barque no more

On the subject of women's blogs, here's my favourite blog of the moment. I know, but I am past remedy at my age. It's called A Dress a Day, and is a dream of a blog - just what every girl needs when her dream barque has left on its tenth round-the-world cruise. It's a case of make your own.

Seriously, this site is much better written, and much funnier, than anyone asked it to be. Check out the Secret Histories of Dresses, featuring this little femme fatale here on the right.
















I do promise poetry on my masthead and this Dada Poem Dress, by the artist Lesley Dill, is my way of sidling up to the subject for now. Apparently the text on the dress - which is made of paper - comes from Dickinson (via Emin). And if you do check out Dress a Day, you might like her occasional series "The Dress in Literature," which features poems by allsorts, including Apollinaire and Dr Suess.

Actually Erin, Ms Dressaday, gets very technical, with lots of detailed commentary on vintage patterns etc. Some of us never lose our interest in darts, fitted shoulders and how to get a pocket into a vintage frock. The site is a deep seam (geddit?!?) of information for anyone who loves textiles, design, 3D construction - oh yes, that's engineering - and, in fact, good old fashion.

All of which could mean boys - or even men - too. (Just not the kind that's going to help me with my embarquing issue.)

blogs for the girls

Actually, the fact that I know I will write more when I'm busier flies in the face of something I read in a newspaper article this week. I can't remember where I saw it, I've looked and looked. But the story's not lost - it's been taken up by Ros Taylor in today's Guardian: Just for the Boys?

According to this mystery article, men blog more than women on every subject, that is except - apparently - things like childbirth and babycare. Men, it seems, have more time! Men are more convinced that the world wants to hear their opinions! And thus they dominate the blogosphere in every (ahem) sphere of activity. They can, according to the article, turn up late for dinner mumbling something about being "busy with their blog" and get away with it. Important stuff. Hard day at the office. According to the article, woe betide any woman who neglects the family nutrition in favour of some silly hobby.

But let's think about this again: what, after all, is a blog - a web-log - but that girly standby, a diary?

Women are time-honoured diarists par excellence. This was regarded as quite respectable even through my newfound era, the practical Victorian, when both bedroom and drawing-room diaries were written by women and girls of all ages.

Okay, this was probably because it wasn't regarded as very important. And of course there were class elements to the trend. But if we think about it, women almost single-handedly - okay, single-genderedly (with a little help from Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Cervantes... and even now it occurs to me that that list of novelists, with the exception of Defoe, points pointedly towards a completely different novelistic strand than the one Austen, Burney, Edgworth created) developed the modern novel.

Women (with servants and leisure time - there's that word again) were able to write novels, once again, because most men didn't consider them very important. And it doesn't require as much education to write fiction, of course. Novels were a logical extension of diaries, being essentially records of the events of other, made-up, people. And this is now the proclivity of women in the notebook area became, over years, a revolutionary activity.

And now the men have taken them over? Girls, why are we letting them do this? It's ridiculous: by tradition alone, women should certainly be staking a claim to webloggery: the modern working mother deserves, no less than her gradmothers, to write an account of her thoughts and activities that she can put - oh, the things we do! - where everybody can read it.

I'm all in favour of a small wirelessly connected laptop being provided to every working mother who wants one, not out of the household, child benefit or other 'useful' budget (actually, the government should provide them), for use in her kitchen or utility room. If this is realyl what it comes to, you can change the world while you wait for the pasta to come to a boil.

The whole discussion reared its head when the ex-Tory candidate and blogger extraordinaire Iain Dale asked Ann Widdicombe why women don't blog on the subject of politics. Of course, the vast majority of political blogs are by men.

The article quotes Georgina Henry, the editor of Comment is free, as saying that "the dearth of women who blog about politics reflects the 'disproportionately male' world of politics." And 'there is a particular impatience expressed towards female commentators who blog about political subjects that are considered mostly of interest to other women, such as childcare, work-life balance or raunch culture. 'Women who write about the social agenda often get slaughtered," Henry says.

Typical, ain't it?

A similar debate has been raging in the poetry world, to wit: why is it - or, indeed, is it - so male-centric? Why are the editors 'all' (sic) men, why do women not start little magazines, why do women, or the 'wrong' women, poets have collections published (or not), is it because they pander to the egos of the male editors, or is it a plot? People prop up their positions with numbers, qualitative analysis, rants, lists, hunches, intuition, quotes. But no one can really agree on what is happening, much less why it is.

Gender - or, as they used to call it, sexual politics - is creeping away into the woodwork these days. You can't talk about it - that is, you can, but not without an argument. It's interesting that all the people I know who think poetry publishing is a level playing field are men. It's interesting that the person who's asking why women don't blog about politics is a man.

