cash dreams from home

My cousin Morgan Evans, a fantastic musician in New York, has posted a post on his website which I liked so much I'm posting it here. We all love Cash in Baroque Mansions. Morgan writes:

Hi Everyone.

So weird.

I had a dream last night of a Johnny Cash concert and he was being backed by this band who featured a complimentary singer who looked like, but wasn't, Gram Parsons.

I am a big fan of Cash and Parsons, the latter of the two my ex-girlfriend really got me into.

The cool part is that after I was really into Gram's music like "Grievous Angel" and all that, I remembered that my friend Quillan Dunlop had always talked about Gram. It turns out my old Woodstock/Phoenicia pal's uncle Ian had played music with Gram for years as Gram was up and coming in the 70's.

Anyway, back to the dream... In the dream the band was playing "Don't Take Your Guns to Town" with Johnny. But Johnny's voice wasn't hacking it and so the other singer was doing most of the leads. The crowd started calling for Johnny though and he managed to come back in and everyone roared. I had a view from behind a drum riser.

I don't know what it meant. It was just a cool concert dream but it felt so vividly like I was there.

The reason I am writing about it though is it is the second Cash related dream I've ever had. The first one is the spooky one, though.

It was a few days before cash died, and I swear I dreamt that I was burying him in the yard of my parent's house near Woodstock, NY. He was looking up at me and I was mournful and suddenly it was a switched vantage point and I could see through Cash's eyes and he was lookign up at me as I lowered him down, then closed and shoveled dirt on his pine box.
I told my friend Nicole the next day at the health food store I worked at and she said "you're weird!" and laughed. But then a few days later my friend Ryan Cohn who plays in the great NYC band the Stalkers told me Cash and John Ritter had died. We drank some shots of whiskey to them at the Landau in Woodstock and the next day when I went back to work Nicole said "you're REALLY weird!"

I remember it vividly. What does it all mean? I can't tell you. But you should read the CASH autobiography. They left some deep and touching stuff out of the Walk The Line film, though I loved that.

They also left out Johnny fighting a God Damned ostrich!
Anyway, go to myspace.com/neutralmilkhotel

I rediscovered them through a Dax Rigg's (of Acid Bath and Deadboy & The Elephantmen fame) cover of "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea"and can't get enough of their 2nd album. It is quirky, moving, psychedelic folk-pop and the lyrics range from Anne Frank to love and death and two headed babies in jars. Every song balances wit and lyricism , serious themes and bright possibilities remarkably well. It isn't all one mood, just like life.

The title track in particular of "In The Aeroplane..." has some of the best lyrics I've ever read including the so simple but true line "can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all".
So true.

The new band is called Pontius Pilate Sales Pitch, inspired by - well, you can read it on their site, see link to the right. It's all good, though. They're recording some fabulous stuff. Here they are; Morgan's on the left. Pic by Yvonne Allaway.

Brick Lane

This picture looks pretty multicultural to me...








Two years ago I tried to get Monica Ali to come and meet a Bangladeshi women's group in Stepney. I was working on a regeneration programme there, and the area is full of girls who are not encouraged to do anything, & I mean anything, outside the home. It's hard to give them role models, when their mothers, aunts and older sisters are all in the same boat. Studying is taken very seriously, but only for grades. Jobs are good, but pretty much in the same way they were good for our foremothers in the 1930's. And, what with the loucheness of being among men and outside the home all day, the Bengali girls I knew at work there were very keen to cover their heads and be model Muslims. They didn't, for example, say anything in meetings. Or presume to aim much higher than admin.

Most of the most hard-core, jihad-preparing young guys I met on that job were in fact - predictably - the local thugs, gangsters, ex-dealers, who used the same strong-arm tactics from their days on the street to persuade everyone around them to become "righteous."

