"No, you remember Rosie, who played the dominatrix in our play?" (pause)
"Yeah, and now she's in another play, so I really have to go and support her... mmm... hmm... well, I'll have to leave by 6.30." (pause)
"Well we don't have to drink much wine, do we!"
A movie. Set in Hong Kong in 1963 and named - in English at least* - after a Bryan Ferry song. It's a slow burn, and the environment feels so unfamiliar that it takes a little while to locate the story in it, but when the story comes out, it is almost precisely in the difficulty of identifying it that it resides.
The two next-door neighbours - she whose husband is always away on business, and he whose wife is - are thrown together out of sheer loneliness, when they realise that their respective partners are having an affair. The bond they develop is partly through circumstance and partly in negative - "We won't be like them," which only means that they have nowhere to put their growing love - and sneaks up on them in the same way that the story sneaks up on the viewer.
In any case, in a society like this one where everyone is overcrowded, there is no privacy and people are always lecturing one another about their personal lives, an affair feels impossible! How are the others managing it? Only by being in Japan, you think.
It's all interiors. The colours are amazing, saturated urban colours. It seems to be always nighttime in Hong Kong, the film is dark, and it feels much edgier even than films set in places like Paris in the same period. Interestingly, the famous "Green Girl" painting kept coming into my head while I was watching it - either that picture is far more brilliant than I'd ever realised in evoking an overwhelming atmosphere, or else the art department used it as a source. Or both.
The film's swelling, yet painfully restrained, Chinese-sounding violins, mixed with Chinese music, mixed with early sixties Western lounge music - the cultural tension between Hong Kong, China (where so many Hong Kong residents came from) and the West is palpable.
The clothes are so gorgeous you forget that the only way Maggie Cheung can look like that is that they're a size nothing.
In short, see it! I've already gone on LoveFilm and put all of Wong Kar Wai's films on my list.
One thing that's really interesting in this story, aside from the film and its qualities, is how it is created by the strictures of the society it's set in - in much the same way as, say, an EM Forster novel, though it is so different in tmany ways. And this is a truism of course. But, here and now, if these two characters found themselves living next door with partners cheating on them with each other, any crises de coeur they might have would be qualms, and strictly personal. Especially as neither has any children. It'd just be women's magazine, Saturday newspaper stuff.
Well, and that may be better. But I'm sure there are people nowadays who are just as wrecked by their life experiences as the hero of this film is, - it's just that there's as little social niche for them as there is in the film for the two crypto-lovers. And that's part of the power of the movie, that it applies itself to a little blind spot, a chink, a patch of human experience we no longer seem to recognise.
* The Chinese title is "The Age of Blossom" which must be purely figurative. There is no blossom, no outdoors and not even any natural light in this film.
"I think when people are past 27," she says, "they go into a world of horror..."
Gwendoline Riley - who is she?
(n.b. they come in threes, right?)
Well, I've seen it all now...
According to the BBC: "Gere, star of films such as Chicago and Pretty Woman, is a Buddhist and travels to India frequently to visit the Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in the north of the country."
Lucky old Dalai Lama!
By the way, click on the picture (picture courtesy of The Guardian, thanks Guardian) to see what the Buddhists might do to Richard Gere when they catch him.
(n.b. ew!)
(n.b. and I never thought I'd have a picture of Richard Gere on this blog.)
Should he be allowed loose in the streets?
I'm sorry. Once again halfway through a post about a culturally-worthy topic (the amazing film I watched last night - In the Mood for Love, & I WILL finish the post - maybe I can work it into my time-travel, Life on Mars, Doctor Who one) I am stopped in my tracks by something so delightful I can't resist it.
Hugh Grant's escapade with a photographer yesterday "near his west London home" simply makes me laugh every time I think of it. And these pictures on the BBC website have only increased the hilarity.
Schadenfreude? Oh yes. Not quite as exquisite as Johnny Depp's £11,000 bottle of wine - it will have to be something mighty spectacular that will beat that. Even if Hugh's beans cost £14.99 from Fortnums I don't think it would be as wonderful as that golden occasion was. But it is still a lot more fun than the usual types of episodes...
Why did it happen? The photographer he threw the beans at reckoned he was having a "bad hair day," but you'd think he had learned to live with those. It could be something to do with the delicate psyches of the rich and famous - after Depp's wine extravaganza, the first thing he did on leaving the restaurant was throw a plank of wood at a photographer. But maybe we will never know.
And just think: if Grant was only "near" his west London home, why was he carrying a "family-sized pot of baked beans"? Was he really out jogging? Does he always carry baked beans with him in the mornings? The only reason I even read the story in the first place was that, after seeing the headline, I had to know if the tin had been opened. Otherwise, surely, the photographer couldn't have been "covered in baked beans." But it is even better. It is Tupperware!
(n.b.: stay tuned, I've just noticed the Richard Gere-Shilpa Shetty headline...)
Thom Gunn!
The elegant, rock-&-roll poster boy for poetry. I've had a little thing for him ever since I was a kid - I remember seeing his books in the houses of my parents' friends, like the Golds, who were photographers and had an Anglophile book collection, in the senventies. I was fascinated by his name, which seemed to inhabit its own spelling system with its rogue "h" and the double "n", and (admittedly) I think by the beautiful typographical covers of the English Faber editions. "Thom Gunn" seemed an infinitely authoritative representative of something I had yet to discover.
