a Stoke Newington scene

The worst place to live, eh??

(see also here)

happy Halloween!

Okay, why didn't the skeleton cross the road?


















* because he didn't have the guts.


(Little Miss B tells me she read this joke last week on a crisp packet. I am so class...)

look out! it's coming after you!

After writing about how we're living surrounded by the past, I happened to stumble on this review - by Peter Ackroyd - of a book called London: City of Disappearances, edited by Iain Sinclair. It amused me, I have to say. Its basic premise can be summed up in this paragraph:

"So the past is rarely visible in London. The city devours its former incarnations, leaving not a wrack or wraith behind. It buries its dead, and forgets where they lie. That is the source of its strength and its power. The living will in any case soon enough pass into darkness. The city itself will always rise again. It will be renewed when those who read these words have utterly disappeared and been forgotten."

...and it goes on - and on - and on! Are we actually seeing it? - because I don't think so! Ackroyd must have found the book pretty exciting, because the review reads more like a Gothic confection, piling macabre on macabre, than like the Times Online website. And, though it's hard to tell from his description what the book is actually like, the review does make a good pre-Halloween read.

Of course, I've always been fascinated by the "under London" idea - all the old sewers and rivers and plague pits, to say nothing of the Post Office tunnels. For example, there's a building site at the end of Essex Road, just as you get to Islington Green, which was held up for years because, when they dug up the foundation of the previous building, they came upon a plague pit - now, who wouldn't be interested in that? I had to look every time I went past on the bus (and I also know where a few more are). But it does seem to me to be evidence that the past stays with us, rather than that it disappears. The review smacks of fanciful balderdash - a phrase our precursers might have used. So I confess I had to laugh when I got to this bit, much as I love the previous Londoners:

"And there are the endless dead who, if they returned from their graves beneath the London soil, would far outnumber the living. It is a city of revenants built upon the dead, their bones part of the fabric."

Maybe Peter Ackroyd's had too many Halloween sweets?

bloggers of the Canon

Okay, it's Sunday and we want to take it easy. My parlour game for today is this: of the old writers we love, who would have had a blog, if there had been blogs back then?

I'll start:

Charles Lamb YES
Byron YES
Defoe YES
Pound YES YES YES!
Eliot NO
Mary Wollstonecraft YES
Mary Shelley YES but it would have all been about Shelley
Joyce YES
Proust NO
Fanny Burney YES but under a false name
Johnson NO, & then someone would have persuaded him, but it would have been SHORTLIVED
Li Po YES (I've taken the word "Western" out of the title as I realised that)

Any other ideas?

a poet's Hackney

There's a lot of guff going around about some programme I missed on Channel 4, which apparently declared Hackney the worst place to live in Britain. I've seen several ether-arguments on the subject and indeed have refuted someone who seemed to be saying Clissold Park wasn't a crime zone (I know; Clissold Park is wonderful, and we all love it).

It's all got me thinking. Of course I love Hackney. Various of its wards were listed in Domesday; Stoke Newington flourished under Henry VIII and it is rather satisfying to send your children to a school named after a Tudor period businessman who was honoured by the king. Hackney is full of splendid Georgian houses, which mark its next big era of prosperity; in those days the rich merchants used it as a base for their country homes (rather as the Thrales did Streatham). I love looking in the windows of these houses; some of them have amazing extant period panelling in their tiny Georgian rooms.

Clissold Park itself is the estate of a Quaker businessman who got rich and built the house which still stands there for his family. He had two daughters. And I think it might have been he who ordered the creation of the New River, now partially underground and moribund, which we know as that green thing that runs along the deer bit.

St Augustine's Tower, which is the remains of the old parish church down in the Narrow Way, cheered my Saturday morning shopping trips for many years. And St John's Hackney is very beautiful, and houses the Hackney Singers.

It's hard not to love Shoreditch, just for having featured in our nursery rhymes - at least, its bells, which say "When I grow rich."

As for specific poetic associations, Stoke Newington is rich, rich, rich. Edgar Allen Poe was raised here as a schoolboy, by his foster father Mr Allen. He lived in the house where The Fox Reformed now is. That's exciting!

But far more exciting still is Daniel Defoe. His house stood on the corner of Church Street and what is now (of course) Defoe Road; it was torn down by the Victorians and the site is now, alas, occupied by Premier Cars, with whom I have had long-running feuds for being so completely useless. It seems incredible to me that those controllers are sitting in there all day, on the same site where Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe and they don't care. I could almost imagine I feel his satirical presence wafting about me, as I argue the toss with them. His gravestone used to be on display in a glass case in the foyer of the library, but it isn't there now; maybe it's been moved inside? Or is it in that Hackney Museum down by Town Hall? Apparently there is a bit of wall along the east side of Oldfield Road which is apocryphally his.

Abel Boyer, in Political State, wrote of Defoe (in 1717): "The Beneficence of his Masters, and in particular the E[arl] of O[xford], enabled him to repair and beautify his Habitation at Newington, where he had set up his Forge of Politicks and Scandal, from which, for these Six Years past, he supplies Monthly, often Weekly, the Publishers in and about Pater-noster-Row."

Abney Park Cemetery houses a monument to Isaac Watts, another great heritage I think nobody knows about. A Dissenting preacher who lived in the 17-18th centuries, in other words, contemporaneous with Defoe, he wrote about 600 hymns, many of which I grew up singing. The one I really loved was Joy to the World!, whose wonderful lyric sums up the complete ineffable joy that the Christmas story is about. There's not enough of that around. He also wrote Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past. He was the friend/beneficiary of Sir Thomas Abney, whose great house stood where the cemetery is now, and the pillars of whose front gates are still there in Church Street. He lived in the house for many years; picture him striding along that early incarnation of Church Street (with the old St Mary's church, but not the new one), in his robes and his wig. Watts' hymns have an unsentimental grandeur and a liveliness - springing from his complete engagement with the Bible as a living artefact - which certainly predates the Victorian taste for sop, and which makes me love him.

Moving along, I was amazed, and saddened actually, to discover last year (reading Jon Stallworthy's excellent biography of him) that St Leonard's hospital - that rather nothing place where we get referred for physiotherapy and chiropody - is where Louis MacNeice died, of pneumonia. Hackney, of course, doesn't care about Louis MacNeice, but I do.