A video made for the programme, made up of interviews with young people on the subject of "what is art?" revealed girls who were very art-literate and desperate for more creative expression in their lives - they desperately wanted tp paint, put on plays, draw pictures, you name it. Asked what the programme could do to help them achieve it, they said things like, "build a theatre!" SO charming. But their parents are reluctant even to let them go to the all-girls craft activities at the local youth club. The boys - on whom more pressure is exerted as future leaders of the local community - were clearly terrified of appearing not Islamic enough, and said things like "art is all those naked people on telly, innit, it's all the song lyrics that go against God, we don't want that." One poor thing, about 14 years old, eventually said, in a trailing voice, "Art is like when people design clothes and things like that..." Asked by the interviewer if that was something he'd like to do himself, he said, "NO." "No, no .... .... no. YES." All the other boys in the frame just laughed.

So I thought a young, Anglo-Bengali novelist might be just the ticket for some of these girls: to meet someone who wrote about people like them and made a success. But nothing is that easy! And of course, I should have thought deeper. Ali doesn't cover her hair, and she speaks in public. They said no, we couldn't approach her, because they'd heard that she had said uncomplimentary things about Sylhet in her novel, Brick Lane.

That old chestnut! As I recall, one character makes one remark in the course of the book about a stereotypical prejudice about Sylhetis being like yokels. (Sylhet is the region in Bangladesh from which most of the Benali population of Whitechapel/Stepney etc is drawn. I gather it is rural, farming country made up of little villages which still feature traditionally-built, thatched houses.)

In the end, not only was no art provision made for the local kids, no one really ever saw the video either. No one cares. The kids are encouraged to improve grades, go to university, etc - things you can measure and count as outputs - but as to any kind of engagement with the wider culture, that is off limits. Because you can't ask questions that might have an "un-Islamic" answer. So what we have is a very dangerous thing indeed: a community that takes everything literally. And personally. And a government-funded regeneration programme allowing them to do just that. And because they aren't looking around them they have no means for critical thinking or comparison.

And before anyone goes and gets the idea that Ms Baroque herself is un-Islamic, I'll just say that I'm NOT. But this isn't really about Islam! (Can you even say that these days...?) It's about the confusion of national/cultural and religious values, and local powers-that-be who are scared to say boo to a goose. I am, though, in the true pre-Revolutionary spirit, un-Didactic. (Notice how "didactic" with a capital D looks like Diderot?) My notion is that novelists should be allowed to write novels and film companies should be able to make films, unmolested.

So now we have this predictable swell of protest, from local young people and others who have never been allowed - encouraged - given a mental space from which - to explore the world of ideas, thinking they can change the course of a river just because they heard a rumour that someone said something they don't like.

Apparently the protesters are planning to burn copies of Brick Lane - in actual fact a rather tepid novel - this weekend.

Remember the saying: When once they start burning books, they will end by burning people. But people are already burning, and in the name of this same thing.

How is our government going to respond if Londoners burn a sweet, polite fiction bestseller in a London street? How will Ken respond? London could easily become another Amsterdam. And I don't see anyone stepping back and defining their terms, so they'll be powerless to say anything.

Here, in an excerpt from an interview in The Guardian, is the chair of the Brick Lane Traders' Association, Abdus Salique:

He also claimed that community groups prevented Monica Ali from being awarded the Booker prize. "This book was contesting for the Booker prize," he said. "We stopped that."

Mr Salique raised the spectre of a worsening in community relations if filming goes ahead on location. "We are living in a multicultural society," he said. "We are in a peaceful situation. This film will make a lot of problems for local people."

He threatened mass protests if the company attempts to film on the streets of Tower Hamlets, saying that "the community feels strongly about this. We are not going to let it happen.

"Young people are getting very involved with this campaign. They will blockade the area and guard our streets. Of course, they will not do anything unless we tell them to, but I warn you they are not as peaceful as me."

Jolly good!

I've left this half an hour and feel the need to come back and make a disclaimer. I know lots of wonderful people in the East End, of allraces and religions. I don't for one minute think that the militant, closed-minded faction represents everyone, even within the Bangladeshi community, which is not, in turn, the whole community.