And because of this I missed the particular discovery of Thom Gunn that was formative for so many poets of a certain generation. I've read accounts where poets recall their first reading of Gunn with something like awe, saying thyey felt he gave them permission to be themselves on paper. He wrote graceful poetry with both rhyme and metre - something that, as has been said, never really went out, and with which in any case the mass of English poets have always been far more comfortable than the Americans among whom he played out most of his career - but he did it differently, he was sexy, he wrote about Elvis, and after he moved to San Francisco he lived (and wrote) a wild (yet intellectual) life full of homosexual excess. He and Ted Hughes (paired by Faber and both at their peak in the sixties and seventies) were the sexiest poets to come along in a while, I guess.
By the time I read him I was just saying, "so this is what it's all about..." I've always found it interesting that the New Formalists don't showmore interest in him.
Anyway, there I was, and I've always loved him for his warmth, his lack of vanity, his poetic immediacy and of course the beautiful sounds and technical bedazzlement of his poems. When he died three years ago today, it didn't seem possible that he was 74 - technically, "old enough" - so "not-old" did he seem, for all that he'd been around - well - forever! My forever, anyway.
Love 'im.
Here are the obituaries from the Telegraph and the Guardian (with a wonderful picture).
And here's a poem that seems apt, from his last collection, Boss Cupid:
To Donald Davie in Heaven
I was reading Auden - But I thought
you didn't like Auden, I said.
Well, I've been reading him again,
and I like him better now, you said.
That was what I admired about you
your ability to regroup
without cynicism, your love of poetry
greater
than your love of consistency.
As in an unruffled fishpond
the fish draw to whatever comes
thinking it something to feed on
there was always something to feed on
your appetite unslaked
for the fortifying and tasty
events of reading.
I try to think of you now
nestling in your own light,
as in Dante, singing to God
the poet and literary critic.
As you enter among them,
the other thousand surfaced glories
- those who sought honour
by bestowing it -
sing at your approach
Lo, one who shall increase our loves.
But maybe less druggy,
a bit plainer,
more Protestant.
Ladies and gentlemen, can I please direct your attention back to February 21st, 2007? It was the day WH Auden would have turned 100. Here at Baroque Mansions we hung out the bunting and celebrated with a new poem, made largely - not entirely - of lines from Uncle Wiz himself (though Madame here forgot to keep notes of where the pertinent lines came from! I know I have the book around somewhere...).
I think it is time to address attention to this post again, if only to address attention to the comment it received today. I've never made a post out of someone's comment before, much less the comment of an unknown poetaster. However, there is such a thing as progress, and just as Marie Antoinette might have put the world's first feather pompoms on her pink satin mules, I intend to break with tradition right now and post it.
Heiranonymous Bosh, Poetaster De Luxe, writes:
"Madame B., thank you for your delightful poem, which I like very much in all its alleged rough-hewness. I shall be sharing it with sympatico friends. It is a graceful & generous hommage to such a rare one as Auden, who did indeed (though certainly no angel himself) commit some of the 20th century's "sanest, most liberal, & chaste poetry in English", successfully interpenetrating the sacred & the profane in a "user-friendly" poetic fashion.
Incidentally, I have just chanced upon this interesting site of yours via a bewildering cascade of chance search-engine turns & twists whilst researching-- of all things-- the celebrated (or, more mischievously put, "the sainted") Maya Angelou as viewed speculatively in the light of both Vladimir Nabakov's provocatively iconoclastic ideas regarding the poshlost & its viral inroads into the heart of man in these days of the global exploitation of Admass, & Paul Fussell's conception of the ultimately barbaric jingoist-consumerist faux-Culture swindle of BAD. (Whew! Try saying that a few times!)
Just pour lagniappe, a few perhaps germane things I've also just chanced upon:
One Patrick Kurp, of Houston, Texas, usefully referencing The Prolific and the Devourer in a caustic protest against the misuse of poetry in the forlorn-hopery of misconceived Good Causing:
http://www.evidenceanecdotal
"It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done-- or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never _made_ anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself-- beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing."
I'm sure most will be familiar with this sharp-edged but humane piece by Randall Jarrell, but it is evergreen & bears another look:
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts
The Pakistani-American writer Maliha Masood spotlighting (against the current deep-darkness of the geopolitical background) a past master of what is arguably the most radical poetry conceivable who, though long dead, is currently holding his spirited, lively, & unyieldingly Sufic own against the rigours of attempted feel-good co-option by out-&-out frauds and even well-meaning but ignorant acolytes of the current terror-drenched dispensation of global provincialism & fuzzy-thinking/feeling (Whew! Try... O skip it):
http://www.atimes.com/atimes
Roger Downey's "In-sufi-cient: Translating Rumi's verse into the stuff of self-help books"--Traduttore, tradittore:
http://www.seattleweekly.com
Recently-read joke which I stared at, mind-nulled, for several seconds, like an emu contemplating a chrome lug-nut, before reaching Epiphany:
"Don't you know the King's English?"
"No, sir, is he?"
I am looking forward to perusing your site at greater length. Cheers!"
Ms B says cheers to you too, Mr Bosh.