None of this has anything to do with what Channel Four was talking about. But, as people are saying, there are plenty of other places where the crime is just as bad. I feel it is something, and not something small, to walk down streets where you can still feel the presence of named people who lived through words, who helped the language to live even through your own mind, and to live among these beautiful buildings and parks left us by people who lived here, just like us, before. Autumn among the chestnut trees of Clissold, or the mist rolling along the willowy hilltops of Springfield, is still magical. I'd choose the evocative chiaroscuro of Hackney over, say, Tottenham or Peckham any day of the week.

how DO we do it

Well, it's easy to keep up print appearances if you're home all day, no matter how ill! Back out in the world for two days, all the energy one can muster goes into making it through the day without a lie-down.*

Of course, this is the same old bugbear as always; for many years people have been saying to Ms B: "How do you do it?" And for many years the answer has always been: "I don't know." But of course it's a simple combination of focus, energy, determination, etc. Every working mother knows this. And paradoxically many people do find that the more you have going on the more you can do.

Two days into being back at work, therefore, and feeling like I've "done nothing" - meaning what exactly, I don't know, except that I have stacks of bills and papers and have to go see the bank about something but have been too tired to run around in my lunch hour, and still don't have a good list of magazines to send poems off to, which needs doing badly - two days in, as say, I've almost edited an entire document; I've had some big fat dynamic ideas and started to sell them around the organisation; I've written a good start on a fun (yes!) new poem, which I think will come out quite ambitious but is falling off my pen; I've finally found my Primo Levi quote (I had to buy the book, again, & strangely it was not easy to find) and put it into the article, which I can finally send off final edits to the editor; I've read this great article, about a police force in Mexico turning the tide on crime by teaching their officers to read; and this one, which confirms me in my hatred of Starbucks; I've been in yet another of those arguments about poetry sales versus "what readers want" etc; I've read some Auden (this reader wants Auden); I've read a pile of poems a friend sent me; I've texted the 15-year-old Rock God in France (no reply; he's back Saturday night), and kept up with the others at their father's house; and I've been for an after-work drink (my first glass of wine in 10 days!) in Thistle Hotel bar at Victoria Station, which is a fab place to meet for drinks, actually. You get that big old-fashioned hotel feeling, which is always a tonic; I could have been Miss Marple, sitting there. Next time I'll take some knitting.

Oh, but the trip home: I just wished I had a room.

* nb this turns out to have been the stones of gall.

elegantly dressed Chrissies

Continuing the 'rock chick' theme from last week, here is Chrissie Hynde, that perpetual beacon. Oh yes: even now she's kept her look and it still works. Put her in a pop environment (how odd that sounds; still, we can't say 'on Top of the Pops' anymore, can we) now and she'd make all those desperately over-accessorised, colour-clash, falling-off-shoulder, lipglossed girls look like granny's favourite flea market. And that was always her charm. Even at the time she was the necessary antidote to Bucks Fizz.

You can't confuse her with Beautiful Crissy, whose hair grows ("all the way down to her knees!") if you pull it gently whilst pushing in her enormous belly button, and you can wind it back up using a flesh-coloured wheel on her back. She came in a very glamorous orange mini dress covered with orange lace, that even the infant Ms B knew was already two years out of date when she was brand new, and - uh - matched her hair... Everyone in the neighbourhood loved her, and indeed Little Miss Baroque does too.

But you can see how the path was wide open. And it is now. Chrissie, we still need you!

the Veruca Salt of filmmaking

My darling mother, Mama Baroque, sent me this article over the weekend, to cheer me along my sickbed. It did! It is a review, by Dana Stevens at Slate.com, of the Marie Antoinette film, which opens with the sentence "Sofia Coppola is the Veruca Salt of American filmmaking." Talk about hooking the reader! (One is a total sucker for any sort of reference to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in higher discourse.)

I actually disagree with much of what she writes (is it a she?) - sometimes simply in matters of tone, as in her assessment of Lost in Translation, where what she says in a damning-with-faint-praise way I think sounds right, but praiseworthy - and I think she fails utterly to substantiate her critical stance - but it's a long time since I have been so roundly entertained.

Naturally Ms B hasn't seen the film yet, as she has not yet arisen from her bed of pain to take on, once again, the mantle of the world - but this review is keeping the flame alive.

Little Miss B did go yesterday with some friends - it's half-term, remember - and her assessment was a shrug. She liked it; her friends were bored.

Kind of like Marie Antoinette, I hear you say.

miso happy

Many thanks to the kind and clever friend who suggested I might be able to eat miso soup. To celebrate the seventh day of this awful gastric flu,* I had decided to test my land legs with a little hobble down the hill to Church Street - source of, among other things, my dry cleaning and the new skirt I was having altered (so that when I do go back to work, provided they haven't moved away by that time, I'll have something to put on). It was remarkable: in one of those rare confluences of timing and - well - timing, my friend made this suggestion of miso soup before I went down the hill.

Clearly a Fresh & Wild job. Miso soup. Not in Morrisons. Too tired and, frankly, winded to go round the Turkish shops looking for bits of spring onion, I bought what I wanted in one easy (I say easy, I mean except for the ordeal of shopping with a fellow clientele who all clearly feel entitled to a Perfect Experience; everyone in there seems to think that by walking through the door they've somehow rented aisle space for themselves and their enormous buggies/spoiled children/need to take up six-foot stretches of shelf while they make some earth-shatteringly painstaking choice/aggressively laidback boyfriends who stare at you openly if you say 'excuse me' and go past them/long sips on their carrot-&-wheatgrass smoothies; but stop me before I go into my rant, because they clearly MUST be as cool as they think they are just for living in Stoke Newington - right???)** stop. Here is what I got:
organic miso £2.79
organic tofu £1.59
organic jasmine rice (yay! another kind of rice!) £1.99
organic spring onions £1.29
eight organic brown field mushrooms 42p
organic ginger (Chinese) 31p
Yogi 'Stomach Ease' tea £1.89
total organic cost: I'm too tired to add up but you get the picture.

Picked up the dry cleaning. As I stood there panting slightly and 'glowing' with the effort of leaning against his counter, he cheerfully told me they don't worry about when people collect their cleaning. Anyway, he and his family haven't been quite right, what with bugs and sinus infections, etc, ever since they went on holiday back on September 22nd. I paid £39 for my suit, 2pr trousers, top, jacket, and shortened skirt.