But this global failure to define our terms is what is keeping these issues locked inside the PC pen. And even if the shouting mobs speak only for a few, they do seem to the ones making the noise. I don't see anyone protesting to get the film made in Brick Lane.

There's more to say about this. A lot more. And the worst thing is this nagging feeling of being a little afraid to say it.

everybody loves Zoie

Actually I thought it might make my sister, the other Ms Baroque, happier to see a picture of her dog. Bucolic as Zoie looks in this picture, she hails from Madison Avenue. Can't you tell? She's so - cosmopolitan, somehow, in her effortless style.

And by the way, you can tell my sis is secretly Baroque - after all, she does have a lapdog. In all the other pictures from last summer the pooch is sporting a red ribbon around her curls.

And she lets her eat cake.

happy birthday Leigh!

Yes, today is my sister's birthday. Here she is, with her eyes open, next to her then best friend, and our then next-door-neighbour, Marsha Ball. (By the way, I hear Marsha has grown up absolutely impossibly gorgeous. If anyone ever reads this who knows her. I haven't seen her since we were all growing up.)

One day - before this picture was taken, we were still in the old house, so Hurley must have been 6 or 7 and I will have been 7 or 8 - I went up to the attic to play. We had an old-fashioned attic with, among other things, old boxes of National Geographics left in it from the previous owners. We used to read them, of course; I learned a hell of a lot about those Burmese women with rings around their necks that way. And I might remember something about Chinese footbinding. But the boxes were very useful as furniture, too. We used them for chairs; it was very cosy. So one day I went up there to play, or read, or think, but my sister was already up there, sitting pensively among the boxes in the corner.

"Katy," she said, in a thoughtful voice. "If you could have any name in the whole world, what would it be?" I thought about it. Big question. I thought of all the things I wanted to be, and I thought of all the little girls in those books I liked, the English ones with the pleated skirts and strappy shoes. What were they called? "Jane," I said finally. "I'd really like to be called Jane. Why? What name do you want?"

She answered in a firm, definite little voice. "Blueberry," she said. "Blueberry Bush."

Happy birthday, sis!

what would Dr Johnson say?

or, The Saga Continues


Well. I have a letter from the Immigration office at Heathrow. It's not from my mate Jimmy. It's from my mate who shall remain nameless for his own protection.

At first (I say first; I'd been waiting 45 minutes) he simply crossed out the offending lines of text with a biro and wrote in there, "stamped in error." I pointed out that I could have done that myself, weeks ago and without the expenditure of £20 and the second-hottest day of the year spent in transit in central London. He said if he stamped my passport with a fresh stamp it would be "falsifying the passport," as I had not entered the country today, and what would it look like. He kept showing me the actual stamp, turning it this way and that, saying "it's just human error." I'm a bit of a pedant; I could appreciate the falsifying point; so I said to him, "so what's the solution?"

He gets a bit exasperated, goes: "But you have this (voice rising) stamp here, it says indefinite leave to enter! They can see that you have it!" See, he hasn't spent enough time on the phone to the Home Office. I said to him, "No. It all goes on the most recent stamp." He says I can always write to them and ask for a letter; it won't take long, maybe a week.

I asked him to wait, I rang the employers, I told the girl in HR about the line through the stamp. She sounded a bit sharp. She says, "You could have done that yourself." Tell me about it, says I. I said, here, talk to the guy yourself. All on my bill, mind. I passed my phone under the little hatch.

Ages later, still on my bill, he passes the phone back and she says to me that if I can come in tomorrow she will photocopy my passport, and write a letter to Immigration, and as soon as they've sent her a satisfactory letter I can start work. It shouldn't take more than a week. "I'm getting off the phone," I tell her. "Let me handle this."