Oh, and by the way - by following the links I came to a home page that seems to belong to Mr Bosh, and bless me if I didn't find a description of myself there!
| "Button-cute, rapier-keen, cucumber-cool, and gall-bitter..." -- S.J. Perelman. | ||||
a cinema poster from the Hackney Cinematograph Theatre in 1912
As promised, here is more news on the campaign to save the old cinema at Clapton Pond, recently rescued from the social death that is gangster nightclubdom. The closure of the nightclub was achieved largely through the concerted efforts of local residents, which proves that it can be done.
The campaign has a website and a petition. Unfortunately, it's a petition you have to print off, collect signaures on and send back to the address on the website, but that's not exactly rocket science, is it. I think we should all have a go. If you are reading this from anywhere in the environs of Hackney, or if you care enough about cinemas and community amenities (it's also going to be a community facility) please sign the petition. Let's put cinematographs back on the map!
Inciudentally, I think "cinematograph" is a charming word; it reminds me (pointlessly, I know, a simple etymological coincidence, made all the more coincidental by being completely gratuitous in "cinematograph") of Spirograph, which can only be a good thing. And it also reminds me how important movies used to be, how grand the theatres were because people loved them so much. Wouldn't we like it to be like that again?
To paraphrase Frank O'Hara: Mothers of Hackney! Let your children go to the movies!
Eleanor of Aquitaine - just resting for a bit
The Grumpy Old Bookman writes: "Madame Arcati has two stunning interviews with Molly Parkin, part 1 on 13 April and part 2 on 18 April. Surely, few writers can have lived life with such energy and commitment."
That'll be me, then. Since my return to The World I have managed to achieve not one thing in my writing life. I read Joan Wyndham's teenage wartime diary, Love Lessons, which is not very long and is about as taxing as - well - as lying in bed reading something light for a little while. I've written half a blog post about it.
I've written, in instalments, half of a post about Life on Mars, now about two weeks out of date. In the intervening time I have watched two episodes of Doctor Who and thought I might cleverly incorporate the Doctor into my Life on Mars time-travel post. But it's half done and I don't mean the half where it makes sense.
I bought Poetry London and flipped through it thinking, "what kind of poems does Maurice Riordan want for this journal? I mean, that I write? Oh, I'd have to write some new ones. He wants different ones. Oh, and maybe not by me." Which was just silly, except for the part about having to write some new poems.
I went to the launch of the new Poetry Review issue: an exclusive little do in Borders, Charing Cross Rd. I had to sit down a lot and went home at 8pm when they all went to the pub (I say "they all" - I mean about five of the fun people of course, ring-led by my friend Jane "Are you two sisters?" Holland, ex-snooker pro, poet, jobbing writer and hard-as-nuts mother of five, count-'em, five kids)... It was great to get out in the world, & I had some lovely chats with people, including someone who was at the last thing I went to, the night before I got sick. I was shaking when I got home.
Met another delightful poet and editor, Raul Peschiera, chez my friend Clare. Raul's international poetry magazine, The Review, is currently being revamped: watch this space. I borrowed an old issue containing an early interview with my friend Michael Donaghy, interesting because it predated his 2000 collection Conjure: he was just talking as a poet who'd had an amazingly successful first book, and had published a second, and to whom the next collection was always moot. And Conjure was going to be definitively great. He sounded a bit stressed about it at the time but of course he needn't have been. Oh, dear me... Incidentally, Michael was the last person I knew who had gallstones. He was dead six months later, though it is not connected.
I ascertained that Baroque was not quoted in this week's Guardian Review.
Got a couple of rejections. Am waiting for others.
Didn't work on any articles. I read a bit of poetry by one subject. I talked a little about another.
Had a dream about a large blue china jug I have - from a Victorian commode set - in which it had been given to me by my dad, and through him by MacNeice. This is because Jonathan Wonham had written on his blog about a crystal vase which is the only extant "personal" effect of the 12th century queen and overachiever Eleanor of Aquitaine, who acquired it through her grandfather William IX of France, who had got it in the Crusades. (Wm IX was, incidentally, the first troubadour poet, and the court of Eleanor was the first flowering of the cult of Courtly Love, until Henry II arrived and put a stop to all that nonsense. I think he didn't quite get the measure of what he was marrying. And you can't even say it was because he was English.) The crystal vase is in the Louvre, saved by the fact that Eleanor's first husband, Louis, presented it to the powerful and visionary Abbe Suger. In my dream the blue jug was floating in the air, very prominently, and an indistinct voiceover suddenly became very clear and loud when it said: MacNeice.
It's a message.
But interesting as that is, I didn't work on my articles.
I drafted, one evening, for a little while, a bad poem, which will need a lot more work (preferably at a time of day when my brain works) to be any good at all. It's about listening to the recordings of Ezra Pound, which are now available on the web.
Just the one, mind.
And I spent what very little time I could just - about two hours, I think - being a bit of a vegetable - which reminds me, I am so sick of chicken I could scream, and I've gone off fish completely. I don't care if I never see another mussel.