Got on the next available bus, with various stubbled old men in stained track suits, elderly black ladies clutching walking sticks with their arthritic hands, and teenage mothers with scraped-back hair, who have never rented aisle space anywhere, and rode home feeling like a total ponce.

However, I have now had one bowl of jasmine rice, one bowl of miso soup with tofu, ginger, spring onions and mushroom slices floating in it, and one little extra bowl of jasmine rice with miso soup poured over it. I am so happy. We'll see how I go with the spring onion. (They're only little.)

* in retrospect, actually the gall stones. Note to self and others: if you keep getting sick all the time, go see the doctor!

** I think it shows, that I haven't set foot out of Baroque Mansions in a week - right?

I must be getting better

Lying there in that pre-sleep trance, after a day of dizziness, faintness and what we will call a gyppy tummy, I had one of those floating visions you sometimes get, which you aren't quite sure if they are dreams or thoughts.

It became clearer and clearer until I realised it was the end of a beautiful soft-focus fork holding a piece of kielbasa.

As soon as I realised that, the whole kielbasa came into focus, and I woke up.

for a change

Okay, tagged, by the Tart of Fiction. Participating in one of these meme things never seemed like the Baroque way, but I'm poorly, and I want to get out of the one where I write 'five things feminism has done for me'.

And by the way, did we realise that the very word 'meme' was coined by Richard Dawkins? If Wikipedia says it it must be.

So:















eight things about me

1. I wrote my first story at the age of four, dictating (even then an infant Late Period Henry James) to my mother at her typewriter (who looked just like Anne Sexton at hers). It was about a "very, very old" fairy, who was 24.

2. "You're so camp, you should have been a trannie!" - Jen Pepper, admiringly, to me, 1999.

3. I wrote a roman a clef - that is, half of one - based on my extended family. I sent it to my mother, she sent it to my aunt, and my aunt said, "So that's what she was doing all those years: the human tape recorder!" (It's their fault; I took notes. They should never have given me Harriet the Spy.)

4. By popular demand in the film of my life I must be played by Jennifer Saunders. For years I've been pleading for Judi Dench, at least in the older bits, but they all chorus, "Whaddayou, kidding!!!" Gutting, really.

5. I raised the money to come to London by nannying full-time for two families, 70 hours a week and up to 9 kids at a time. I took three of them to a children's fair at Mark Twain's house one day and I overheard two old ladies sighing sentimentally to each other as I passed: "Isn't she a good mother!" The oldest kid was 3; I was 18. I thought they could at least disapprove!

6. My boss, in front of a rep, 1988: "you are so arrogant, you always think you know everything! And you're lazy! How could you forget to do [whatever-it-was]! Your head is like a - a - a, one of those things with holes in... " (voice trails off)
Me, helpfully, still in front of rep: " a sieve, Liz. My head is like a sieve."

7. I can do maths. I can knit, I can sew, I can get the best deal on a mobile, and I make perfect pastry. Every time.

8. "The trouble with her is, she's either a genius or crazy." Tom Vink-Lainas, New York 1979. (It's okay, he's my uncle.)

turning one's back on EastEnders

Okay, this is what I get for not reading the soap mags. It's the cheesiest goddamn thing in the universe and hardly the route to recuperation for a girl whose trouble is already connected (if only hypothetically) with her poor beleaguered nerves. I was better off watching King Bloody Kong.

What am I rambling on about? I'll tell you. This bloody stupid storyline. I thought it was going to be Good, but it is Bad Bad BAD! Johnny Allen's dead of a heart attack in prison, and muttered Jake's name to his cellmate ("It's only one phone call, mate, who's the geezer?") by some stupid cheesy accident, meaning, I guess, "I have asked Jake to kill the bastard," but racked with pain (like Ms B) could only mutter "Jake..."

Now, end of Friday episode, Jake's confronted by a couple of the meanest-looking hitmen in the whole hitman union. A quick Google search reveals a Sun article revealing the imending death of Jake. What a waste. And Johnny Allen too! And with Phil Mitchell obsessed with being a good dad, and Grant Mitchell off in Portugal obsessed wtih being a good dad, you have to wonder. I thought this programme was supposed to be full of villains. Well it won't be now, they'll all have been killed off! Is someone trying to turn it into Brookside??

I won't watch it, I won't.

the movies...

...that I've watched in the past three days (I haven't cracked a book):
1. l'Enfant
2. Memoirs of a Geisha (puke)
3. The Merchant of Venice
4. Gone with the Wind (half: fell asleep)
5. Amelie (half: too cloying, & that was at 3am)
6. The Man in Grey
7. Brief Encounter (so wonderful, so English, & absolutely packed with cups of station tea)
8. King Kong (trashy 70's remake with Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange)

Little Miss B has gone back to her father's; the Rock God and the Urban Warrior are never here anyway; I have to fend now. I've managed two cups of soup today & even managed to make the soup (easy; the dishes will be another matter). Looking at the picture I feel I should have saved it for a Wednesday; and if this film goes on much longer I might go and make myself a cuppa, if I have a clean cup.

sickness

It's no joke; today far worse than yesterday - I'm only writing this because I went to sleep for an hour and woke up 1.2C degrees cooller, with all the bedding drenched. So I'm in clean sheets. I managed a small baked apple. But is it a cure? Probably not yet: still plenty of scope for another sleepless night wandering the corridor like an apparition, wrapped in a pink Ikea blanket (fleece) and groaning...

almost a trifle

Picture it. Baroque Mansions, the living room. The sofa, large and cream-coloured. On the sofa, an enormous white duvet all piled up like a mountain of syllabub, and two white pillows. On the duvet, a white laptop, yes, the adorable little Baroque iBook. And, under the syllabub mountain, well - I'm afraid - Ms Baroque, languishing in a big white shirt (elegantly dressed, at least, for Wednesday) with the flu that is currently sweeping through London, striking down at random almost everyone except the London Lite vendors (yes, I know it's free! So what are they?): lying for hours almost immobile, except for, now, the moving fingers that type, desultorily, and an occasional languid arm reaching for her water bottle... Picture her cheeks, red as cherries.