When he comes back down he has written the letter himself, having been told by his boss that the procedure is for me to write in and wait like a good girl for my reply. He asks that I not complain to his boss about the initial error, as he has gone out on a limb. I ask him if he doesn't think this whole system is all a little - you know - unprofessional? He shrugs: "It's the public sector."

if you can't stand the heat

Ms Baroque has been thinking about cooking. Not actually doing it, mind - in this heat!? I can barely eat anything, let alone cook. That is sad, given how much I love grilling aubergines and courgettes, but as we know, if you can't do it you might as well think about it.

Someone said to me yesterday, with no preamble whatever: "So, Delia or Nigella?" Just like that. And in a flash I said: "Delia."

Isn't your copy of Delia's Complete Cookery Course totally worn out? Don't we love her chicken paprika? However enthusiastic Nigella may be, and of course she does have those biscotti I love so much, Delia, well she is so calmly about just making the dinner. Making it without fuss, but with a decent lashing of cream, you know. No licking of fingers, no showing off for the kids. Just this is how you do this, and then you do this, and put it together like this, et voilá!

I should say I love Nigella, expecially her epoch-making first book, How to Eat. She has fresh ways with classic recipes, which is of course better if you knew the classic versions in the first place; but I did, so that's okay. She has great cakes. And she has a wonderful version of lemon surprise pudding. (The surprise, of course, is that it's chocolate.)

When you get right down to it, mystique aside, cooking is making something. I've always loved making things, & in cooking there is chemistry. Things transform when mixed with other things and subjected to processes and heat. (So do I: I'm melting.) At about the age of 12 I discovered I could have pancakes whenever I wanted, and that it was more fun then messing with my chemistry set that didn't make anything happen - & I've never really looked back since. It's great, after a long day at work, to come home and do something tactile and constructive with earthy things like vegetables - or ice cream ingredients. There's a restorative element to it. If Nigella is all about having great food, and serving it to your friends, Delia is about enjoying the quiet happiness of making and doing.

And I've discovered another thing. She's a rock chick. Delia, yes, our very own Delia, baked the cake on the front of Let It Bleed.

the book I left behind

I'm going to immortalise it here. I have to; I couldn't buy it because I was shelling out for Leon Edel's complete biography of Henry James in 5 vols, all 1st edition, all fine in d/w - which I couldn't find anywhere last year when I was desperately looking; plus Walter Jackson Bate's wondrous Samuel Johnson; The Poetry of Chaucer, 1st with Blackwells plates, by my adolescent hero John Gardner (a companion to his life of Chaucer, which I bought in hardback with my own money at the age of 14); plus the odd volume by George Barker, WD Snodgrass, etc - and in fact I also had to forego an Ashbery 1st and a Berryman 1st, which did hurt.

It's been a kind of life-changing day.

The one I should have got? It might have explained so much! Milton and the Baroque. Maybe I'll write to the shop.

the joy of sitting still

Didn't leave the house all day. Sat and wrote on balcony! Finished Cathedral poem! It's even longer! Watched the sun sink down over Alexandra Palace, behind our three tower blocks. Spied on people walking up and down the road - you can look straight down at the tops of their heads as they go past.

It's so blissfully different from all that dashing about Ms Baroque used to have to undertake on the bus: down to Dalston, navigate the crowds, go around the corner, wait for the 277, take that ("take that!") through Hackney and all the way down to Mile End... however pleasant it was to get a seat, or to (try to) read a book, it could take an hour and a half! That makes potentially a 3-hour commute every day, not even counting the duty visit to Morrisons, and all the heavy bags. (People with cars just don't understand the tyranny of bags.) No wonder all I could ever think about was my next coffee. And oh, the humanity. The buzzing ipods, the swollen-ankled ladies, the gangs of girls with ATTITUDE... the people eating their greasy smelly fried chicken two feet away... & I was once on a bus where the driver was talking on his mobile as he took the turn from Mare St into Amhurst Road, and a lady was paying him at the same time. Yes!

I have to say I'm enjoying just looking at the tops of people's heads, with a nice glass of white wine full of ice cubes.

And I am thanking God I'm not on the Victoria Line in this weather.