Yesterday, exhausted to the point of emotional desperation by my few little social sojourns (all copiously backed up by minicab support, and involving little alcohol and even less food),* I had no choice but to take Mlle B into the West End, so great is her need for school clothes. I know: at this time of year! But shoes give out, shirts go grey, and they always clamp down on uniform in the summer. It was awful, hours and hours of it, and when we finally staggered into the flat Mamma was good for nothing except the bunging of a chicken (organic, M&S, which we were fortunate to have at all - I had grabbed it one day just because M&S is right in Victoria Station; and lo, the supermarket itself proved beyond me this weekend) into the oven, in between lying on the sofa.
And now it's Monday. I could weep. I've done nothing and I haven't even had a chance to rest.
Maybe Molly Parkin's had times like this too. Maybe this is what "energy and commitment" are really about.
So much for easing myself back in, eh. Now I have to finish this, have a bath, do some "working from home," wake up the Tall Blond Rock God and go to the doctor. No, not that Doctor. I wish. And then to work.
* And I thought I better had: you never know, you might meet someone. Otherwise I really will spend the rest of my baroque life sitting here all alone in an empty flat. But no: only one cute guy and he was married.
I went to a friend's birthday party on Saturday night, in Stoke Newington - this was where the whole thing fell down. I was delirious before I even arrived. And there was no one there I'd never met before, all couples from years back & school parents. Everyone was telling me how extraordinarily well I look! This despite my eyes spinning round in opposite directions like those psychedelic toys I had when I was a kid. I think they meant, variously: "You're not dead," "you've lost weight," or "I like your earrings."
It's H**ler's birthday: maybe we should all send some flowers over to Bryan Ferry's studio. I'm thinking "Music in the Night" might be a good choice.
I know, I know, the Roxy one has apologised. But nothing can make up for being that stupid and vain in the first place.
Further thoughts, though. However glad the news is that it can cut both ways - see this report - Ms B is struck by the remark of the M&S spokesperson who said that Ferry's personal views are not the issue: "we chose him because he is a style icon." Kind of like you-know-who, then?
(There is a German word that springs to mind here. It's schadenfreude. Being the male Face of M&S may be punishment enough...)
There is a wonderful person called Francis Stokes.
Francis Stokes made this.
Go ahead! Tell me you don't love it. I'll know you're lying. And by the way - my favourite character doesn't even come in till episode 2.
Liz Imbrie, in The Philadelphia Story: see, even in 1939 you could be a sparky professional girl & look great in a little suit (and go to society weddings, and get Jimmy Stewart, and and and... but the poor girl did have to both suffer and work for it).
Those Baroque readers who also frequent Temperama will know that my neighbours at the other end of "Murder Mile" have had a job on their hands lately to close down a notorious gangster nightclub that stands on a busy and prominent intersection in Clapton. It's an excellent spot: right near the pond, of course, but also right by the bus stop, the new(ish) Cuban coffee place, and Jimac, one of the oldest and best local minicab firms. Their drivers are gentlemen and philosophers.
So this nightclub that's been closed down, the building it was in is actually not so bad, once you get the riffraff off it. Dave has very helpfully alerted a group of us Hackney bloggers (including the increasingly remiss Hackney Lookout) that there are plans afoot - that is, a campaign - to use the premises for - wait for it - Frank O'Hara would be so happy - a CINEMA! Come ON! come on people now, we can DO this thing.
We have to get organised, though, because there is a counter-campaign to tear the whole place down and probably make something really ugly and useless.
Click on the link to Dave's post, and then to Julia who has an e-petition. Sorry. I've been at my first day back at work and Ms B is comatose, but I can handle the idea of a new community cinema nestled right in the armpit of the borough.
Let's sing:
Oh! Come on you people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now
Come on you people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now
So Joan Wyndham has died: "aspiring actress, heroic drinker, jitterbugger and Benzedrine-fuelled bohemian," and teenaged keeper of a wonderful wartime diary, which I loved loved loved when it was published in the mid-eighties. (There were two books: Love Lessons and Love is Blue.) Here's a taste (though there is more, more - I remember the bit where the maid left, because of the bombs, and her mother had no idea how to make hot chocolate, so Joan just melted a bar - but couldn't add anything to it because there was nothing - and it made them sick when they tried to drink it):
"Went to Confession at the Servite - Father Carato, again, three Hail Marys. While I was kneeling in front of the altar saying my penance, I suddenly thought of G kissing me and a kind of delicious stabbing pain ran through my stomach, so sharp and strong that I winced."
I've been thinking a lot about translation lately: not from the vantage point of doing it; as a reader. I can see what would be in it for the translator, and I can hardly imagine another task that seems as difficult and stretching.
I've never read as much in translation as I think I should, as I would like to. Certainly there are writers I love whom I know only in translation, which feels kind of like not knowing them - especially in poetry. God knows it's hard enough even in English! I tend only to buy a book in translation if it has a parallel text (unless there isn't one available), and then reading it takes ages as I pick through the original. Let me just state that there is not another language besides English that I can read really adequately, so this is probably just silly! And if I like something I will seek out every known translation, so I can take a sort of median reading.
This approach makes me suspicious of poems published as "versions" of other, foreign poems. When you read a version you don't know what you're reading: neither fish nor fowl, as it occurs to me that Andrew Shields might have it.