The pay discrepancy (highest in Europe) has been in the news again. It just won't close, damn it! New research shows that, among other things, pay rises go to those who ask for them, and men ask for rises far more than women do. Ms Baroque herself has sat and been told by her erstwhile line manager that no, she was not experiencing sexual discrimination in the office, even though she knew she was (but that is a long story which ranges freely around three cultures). The arguments are heated enough that it's tempting to slink out the back, rather than get burned from either side.

However, some new research from America apparently shows that women do in fact occupy half the blogosphere - a whole demiblogosphere. The worry, apparently, is that while we are blogging, which is a good thing, we may be clogging up half of the world's precious bandwidth with blogs on nail polish and boyfriends... can this really be true? Follow this link for an article exploring this happy news - but watch for the headline: Women hog half of blogs.

baroque no more

Well, things have been busy here in Baroque Palace. Baroque no more, and certainly not Rococo, I've decided to skip right over Romanticism and head straight into the New Pragmatism. Yes - I've got a new job! And a very practical one it will be too. Two weeks of serious searching resulted in two interviews, and the one I liked I got offered. Hurrah, but not Hooray Henry, because those people didn't offer their job to me. It's all right; I had rejected them before I knew they'd rejected me. Let's just say I have eschewed royal patronage in favour of the real world - in the very shadow of Prince Charles' much-vaunted £800,000 profit increase: a small but liberating step and another sign that I might not be quite as over-the-top as certain parties like to claim (though I wouldn't mind getting my hands on the 800,000 smackers).

And so it goes. Soon I'll be busy again, which will mean I'll have more to think about and thus will be posting more on my baroquelog, in those snatched moments between arriving home all hot from the Victoria Line and plunging into the heat of the ever-waiting kitchen.

the best things in life are free

Okay so the money-saving tips are not arriving. Ms Baroque has had a fabulous cut & colour (at Beaucatcher in Stoke Newington Church Street, N16 — not money-saving, but fun), bought some sweet green earrings made from buttons (Hamiltons, Church St as above), purchased £140-worth of groceries, black patent leather sandals, oh and some Hugo Boss perfume. Well, that one was an emergency. So I think the money-making tip here is just don’t turn out like me. Let them eat Waitrose foodstuffs and drink French rosé.

On the upside, I did make a double recipe of homemade biscotti this morning, which if you consider that they’re a pound each off the counter at Caffe Nero is an almost incalculable saving.














And Regents Park, the most romantic place I think I’ve ever been (I know, how sad is that), is free. The roses are like something out of Boucher.

Baroque in a book bind at Borders

And I have nothing to say because all I’ve read for two weeks is The Camomile Lawn, by Mary Wesley. There. I admitted it. And, awakened with rude slowness from my fantasy that London would be wallpapered with secondhand copies of this book — as it was wallpapered with new ones in the late '80s — I came to at the till in Borders, in the act of forking out the full retail price. Now I’ve read it, there’s nothing left but to give it to the sodding charity shop. And in the new edition.

The Camomile Lawn

Also bought recently the new Penguin Selected Geoffrey Hill — another book I’ve been seeking, and with a lovely black-&-white-&-red-all-over jacket in keeping with the series’ lovely new fifties-looking graphics. It’s about time Penguin revamped its wonderful poetry list; Geoffrey Hill has become surprisingly hard to get hold of — his works, I mean.

There is a delicious quote from George Steiner on the Penguin website: "Among our finest poets," he says, euphemisitcally, "...the most European."

The meaning here is clear enough - Hill is unashamedly not anti-intellectual, not an anecdotist, not driven by the desire to please, nor by some half-baked fundamentalist atheism, nor does he write like he hates words - but you have to wonder what the ellipsis stands for.

another day

It’s hard to think at all, let alone straight, when the weather is so wonderful and the neighbours wake you up at 5am shouting drunkenly in the street at their poor dogs. It wasn’t the guy with the spider webs tattooed all over his cheeks but it looked a little like him from my balcony. And the dog would not hurry up.

Unemployment, not driving me to derivative body art, is definitely my metier. A moment of near boredom ten days ago did ripple slightly the surface of my halcyon days, but they are otherwise completely taken up with luxury activities like taking the recycling down to the bins before the neighbours complain, sorting out the sad forgotten crannies in my house, cleaning the kitchen, actually being around to talk to my kids sometimes, important lunches — when you’re unemployed anybody could be a useful contact — and listening to good old Roxy Music and Johnny Cash. They're a great summer combo and to be recommended.

