undone

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

the one called Being the view; and the viewed

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

the cookbook one

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

fix up link lists in sidebar, they are a total mess and out of date, and both my linkees and you, readers, deserve better.


Books:
Little Monsters, by Charles Lambert

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

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

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

Ted Hughes' Selected Letters

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

The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

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

Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, by Charles Nichols

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

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

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

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


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

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

dishes

ring cleaner and beg her to come back

er - light bulbs?

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

where can I get a lamp rewired?

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

change the beds.

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


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

send some poems out

edit about three new poems

no, edit about ten new poems

maybe edit first and then send them out!

another review, for The Dark Horse

my secret essay I'm (not) working on

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

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


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

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

send Infamous back to LoveFilm

pay British Gas

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


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

infamous indolence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the red earth of Tara: a competition

I couldn't get the image I wanted; indeed, any of the images I wanted. But while we're on the subject, here's a competition for you! There will be a fabulous [sic] prize for the first person who can tell me where the phrase "gone with the wind" comes from.

(Note: All members of the Spaniel family and its tenants and employees are ineligible for this competition.)

Thinking about it, I can offer a bonus if you guess correctly the image I wanted. Note that I will ideally want you to know what's happening in the scene and what the music is doing. (Spaniels may have a go at the bonus question.)

All answers should be emailed to me, at the email address in the sidebar. I will award the prize to the first correct answer, and the bonus to the first correct guess as to the image I was looking for.

In case you don't feel like helping me celebrate my brief "Red Earth of Tara" moment, here is a nice piece of Hollywood trivia from the obituary of Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick in the New York Times, June 23, 1965:

"Nothing in Hollywood is permanent," Mr. Selznick said in 1959 on a Hollywood set, as Tara, the mansion built for "Gone With The Wind," was being dismembered and shipped to Atlanta, Ga. "Once photographed, life here is ended. It is almost symbolic of Hollywood. Tara has no rooms inside..."

Click on the image below for more of this kind of thing.

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.

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.

no time to post...

the elegantly dressed, thinking of Dr Johnson

coming soon, on a dark and rainy night near you...

What happens when you go out looking for something? What happens if you find it - or it finds you? And how can you tell?

Tune in to Propeller TV, or Sky Channel 195, to find out, this Saturday night at 11.05. That's tomorrow. And depending where you are it might not be 11.05 - but you knew that.

Ghost Club is described as "a short film in which the three members of the South London Paranormal Investigation Society keep a night-time vigil at a 400-year-old mansion in the hope of seeing 'Possible Incorporeal Entities'..."

Written by: David Secombe and Andrew Martin
Produced by: David Secombe and Andrew Martin
Directed by David Secombe

John: Geoffrey Freshwater
Ian: Kieran Hill
Peter: Miles Richardson
Hoody: Gordon Ridout

© Scout Hut Films 2007

there will be bloodsucking

Just to reprise: At the end of the previous post I wrote, "But where Les Enfants evokes dream life, the underground in There Will be Blood does the opposite - because Plainview is literally, as he himself says, draining it."

I wrote that, and then almost immediately happened upon this sentence on IMDb: "The main character Daniel Plainview was modeled loosely after famous oil man Edward Doheny and his characteristics were based on Count Dracula."

See?? My theory about this mysterious strangulated silence at the heart of the film, which is developing only as I type, is beginning to be substantiated! (if not transubstantiated.)

I was also amazed, having just made my leaping, not to say chasm-gulfing, comparison between this movie and The Godfather, to see that a message board had been set up on the subject of "Day-Lewis vs Pacino." Was someone going to talk about the qualities of silence in the Godfather? Pacino's brand of solitary power-hunger vs Day-Lewis' extrovert misanthropy? I clicked into it. (nb. you have to be registered.) And what did I see?

"Pacino had his time but he is no longer the gret actor he was Daniel Day Lewis is by far a better actor than Pacino who I agree was amazing in Heat, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Godfather."

That's not all. Someone else wrote "pachino". What did I expect.

there was blood

I take it all back: all those years of thinking he was too pretty, a lightweight, boring, a worthless scoundrel beneath encouraging.* I take back all the conversations I've had about The Last of the Mohicans, a movie so boring it was almost faithful to the book - and in which, to be honest, DDL paled (literally) beside the hunky guy who played Uncas, the noble Indian guide. The waterfalls were more interesting than he was, to be honest, in that film. I take it all back.

