Guy Davenport and Harold J Smith: the link

The great Modernist critic and writer Guy Davenport was also an illustrator and even a cartoonist. I knew he could draw pictures, because he illustrated several of his own books of short stories; his line drawings of Vladimir Tatlin and Stalin are memorable. But what I didn't know was that the manifestation of his skills was so much more multifarious than that. Above, his 1958 book jacket for a Western set in the Civil War.

It's lovely, isn't it? Even aside from the brave, manly-looking soldier, I mean. And his wonderful buttons. There's a whole description and explanation of it (except for the buttons) here, in the middle of a highly interesting essay on Davenport's careers - both literary and visual.

This picture reminds me, in its solitary heroism and impeccable fifties look, of an item I read last week on Amy King's blog. Amy informs us - with a link to her source - that Jay Silverheels, the American Indian actor who played Tonto, also wrote poetry! Of course he did. It was based on his childhood on the reservation, and it is apparently lost.

As disappointing as this is, it can't be as disappointing as the fact that Jay Silverheels' real name was Harold J Smith.

Heigh-ho, Silver!

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?

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.

"it's unsustainable..."

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

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

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

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

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

"We seem to be volunteering for ours."

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

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

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

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

Ta to Francis Sedgemore for the link.

Cardiff in the rain

Right now the Baroque nerves are about as jangled as they can be, and no wonder! Here's one I prepared earlier (you'll see...):

The train station in Cardiff is rather thrilling as you roll up to it in a minicab, in the rain, the day before the big rugby match with the town full of drunken Frenchmen wrapped in creased Tricolours – bearing the legend above its massive portals, THE GREAT WESTERN, it reminds the receipt-seeking, minicab-paying, mobile-phone-answering person of the romance that used to attach to this whole process of getting from one city to another.

Ms Baroque has today spent several hours in the capital city of the land of her fathers, and of course this exciting station is one of the bits her grandfather – and even her great-grandfather - would still recognise, at least until they got onto the platform. At that point they might lose the point, especially if they decided they wanted a last-minute coffee.

Fortunately that didn’t happen to me. I got my coffee earlier, at a place called Shot in the Dark.

We weren’t shot.

And this, dear readers, sums up the excitement of travelling to Cardiff! I used to go there a lot, staying with a glamorous BBC-working cousin, and I loved it: the castle, the old buildings, the feeling of not being in England, the people speaking to me in Welsh (see, in London everyone thinks I’m Jewish; in Wales they talk to me in Welsh). It’s what my children’s non-Baroque grandmother would have called a damned shame: there’s the whole clan, sitting in America yearning to go to Wales, the trip of a lifetime, and there’s me in the rain trying to get home in time for dinner while the ghost of my grandfather runs alongside my cab, going, “Stop! Wait! Maybe I drank in there! And that place, it could look a bit familiar…” In the end, my colleague and I are quite happy to get a train half an hour earlier than the one we’d thought we’d get, although he’s also partly annoyed because it means he’ll be in the pub before his friends.

And the romance? It was all in the lettering, just as it is on the (frankly thrilling, I think) Welsh National Opera building (which I’ve never been inside, alas). It certainly isn’t in the way my knees feel as I type this, or my poor shoulder hunched over a 12-inch-wide fold-out tray on an overcrowded commuter train... (Editing in: I had pretty much had it by Reading. That was two hours ago. I won't even talk about the conversations I was trapped in the middle of on the 73 bus; I got off and walked, in the end.) And Grandfather feels a little forlorn.

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.

Mrs Hackett

There's another funeral in Connecticut today, one I'd have liked to be at, if that's the right phrase.

Mrs Hackett's.

Mrs Hackett was the grandmother of our next-door neighbours and best friends (see Marsha and Sis, above), in whose house we kids practically lived - when they weren't living in ours. We used to go back and forth almost indiscriminately, and my sister and Marsha used to communicate by semaphore across the driveway from their bedroom windows at night, and in the mornings before school. Or did they? Was that me? Was it the bedroom windows or the ones on the stairs? Was it the window at the top of our back stairs? When our cousins came to live with us (bringing the number of kids-under-12 in the house to a dizzying eight) they all played with Mark and Marsha too. Instant best friends.