My temperature is a fairly steady 99.7F, which isn't high enough to be interesting and certainly doesn't explain this headache! My stomache is feeling very bad: I was awake half of night-before-last with it - the old trouble with my nerves* as I thought, like steel cables around my ribcage but not so nice - and attributed it to anxiety about my (now not-so-)impending laser eye procedures (& thanks to everyone who has emailed their good wishes; I am a charlatan). Bravely, on little sleep and with the steel cables still in place, I went to work yesterday, somehow made it through, and when I got home collapsed into bed. An hour later, realising I couldn't move and finally connecting that fact with the cold sweats of the previous night - and the fact that my top was really hurting my skin - I decided to take my temperature, and as the mercury rose the penny itself dropped. It was higher then but has been constant all day, for those of you who feel like following it.

In short, I've had to call the hospital and tell them I'm sick. What a laff! I've called the squadrons of support units and told them to call off the dogs for the time being. And now I'm waiting for a letter from the glaucoma clinic.

What a mess.

Argh.

And the eye's still shot to hell.

What a life.

* note from future: it was gall stones! If a GP ever tells you you have IBS, don't believe them.

most elegant of all

Patti Smith. Nothing more needs to be said!

London Lite

I hate it! Isn't just the very concept - a watered-down, blandicated version of our beautiful city - as well as the stupid spelling, isn't it just detestable? And which is more detestable, the name, or the concept, or those awful oppressed people in purple polo shirts, thrusting these execrable organs in your face every few yards as you try to walk to the station??? One on each side of the road, as you cross; another a few yards on, in case you missed the others; come on! WHO thinks that's a good idea??

And London is turning into nothing but a tawdry sea of trampled, dirty newsprint. If it's this bad now, think what it's going to be like in late November.

I can't help it. I HATE 'London Lite.'

In other news, however, I've finally caught up - I think I might have flu, I spent the whole entire evening in bed taking my temperature (100.5) and watching the last week's 'Enders - and, great news. At LAST. Johnny Allen's back! And Jake's going to turn, you can see it happening already, it's that look in his eye. I haven't seen today's yet. Ah, thank God. Thank you, lovely BBC!

swithering and winning, swithering and losing...

The word "swithering" has, thanks to Robin Robertson, entered the current poetical lexicon in much the same decisive, all-of-a-sudden way as Seamus Heaney's "snedder" did earlier this year. However, I think I will probably never use a snedder. I just cut my occasional turnips with a knife. But unlike the snedder, "swithering" represents an experience just about anyone (except for, thinking about it, maybe Margaret Thatcher) can have.

Unfortunately, swithering is exactly what I have been doing for two weeks when confronted with his book of the same name. I bought it the day it was announced that it had won the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection (as reported previously; I was sitting in the glaucoma clinic at Moorfields when I read the news, and headed straight to Waterstones in the rain). I thought I might do a little mini-review or write some amusing post on the subject, thinking to keep up-to-date, you know. And I did read it, or parts of it, some of which were rather ambitious (to read, and probably to write). There was some spot-on imagery, and lots of Celtic mystery (which shouldn't be a problem to someone who, like me, has been accused - albeit unfairly - of Welsh witchery), and tons of writing, much of it very muscular and manly. I have had it on my mind this whole time, in a must-get-to-grips-with-that way.

However, Ms B is saddened to announce that the book got left over the weekend in the shoulder bag in which she carries papers, files, laptop etc - along with an upside-down, half-drunk blueberry smoothie.

I think you know the rest of that story!

(The laptop was fortunately out of the bag. The book, rinsed off and probably still usable, though as dark blue in its spine area as Violet Beauregard, is currently drying out next to the kitchen sink. As is the bag.)

So I think it is sadly clear to all that this lady IS for swithering. All I need now is a snedder.

internationalist Bitch

The Fiction Bitch - aka the Tart of Fiction, which do you like better? - has posted a vivid account of going to hear a talk by Murat Belge, a writer from Istanbul who is also the publisher of Orhan Pamuk. If you're reading this and you don't know who Orhan Pamuk is, he just won the Nobel Prize for literature - just months after having charges against him, of "insulting Turkishness", dropped, after a huge international outcry against the trial (he was quite calm, at least in the press). I'll be saying more about this issue, trust me, but in the mean time please go and read the Bitch's post!

As it happens, this is a holding piece. I think that what I'm thinking about is bigger than a blog post, anyway. Robert McCrum hit some of it in his excellent article in today's Observer - up till I read that I'd been feeling disappointed with the press coverage since the Nobel was announced, which seemed mostly to be either cynical English "it's just a political award" (as if that were a bad thing) or, frankly, just more interested in the Booker.

The Bitch points out in her piece how tragic it is that none of her fellow Mancunian writers seemed to feel the need to go see Belge speak, even given the fortuitous timing. Are we that parochial? (answer below)


(answer: yes)

paint like Jackson Pollock

Go ahead! Try it!

When you pull it up on Google it says - and this is all I know - "by Miltos Manetas, 2003, original flash animation by Michal Migurski."

the blind critic

Of course I’ve been thinking about this lately. I’ve thought about it since the age of six, when I realised how important reading was. I know from poetry readings, and indeed conversations, that I don’t take things in nearly as well through my ears. Seeing is believing! I’ve often liked spoken poetry, only to find when I saw it on the page that the poet hadn’t reflected his own written form.

It's a delicate balance between a line ending and a caesura. When I read, this is the hardest element to enunciate, and when I go to readings it is the way in which poets most often ruin their poems: bad poems can, dangerously, be made to sound better than they are, and beautiful ones can be made to sound choppy. And the fashion for reading straight over a line break as if it didn’t exist means that the shape of the poem is (in the absence of visual cues) destroyed.

There are poems that appear to be free verse, and roughly are, which actually contain metrical and even rhyming lines embedded within their structure. I think a lot of poets do this unintentionally. They just don’t have the ear, and when they read aloud they read in metre without even knowing it.

On the other hand, for example, Dorothy Molloy is a poet who does it on purpose as a sort of contrapuntal technique; it’s part of her style signature. Look:

My heart lives in my
chest. I know it’s there.
But now the rogue will often
disappear, and leave me
stranded in my scarecrow
mind. It’s so unkind.

These lines, read naturally, aloud, would sound like three perfect iambic pentameters on an aabb rhyme scheme, with a short final line:

My heart lives in my chest. I know it’s there.
But now the rogue will often disappear,
and leave me stranded in my scarecrow mind.
(Da DA da DA da DA,) It’s so unkind.