Yet.

the death of immortality

The current issue of PN Review contains an article by Raymond Tallis called "The Death of Immortality." For some reason I read this article with mounting joy which ended in actual out-loud laughter, as if it were a work of art and I were experiencing perfect happiness, like when I read War and Peace.

It begins:
'Man,' Yeats famously claimed, 'has created death'. This is manifestly untrue: evolutionary theory tells us that man was created out of death. H. sapiens grew out of a rising pyramid of the unsurviving unfit. What Yeats really meant was that Man, uniquely, has made death explicit. In us, transience, the condition of all things, has been transformed into a tragic mystery black-edged with terror. And so we have invented immortality, to cancel the certainty of physical death with the promise of eternal life. Unfortunately, the idea of immortality may itself be proving mortal.

A page and a half of delightful argument follow, & then this:
Anyway, we can't all be famous. The dead compete with one another for the divided and distracted attention of the living. One person's posthumous glory requires the obscurity of thousands of fellow humans. If fame were apportioned equally, no one would be famous. Signals such as 'Shakespeare' would be lost in the noise. Every supernova dims established stars: even Zadie Smith steals a little of Homer's radiance.

It ends:
How fortunate, then, that we are shallow, so that our dread of extinction is not as frequent, and rarely as intense, as our sexual desires, our longing for sleep, or our fear of embarrassment. And when the blessing of shallowness fails us, we might recall Imre Kertesz's claim that 'the smallest instant of life is stronger than the death that denies it', and try to imagine this as if it were true.

mad, yet somehow classical

Once again I find that these little things are what makes it all worthwhile. I went down Church Street to grit my teeth and pay £20 for that first edition of Platform (oddly expensive I thought for the first UK edition of a recent French book...), but on my way what did I see? Sitting outside the secondhand place, a pair of large cream porcelain side lamps shaped like artichokes. £10 the pair! Judging from their practically-Bakelite switches I'd say maybe fifties? sixties? Oh, the bliss (and they have stickers on their bottoms saying they passed a safety test in 2oo1).

Naturally, a done deal. Now they're beautifying Baroque Mansions like nobody's business, one on each side of the £2,000-sofa-that-has-no-sofa-cover (don't buy from Sofa Workshop: no care labels). As an act of kindness I have left out of frame the really nasty eighties Woolworths shades that currently sit in an evil curdling way above my poor artichokes, and which will be gone as soon as I find something suitably creamy & delicious to put there.

The great thing is - then I thought, hmm, spent £10, that's half a Platform. I find on the internet that first editions of the book go for £10. That's more like it! For twenty quid I get book AND new instant-antique lamps. Ocean Bookshop, take note.

Later, middle child, the tall blond rock god, comes in, sees lamps, goes: "they're very... you."

elementary particulars

By the way, Atomised (see below) was published in the USA as The Elementary Particles, which is a literal translation of its French title, Les Particules Élémentaires. That is a great title - but Atomised is a different kind of brilliant.

One reason I hardly read novels any more is the clumsiness of most contemporary prose. So many novelists seem to forget that words often have more than one meaning, or that they have sounds, or even that sentences have a rhythm. But Houellebecq's style, at least in Frank Wynne's translation, is like a limpid pool.

According to at least one of the reviewers, Houellebecq "spent many years as an abscure poet." This is not surprising: the character Bruno's poems appear all through the book, and Houellebecq leaves out of his narrative most of the annoying, gratuitous detail so beloved of so many fiction writers.

excelsior!

One thing that happens when you go baroque is that you have a lot of time on your hands, and I have used some of this time doing something I thought I'd practically given up: reading novels. It's great! The new reading glasses (dark purple, rimless at the bottom, v cute) are really helping. Just finished Michel Houellebecq's bleak, brilliant Atomised, having let it sit on the shelf for years. It's the kind of book that makes you see everything else through its lens for some time after reading it.*

And is it me, or have people largely missed his point? Is he really, ultimately, saying mankind is better off without sexual procreation and/or death? See, I'm not seeing that. I'm seeing massive irony. Some reviewers admitted the book is funny - and it is - but then the humour they cite isn't where I see humour. I thought the end of the book, which also amounts to the premise of it, was the funniest part. It makes the whole thing a farce, in the good sense of the word. A fantasia. (I just feel sorry for the cows.)

