your tiny hand is frozen

Live from the Met in Zeffirelli's famous production.

The singing, just incredible. Ramón Vargas a heartbreaking Rudolfo - I don't usually like tenors (with one or two exceptions, and please try to ignore the background noise) but he is amazing - and the [insert superlative here] Angela Gheorghiu singing Mimi... Ainhoa Arteta was a gorgeous Musetta, like chocolate if that makes any sense. I don't go to the opera enough. And shock horror, I've never been to the Met. Good old La Boheme.

But oh my God, La Boheme, it's amazing: it turns out you even cry when you're just listening to it on the radio.

...or maybe that's just the commentary. What is it with these people and their loud voices, Rudolfo hadn't even got himself properly flung on Mimi's deathbed yet when some woman starts going, "This opera is all about relationships falling apart and coming back together..." and then: "I heard Puccini lived a life very much like this, didn't he? He was a starving artist... but I guess he had his fun."

Okay, I've turned it off now. Puccini himself wept like a child when he wrote the death of Mimi. Let's just remember that.

how beautiful is a semi-colon?

How beautiful, indeed, is the hyphen in "semi-colon"? How lovely is an apostrophe, how bewitching a pair of parentheses? I think the semi-colon is the most beautiful of all, like Snow White with personality.

Apparently the French are up in arms about the possible loss, brought on I'm araid by us, the brutish Anglo-Saxons, of the lovely little point-virgule. It is a shame; I personally have always loved the semi-colon for being the most elegant, most subtle and expressive punctuation mark. I'm glad the French media are discussing this. We over here seem to be only too happy to chuck everything away with both hands, and the baby and bathwater with it.

Jon Henley in the Guardian:

"The point-virgule, says legendary writer, cartoonist and satirist François Cavanna, is merely 'a parasite, a timid, fainthearted, insipid thing, denoting merely uncertainty, a lack of audacity, a fuzziness of thought'.

Philippe Djian, best known outside France as the author of 37°2 le matin, which was brought to the cinema in 1986 by Jean-Jacques Beneix as Betty Blue and successfully launched Beatrice Dalle on an unsuspecting world, goes one step further: he would like nothing better than to go down in posterity, he claims, as 'the exterminating angel of the point-virgule'... (Ms B interjects here: I hated Betty Blue and now I know why. The man's a philistine.)

In the blue corner are an array of linguistic patriots who cite Hugo, Flaubert, De Maupassant, Proust and Voltaire as examples of illustrious French writers whose respective oeuvres would be but pale shadows of themselves without the essential point-virgule, and who argue that - in the words of one contributor to a splendidly passionate blog on the topic hosted recently by the leftwing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur - 'the beauty of the semicolon, and its glory, lies in the support lent by this particular punctuation mark to the expression of a complex thought'."

Anyway, here from the Guardian are some bagatelles from current perpetrators of written English:

Will Self: "I like them - they are a three-quarter beat to the half and full beats of commas and full stops. Prose has its own musicality, and the more notation the better. I like dashes, double-dashes, comashes and double comashes just as much. The colon is an umlaut waiting to jump; the colon dash is teasingly precipitous."

GB Shaw, writing to TE Lawrence on The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: "You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life."

Kurt Vonnegut: "...do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing."

Gertrude Stein: "They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature."

We in Baroque Mansions disagree with this last: a comma is a sweet enough creature but very common compared to a semi-colon. It is like comparing hot-smoked salmon to tinned tunafish, nice as tinned tuna may be. But after all a Stein is a Stein is a Stein...

;click on the picture

just dashing through

A technical issue at work has yielded this bagatelle from good old Wikipedia. I might add that it is possibly the best and most carefully punctuated Wikipedia entry I have ever read.

"Traditionally an em dash—like so—or a spaced em dash — like so — has been used for a dash in running text. The Elements of Typographic Style recommends the more concise spaced en dash – like so – and argues that the length and visual magnitude of an em dash 'belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography'."

(I'm crushed. I used to love that aesthetic; I can remember, as a wee child... but never mind. Why, why??)