Don Paterson famously (actually, maybe it's not famous; it's famous to me because I blogged on it) did this with his Rilke versions - in which, beautifully muscular and meaty as his language may be, he changed words which bore the whole meanings of their poems - load-bearing words, as it were. This analogy is apt: quoted by Adam Philips in the Guardian, Paterson says: "Versions are trying to be poems in their own right; while they have the original to serve as detailed ground-plan and elevation, they are trying to build themselves a robust home in a new country, in its vernacular architecture." This statement is illuminating amd comfirms one's suspicion that in buying a book of "versions" one if buying more a book by the translator than a book by the original, non-English poet.
I know of a case where some poems have been "translated," with input from the originating poet, and then published as "versions" by the "translator" (please excuse the scare quotes) - so that the originating poet now does not have access to the English versions of his poems because they are "versions" and have been published in the translator's name!
Phew! Ms B is not an expert in international copyright law - thank God, otherwise her head might explode - but this does seem rather unnecessarily complicated, not least for readers of the poems.
The issue is one of trust, I think, or maybe it's a question of identification. In a new city you have to rely on the driver to take you to the right place. Or, if you've read the guidebook, when you arrive in the city you want to be able to recognise it.
Andrew Shields was one of the two translators, along with Michael Hofmann (who got the contract), to be considered by Faber for a translation of Durs Grünbein's Ashes for Breakfast. (My Farrar, Strauss & Girous edition is copyright 2005, and the Faber came out last autumn - so I'm not sure how the contractual aspects worked: I'm basing my remarks on what Andrew has written. And it seems that the Faber paperback, which costs as much as I paid for the Farrar Strauss hardback - admittedly off Abebooks - does not have a parallel text, which mine does.) Anyway, Andrew has translated Grünbein too, though not in book form I think, and while he says he has deeply enjoyed Hofmann's translations, he points up some aspects of the rationale of a translation which constitute the very reason I like parallel texts. (Still with me?) Don't worry about the references to the poems, in his post he gives two translations of the poem with the line in question:
"Leaving aside all the other differences between the two translations... I immediately noticed that Grünbein's 'green plastic fish' had become Hofmann's 'yellow plastic duck.' In part, I noticed this because a comic version of the thesis of my unwritten essay was that Grünbein is a (green) fish, and my thesis does not make sense if the English poem turns the fish into a (yellow) duck. (The serious issue the essay would have addressed is the near-absence of the first-person singular in Grünbein's first three books and its partial appearance in his fourth.)
But more seriously, the shift from fish to duck raises two concerns for me: first, I do not understand the motivation for the altering of the image, and it seems to change the metaphorical implications of the poem quite considerably. The toy may be plastic, but a fish floating on the water is dead, while a duck floating on the water is not.
Secondly, and more generally, it makes me wonder whether Hofmann has altered Grünbein's imagery elsewhere in the book as well. Is this move from fish to fowl an isolated case? Or is it a symbol of Hofmann's translation procedure in general? If so, then those who discover Grünbein through this book might wonder whether the scaly Grünbein of the original German has become feathery instead. Or to put it another way, Hofmann has produced a wonderful collection of poems that are a great pleasure to read, but they might be more 'yellow' than 'green' (as in Grünbein)."
George Szirtes, meanwhile, currently apparently at a book fair in Budapest, gives a vivid account of a conversation with his editor regarding some conundrums in a translation he's doing, which actually addresses, I think, some of the issues in a way that feels trustworthy to me. He writes:
"In the morning, editor Zs calls to discuss the translation of the Márai piece of which I have already put up an extract... The chief issue is whether 'Western Patrol' is the best translation of the title: Napnyugati őrjárat.
The joys of translation! Napnyugati does not mean simply 'western', though it means that too. It is a slightly archaic term meaning 'the west of the sunset', the romanticism partly straight and partly ironical.* The other word is indeed 'patrol' though Zs thinks the allusion is to Rembrandt's 'Night Watch'. I mention the potential association with 'Watch on the Rhine' and we drop that. So now it is still western patrol but with a colon followed by 'In the Lands of the Setting Sun', and, underneath, following Márai's subtitle as closely as we can, 'A travelogue novel'.
...it is precisely these balances of tone that matter most to me. That has taken some half an hour already and we haven't even started on the text,** wherein the same romantic term for the West keeps reappearing.
Constantly to reiterate it seems a bad solution to me, tiresome, heavy, dull. So I draw on one of those semi-improvised personal theories of translation that may be worth exploring. The theory - far more instinct than theory if truth be told - is that translation might work zonally rather than lexicographically. When a complicated concept appears without a direct equivalent we distribute the various shades of its meaning through the text. I think this works, so I say it works. Zs thinks it might work. It is decided: it works.
It is in fact what I have always done, particularly in poetry: keeping form while gently redistributing image and diction to locate tone. I don't know how else it is possible. Furthermore it resembles the way poems seem to get written: a kind of hovering above magnetic territory, always seeking the centre of meaning."***
* My God! Can you imagine writing poetry in a language like that? I want that word.
** I'll point out here that editorial meetings at work - where I'm going back today! - are just as tortuous, and there is no poetry to show at the end of it! Editing someone else's policy report is kind of like translating, & requires a similar nimbleness with vocabulary and tone - only I hide it under the various bushels of "identifying your reader," "house style" and "best practice"...