For yea, Daniel Day-Lewis has delivered a truly craggy performance, and in a truly craggy film. He's fifty now, apparently. And There Will Be Blood is an amazing film, a tour de force of atmosphere and implication, a parable. He isn't even the best thing in it: the oil derricks are ten times more exciting even than those old waterfalls. Or no: he is astounding in his portrayal of this man simply disintegrating. (Someone said to me that they don't think Daniel Plainview develops in the course of the film, and I think this is true: he disintegrates.)

I know I'm behind the times, saying these things: everyone who's anyone has seen it and said them already and lots more. But I'm also shackled here, because I know loads of people (sorry: it's just the kind of people I hang out with) who haven't seen it yet, and I can't say the things I want to say because I think some of them read this blog, and I'd hate to deny them the experience!

So I'll just say:

Paul Dano: wow. That is one hell of a goddamn character portrayal. Watch this guy. Christopher Walken with heart. (Only, even better: he turns out to have been the brother, Dwayne, in Little Miss Sunshine - another pivotal character - and also appeared in two episodes of The Sopranos.)

Jonny Greenwood! The music! Jesus. See, I've always loved Radiohead. The way the music creates the atmosphere and then seems to take the story along after it - as if we had always had that emotion and the film was merely doing us a favour by showing us why - is something I've barely experienced that way, ever. Even so, the thing that really blew me away I can't talk about yet. It's too specific and too big a part of my enjoyment of the film - it would be a spoiler.

The violence in this film is extremely interesting. It reminds me of The Godfather in the way that it sets up the expectation of violence - in fact, simultaneously creates the feelings of an aftermath of violence - psychologically. No, that word is wrong. Symbolically. Everything in the entire film is relentlessly harsh, and serves this brutality.

Also, the silence. I'm struck by the silence (which isn't really silence at all much of the time, thanks to the afore-mentioned score which at times is almost overwhelming) and by the importance of its proximity to under the ground. Famously the first line of dialogue is spoken 15 minutes into the opening, and the preceding 15 minutes are mesmeric and gripping by turns. The hero, Plainview, is trying to find gold under the ground; later on, he drills oil from the under the ground. He is a taciturn man, and much of the story revolves around silence, the inability to speak, or to hear, or to understand. The ritualised, yet frenzied, speech of the preacher Eli Sunday has a huge meaning in the film, but Sunday's moral character is far from clear-cut. (Interestingly, Dano's character in Little Miss Sunshine, who has the best scene in the film, is - tada! - silent.) Of course the underground is the region of sleep and dream, and thus the seat of speech, as well as of death and the devil - which is the necessary association in this film, especially with all the fire and brimstone around. **

I preferred the cinematography in the Jesse James film, though I'm prepared to concede that this may just be my love of things that sparkle. I can see why this film was shot the way it was, though: it's about harshness... and flatness... and it's very clean. There were two shots that are really staying with me, one of which is ineffably beautiful and achieves the status of poetry. And it is rich in its austerity, if that makes sense. God, I'm a prat. Anyway there are one or two scenes, with the derrick etc, that pretty much won him the Oscar.

The oil! The oil, I'll say at the risk of sounding even more stupid, sentimental, poncy, pseudy and annoying, is the blood. That much is clear as, well, tar. And of course the title is a prophecy, which is such an old-fashioned concept these days.

The story, it's true, could be considered weak. The same person said they thought it was "too episodic," with which I had to disagree also: it's as if Anderson sets a thing in motion - like the arm of a derrick, perhaps - and then it has nothing to do but gather its own momentum. I saw the film with my 17-year-old, the Tall Blond Rock God, and when I told him this idea about episodicness, he said: "well, the story's not much, but it needs to be that way to show what happens to his character." And there you have it.

I always react too strongly to movies when I first see them. Will I always think it's this great? Is it too harsh? Is it too inexorable, not questioning enough? Too mono, or behemoth? But you watch it and you see the entire 20th century of America stretching out before your mind's eye like those long roads, and you see the strip malls and ugly chain restaurants and gigantic acres of carpet warehouses, and the way oil tramples on everything else, even the people, and you think: Upton Sinclair couldn't even know all that yet! Could he?