I thought I might write a lot during this time but like fun. I’m operating on a totally different level. More intuitive, instinctive, you know —

24/7

By the way, I’m engaging in an activity one could scarcely have imagined even five years ago: remote blogging. These posts are seemingly all posted at the same time but I have been writing them in coffee shops and Turkish restaurants up and down Stoke Newington. My favourite possession, my handbag-sized 12” iBook, is the thing that makes this remote blogging possible, and if I could be bothered to go to the Angel and sit in Tinderbox where they have wireless connectivity I could even upload at the same goddamn time. But I can’t be bothered. I kind of like the old-fashioned handmade feel of a blog uploaded off my own ISP. Call it the information-age equivalent of dressing up in a shepherdess frock.

The iBook, by the way, is discontinued. This is very sad news. It’s been replaced by a rather cumbersome-looking 13” laptop in white or black, which weighs nearly 6oz more, and is unfetchingly called the MacBook. It has one of those PC processors Macintosh is so unaccountably proud of — considering they’ve spent the last 20 years telling us theirs were better, like what is THAT about?!? — and a remote control (white only, reason enough for Baroque never to order a black one), but it wouldn’t fit in a handbag. We are not impressed.

And, now I’ve got that off my chest, it’s time to take my precious ikkle computer and go home!

a plate of the warm south

Sitting at an outdoor table at The Dervish, with a glass of house white and some meze — now, this is what summer’s about! At this time of the year all I want is Turkish food. I love the plump, pale green, squeezable broad beans and the thick creamy yogurt sprinkled with paprika, the eighty different ways of cooking aubergine, in fact the amazing abundance of vegetables. The whole time I was growing up it was as if there was something wrong with me, I loved vegetables so much. You weren't supposed to if you were a kid. I can remember asking my mother why I wasn't supposed to like spinach and just standing there with a perplexed look on my face. But even if I had ordered meat here, some gorgeous grilled lamb, it would only be a part of the meal and I would leave still feeling replete with that wonderful vegetable-nourished feeling.

And I know this is going to sound silly, given the food-porn pages in the Sunday papers and all that, but do we really experience our food enough? I was eating a plate of sliced, grilled pastourma sausages the other day, trying to savour each aromatic, chilli-tasting, meaty slice (expensive and fatty as they are) to the utmost. Even as I thought about all that, though, the thought led to another thought and another, and before I knew it I’d eaten about three slices without even noticing.

The situation isn’t helped by my situation. At home during the day I find myself eating bread with peanut butter on it. Is this the sort of food you CAN savour - well, no, it isn't, because you are too busy trying to unstick the roof of your mouth from your tongue so you can a) finish your sandwich and b) live. And yet I love peanut butter. (The inspirational lessons of my childhood still contribute to this: the hero George Washington Carver, who saved generations of children in the post-Civil War South from rickets or worse, through his discovery that you could nourish them with the humble, unconsidered peanut, makes me love it. And now our overfed millennial children are allergic to it.)

But you know what? I'm talking about experiencing our food as something to savour deliberately, like an intellectual pleasure, and I'm sitting here eating delicious Turkish meze, dripping in olive oil and washed down with a crisp cold white, and writing about peanut butter. I must be - well - nuts!

24 - no comparison

First of all I have to issue a disclaimer and say that in my books Kiefer, as great as he may be, will never be a Donald. Sky One has a strange habit, during 24, of always advertising programmes starring the same people as 24, and now they’re advertising something called Human Trafficking that has Donald Sutherland in it. Seeing him in the commercial makes going back to dour Kiefer after the break that little bit less enticing a prospect... Kiefer lacks that twinkle, the amused detachment, the freedom of perspective that makes his dad, even in his seventies, by far the more sexy of the two. See for yourself:But my real issue is the plotting. Okay? I’m sure someone has written about this but I haven’t seen it, and every week the issue of plotting distracts me from the rest of the programme. It's all so patently for effect, I sometimes begin to feel used. What’s the formula? Every week there’s a sacrificial victim — or an apparent one — and that potential casualty is dangled in front of us till the plot sweeps (like a swollen river) past them and we engulf the next one. Often they are decoys. Audrey’s all right (I think; are we feeling safe, with her in the car?) but of course her father’s the one who plunged off a cliff rather than let Henderson’s men kill him with their evil laser beam.

Call me old-fashioned, though. Are we ever going to hear of that kid from the first few episodes again, and his mother? Or is there a rationale around the verisimilitude of real-time (sans commercial breaks) to the real-life habit of never tying up loose ends? As satire I think this is incredibly important television, and TV as the medium of maximum saturation must certainly be as pointed as possible about this administration, but the lack of integrity and symmetry in the plotting is bothering baroque moi.

Two asides: the First Lady is SO well-named as Martha! This gives me pleasure from the beginning to the end of every episode. And President Logan looks deliciously like Nixon. I've never seen this poignant touch mentioned, but then I'm not versed in the literature.