How on earth would you pick that up with out seeing it on the page? (And how would the blind critic even get hold of this kind of work in the first place? But that’s another question.)

I just finished putting next-to-final edits on a close reading, for the Contemporary Poetry Review, of a Joseph Brodsky poem. More-than-usually conscious of how I work, I realised something explicitly which I think I've always noticed under the surface: that I read a poem (aside from hearing the sounds, which so many poets seemingly fail to do) simply by looking at it - its patterns and shapes settle themselves onto my eye, informing the linear reading.

This isn’t how Homer’s audiences did it. But they probably also weren’t writing essays about his use of assonance and dissonance, end rhyme, internal rhyme, slant rhyme, caesurae. Or were they? (Of course, Ms B will probably now have to adopt the great poet as a mascot, if not as an actual role model; but he lived in the Great Age of Memorisation.) In our world, how do you formulate a critical opinion if you can’t see all the beautiful double l’s standing up in lovely rows?

I’d need to train someone to read to me, according to some system I would develop, and I’d have to memorise the line endings. Otherwise, in practical terms, one’s judgement would be in fact shot.

Now, I am clearly writing this with my eyes — in fact, I'm sitting in the lovely Charles Lamb pub, waiting for my friend the Darling Ranter — and even the worst thing I have been given to fear in the immediate future is not the total annihilation of the Baroque Vision; as I say, I entertained these musings from the moment I realised about reading. It is a formal deliberation.

But the routine disregard of linguistic patterns someone went to the trouble of making is something I do think about even at the best of times, so why not flag it up now?

Happy belated National Poetry Day!

I'm always saying I'm going to read Miss Baroque's books when she finishes with them, but of course I never do. And I don't care, because now I've found something first.

I've just read this quirky and utterly charming thing. The Scottish Poetry Library commissioned the poet Gerry Cambridge to write a blog last week, around National Poetry Day, which was last Thursday. The blog was aimed at schoolkids, who could and did post questions for the poet to answer. Ms Baroque was otherwise engaged on the day (though she did go and buy Robin Robertson's Swithering, and also had a visitation from Charles Lamb - maybe not such bad going after all), so only caught up with it today (and was late for work as a result; thank you, Scottish Poetry Library!).

It's vivid stuff. The descriptions are gripping, for example of Cambridge's twenty years living in a remote caravan with no car (he loves umbrellas; and, I should think, eiderdowns) and a stunned vole that let him pick it up off the path and take it in by the gas fire.

There's a lot about poetry here, as there certainly should be - and, as with poetry itself, there is also a lot about life. This is what kids deserve. I can imagine loving this when I was a child (though admittedly I'd have preferred it if there were a girl in the story, possibly cooking dinner in the croft in a long dress while the old man was out trying to find her a mother in his tragic, misguided way), and my inner eight-year-old thinks you might like to read the rest of it.

Here's a partial transcript of a radio interview quoted in the blog:

"Do you have a funny or a quirky poem you could read to us?"

"It's a choice between a Shore Crab talking like a Glasgow hardman, or an old crofter whose main regret in life was that he hadn't got married, and who used to get drunk and go out on his tractor looking for women."

"The old crofter, please."

I read my poem 'The Drunken Lyricist', a sonnet. It is about an old crofter called Tom Mackay whom I've written about elsewhere, especially in my first book of poems, The Shell House. I got quite close to him when I spent a couple of summers on Papa Westray, where he lived. He stayed in a hovel down on the shore. It was a caravan with breeze blocks built all round it.

"Oh, that's a sad poem," Susan Morrison said. She's right, though most folk who hear it seem mainly to see the funny side of it. "I hope he found his woman in the end?"

"He didn't, I'm afraid," I said. "He died in his bed in 1997, and a friend sent me a clipping written by the former Herald journalist Jim Hewitson about how he'd been found by another islander, and how his best friend and drinking partner had been lost at sea within hours of Tom dying – so neither knew of the death of the other.

Fred and Ginger - too elegant for their shirts

The great thing about Fred & Ginger is that they represent both elegance and happiness - even elegance through happiness! Sheer physical exhilaration doesn't usually being the word 'elegant' to mind, but in this case that is exactly what it is. Hurrah!

it's like your maugham says

Some people always seem to know best. It has been years since Ms B read even a line by Somerset Maugham - though I do distinctly remember the impression Of Human Bondage made on me at sixteen (and you know what - it is so true).

A friend in California, too busy drinking wine in the sunshine in Golden Gate Park with his new love to write me a proper letter, has emailed about how rapturously happy he is. Well, here in rainy, celibate London we had better look to higher places for our pleasures - of which carping on about our fellow humans is definitely among the chief. Fortunately my friend has thought to sent me this nugget (geddit??) from Maugham's essay on El Greco:

"I have long abjured the heresy prevalent in my youth of art for art’s sake. Oscar Wilde popularized it in England and Oscar Wilde learnt it from Whistler.* It gave art an esoteric quality that flattered the artist and it was accepted by the cultured public with the humility that characterizes them. The cultured public have always taken a masochistic pleasure in the contempt that artists have shown them and, browbeaten and intimidated, have comforted themselves with a feeling of superiority over the common herd. It was believed that the object of a work of art was to arouse the aesthetic emotion and when you had felt that you had got all it had to give you. But what is an emotion that results in nothing? To experience the aesthetic emotion is pleasurable and all pleasure is good; but it is pleasurable also to drink a glass of beer and no one has ever been able to show that, taken simply as pleasure, one surpasses the other. Attempts have been made by moralists to prove that spiritual pleasures are keener and more lasting than sensual pleasures; they carry no conviction. No pleasure endures and to please it must be taken in small doses and at not too frequent intervals. It would be no less tedious to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony every day than it would be to eat caviar. And until age has blunted the sensibilities the general experience is surely that the pleasures of sense are more vivid than the pleasures of the spirit. We have all known omnivorous readers who read for the delight of it; they absorb books as the machines of Chicago absorb hogs, but no sausages come out of them at the other end; and we have all known the people who moon their days away in picture galleries in imbecile contemplation; they are no better than opium smokers, worse if anything, for the opium smoker at all events is not self-complacent. The value of emotion lies in its effects. Santa Teresa insisted on this over and over again: the ecstasy of union with the Godhead was precious only if it resulted in a greater capacity for works. The aesthetic emotion, however delightful and however subtle, has worth only if it leads to action."