*** I think this phrase is really worth remembering: "a kind of hovering over magnetic territory, always seeking the centre of meaning."
Just this evening, while I've been out on my balcony admiring the bluebells and scooter thieves, fellow blogger Dave Hill (fresh back from Cornwall) has written about the cruising, preening, macho street culture of Hackney - revving up now in the warm weather, ready for another summer of threatening vibes. You know what it's like: the cars, the motorcycles you can hear a mile off, the hip hop blaring through open windows, the thudding bass lines that sound more like an earthquake than just a red light.
It's always the same. Those youngsters! That rap they listen to!
Why, I bet it was just the same two hundred years ago. (n.b.: squirrel suit warning)
Imagine poor William Wordsworth, trying to do his bit so that we could have our bicentenary of the publication of "Daffodils," when all at once he spies a host, a crowd of rude boys outside his window... at first he finds it hard to concentrate on his work in all the racket, but then he gets to thinking: surely someone should try to engage these young people? Why not him?
"A spokesman for Cumbria Tourism, which was behind the innovative approach to the poem, said (on the golakes website): 'Wordsworth’s Daffodils poem has remained unchanged for 200 years and to keep it alive for another two centuries, we wanted to engage the You Tube (sic) generation who want modern music and amusing video footage on the web.
'Hopefully this will give them a reason to connect with a poem published in 1807 as well as with the works of Wordsworth and the stunning landscape of The Lake District that inspired him.' "
It's spring, and with it come the darling buds on the trees along my road; the tree below my balcony is sprouting its tentative, yellowy-green tendrils as I type. The air feels sweet and forgiving, and each sunset spreads its pink and blue hazes far and wide, so that the rooftops I can see across north London seem not so much laid out as softly spread, as if the air were a kind of butter. The mornings are kind of golden and indistinct.
For weeks now, when I've been awake in my ill-and-not-sleeping-too-well mode at about 4am, I have heard the delicious tweeting of the early birds out the back. Yes, they are glad! Glad to be awake and alive in this wonderful nest-building season.
Indeed, young are everywhere, as befits the young year. The entirety of my block - Baroque Mansions - is full now of the sound of babies crying. They cry a lot, they cry lustily, and they cry all the time. It's one of the ways I know I'm awake in the morning.
And I've just witnessed the final harbinger of spring - as if a week of the most lovely, hot weather with lashings of sunshine all round wasn't enough to convince us. As if I had not already negotiated that strange denial, and then the weirdly naked feeling of not wearing a jacket. As if the first Havaiana outing of the year, complete with blisters between my toes, wasn't enough evidence!
No... I was sitting here typing my next post - a treat which may now be slightly delayed, continuing my current obsessive television theme - when suddenly I heard a shrill voice somewhere outside calling out: Oi! What the fuck are you doing? (pause, then an octave higher:) What the FUCK are you DOING, you CUNT!
I rush to the window, wondering if maybe my friend Jan has arrived unnanounced for a spot of tea, just in time to see a skinny little guy in a navy blue hoodie and white shorts - not a good look, btw, with spindly white legs - scurry round to the front of his little red van and drive off pronto. The fattest woman I have ever seen is leaning out the top window opposite Baroque Mansions, watching the van drive off with its two back doors flapping open. In the middle of the road, immediately behind where the van was, a scooter lies on its side. A big one, practically an almost-motorbike. The woman in the window recites the van's registration number as loudly as she can, in a voice that rings with extraordinary clarity, ricocheting off buildings in four directions.
There is a lull, in which the only thing that happens is that the skinny guy reaches the corner of our road. Rather than sceeching round it in Italian Job style, desperate to defeat the forces of law and order, he instead gets out, goes round the back, secures the two flapping doors, and gets back in. Then he does up his seatbelt and drives off into the balmy spring dusk.
Meanwhile, the couple of obligatory Hassidic guys come outside to see what's happening - they reach the crime scene just as the lady appears on her front path wearing only a mauve T shirt and enormous skin-tight knee-length shorts. He was fucking trying to steal it! she says to the two men. The cunt. Christ. The three of them lift the scooter and push it towards the kerb, after gazing down the street for a moment in the direction the red van went in. I can see the smaller of the men, the fringes on his tallis waving in the breeze, mildly saying something to her, but I can't hear him. I got the fucking registration number anyway, she continues, clear as a bell, and then heaves a great sigh as they get the scooter in its parking place. She's having trouble getting it to stand up. The fucking stand!! she expostulates.
My next-door neighbour's head appears out her window. Hi, she says. I think somebody was trying to steal a scooter.
Hi, I say to her. It's spring again!
God, I just know this is going to bring about a bazillion Google hits, but I can't resist.
Every once in a blue moon EastEnders manages to hit a nugget of the real thing. They came close recently when Kevin Wicks quoted Samuel Beckett (a quote so well embedded in the script that it didn't even show unless you knew the quote, and they even got the bit before the famous bit of the quote) and referenced Derek Jarman in the same episode. That was the bit where Kevin turns up at Dungeness, having been missing for over a month, and has an existential encounter with a young vagrant played by the bloke who played Mr Guppy in Bleak House... well, that came close, but wasn't quite the real deal. The thing is, the truly transcendental moments on the Square always, & I mean always, involve Dot.