The very dialectical structure of the book rules this conclusion out, in any case, whatever Houellebecq may be saying to interviewers. (He's the kind of guy who, if he can say something to an interviewer, he will. And he'll be drunk when he says it.) The whole novel is organised on a twin structure. Two protagonists, two outlooks, and the main main character Michel's scientific musings are predicated on alternatives, options, second ways. In other words, the splitting of the cell into two is what gives life, and death is the dance partner of life. Blah blah. Of course, being brilliant, Houellebecq never stoops to saying that, as I just have.

I can see where the charges of misogyny came from - it is interesting that every woman in the book who has anything to do with sex (except the mother; she gets special treatment and anyway is not a recreationally sexual character. She exists to provide the novel with its two protagonists) - as I say, all the sexual women in the book end up dying by suicide. But I'm not seeing this as misogyny. It's more like, look what this attitude - the attitude/s expressed by our characters Michel and Bruno - does to women.

Where the character Annabelle describes her lifetime experience of sex - and it is bleak, I'll say that - I (depressingly, but that's another post) found myself nodding in recognition. And it's all inside the structure of Houellebecq's argument, anyway. So you can't disagree. And he's just as tough on men. Michel never gets to enjoy sex at all, and Bruno goes insane.

In fact, and this is one of the great things about the book, Bruno was insane all along. He just didn't call himself insane. There's a point in the story where he simply goes: that's it, I'm going to be in the asylum forever now. It's brilliant.

I think it's safe to say Houellebecq hates everyone equally. And I'd also say he only hates us because he loves us.

I'm after Platform now, but all I've found is a first edition for £20. Has it been suppressed?

*Untold years ago this also happened to me after seeing Back to the Future. Which was more worrying?

mickey spillane

Mickey Spillane once said, "I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead." It a bit cocky: he was 86 at the time.

Well, now Spillane has died too. He's never been big on my reading list, but I'm beginning to wonder if he should be. You often find these things out in the obituary pages.

Guardian obituary, Mickey Spillane

The killer ending! For over-the-top, almost baroque simplicity I'd be happy to have written this one:

"How c-could you?" she gasped.
I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
"It was easy," I said.

By the way, he was a pretty handsome devil. He's also quoted as saying "Women like the name Mickey," & he's right. It's a great name.

my hero

Okay. Rule Number One, never talk to the Home Office if you can help it. However, it was the HO that gave me the information that I could try Heathrow Terminal 3 Immigration, and gave me the phone number. And after those 3 hours on hold it was the Home Office who gave me the number for Terminal 2 Immigration.

I just wish they hadn't been so stuck on the rules: "Madam, will you listen, I'm trying to tell you the rules. It all goes on the most recent stamp in your passport." Also, the 20-page £500 supplication was getting to me a bit.

Rule Number Two, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

My hero is James Downes, Immigration Officer at Terminal 3. I love him. I'm going to the US Embassy next week to get a new passport in my own name, then to Heathrow with my handy little pack of papers that prove who I am, and all my old passports, and they will look it all over and give me a new stamp right then and there and I will be able to go with a light heart and get a coffee and drink it in peace on my way home. And start work the next day.

In my mind I had me sitting like Juliet Binoche in a bedsit in New York going, so what now! while my kids roamed the glass-strewn streets of Hackney... I hadn't even got to what to do with the furniture.

Jimmy D also told me how the mistake happened, which is a big factor in my recovery: the date stamp and the tourist "six months" part of the stamp are both on one stamp. The square with the date in it is flat, and the restriction part tilts up slightly. The guy had simply tried to stamp the flat surface only, and inevitably the bottom line-and-a-half of the restriction caught the page too. And that is how stupid this whole fiasco is.