*This may be true, and if so the fact that I have always loved the picture above - in which Whistler used his own mother as an "Arrangement in Black and Gray" - in fact, have loved it for its arrangement-in-black-&-grayness - may say enough to damn me completely for a Baroque.

headline shock

For those of you who didn't get to see today's edition of The Sun (no, I didn't buy it; I saw it on the Tube), the front page goes, in 3-inch letters, like this: HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE KOREA?

Prompt rapturous conversations everywhere - and a renewed recognition of the grudging professional respect the paper holds from all sorts of unlikely quarters.

low culture, low expectations

Several days in which Ms Baroqe has done nothing. She has cosseted what remains of her eyes (much better today); tried to read the Forward-Prize-winning Swithering, by Robin Robertson, but was defeated by a combination of Celtic twilight and trying to read it (in that light!) with one eye shut, which doesn't bode very well either for Paradise Lost; she has bought and cooked the minimum necessary foodstuffs, except for a Ben & Jerry's Oh My! Apple Pie! ice cream (yes), and has cleaned the kitchen. The mushroom, chicken & lemon risotto was a perfect autumn Saturday dish. She did a hell of a lot of laundry. She went for a lovely walk in Clissold Park, with the intention of finding the tree the fifteen-year-old rock god's crowd hang out under, and giving him a bollocking in public - but they weren't there, so it was just a nice walk in the park. The conkers are coming out, and if it hadn't been so painful she would have brought home a decorative bowlful of them in their prickly pale green pods.

Excitingly, she caught up with EastEnders after a long lull - but still has no idea what's happened to Sonia and Martin, the odious pair, to say nothing of that noxious storyline where Ian Beale was pretending young flibbertigibbet What's-her-face was his 'wife' for the purpose of impressing those weird charity swingers (why has Jane taken him back?? Oh - because she's a soap character).

See, we do manage bits of low culture in this house. I'm trying to ban reality TV for being too boring, inane and the augury of the death of civilisation, but I'm all for the soaps. You just can't ask too much of them.

And I'll have to get someone to come and read me Paradise Lost, but even if one did that, these days the little minx would be trying to watch America's Next Top Model at the same time (talk about HELL).

there's a Lamb

I do think these things come along as and when they have to. I know most people don't care a toss for Charles Lamb, but nonetheless I've been reading him lately, in a quirky 1948 Penguin called Charles Lamb and Elia, edited by JE Morpugo. It's a compilation of essays, poems and letters.

Now, Charles Lamb wrote wonderful letters. He wrote long, rambling (all the rambling he was doing) missives to Wordsworth, of all people, all about how boring he thought mountains and the countryside were. He says, for example: "I ought before this to have reply'd to your very kind invitation into Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere. But I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life." That's funny, and it's a great letter. And the essays Lamb wrote as 'Elia' for the London Magazine can be weepingly funny, as I found to my cost back in 10th grade, trying to read A Dissertation Upon a Roast Pig in class. But Lamb's other qualities, revealed to me in this little book, are tenderness, affection, humility, a complete lack of pretence, a keenly incisive literary mind, and an understanding of how hard life is.

He was in no way pampered. Unlike most writers one hears of from that period, Lamb worked in an office for thirty years, as a clerk for the East India Company. His letters and essays on the subject of his retirement with pension are infectiously ecstatic - a tone one also does not often encounter. In short, once you read Lamb, you have to love him.

Anyway, yesterday morning I had am email from a very kind friend with a pub in it, yes! The Charls Lamb, in Elia Street, N1. Imagine! It looks charming. I wrote back saying we must go there, and then went off to the hospital.

After the hospital experience I trudged from Old Street to the Angel in the rain, feeling pretty miserable, it has to be said, but liking the walk. I was going to Waterstone's to get (blind or not) Swithering, by Robin Robertson, which has just won this year's Forward Prize for best poetry collection. I feel I might write something about it. So, at the top of City Road I turned off to avoid crush of Angel station, and went down Colebrook Row instead. It's such a lovely little road, all cottages and trees, and brick pavements with many levels. I've often been down that road before, but never from this end.

Well! What do you think runs off Colebrook Row but Elia Street. It was drizzling, I was upset, my feet hurt, my eyes hurt, and there was the Charles Lamb. If I'd felt better I'd have gone in for a nice glass of wine, but as it was I did feel better. A bit further down the road I found something I'd also never noticed before: I was standing outside a pretty white house with a blue plaque on it, saying Charles Lamb had lived there. And indeed, Charles and Mary Lamb did live in Colebrook Row from 1823 till 1829.














It really was as if he was saying hello to me. I've been up and down this road fifty times before and never seen this house. And I'd never have been given this moment at all if I hadn't chanced on this foxed, musty old book in a disgustingly ill-tended secondhand bookshop in Southwold.

Here's a quote from a memoir of Lamb written by one Bryan Waller Procter. I'd be happy to think someone might one day write something like this about me:

"it must be confessed that in literature Lamb's taste, like that of all others, was at first imperfect. For taste is a portion of our judgment, and must depend a good deal on our experience, and on our opportunities of comparing the claims of different pretenders. Lamb's affections swayed him at all times. He sympathized deeply with Cowper and his melancholy history, and at first estimated his verse, perhaps, beyond its strict value. He was intimate with Southey, and anticipated that he would rival Milton. Then his taste was at all times peculiar. He seldom worshipped the Idol which the multitude had set up. I was never able to prevail on him to admit that "Paradise Lost" was greater than "Paradise Regained;" I believe, indeed, he liked the last the best. He would not discuss the Poetry of Lord Byron or Shelley, with a view of being convinced of their beauties. Apart from a few points like these, his opinions must be allowed to be sound; almost always; if not as to the style of the author, then as to the quality of his book or passage which he chose to select."

Well; almost.

a bad eye patch

Everyone has their cross to bear, as I said yesterday - or might have done. Today I went back to Moorfields Eye Hospital to see about the advanced sub-acute not-so-intermittent angle-closure glaucoma. (And in the picture, yes, the blue thing is touching her eye. They give you anaesthetic drops.)

I should flash back to last Wednesday, when I went in for the second time in two days. My eye was so sore, and my vision so dark, I thought it was the glaucoma, but when I got there I was measured, tested, and then pooh-poohed, and told it was "just the eye drops" and that the side effects would "just settle down." I tried to explain how much it hurt, but they weren't interested. Four days later I was so ill (with a range of symptoms starting at eye-related and ending at joint inflammation and a temperature) I had no choice but to go off the eye drops altogether. It took a few days to feel normal again, but today I went in with, at least, a clear idea of what was bothering me. My eye.