"The en dash (always with spaces, in running text) and the spaced em dash both have a certain technical advantage over the unspaced em dash. In most typesetting and most word processing, the spacing between words is expected to be variable, so there can be full justification. Alone among punctuation that marks pauses or logical relations in text, the unspaced em dash disables this for the words between which it falls."

Something for all of us to think about, I think - I just wish Blogger would keep up!

everybody a critic!

Thanks to the indefatigable Ben Locker, armed at the ready with pushchair and camera, for this sweet little piece of Stoke Newington.

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!

elegantly dressed all the word's a stage, and all the men and women merely players

Some people grasp this truth more thoroughly than others, and I believe they are the elegant ones. Take Sarah Bernhardt. I love this photograph of her: unlike all the simpering Beaux-Arts in-character shots, where she really is on the stage (or pretending to be), this is her as herself, a persona she created and made real more than any unselfconscious, unregarding, "natural" self-expression.

Here's some indication of Bernhardt's greatness in this respect:

"In 1915, during an unfortunate performance in the title role of Victorien Sardou's drama La Tosca, Sarah Bernhardt injured her right leg so badly that it had to be amputated. While she was recovering, the manager of the Pan-American Exposition (in San Francisco) asked for permission to exhibit her leg, offering $100,000 for the privilege. Bernhardt cabled this reply: 'Which leg?'

She hummed the Marseillaise as she was wheeled down the hospital corridor and afterwards used a wheelchair, disdaining prostheses and crutches - bearers instead carried the divine Sarah around in a specially designed litter chair in Louis XV style with gilt carving, like a Byzantine princess. Immediately upon leaving the hospital, she filmed Jeanne Doré (1915), again directed by Louis Mercanton. She was shot either standing or sitting; this in fact pinned her down and forced her to use facial expression rather than movement and helped her performance. The five-reel film, distributed by Universal in the U.S., got rave reviews and reflected well upon both its game star and the industry as an art form. For ovations she stood on one leg, held on to a piece of furniture, and gestured with one arm.

Shortly after the amputation, she visited the WWI front lines near Verdun to perform for French troops in mess tents, hospital wards, open market places and ramshackle barns. Propped in a shabby armchair, she recited a patriotic piece to war-dazed men fresh from the trenches. When she ended with a rousing 'Aux armes!' they rose cheering and sobbing. '

The way she ignored her handicap was beautiful', wrote an actress who accompanied her. 'A victory of the spirit over the failing flesh'."

She also knew how to make the best of curly hair.

Sarah Bernhardt was "the divine" until she died on March 26, 1923 - eighty-five years ago today - having never retired from the stage.

the chicken, the egg, Idun's apple, Adam's apple and a few snowflakes

Well, here we are, in the middle of the story. I can never quite break away, in Holy Week, from the idea of being in the throes of a tale unfolding, of being in some kind of real-time replay. And in fact we are: it's spring, and the old exhausted winter must be put to death so new life can be born - whether everlasting or merely until around October is up to you, really. (Of course, I say this now: and it's snowing outside, which for London is just ludicrous of course. Though I'm sure I can remember at least one other Easter when it snowed here.)

One of the oldest and most human of all human attributes is our need for stories. They do literally explain us to ourselves; they also explain the world. Little Miss B was raised, for example, on Greek myths, which were explained to her as the attempts of ancient people to explain the attributes of the world, which is one reason why the myths and legends of different civilisations can be so similar: they are - in the sense that applies only (for all we know) to our own world - universal. This is why Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces was such a seminal book, after the adolescent shock-to-the-system that is The White Goddess: long before Christopher Booker's back-to-basics Seven Basic Plots, they showed us something about how we work. Imagine my joy unbounded when, aged something-or-other, I discovered that the wife of Bragi (the Norse god of poetry) was called Idun, and she had a precious store of apples which helped the gods to stay young. At some point she is lured by Loki out of Asgard, and without her apples the gods age visibly; great means have to be resorted to in order to get her back and restore their eternal youth.