Go see it.

(see, I don't hate everything.)

* This would be after the famous Isabelle Adjani breaking-up-by-fax episode, which shocked me deeply at the time - though these things always look different when one is that bit older and more weary: I found the memory oddly comforting years later when someone broke up with me by informing me in an email that he had been transferred to Zurich and would be leaving the next day. Ha!

** Coincidentally, I'm also thinking a lot lately about Les Enfants du Paradis - which may sound inapt here, except that it too is a film about silence, and not speaking, and power. But where Les Enfants evokes dream life, the underground in There Will be Blood does the opposite - because Plainview is literally, as he himself says, draining it.

the new cure for depression

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

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

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

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

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

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

ten writery bits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

okay, while we're on the subject of Tilda Swinton

What is that dress?!? Dear God in heaven. (She says it's "comfortable.")

Oh no, but wait, this really is funny:

"She said she was surprised people didn't know she's funny. 'I'm funny all the time', she says. 'I'll have to work on that'."

the ghostly presence

A strange dream last night, in which I'm looking at my reflection in a shop window or similar... but there is another reflection of me, lurking behind the one that's moving, smiling, etc. The one behind is sad, or at least very still and expressionless. So, I'm looking at two reflections of my face at once, in the same window, and they are separate. I deliberately try out some different facial expressions: the front face makes them, the face behind doesn't.

As to how we construct indicators in dreams: in both these reflections I have the kind of glasses I used to have: not the big round metal NHS ones I had for years (yes, children, it's true), but some smaller ones I used to have before that.

Also: I think this dream is in black-&-white. The quality of reflection off glass is perfectly rendered.

not Vincent Price

(not)


"To leave is romantic, to return is baroque." -Anton LaVey

I saw this quote on 3 Quarks Daily. I collected it for my Baroqueness files. I looked up Anton LaVey. Oh dear.

And he was born on my birthday! I'd love to be able to think of him as a sort of lovable Vincent Price character, but I'm afraid it is not possible. (Though, for coincidences, here's another: Vincent Price died on the very same day as my grandmother. I have to say, it was a comfort.)

However, of mild amusement is LaVey's listed list of influences. Spot the odd ones out...
Ayn Rand
Aleister Crowley
Friedrich Nietzsche
HL Mencken
Jack London...

the Jarmans are coming

Funny: I woke up this morning thinking about Derek Jarman, for some reason. Then on the way to work, in the Metro, I read an interview with the filmmaker Isaac Julien, who is curating a Jarman exhibition at the Serpentine, featuring a film he has made over the past - I think - 18 years. He credits Jarman with inspiring him with his vision of film as a kind of poetry, rather than as a kind of narrative structure.* (Julien has filmed a version of Derek Walcott's epic Homer-based poem Omeros, but I haven't seen it. He clearly really is interested in poetry; and perhaps also in people called Derek...)

I tried to look all this up on the Metro's website so I could get the actual quote, but it is an appalling Heat!-style fiasco, bearing no resemblance at all to the paper. Lots of celebrities and football and, natch, no Jarman.

Unfortunately the film is also full of Tilda Swinton, and I don't know. Something about her always makes me want to pinch her, to see if she can move her facial muscles spontaneously.

* i.e., an extension of the novel. This is interesting in another way: I remember at the time, it was all Jarman/painting, all about the visuals. The Caravaggio one obviously accentuated this association. Was Jarman irredeemably a creature of the eighties, like Peter Greenaway (don't make me), or would his films still stand as interesting art? And would it shed a light on the film-as-poetry thing? Ideas and responses welcome.

I know: he has come to stand for something else, so that the films are now almost beside the point, but I'm not sure what that thing is. Human courage, maybe. Aliveness: he certainly had that. He was writing to the Times the week before he died. I've read parts of his journals, he was a terrible misogynist.

not in the mood for blueberry pie

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

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

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

It's very strange with no kids.

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

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


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

** Oh! Delight! From the Guardian:

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

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

oh, goody

I can't wait. Branagh and Curtis, together at last.

On a small boat.

I knew it all along

Jacques Prévert in an interview before the first showing of Les Enfants du Paradis, for which he wrote the screenplay:

"Cinema and poetry are the same thing."

"I'm afraid the patient has died."

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

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

The Guardian continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.