Walford whinge

Oh and EastEnders! What's it coming to?? I'm sorry, it was only a matter of time - and not much time, at that - before I had to say something. Under the so-called auspices of the new production team the show is now FIVE TIMES more boring than when it was supposed to be so bad! The storylines are both stagnant and all over the place. There's no consistency. Phil and Grant have seemingly both had lobotomies to prepare them for fatherhood. Naomi should go. Sonya should go, come to that, if only for how bad the acting was with Naomi: the two lesbians who looked sick every time they had to touch each other. Better just not to run the storyline! The whole Fowler household is turning more boring than a wet day in February. What happened to the romance between Joe's friend and Big Mo? And where's Honey's father? He was fun, being him back! They seem incapable of following anything through, so we're stuck with Sonya exploring all the different faces you can pull to look sorry for yourself, sitting on the bench in the square, presumably while the story team try to think of something to put next.

And the scriptwriting is suddenly down the pan, dialogue-by-numbers based on hypothetical scenarios rather than on precedents set up in the previous day's script. Or, oh yeah, character. The weird about-turn on the story with Jane and the strangely personality-free Grant, for example, is just embarrassing. It's enough to make you miss the much-maligned Ferreiras. (I never minded them in fact, & they were a lot more fun than bloody Pauline Fowler. And what's with HER? She's suddenly the colour of a mahogany sideboard! What, she got that at the launderette?)

The Squid and the Whale

I've just come back from my second trip to the cinema in a week. Amazing what you can do when you aren't in an office all day every day, oh and on the bus for two hours as well.

First was "Caché," or "Hidden," a psychological thriller (by Peter Haneke) which was ultimately aboutcoming to terms with the past. Interestingly - I guess - the threatening videos which are being made of the comings and goings of a Parisian family turn out to be the objective correlative of the unrecognised childhood guilt of the father (Daniel Autueil).

"The Squid and the Whale" feels like a much more personal film, set in the middle of a family break-up in Brookyn in 1986. Personal to me, that is, I guess, and produced by the same team (partly) as "The Royal Tennenbaums." Both these films are about what happens to you if you repress your feelings, and in both films it is the father of the household who has been hiding specifically behind his intellect. Cordoned-off emotions in Caché literally lead to death - but as there is also a political correlation going on it's not the death of the guilty party (sorry if you haven't seen the movie yet; let's say it's the chicken). In "The Squid and the Whale" things are a bit more hopeful, with the kids finally getting the point at the end of the story. Both films are a little heavy-handed.

EVERY review says that "The Squid and the Whale" is funny. I suppose there is clever dialogue, and I admit the trailer seems as if it might be funny. Moments. But in fact the thing is painful all the way through in the manner of "My Life as a Dog." People laughed at that, when it came out. I laughed the first time I saw it. I laughed less the second time. The third time I felt it was the most depressing film I'd ever seen.

Half an hour in I realised "The Squid and the Whale" was making me want to bang my head against a wall. The picture above, which is obviously not from the movie, is full of the element the characters could most use: cooling, refreshing water.

Both of these films dissect the way a certain stratum of society operates: the intelligentsia. Daniel Autueil's character presents a TV talk show of the "Late Review" sort; Jeff Daniels' character is a writing professor and waning novelist. Autueil's dining room is, literally, a wall of books - and the set of his talk show is a simulated wall of books. I liked this detail: when he goes for a slightly ominous meeting with his producer - the station isn't sure they want his show for the next season - there's a small stack of badly-piled books next to a pillar. Jeff Daniels' character interprets life through snobby critical judgements - "a minor work," "the 'filet' of the neighbourhood," "not really 'serious'." He praises books: "very dense." A touch I liked was near the beginning, before we fully realise that this character blames everything on everyone but himself - a man who sacked his agent because the man made a disparaging comment about the Knicks at a cocktail party, and now feels bitter because he's not getting published - when the camera passes in a leisurely way past his side table, with a copy of Saul Bellows' "The Victim" on it.

In both films the women are discounted by the men, though not by the filmmakers.

Baroque in Hackney

"Baroque in Hackney" is a blog about poetry, criticism, the general state of culture, money-saving tips (very important when you're nearly rococo) and, well, probably me.

We're starting at a point from which a multitude of avenues originate. I have been dropped from the Parachute of Redundancy to a crossoads, or maybe a roundabout. Little lanes radiate, in varying degrees of leafiness, from the very spot where I stand, and all I have to do is decide which one(s) to venture. I can take any of them I like (as long as they pay well; baroque doesn't come cheap).

What DOES come cheap is sleeping on the couch! And it is much better for you than what they say.