Once, when I was burbling on about human nature, la comedie humaine and cheesy scene-editing, a friend of mine told me nothing amuses her more than the spectacle of her most intellectual friends trying to develop a construct to justify something they like watching (mentioning another friend of hers who likes Mulder and Scully). But sometimes you don't really need the construct. Sometimes a story just manages to go somewhere deep. As the books will tell you, this is almost always because of something in a character, which is why the Derek Jarman routine never got above (very enjoyable) kitsch.*
A week ago it was a storyline like any other: Yolande starts "helping" Dot out at the launderette, because she's trying to run it singlehanded since Pauline left - I mean, died. Then Dot becomes convinced she's no longer needed, and then she sinks into a depression. Jim takes her away for a day in the country, down to where they used to go hop-picking in Kent (just like in Of Human Bondage), and the day becomes one of those EastEnders set pieces (like the Dungeness one, but without the jokes about Scotland).
The hop fields are gone, and there's a museum. The farmhouse, where "it used to be all mud and barking dogs," is all cleaned up and gentrified. Dot and Jim stand there looking stricken. Dot wants to go visit her old hop-picking friend, and on the way there she stops at the local church, only to find that her friend has recently died. She goes to see the friend's son, who was a vicar, but who now turns out to have renounced his faith in favour of a pastiche of cultural relativism, i.e., big fat Nothing. He becomes a bit ugly, despite his Free Tibet T shirt - blaming his mother's religion for his loss of faith, and explicitly blames Dot for all the trouble with her son Nick (his childhood playmate, see) (currently languishing in prison: not sure what they've done with the erstwhile cancer storyline). Dot is now precipitated into total crisis. Not only is she completely useless, and not only are her memories all destroyed, her world oder turned on its head, but she is accused of having been a failure all along. She makes Jim stop so she can go into the church again to pray, and when she gets into the church she finds a baby in a basket, and sees a young girl running out of the church.
Well, reader, you know what comes next! The baby has been given to Dot by God. God has given her another chance. She is going to give the desperate girl a chance. She takes the baby and leaves a note with her address on the notice board. It's a Sign.
This has been a classic couple of days: Jim's ill-fated visit to the sleazy "gentlemen's club" in Dartford - address found on a flyer in the basket with the baby; the sub-plot about Big Mo thinking she's being haunted by the ghost of Garry and Lynn's lost baby, because she keeps hearing crying;* Jim's "good-citizen" call to Immigration to shop the girl. Dot, get this, doesn't even go to church on Good Friday. There is, of course, the almost obligatory current-affairs, educating-the masses aspect, as the story by now involves the lovely young Russian-sounding girl, an illegal immigrant of course, who is the mother of little Tomas - but, because it is the EastEnders Easter story and is all about Dot, it soon overtakes all that. By the end of tonight's episode even Jim can feel the holiness and realises that Anya (as well as Dot) is the child of God.
Maybe you had to be there.
I feel Dot's inability to feel needed after the death of Pauline - her fear of losing Jim as well - her questioning of how, after all, she belongs to the world - is being played out in ways that would not disgrace Tolstoy.*** The immigration officers follow them to the church, where Dot has taken Anya for sanctuary ("where all o' God's lambs can find shelter"), and Dot stands there implacable in the opening of the rood screen, her arms held straight out to the sides so they can't enter the chancel."I will not let you pass!" she says. "I ain't scared o' yer. I'm a woman o' Christ, and Jesus' hand is on my shoulder, and the mark of 'is love is on my brow, and 'e will not let me be swept aside in 'is father's house."
Anya gives herself up but leaves the baby to Dot & Jim (the immigration officers don't know about the baby), whispering in Dot's ear while she hugs her goodbye, "I trust you." Dot runs out and stands in the dark night waving helplessly as Anya's white face recedes... the closing shot is Dot & Jim standing huddled together in the dim gold light of the church, near the altar, cradling the swaddled baby.
Gulp! Dot is the hero of EastEnders.
* Mr Guppy to Kevin: (something along the lines of) oh yeah? Well what makes this Jarman geezer so flippin special then??
Kevin to Mr Guppy: He made films. (menacingly) And I like films.
** Sadly, Ms B laughed like a drain when Mo ran over to beg Garry for forgiveness for always calling him a plonker, with rolled-up loo roll sticking out of her ears "like the Easter bunny"...
*** I say this advisedly, in light of the kischiness of the Russian novelists and in particular the Tolstoyan brand of it. It's not Dostoyevsky and it sure as hell ain't Chekhov.
n.b.: this has been brought to you in the place of the previously scheduled report on time travel, vis-a-vis this week's final episode of Life On Mars.
the master of farting around?
There has been much discussion over the past couple of days, here in Baroque Mansions and elsewhere, about the state of Americans. That the discussion was intended, by Ms Baroque, actually to be about casual prejudice among Britons* is neither here nor there at the moment, because the anti-American feelings were simply too strong a force to be quelled.
It has long been held by Ms Baroque that to be an American in Britain - even in London - is no easy thing at times.** This is truer in the Bush era than ever (Ms B, like some of the more resilient dinosaurs, has been here through at least three if not four eras, including the Jurassic).