Mrs Hackett, the calm at the eye of the storm, used to come for visits from what always seemed to me her exotic life in Springfield - exotic, I suppose, because unknowable. She was a tiny, and quite scary, woman who always had time for an intelligent conversation with an earnest little girl (as long as the earnest girl was also planning to go and play). I knew she was something special: her personality was so strong, and the details of her life that she told me were so particular (though I don't remember much about them now) that I knew she had become who she was by sheer force of will. She was the number one grownup you didn't want to get in trouble with - followed closely by her daughter, the impeccably beautiful Mrs Ball, aka Marsha's mom. She impressed herself on me indelibly.

In December, at le Duc de Baroque's memorial service reception, I suddenly heard my mother calling me with an urgency in her voice - and when I turned around, there were, for the first time in I can't admit how many years, Marsha Ball and her mother, looking exactly the same as always. You can imagine the scene. In the course of the exclamations I said how I really remembered Mrs Hackett, and they chorused: "She's still alive!"

No....! Yes, she was. She was in a nursing home, she was 107, and she had lived in her own place till she had a fall at 102. They said to me, "She slowed down a bit after the fall..." There they were were at my father's funeral and they were telling me Mrs Hackett was still alive! See, anything can happen. (Srsly.) I remember her as quite old, even when I was a kid.

From the obituary in the Hartford Courant I now know that Mrs Hackett was born in New York City (like me), in 1900. For many years she was a pastry cook at the Old Colony Club in Springfield, Mass, which sounds fascinating and romantic from this distance, doesn't it? I wish I'd known then, or maybe I did; I seem to have a faint memory of cookies... "Having begun voting upon the passage of the Women's Suffrage Act in 1920," the obituary says, "she was justifiably proud to be one of the oldest voters in Connecticut." She was also a diminutive black woman, born only 34 years after the end of the Civil War - the Civil War my own mother can dimly remember seeing veterans of, riding in open-topped cars in the 4th of July parades when she was tiny, when they were little old men. Mrs Hackett lived through the entire century and then some, and from what I could see she stayed perfectly calm through the whole thing.

And after all that, it's the driveway between our two houses that I'm seeing now, shaded by those special childhood rododendrons and cushioned at its end by an exotic patch of non-deadly nightshade next to my log-cabin playhouse, with a view into the Balls' kitchen window where I can imagine Mrs Hackett sitting as I come running up after school... I've probably been reading one of those books I loved in the school library, the biographies - about Sacajawea, Susan B Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Clara Barton - and I'm dying to talk to a grownup, who can remember all the great days and tell me things about the Depression. She'll give me some milk, answer my questions and then fade into a grey-haired blur as I go find the other kids to play kick the can... but all that was gone already, wasn't it?

Bye bye, Mrs Hackett, after all this time. I wish I was in Connecticut today.

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 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?"

in brief: Alan Sillitoe at eighty

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

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

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

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

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

the day Wallace Stevens punched out Ernest Hemingway

It happened in Key West, Florida: "sort of pleasant like the cholera," (sez Hems).

Stevens, the mild-mannered and canny insurance-man-stroke-seminal-Modernist (adjunct anecdote: Stevens to someone from his publishers, who had haplessly called him at the office to sort some urgent piece of business: "What are you doing calling me here? I told you never to call me on this number!"), turfs up at a party in Key West. Stevens says: "By God, I wish I had that Hemingway here now, I'd knock him out with a single punch!"

Hemingway's sister is at the party, and forcefully tries to convince Stevens, through her tears, what a sap her brother is - he's no man, etc. Hemingway, drinking quietly at home,is sent for, and meets the very drunk Stevens coming out of the party into the rain. Stevens swings the promised punch, but misses, and Hemingway punches Stevens three times, "and I knocked all of him down several times and gave him a good beating." Into a puddle, apparently.

Someone suggests that Hemingway take off his glasses: whereupon - according to Hemingway's account in a letter - "Mr. Stevens hit me flush on the jaw with his Sunday punch bam like that. And this is very funny. Broke his hand in two places. Didn't harm my jaw at all and so put him down again and then fixed him good so he was in his room for five days with a nurse and Dr. working on him."

This happened in 1935: Hemingway was 36, Stevens was 56. you have to wonder whether the weekday punch would've floored Hems.

more ghosts

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

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

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

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

ghosts of myself

While doing some other things at the weekend I came across something I didn't know even existed: a fat sheaf of poems I wrote when I was a teenager. I know there are some around the place from when I was younger than that, and there are definitely stories I wrote in primary school; there are also essays, and once I even wrote an opera! (Well. It was two pages long, and I wrote it with a friend. Not like the precocious kids I know nowadays, they all practically have deals.) But these are the real deal, written when I was still demonstrably a kid, but old enough to be "serious" about it. When I read Collected Poems of this and that poet, I've always felt a little bit sad reading their juvenilia, because I don't have any. But now I have! Not only that, but in the strange manner of things that come back to you through time, many of these poems are as familiar as ever, in that their first lines or whatever are very fresh to me.