So, let us not despair!! There really IS no need to go into all that... as the Irish poet Derek Mahon has written:

I live here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

baroque, battered and beleaguered

...battered by red tape, that is, which is why I have been so strangely silent these past days. Actually, more trussed than battered: that comes after. The culprit is the nice man in the immigration queue at Heathrow last year who, chatting merrily with me about the incredible length of my residence in London, so distracted himself that he absentmindedly stamped my passport "leave to enter for six months, employment prohibited."

Add to that the fact that the US Passport Office doesn't recognise deed poll (yes, like a raving lunatic who thinks he's a different person every other month, I had to go and change my name by deed poll after my - more Gothic than baroque - divorce, as no one agency would accept a new name without evidence that others already had) as legitimate. So the passport in question in fact gives me a name I haven't used for over ten years. (As an aside, when you change your name by deed poll you have to swear an oath that you will only ever use the new name in future. So the mighty US Passport Office, in their insistence upon a long-defunct name, are forcing me already to break the law. If challenged to produce ID in support of my passport I would be utterly unable. I wonder what the penalty is for that.)

So, what does this mean, in real life? It means that not only can Ms Baroque not work until this is sorted out, but it is going to take jumping through an ever-lengthening succession of hoops - letters, faxes & phone calls in all directions, reams of supporting documentation, personal appearances at both the US Embassy and Croydon, and (crucially) weeks and weeks, to GET it sorted. Plus it looks like costing upwards of £600.

£500 of that is the Home Office fee. All to rectify their mistake! Then there are the endless phone calls (three hours already on hold at Heathrow Terminal Three Immigration Office, & still haven't got through), Recorded Delivery fees, loss of earnings (which looks like, is even worse than, and indeed also amounts to, loss of earrings), and the incalculable wear and tear on my only-just-back-to-normal nerves.

The people on the phone at the Home Office have a terrible way of saying, in answer to any little nuance of this problem, "It all goes on the most recent stamp." That's not much nuance, in my decorative little opinion, for something that was a patent error, which if it had been an actual decision would have been insupportable on any legal grounds. And the word "apply" does have a meaning: it means "ask." I'm told the result of this application will be "at their discretion" - in other words, I'm being told to supplicate for permission to live my own life!

Meanwhile, the Council Tax bill is due. Let's see, who do I pay first...?

Marie Antoinette had no idea.

poesy and life

I'm stalled. Halfway - more, I thought, and now think much less - than halfway through a long and ambitious article on 'archaism and tone in contemporary poetry'. Sometimes I dazzle myself with the crystalline beauty of my own arguments, and other times I realise the arguments are all in my head and don't in fact even exist. In fact, what IS archaism and tone in contemporary poetry? I made it up and I don't even know what it means.

Also on a long and ambitious poem about Southwark Cathedral. This, taking in as it does the whole sweep of London's history, had better be clear as day when it's finished, which will be in about ten years. When I finish it it will be half a page with the history edited out.

I have all the time in the world. I thought I could set up a little table and write on my little balcony, but it's hot and I'm bored. I just look over the balcony edge at the little Hassidic children playing in their long dresses and tights - in this weather! - and their pale, thin mothers endlessly leaning on the posts by the pavement, in long sleeves and headscarves.