The nurse was lovely, really friendly. Two very sweet doctors (one conducting pioneering PhD research intoglaucoma and genetics) remembered me, and I told the story of the poisoning eye drops but their horror (it turned out) was not to be transmuted into anything more substantial than a note in my file saying "possible effects from Pilocarpine." Had inital tests, went into hallway to sit and wait. For an hour and a half. I know it's not so long, but by the time I got called back in the hospital was getting to me, and I'd had time to think. It was yet another young doctor (they're all about 28, and trying to get ahead) and she, with no reference to my having spoken to anyone an hour earlier, asked me for my symptoms and "how I had been."

Cut to the exact same tests the nurse had just done. But 'checking the angles' hurts, and by that time I was feeling upset, and I couldn't get my eye to let her do it. The third time she failed I had to say, "I'm sorry , I'm just a bit surprised. I just told three people all this stuff in detail an hour ago! Didn't it go in the notes?" She gets up and goes over the way. Comes back and tells me to come over. I'm asked to sit down in the chair by the eye apparatus and there is a large man there. He looks rather engagingly straightforward.

He must be the consultant, but he doesn't introduce himself. He addresses me as "Mrs Evans."

I say, politely, "It's Evans-Bush, and I'm not married. It's Ms."

He stops what he's doing. He turns to face me full on, meets my eye, holds the gaze, smiles insanely and fakely, holds the smile, and apologises three times, one after the other. (But calls me Miss. I'm not Miss. I've been married.) It's as if he's channelling Margaret Thatcher. Well, this clearly is the consultant.

Asks the questions. Gets told the answers. Does the tests. They hurt. My pressures (I have to ask to be told) are up since my arrival, and they were high then; it's all very distressing. While he writes up the notes I cry a bit, but he doesn't notice. We're sitting, in effect, in a corridor. He tells me all about the parlous state of my eye, the laser treatment I have to have, with its risk of accelerating the scar tissue already forming on the iris (I have scarring on my iris - I never knew that could even happen), and the operation I might have to have "at some point in the future" (or sooner if the scar tissue accelerates) for which the particular shape of my eye is itself a severe contra-indication. He mentions the distinct possibility, in that case, of "serious complications." As always in these conversations, what we are talking about is whether I will lose the sight in my left eye. There's been talk of this operation for three years, though he doesn't know it; and I guess it's been hovering in the background since 1988, when they told me my surgical iridotomy "might not last forever" - though 20 years felt like a long time then. But I know more now than what they told me then about the shape of my eye, how tiny, how problematical it seems to be. So I'm still reeling when the consultant launches right into a calendar on his computer asking me when I can have the laser treatment.

At no point does he tell me the name of the laser procedure, ju7st as he has not told me the name of the possible future operation. But he does say that, in the event of having this unnamed operation, "we will both be going in there on an understanding..." His voice trails off. He's looking at diary dates.

Not next week, his wife is due to have a baby. Maybe the week after? I say - sharply - "you know, babies are just as likely to be a week late as to come on time."

He looks at me. "Fine, do you want to try next week? On the basis that I might not be here? Or shall we say, hmmmm... the 19th?"

I can't believe this. "Oh, let's go for the 19th."

In the middle of this conversation we are interrupted by another consultant (from the looks of him: pampered, baby-faced) who is looking for something or someone. My guy helps him out. Then, just as we're getting to the part where I go blind, Babyface comes back. More chat. Lots of smiling and chatting, while I watch politely, holding my tissues. My doctor apologises and we make the appointment.

He hands me a letter in 14-point type and closes my file.

I ask, were you going to give me something for the next two weeks? The pharmacist was talking about these newer-generation drugs. He says, "Oh, I don't think you need anything. I mean, how often is it really bothering you?" It's bothering me all the time, enough to get me to A&E, doofus. (I don't say doofus.) I say I can't read in the evenings, some nights it's a full-blown attack & I have to just lie on the couch or go to bed at ten. I do have a job, I have to be able to work, I have three kids, I write. (Plus, you know, I have this scarring on my iris? I'm trying not to let it get any worse?)

Last week the nice doctor, Anthony something, asked me what I do for a living, but not in a sense of managing my eye. It was just curiosity. For YEARS I have been asking these doctors about my glasses ("Oh, just go to the opticians" airy wave of hand), I've asked about eye strain, I've asked about things. I've asked. So here I am, at the gate at the edge of the desert, asking again.

I tell him I'm a writer. I say, "I write for my job, and I write when I'm not at work. I read. I have two books to review - I haven't even started one of them, because it's dense prose. You know? It's not like all I have to do is make the dinner!" He reaches for his pad.

I ask what he's giving me. He says the normal thing would be Pilocarpine, with my shape of eye etc, but he's giving me something else. You know. Nyocene, I think. I think he mentioned a side effect it might have on me, but I can't remember. It all felt too surreal. Anyway, I read the information on the bus coming home and it is flipping terrifying. Up to and including strokes. I won't take it.

I say, can I ask you something? I've prepared a list of questions: Is there a list of what actually contributes to the pressure in the eye? People keep casually mentioning things to me, like last week I was suddenly told I shouldn't take cold remedies. He replies, "well, there are a few things you shouldn't take, but they'll say so on the information slip that comes in the box. Decongestants, cold remedies, muscle relaxants, some anti-depressants..." (In short, anything that might actually make tyou feel better.) I say, what else? I mean, aside from drugs? He looks at me blankly.

So then I asked him about my glasses. Lately even with my varifocals I can only see to read if I wear my specific reading glasses. YES, emphatically, he says, wear the reading glasses. Yes, reading can increase the pressure. Bending your head down, the way you do to read, increases the pressure; he says to read if possible at eye level. He says when they want to induce an attack, they put someone in poor light and make them hold their head foward. (NOW they tell me.)

Every time he gets to the end of an answer, he shuffles the file as if to dismiss me. Every time I have to interrupt him and say, can I ask you something else? He says there's no point talking about the Pilocarpine, which the pharmacists tell me comes in much weaker strengths as well. There's no point: if I had a reaction on 2% I'll have a reaction on 1%. He's not telling me to stop reading (even though my eye vlearly is). Good light is of the utmost importance. Yes, the size of the print matters: the less strain, the better.