I'm not going to make many claims for the quality of the poems. I was no Millay writing "Renascence" at 17. But they are reassuring to me, because for one thing they're not as bad as all that: they show promise. For another, though they are full of awful stylistic tics, the voice is recognisably that of me. And some of those stylistic tics I've only managed to shake off within living memory. The good news is that while I was writing like Nikki Giovanni I was reading much more demanding stuff. And it shows.

The other good news is that I already had an ear, I was using assonance and dissonance and some crazy rhymes. I had some rhetorical devices, and ambition: there's a long numbered sequence in there. Mallarmé would be pleased to note that I was writing to the words, not to the idea - though there are certainly ideas aplenty. I was already doing that mixture of soulful and quirky. I haven't even read it all yet. And was it Brodsky? No - Auden, said that you spot a promising young poet by the fact that, however awful their work is, they are clearly in love with words, and experimenting with technique. He said the content can come later.

In the bit I have read, there are two lines in one of the poems that, not only do they sound like me, I can tell you which poem they sound like: it's not going in the book, it's called "Hullaballoo", and although I've always had a soft spot for it I've never felt it quite worked. Here are the two lines:

"While some stay home to tend the goats,
Some go to work in camel coats..."

The rest of it is execrable. But here's another good bit:

"Quiet oasis in this LOUD* desert
of time interrupted by the clatter
chatter**
of this metal pretender box, carefully woodgrained
for the pseudo-elegant effect,
whose pictures, constantly, mean untiringly
nothing.
They shatter me anyway:
oasis a mirage glimmering."

(See, there's me just gearing up for an adult lifetime of ranting on about substandard TV! I love that "constantly, mean untiringly/ nothing." Fine work.)

Or:
"& now I find you gone
I find I've lost a limb
or else I'm out on one"

Or:
"The sun in kindness throws me
handfuls..."***

Most interesting of all, though, is the subjects I was writing about. Some of these poems, given a spit & a polish, could be by, well, me. I clearly have my lifelong obsessions, the things I'm working through and never stop thinking about. Or - as one of them is the ghosts of the past - that never stop thinking about me. (Oooooo-ooooo-oooooo...) They really do presage the whole "Me and the Dead" theme. Here's a whole poem, not that it's that good but I think it is interesting, & surely we can afford to give some indulgence to a 10th-grader:

"You cannot see Connecticut tonight.****
It is covered by mists which are
impenetrable.*****
The Yankee ghosts are home to roost,
sitting on the past,
covering up the present,
floating across the streets
with absent-minded nonchalance
as if the years which intervene
did not exist.
You cannot see Connecticut tonight,
so shrouded in its own debris it is,
so hidden in the drifting mist
of the builders of its houses
that you cannot see
at all."

Well, bless. I think that mini-me did a good job! E'en this very summer I wanted to draft a poem about exactly the same thing: those mists in the woods. And the ghostliness of the whole place, only I now think they're Indian ghosts more than settlers. That particular conceit, of the ghosts being so thick you can't see for them, I actually thought dated from a dream I had when I was about 23, but apparently it was already in place.

Here, for comparison, is the first stanza of the title poem from Me and the Dead:

"Safe in the past where nothing more can happen to them,
they occupy your streets and your favourite buildings
in their ribbons and wigs and silver-buckled shoes.
You often look at pictures of them : they were
more beautiful than the people you know, so serene
in the bright clear colours of the past, with intelligent eyes
and effortless skin tone. You feel a kinship with them.
Reading their letters again you want more, more.
You prowl through their houses ; you run your hand
lightly along the wood, leaning on their door-jambs :
door-jambs with a quaint look, that to them were modern."

And now, good night! When I wake it will be the future. ******

* See, I was reading old Ez...
** Note nasty stylistic tic!
*** See, I was reading Mayakovsky. Sometimes I still write lines that sound like this.
**** See, I was writing my IPs!
***** But then it falls to bits. Come on Kate.
****** Alas, not quite far enough into the future. Another hour or two would do me fine.