Campbell and Booker are both Jungian in their philosophy, though Booker also bolstered himself with an epigraph from Johnson, just to be on the safe side. And while we don't want to turn "The world's plots into a narrative sludge," as Adam Mars-Jones pithily said in his review of Booker,* it is a good idea to get over this idea that we're somehow more clever than the people who went before us, or that our world is somehow full of things that weren't in theirs, and sometimes to respect something precisely because it's a story, not in spite of it. We're concerned here wih plot, but also with scenario, character and symbol.

Sorry, I'm tying myself up in knots here. I know there are problems with Jung. Jaysus. There are problems with everything. In a minute you'll see how that's the only way we can possibly understand that everything is okay. And no, I don't mean that the Holocaust's okay! We are allowed to have some things, the things that are okay, be okay - I'm trying to say that the point of the story - any story - is to figure out how they are, and which ones they are, and what went wrong when it did go wrong.

Basically, I think what I'm getting at is that although everything is itself - gloriously, beautifully so, as Henry James might have said - everything also represents something else. This is the case if someone who unaccountably disturbs you suddenly reminds you of the bully at school, or if the colour of the wallpaper in a hotel room makes you feel weirdly sad - or happy - and maybe it's the same as in your favourite room in the house where you grew up; or, you know, the stars twinkle out at sea... People talk about symbol being pretentious (eg in discussions of poetry) but all it is is something reminding you of something else, and harnessing or assuming some of the properties of power of that other thing. Hence, in dreams, if you dream about money it represents your "values," aka "what you treasure." Hence eggs mean new life. Also, though the ancients didn't really know it yet, aren't they universe-shaped? Hence also eg female=vessel, male=the thing that goes in the vessel. Smut!

Anyway, so here we are in the middle of a story. When I started writing this last night we were in a very sad bit of the story. I always feel, with Easter, that one should help to act out this story, but maybe only because it's traditional. Then again, why not be traditional? Acting out a story, following it to the point of empathetically becoming part of it, is a good, cathartic thing for us humans. It's why we like movies better on the big screen and why we think 3D is an improvement. (Hm. Maybe I'm the exception.) It's why, as Booker says in the intro to his Seven Basic Plots book, "we take it for granted that the great story-tellers, such as Homer and Shakespeare, should be among the most famous people who ever lived."

On Thursday, after a week of increasing tension and uncertainty, though with great reviews in the popular local press, Jesus sat down to a meal with his friends and followers. The authorities were after him; they didn't like his brand of insurgence and they were frankly annoyed that it was such a hit with the very people they were trying to keep under control. Okay? Then we have the betrayal by the best friend. In the Gnostic Gospel of Judas Jesus even reveals to us, in a touch almost worthy of (though, frankly, subtler than) Italo Calvino, that we are in a story: he says to Judas words along the lines of, "Yes, off you go; you have to betray me, because that's just what you do, and it's the story."

On Friday Jesus is duly taken away by the authorities, driven through the streets and then executed in a particularly nasty, humiliating way - humiliating, on top of everything else, because it is usually reserved for the lowest sorts of thieves and gangsters, horrible people - though, in this story, even they are not allowed to be without their redeeming qualities. I think we don't need to be reminded of the power this part of the story has for us poor humans, who have suffered thousands of years of political and personal oppression, who have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, who have been silenced and misrepresented, who have so often known we were not what we were made through circumstances to seem. Part of the power that this story has is that it is so universally applicable, to large-scale political events - due to the civic nature of Jesus' protest - and also to small, personal disasters. The fact is that this story of Jesus has provided comfort and example to many.

In fact, at the time when he was executed, at 3pm, there was a fearful storm (or was it an eclipse?) and the whole sky went dark. The people who had come to sit vigil with him - or to watch for fun, as there were no movies in those days - were terrified. So although he is stripped of his public pride and killed, there is a hint even here of the power he possesses. He is, of course, Everyman, literally, in that he is God (and the son of God) and, according to this model, God is all of us. So he, God, and all of us, dies and is put in a tomb by his friends.