All through the nineties I was asking doctors at Moorfields (and Charing Cross) about eye strain and glasses, and it was as if they were deaf.

Well, then I reached the end of what I could think of. And he was clearly desperate for me to be off. So now I'm out. But I only asked my prepared questions, hard as that was, so I don't know what the aftercare is, how much it will hurt (although he did say "very sore," the timescale was "anything from a few days to a few weeks, or more", and he didn't mention pain relief), whether I'll need time off work ("very sore" may not "affect my vision" but it also doesn't sound good for "being an editor"), how soon they can tell if the laser has made the scarring worse, when the operation might be were it to come to that, the name of the operation itself. Will I be blind in one eye by Christmas? There has been no offer of a phone call before the procedure if I have any concerns in the two weeks before.* There has been no suggestion of talking to anyone about possible long-term effects (another euphemism, of course: no admission, even, of what we're talking about).

I did tell the doctor I thought it might be a little different, my case, from the old people he typically sees in there. I'm in the middle of earning my living, raising my kids, living my life. I have to work till I drop, I can't just take early retirement. I have no pension, I live in a rented flat. And I know I'll disagree when I'm old. I'll want my life then too.

My most curmudgeonly friend, the Darling Ranter, suggests I ring the RNIB. That sounds like a good idea to me. He says, "these people are just technicians."

Now: this guy, my doctor, is supposed to be something like one of the top four people in the world for my condition. That's got to be a good thing. I was told that by last week's doctor, and I hope it's true. The consultant says cheerfully that he will have to be the person who does my laser, and I believe him, and so we're scheduling it around his baby. And it's soon.

But what kind of treatment is this, where no measure, however small, can be taken to address distress and emotional trauma? Wrong names, questions answered under duress, never the same doctor twice, strangers interrupting conversations about how you may well go blind in one eye? If you were at risk of losing your leg, would they be so offhand???

So I left. I walked to the Angel. ~And I was lucky: my friend the Catwoman was in. I went and hadsome home-cooked dinner and then she took me to the pub. So I haven't been sitting here all alone all night. But no one ever asked if I would be.


*The PhD doctor from last week saw me as I left; she did say I could ring if there were any problems. But it wasn't part of the programme, she just happened to be passing. And she wants me for her study.

elegant Anne

If only I looked like this when writing. If only I had a typewriter! On reflection one might wonder whether the typewriter may be due for a come-back - if only they word-processed...

In fact, a wise old priest told Anne Sexton, not long before her suicide: "God is in your typewriter."

I think the priest was right; but, however glamorous and lovely, Sexton could probably not be classified as really happy. She did her best, like all of us. She made an Elegant Effort. Afflicted by terrible mental problems & health problems, as well as the usual life problems, she wrote wrote wrote. She wrote through everything. She struggled in the biggest way and it is all there on paper for us to read. Her poems are elegant too, but not in a decorous way. They laid her bare. Instead of being embarrassing, for the most part in Sexton - and this can come as a surprise to me every time I go a couple of years without opening her book, and then open it again - they're elegant. She never lost her poise.

dog on a plane

The best friend, Ms Rational Self-Determinism, has finally got her puppy. He's a 12-week-old Great Dane, black, with a little white rivulet going down his chest. He is SO silky and lovely, it is hard to describe, with giant paws and a giant, but long and noble, face. When he sits down his haunches wrinkle up delightfully.

He's the only dog I've ever met who had to be flown in specially. Most people go to the pound to get their pup; but oh no, my girl went to Heathrow for hers! He is apparently, though emphatically not a Scotty, Scots. When he grows up he may well have a bit of a burr. It cost a shocking sum to fly him down, too. And it had to be put off, because the first time he was too nervous.

She's called him Prince Myshkin, which is of course the name of the title character in Dostoyevsky's novel, The Idiot, which I happen to know her reading group recently discussed.

Ms RS-D tells me: "He's a dog of average intelligence."

miseryguts for garters

Call me shallow, but it seems to me that Martin Amis is aging rather badly... For one thing he has the bizarre modern version of a comb-over - a comb-back - with thin, longish hair that he must consider trendy or something but in fact makes him look sort of Dickensian. And he looks shockingly sclerotic. This sclerosis perhaps contributes, or is it the other way around, to an air of pained, desiccated misanthropy. (On which note, I love the way he's now sticking up for the rights of women! Back in the day, girls, did we really think of Martin Amis as one of the sisters? Let's try and remember.) It's been going this way for years: it must have been in the early nineties, the interview I read where someone asked him about money, maybe to do with That Advance, and even then he answered airily: "oh, I just send all those kind of things to my accountant, I never even look at them, it's too tedious." He said he never even glanced at his own bank statements.

Maybe that fact alone can shed some light on why he just doesn't get it.

(Of course Ms Baroque doesn't glance at her bank statements either, but that's not tedium, that's just not wanting to face the fact that one will most likely starve in old age. Every so often Little Miss Baroque will start to follow her around the house with them, saying, "Mummy, shouldn't you open some of your post?")

I read his big "Horrorism" Observer piece the other week, all the way through. It was full of the patness we have come to expect in his fiction. Neat little stitched-up, packaged-up shticks may be all very well for a satirical novel, but if he really is claiming this towering moral superiority for "The West" (Timothy West, maybe?), and if he really is citing our brave tradition of freedom of inquiry and thought and speech and all that, maybe he could start by looking at his own brand of didacticism. He's beginning to tip over the edge into one of his own characters.

Amis has, by his own admission, been spending some time writing a novel ("on suffering") poolside in Uruguay, in between summering in the Hamptons of course. It's probably easier doing it that way; even in Notting Hill or somewhere he'd probably just be too close in to see it properly.

And now this huge (Observer, once again, and sadly not on the web) picture of him glowering on an enormous sunshine-yellow couch, at his summer place in the Hamptons, has given me great pleasure - the word "Amis" is in a matching yellow, overprinted on top of a rather striking eight-foot abstract painting. You know, as an example of our culture I did love it. I do love our wonderful heritage. It just looks wonderfully and completely inane, like something out of Decline and Fall.

Maybe his upcoming UK book tour will do him good. And it might remind him why, here at the coalface, we have to laugh.