I was standing on the balcony at sunset, which I love doing, the sunsets are ineffably beautiful up here - you get orange reflections off Ally Pally in the distance - and a man turned into my road from the high street. Late thirties, forties maybe, a black man in a white shirt, untucked, with the sleeves rolled up, just the end of a long day at work. (Of course my inner art director was coming out: lovely looking man.) I couldn't tell if I thought he was going home to someone, or just to nothing. He never looked right or left, just walked along, holding a briefcase or bag. He walked first towards me and under my balcony, then along down the road, in the dimming light, while beyond him this huge orangeness exploded over the horizon. I watched him from behind as he got smaller and smaller, never slowed down or speeded up, just kept going, till at last he was just the speck of his chirt, white in the gold light, and then he disappeared at the end of the road.

pirates of the caribbean, alas

Okay, let's get this straight. Pirates of the Caribbean is supposed to be the most inventively clever, irreverent, FUN thing in the history of movies, right? Like the Simpsons of the open main, Errol Flynn on - well - lashings of rum, etc. So how come this new movie feels like Star Wars? What's with Bill Nighy's face? The sets feel like the old animated Peter Pan settings (and don't tell me they didn't use them at some stage in the research and design process) - but the Peter Pan lagoons and bays were more evocative.

The thing that worries me about this new Pirates is that I was so conscious of the special effects, the computer animation, the Disney settings. From almost the beginning! They've let it get out of hand, and aside from the Depp 'swishbuckling' factor it is now feeling like what it really didn't before: a Disney franchise.

Those who know me will know how much pain it gives me to have to say this. No one - and I mean no one - can have been more excited than I was at the prospect of more Pirates. I went in there like a six-year-old (albeit one with a hard-to-satisfy critical awareness). Even at the end I was the one screaming and punching her knees when Geoffrey Rush (whose death scene in Pirates 1 actually made me cry, he invested it with such Shakepearean complexity) comes down those stairs... oh yes, I will be there next time. Biting my hankie.

But what;s with all these weitd alien critters? How much happier I'd be if I weren't waiting for Chewbacca going to appear.

The kids thought it was great, they wanted to love it and they did love it. I think the problem - there is a problem - is that there is no one concept so surprising and complete in this episode as the central concept of the last one - the undeadness. That had everything: fear, humour, sight gags, lots of scope for the computer whizzes. It also had the advantage of driving the plot, I mean the sight gags were part of what drove the plot. The moon moving over those living bodies and showing them as skeletons was unforgettable, I can't even imagine the delight of having seen that as a child. This episode reprises some of those ideas to good effect - the scene where they give Tia Dalma, the magic woman, the undead monkey, for example - but the Davey Jones wheeze, even with barnacles, isn't enough to replace that. The old undead man who is becoming part of the Flying Dutchman, he is integral to the plot, but the pearly-king mussel outfits and fishfaces on the others are not driving anything: it's just Industrial Light & Magic. (Having said which, there was one interesting moment when Bootstrap Bill thinks Orlando Bloom has been swept away by the Kraken and another barnacle pops out on his face - like that - pop. Stellan Skarsgård does the best character besides Depp in just the way Rush did in the first one - and next time we will possibly get the confrontation of the old enemies - Bootstrap and Barbossa. So that's something to look forward to...)

I must just also say that Tia Dalma is also the best thing in the film. She's an inspired character.

I will probably come back to this. I love Pirates of the Caribbean, it sums something up for me, as it clearly does for lots of people. We seem to need our Pirates. My question is whether we're getting the Pirates we need.

composure

It occured to me in a half-sleep the other night that the whole problem with a blog is that you would never normally show everyone something you hadn't finished making yet. THAT is why this is so scary! I can't stand that rambly, oh-God-what-shall-I-say-now kind of blog and yet here I am, thrashing around looking for something to say, in public! And if you don't think of anything, and then don't post, it still shows! AGH, the empty page! It's like one of those bad dreams involving things like toilets, stages, exam halls, voting booths, etc. Or, in my case, for some reason often Nazis. Apparently the secret police like things to be well composed & quite polished.

So the blogosphere can just sing for all the pithy comparisons and trenchantly analytical observations I'm constantly making in my head all day! If you're lucky I might write some more about EastEnders.

link-de-link

Just a small sponsor's announcement in service of the links to your right: I'm afraid they are very self-serving, to the extent that they all contain work by me. I apologise herewith to any bloggers I may know or admire whose blogs are not on my list of links. You are out there! I will address this in due course.