a trans-Atlantic initiative - or was it a reading? I'm not sure - in partnership with the Poetry Foundation,** but one whose ripples, if they did jostle the UK poetry scene at all, didn't reach Baroque Mansions.

And now we have Charles Simic, the Yugoslav-born poet whose Belgrade childhood "was complicated by the events of Word War II" - "a childhood in which 'Hitler and Stalin taught us the basics'" - who survived the US bombing of Belgrade and lived as a refugee around Europe before arriving in the US at the age of 15. He didn't even speak English then. Simic has told the Guardian he considers himself "a 'city poet', joking that he has 'lived in cities all of my life, except for the last 35 years'."

Simic's style, I suppose in keeping with the taste of the Library of Congress, is very clear and precise, relatively literal, and not clogged up with excess vocabulary. In this it might satisfy the requirements of Keillor (quoted here in his introduction to Good Poems):

"The goodness of a poem is severely tested by reading it on the radio. The radio audience is not the devout sisterhood you find at poetry readings, leaning forward, lips pursed, hanky in hand [?!];*** it’s more like a high school cafeteria. People listen to poems while they’re frying eggs and sausage and reading the paper and reasoning with their offspring, so I find it wise to stay away from stuff that is too airy or that refers off-handedly to the poet Li-Po or relies on your familiarity with butterflies or Spanish or Monet."

He also comes down on the side of the good guys every time. But Simic's clarity is a chilly one, and his imagery is surreal, absurdist. I'd say his take on the world is surreal and absurdist. In short, although he lives somewhere in leafy New Hampshire, and definitely does celebrate that fact, he brings the rest of the world - the dark, mid-century world of Ionesco, Kafka, Bulgakov, Günter Grass - in with him.



little Charles with his mother - click on the picture

"'He's sort of a Renaissance man. He's a very worldly and sophisticated and intelligent poet', said Jonathan Galassi, president of book publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux and a former president of the Academy of American Poets." (However, not to frighten the children:) 'He's a very open and accessible person with no pretensions who is kind, so I think he will be a very good public face for poetry'.''

His laureateship starts in October, so we'll have to wait till then to see what he plans to do with it. Here's a taste of his thinking, though: asked about the question of poetry's role in culture, he mildly replies, "That reminds me so much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, 'What is the role of the writer?'"

Both the Poetry Archive, and the Academy of American Poets have good pages on Simic, with audio files, poems and bios.


* "Poetry not only isn’t good for you, bad poetry has been shown to cause lymphomas and, in extreme instances, pancreatic cancer, in laboratory experiments. (I’ll have to dig around in my notes to find exactly what study that was...) I avoid Keillor’s poetry moment at nine a.m. here in San Francisco as I avoid sneezing, choking, rheumy-eyed passengers on the streetcar, lest I catch something. But occasionally, while surfing for the news, I get bit and am nearly always sickened, if not terminally, for several hours.

Keillor means well. Of course he does. That’s his problem. His execrable Almanac [morning programme on the radio] begins with a few bars of hymn-style piano. And how could it be otherwise? We are in church. Garrison is ministering culture..."

** Even the description of it sounds like a funding requirement.

*** the exclamation is Kleinzahler's. I for one have often attended poetry readings with, shall we say, an intense look on my face and a damp hankie in my hand... I won't say who was reading. There are people who refuse to sit next to me now. But I don't think this was the kind of thing Keillor meant.

one easy lesson

Recently there has been a very small storm in a very small teacup about the UCU's boycott of Israeli academics - and also, in Baroque Mansions, an even smaller one about the tiny print at the very bottom of an email about the AGM of MY union, the NUJ - so much for impartiality, boys! - saying that the NUJ supported a boycott of Israel.

This has, following an uprising of NUJ members which alas I had nothing to do with - I've been so out of it - been rescinded. (Thank God, because it was cracked.) There was even a blog! Who knew! It was written by BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones, who in his final post gives an admirable account of just why the boycott idea was so cracked. (If you weren't sure.)

The papers say anti-semitism is on the increase. Anecdotally, anti-semitism is on the increase. Most of my friends on the left are so rabidly anti-Israeli that it makes me very uncomfortable, and I'm not even Jewish (though, as the joke goes, I pass).

Anyway, Dina Rabinovitch has a couple of humdingers of examples on her blog, fresh from the streets of Hendon (where, by the way, she is also on a quest for a really good blow-dry, a project we here at Baroque can only support).

She also has a link to a video of her husband, Anthony Julius, describing the "new anti-semitism" and why we find it hard to recognise, acknowledge properly, or deal with. Of course he says "we" and he means Jews, but I think "we" is everybody. One of the most prominent lawyers in the land, he is no slouch at putting together a position, and this little ten-minute video outlines brilliantly a particular way in which anti-semitism creeps in under the door, as it were. Watch it below and ask yourself a few questions.



By the way, I think the ideas Anthony raises, if applied to the position Muslims find themselves in today, might equally well apply. The truth is that we are in a rationalising age, where all sorts of polemics are being used to give intellectual support to all sorts of irrational prejudices and fears. This speech gives the beginnings of a cogent analysis of part of this tendency.

The speech was made at a meeting in Euston last week, run by Engage. To see the other speakers click here.