Of course he rises again! On the third day. That's early today, this morning. The friends went to the tomb to look after his poor body, and discovered the stone in the doorway rolled away, and no body inside. In some versions he speaks to them, says everything is all right, and he's going to work. In some they are left to infer all this. In yet more, the naughty ones, he goes away to Egypt and lives a life of sybaritic pleasure with Mary Magdalene or similar - that's the Alec Guinness version. But whichever it is, today we're all wearing nice clothes and eating hot cross buns and chocolate, and singing songs, because we're acting out the happiness of the friends when they found that their dead friend was alive again, which also meant that they were alive again (because when someone you love dies you do feel as if you too are dead, don't you), and of course it was spring, and Persephone was freed from the Underworld, so everything could grow again and they would all eat in the summer, and in fact everything is in its place and all's right with the world.

Unless you had the story of everything going wrong, how could you possibly know it was all right?













* By the way, in case any of you read the review, I'd just like to say that I think his view of the role of the anima and animus is fundamentally flawed, by being partial. The mistake he seems to be making is to view the thing literally - a very common failing de nos jours - and looking from the dark bottom of the well we know as the politics of gender and sexuality. It just ain't so that because the hero is a male character, seeking to incorporate his anima in the person of the heroine, the reader or viewer must be literally male! Just as she is the anima of him, he is the animus of her. The story is admonishing all of us in the same way.

I'm certainly not above a feminist rendering of a story, and I know there are problems with Jung, but I think on this one we can just let it rest. The ancient stories allow women more power than the ancient world did, and often more than our newer stories do.

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?

"an unresolved mass of imagery, which sort of in the end... floats over people"

That's what you get if you say, when taking the picture, "let us for the umpteenth time capture the pathos of a starving child" - and not, "why is this child starving?" "Who's denying the food? What's the background, what's the history?"

So says the Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths, who died yesterday aged 72. A Welshman who left Wales at 16, but said that growing up there influenced everything he ever did, he spent a lifetime photographing conflict and its aftermath so you wouldn't have to.

Of his work in Vietnam, photographing the effects of the war on civilians, he said to the BBC in 2005, "I wanted to show that the Vietnamese were people the Americans should be emulating rather than destroying." He was instrumental in influencing American opinion against the war.

But it wasn't all war. His photographs from Wales and England from, being frank, before Ms B was even born (this is somehow humbling, when you go to look again) are starkly revealing - of things Britain probably didn't want to know.

He says, "Any intelligent society would somehow give special privilege to critics. It's by criticising society that humanity has made progress... However, that's not the way the world works right now. What you have now is that you have the bandits in control, and they control the way people think." Follows a detailed explanation of how the bandits do this. All on film. Beautiful. Listen to him - listen to him on the visual history of the 20th century - and learn.

While he will be right in what he says about power and control, he also has a point about the power - and the responsibility - of the photographer. This man helped to make the very history that was being written while I was growing up. We say these images are "iconic," but that's just lazy. Think about what it means to be the person who made something so powerful and important. Jones Griffiths lies somewhere behind all of little Miss B's backyard ruminations on the nature of war, the world and her place in it as a little girl and future woman, whether there would still be a draft when she reached 18 and whether they would be drafting girls by then, what she would do if they were, America's place in the world, what it would be like to be a little Vietnamese child, etc. That's the power these images had.

I think he'd be happy to know about those ruminations. This is photography with a heart - with empathy, encouraging empathy in its viewers - but above all it's photography with a mind, in service of truth, against cant and self-serving conveniences. Jones Griffiths wants you to feel, but even more than that he then wants you to think.

Don't get me wrong: Ms B loves art for art's sake. Indeed I have argued its case many's the time; but the success of the case may depend on what is meant by "art" and what, at bottom, one thinks it is for (even when only in its own service). Jones Griffiths understood about art. He said, I forget where, something wonderful about the first time he ever saw a photograph by Cartier-Bresson (aka, of course, the Master). It was upside-down. He was in a class or something, and the teacher had deliberately reversed the picture so as to draw attention, not to the subject, but to the composition. Jones Griffiths said this had a permanent effect on how he looked at things, and this to me is a sign of the utter integrity of his vision. An eye that can't push itself past the obvious and really see what's there is no eye. And a heart and a mind without an eye cannot produce art - and photo-journalism, without being art, cannot succeed.