Sunday shadow puppets

I went out for a walk in the late afternoon sunshine; it was sort of glowing all over the buildings. Avoiding the trendy bits and the nasty old (I mean good ol') High St, with its betting shops, takeaways and filth, I walked the back way to Church St, through the neighbourhood with its huge square houses. To get to the neighbourhood you go to the end of my road, down a little road with a bridge over the train tracks and a row of Hassidic shops (challah, buns, cakes, kosher wine, groceries, household items), & past a church I've never been in, and then you turn. The houses are very big, very square, made of some kind of pale stone, very unyielding. They all seem to have budleias in their front gardens - budleias and rubbish.

This was the hour when the whole street, the whole neighbourhood, smells of gefilte fish. I used to love that stuff when I was little and if I only knew someone now would would make me some I'd be very happy. I hear it's an art, but then so is chicken soup with matzo balls and I can make that.

The light was golden (as schmaltz? Or is that too schmaltzy?) when I went out, with the sun shining straight into my eyes; I walked round the churchyard of the old 1560s St Mary's church, with its moss-grown crypts and those awful memorial stones that are the size and shape of coffins or mummies, just as the light was beginning to pinken. The ground was a clutter of old sticks, broken slabs, dirst; one gravestone had a single, dark green strand of ivy growing straight up it. Most of the graves are too eroded to read, but some of them date back 200 years.

But once you're in the park you get a horizon (ignore the fact that it's Green Lanes) with a sort of castle jutting out into it (ignore the fact that it's the climbing centre); over there, and over the houses with their chimneys, the sunset went an intense, violent orange, melting upward into the usual pale blue. The trees were black cut-outs against it, and a jet trail hung motionless in the sky beside a faint white crescent moon. A duck flew up from the pond. It was exactly like this:




















I sat on a bench for a few minutes till the light went a bit more.

Except for a couple of very short, where-are-you-when-will-you-be-home conversations with Mlle B, I have not spoken to a soul all day. Well, scratch that: I spoke to the girls in the Spence, ordering coffee and telling them that Fresh & Wild is now charging £2.59 for one of their small white loaves (£1.40 in the Spence itself - they laughed and told me they even take it down there hemselves - nobody from F&W has to lift a finger!). But aside from that, I have been on my own and silent since yesterday afternoon, & life is but a dream. It's hard to believe I'm even in this scene, somehow.

Strangely, hanging all those newly-framed pictures seems to have contributed to this dream-state, as most of the pictures are things I have either had for ages, or have had all my life, or have been given by friends and relatives, or have inherited from my father le Duc. In short, they all have very personal significance, as well as being interesting to look at. But then, hanging them if I weren't in a dream state they may not have had such an effect. And no one has even seen them yet.

Coming back there were a few more people about in my road: an old man in his long black coat, stooped over a cigarette in the street; a tall, red-headed girl in her long navy blue (why must they wear navy blue?? It is simply ugly on everybody) skirt, looking impossibly grown up and impossibly young at the same time. Two tiny boys, in their yarmulkes, playing: one by the front gate, and the other running away pell-mell as fast as he could, while the first one shouted - screamed, really - Eins! (pause) Zwei! (long pause, jumping up and down, then hilarious burst) Dreeeeeiiii!! And with that he rushes into the house.

By now the pink fairy dust is settling and the blue is arriving. Sounds are sounding more normal, less enchanted, and soon it will just be plain old night, with traffic and harsh lighting. The fish smells even more delicious. I've been walking for an hour and can hardly tell the difference between life and dreaming: I've been living since Thursday almost entirely in my own internal spaces, and sleeping badly so I'm never sure if I'm awake or not. And I'm home.

let's do the time warp again

I may have thought the patient had died, ladies and gentlemen; but if so, the corpse is about to get a darned good burial. I've just seen the first episode of Ashes to Ashes, in which the Bad Cop DCI Gene Hunt from Life on Mars is resuscitated for another trip through time - this time to the wilds of London in 1981. Double creepy! I was here! Remember that weird orangey-red lipstick? The clothes are looking horrible, yet strangely normal, and the locations are looking fab.

But the problem is, once you see it on telly it really does start feeling like it was just yesterday. How odd that you can't just step through somewhere and be back then. (Oh - and that's what time-travel stories are all about...)