Some people might say 72 was a good age, but to lose this person now, at a time when we need his particular qualities so much, seems a tragedy. He was so young. Younger than we are.

the elegantly dressed middle brow

Not an easy subject to find a suitable illustration for, even if a girl knows what she means.*

It's something to do with a discussion about Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Brutus, the end of civilisation, Kierkegaard's "unconscious despair," and of course Hamlet (his was conscious); plus having been reading Geoffrey Hill in the bath last night. I could get very serious indeed, and talk about all that. I will, I will... But my origins in the middlebrow middle class make it hard for me to do anything other than undercut myself with bathos, jokes, wilful bringings of the argument back to quotidian concerns (e.g., I have to leave for work, coffee, weird hair day, etc).

One wishes one had more time for serious thought, for seriousness generally, but then when there's time there are meals and bottles of wine to be seen to... Then one wishes one had the depth of reflection. I argued a case the other day only to be shot down completely in flames, and then realised I had argued agains tmy real beliefs, and agreed with the person who shot me down! I mean, he was arguing my real position. And the position I had argued was the middle brow one of "eh, everything's fine, try this."

However, the rest of us does keep going on behind that pernicious, easily-satisfied middle brow, and our job I suppose is to give it enough space so that our despair (or joy, or indeed our understanding) is not completely unconscious... This is where poetry comes in. I was writing to a friend yesterday about the closeness of our dreams - as in, what we dream at night - to poems, at least in me that is often the case. She burbles inconprehensively. But no time to make it right, she really does have to go.

Here's your quote for the day, and I don't want you to read it as about politics!

When history sleeps, it speaks in dreams: on the
forehead of the sleeping people, the poem is a constellation of blood.
When history wakes, image becomes act, the poem happens:
poetry gets into action.

Octavio Paz

There was a picture of Salvadore Dali with something on his forehead but that only reminded me of a middle-brow anecdote, which I'll save for another time.

(Edited in: it strikes me that this is about the opposite of elegance, or the need to rise above elegance, or the limitations of mere elegance, or something like that. Ms B is back at work and has no time for these considerations, except to say that although her shoes have very thin heels they are very comfortable to walk in.)

* (click on the picture: v interesting blog.)

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.

arcana, canis and the arse

By the way, lest we think the debate over the corrupting democratisation of the blogosphere and its hordes of uneducated oik denizens has gone away, here's a fun snippet:

"Don Paterson 'fucking hates blogs' - in case you were interested..."

Now, why is that? (It strikes me that George Szirtes, for example, doesn't.)

I bet Andy Croft has an idea...

Sorry. I've given you homework. Both poets' essays are really well worth reading, though, and Croft in the New Statesman will raise a laugh. He did in me, anyway. Just what you need on a rainy Sunday.

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.

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.

the elegantly dressed thinking of Dr Johnson

Patrick Kurp, at Anecdotal Evidence, writes about literary biography and the New Criticism (as was):

"From Samuel Johnson – his works and life – I have learned much about how to be a man and a writer, how to live with unhappiness and adversity, how to dwell in vanity while striving, without hope, for humility."

He links to Theodore Dalrymple in the City Journal, who explains that Johnson's greatness lies in just this paradox, which is the source of his profundity as a human being:

"Johnson is a good but flawed man, always trying to be, but not always succeeding in being, a better one: he is proud, he is humble; he is weak, he is strong; he is prejudiced, he is generous-minded; he is tenderhearted, he is bad-tempered; he is foolish, he is wise; he is sure of himself, he is modest; he is idle, he is hardworking; he is opinionated, he is consumed by doubt; he is spiritual, he is carnal; he is hopeful, he is despairing; he is skeptical, he is credulous; he is melancholy, he is lighthearted; he is deferential, he is aware that he has no superior in the world; he is clumsy of body, he is elegant of mind and diction; he is a failure, he is triumphant. We never expect to meet anyone who, to such a degree, encompasses in his being all human vulnerability and human resilience."

Look how nice that paragraph looks, the words laid out! All the "is"es. Lovely.

I know that "elegantly dressed" is a bit of an overstatement in the Doctor's case... and he's not exactly topical. But he's timeless.

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...

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.

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?"

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.)