And with a sultry (yet, in this episode, mainly rather hysterical; I'm hoping that will change) female time-travelling sidekick, it's looking like Gene Hunt's going to get to be the Bad, Sexy Cop this time round. Is that going to be fun, or tedious,or is it an eighties hommage á la Moonlighting?

The papers are talking about its black comedy, its surreal weirdness, and its soundtrack.

So hurrah! Dennis Potter it may not be, but it is cracking good fun, it's put together with cleverness and sophistication, it's original, and it actually has a bit of the Zeitgeist about it. As I recall that was a word we used to like, back in 1981.

I take it all back...

framed on a Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.)

the world turned upside down

After last week's shock announcement that the Home Secretary needs a bodyguard to go for a kebab, and thinks (yes she does; she said so) that "no one would" go out and about in Hackney after dark, we now find that our new Housing Minister Caroline Flint is shocked at the number of council tenants who don't have jobs. Funny; one might be reasonably shocked by these sorts of things, but of course the big difference between her and Labour Ministers of old is that she thinks all these jobless tenants are just a bunch of lazy bastards.

The number of council tenants without jobs has risen, from 20% in 1981 to 55% now. That means of course that where most council tenants previously were trotting off of a morning with their dustcarts, chip vans and nail files, nowadays they are less cosy to look at and think about. According to Flint, that's reason enough to take these people in hand and make sure they're at least looking for a job - sinisterly, even to make sure they're "employable"* - before they're allowed to have a council home.

After all! The likes of us aren't paying perfectly good taxes to support the likes of them, are we!

"She told the Fabian Society on Monday: 'The link between social housing and worklessness is stark. I am concerned about what has been called a collapse in the number of people in council housing in work over the past 25 years.

'We need to think radically and start a national debate'."

Okay - so let's start the debate. First of all, I move that the word missing from her statement to the Fabians is "causal." There is no evidence that being given a council home has in any way encouraged these people to become, or to remain, jobless.

In 1982 the unemployment rate famously topped 3 million, or one in eight people. It was going up, at the time, not down. Remember why Thatcher was so thrilled when Argentina invaded the Falklands?? In 2007 the unemployment rate was around five per cent, or one in 20 people. Spot the difference. I'm not even sure what the population has done in that time, but the actual number of unemployed people now is around 1.5 million, or half what it was in the early eighties. Does that sound to you like a huge segment of the population has just decided not to work?

As it happens, in 1984 - three years after the date the Minister is concerned about - yours truly here was party to the purchase of a flat in Wimbledon (I know, I know - I was a child bride, I liked being near the Wombles) for £29,950. The combined salaries involved in the mortgage - from two young people both, at that time, working in shops of one sort or another - came to roughly £16,000. In other words, we were earning more than half the amount the flat cost.

Er - compare that to now. On a salary of over four times what I was earning then, I am unable to afford to buy a flat. Well - okay - I have kids, I'd need a bigger flat, and I'm only one adult in the equation, not two. However. The average price of a home in 2007 hit around £200,000. Even in nasty old Hackney you can't even buy a garage for twice the combines earnings of two shop assistants.

The Telegraph puts it this way:

"To put current house prices into perspective, the median weekly wage, according to the Office for National Statistics, is £447 – equating to £23,244 a year. Average house prices, then, have reached a remarkable 8·6 times average earnings."

Now, you may recall that many council properties have been sold off under Right to Buy. Many of those places now fetch the same prices on the open market as other properties, despite the fact that councils deprived of the rental income can't even afford to keep up the communal areas properly - such is our housing shortage - and, thus, the competition for those that remain is so fierce that there are severely overcrowded families growing up and even leaving home before they can be rehoused in larger properties. I, at one stage having not worked for nine years and finding myself with nowhere to go, spent several years in a one-bedroom privately rented flat that cost me more than a 3-bed council house would have (of course I was working; I was doing nothing bloody else). I currently, in a 'good job', spend nearly half my take-home pay on the rent of the cheapest habitable two-bed flat I was able to find (in good old Hackney). (It's very nice, actually, but that is beside the point.)

Now, in this climate it stands to reason that the few council properties that do remain will go to the most desperate people in our society, those with no jobs, those who can't raise a deposit for a rented place, those who have been made homeless (the only way to get housed in inner London), those who have no other option. The ones the council has to house.

They are the deserving poor.

Of course fewer of them are working.

Caroline, wake up! Wake up! It was all a dream!

* I wonder if that means they have to speak English, too.

meanwhile, back in America it's fistfighting versus poetry

...and some interesting parallels:

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

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