Oddly, I was once welcomed with open arms as a guest reader at an exiled poets event - & no one more surprised than me, as my (technically; I have long repudiated it with my feet) government is helping is many of these people's governments to commit the atrocities that have landed them so far from home - because the exiled poets recognised that the American people are suffering under the oppression of the Bush administration, its lies, its erosion of civil liberties, its smokescreens, its insistence that if you aren't part of its solution you are the problem. In short, they accepted me as an exiled poet. It was the strangest feeling. I felt like a fraud.
Well, there are Americans who are intelligent, travelled, cultured, clear-thinking, humane, and articulate in their opposition to the present situation. But there is one less now, because Kurt Vonnegut has died. I suppose it had to happen sometime, and he was 84. But it is sad news.
Here are extracts from an extract, published in the Guardian last year, of his memoir of the Bush era, A Man Without a Country:
"It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the US Constitution.
But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'état imaginable.
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: 'C-Students from Yale'.
George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences...."
"There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president..."
"In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.
In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as Nazis once were.
And with good reason."
editing in again: Oliver Kamm has written an interesting critical piece on Vonnegut, which appears both in the Times and on his own blog.
* There was a link in my mind, if nowhere else, between the ease with which people told, and excused, "stupid American" stories and the rising tide of anti-semitism, also increasingly socially acceptable, which is also usually denied and/or justified when brought to light.
** Not that I usually make a big thing of being "American"...in fact, there's no need to.
Some birthday candle!
As some readers will be aware, blogs are officially ten years old. Not this one. And not, necessarily, any blog in particular. But blogs as a phenomenon have been here in one form or another for a decade. The Guardian news blog has a little piece by a Bobbie Johnson (who he? Ed.) celebrating that milestone and highlighting some of the blogs which have made blog history: blistory.
But wait! The thing that sticks in this little blogger's memory after finishing this post is the bit that says The Bloggies - the best-known international blog awards - reward "people everybody has heard of for writing nobody remembers."
Yeah - like we all remember every leader we've ever read? And as for some of the regular columnists..!
Seriously, folks. I once read a news article in the Telegraph - I read it online, and alas, now I can't remember what it was even about. The writing itself was so bad, in so many ways, that I was driven to leave a comment saying it gave newspaper journalism a bad name. I know it wasn't the Guardian. But even in the Graun one does occasionally come across a column, meant to be entertaining, which is so lame that one is actually embarrassed, alone in one's own kitchen.
edited in: the same Guardian blogger has a new post, gleefully announcing that they are shortlisted for three Webby awards! Clearly nothing like the Bloggies then.
I know this is a massive cheat, but sometimes the accoutrements are as important as the garments. And trust me: this breakfast looks a sight more elegant than Ms B this morning! It is a shame not to look as elegant as the phrase "the baroque birthday" might suggest, but I'm afraid that is just now it is. Elegance can come from within, as we know, and it can also come from so far without that it is in the furnishings.
I always think some nice china can improve almost anything. I have a massive thing for cups and dishes, jugs and vases. The plain cream vase is one of two I have - the other one is about four inches in diameter - and I love them. They re quite old but I don't know how old and can't even remember where they came from.
The flowers are on their way out, but are two weeks old and have been beautiful. The adorable black spotty cup is a present! Christine (aka the Cat Lady) has delightfully given me a pair of them for my birthday - she was worried because "they've been out for ages," but I have actually, in fact, been hankering after them for ages! So that works out. The bowl contains blueberries, nectarine, strawberries and yoghurt. No fat.
It's very late to be posting a breakfast picture, but by a miracle I slept until nearly ten! And, yes, ate my little breakfast at noon. I did waste my morning trying to google something amusing about my birthday, but failed utterly, only getting sidetracked into the depressing story of Sir Thomas Wyatt's only son, Thomas Wyatt the younger, who was beheaded on this day in 1554 for leading a rebellion to prevent Bloody Mary from marrying Philip II of Spain. (It didn't work: she married him anyway, of course. She was in foolishly in love with him, though for him it was just political expediency, and I myself have seen her personal prayerbook stained and hardened with the salt of her tears.)
I do share a birthday with the poet ("poor, mad") Christopher Smart, born in 1722, who is most famous for his poem about his cat, Jeffrey (which I will not reprise here, but of which I am sure the Cat Lady would approve). But I knew that already.
Ms Rational Self-Determinism tried to wreck the vibe by ringing me up and asking how old I was, because she can't remember. "Good," I said.
Not sure what next.* It's strange being off sick on your birthday. I had a lovely card from the team at work, though. In a hot pink envelope. Coffee, somewhere, in a bit. Oh, my dreamlike days! My limbs are pulling strangely downwards, and my brain is in a fuzz. Where is the intellegual rigour? I'll take the kids out for dinner, at some comparatively vast expense. I think I could eat a seafood pizza, if I told them to hold the olive oil.** And I'm just waiting for the day when a birthday treat doesn't have to be on my tab.
However, I'm wearing a groovy top I haven't fitted for ages!
* Secretly, I think I feel like going and having another little kip...
** Later. Okay, here's the deal. Seafood pizza really needs olive oil. Dried-out mussels are not a good thing.
Of course, Ms B is getting less fat by the day, and this may be flying in the face of a beloved national generalisation. For yes, she is (whisper it) American.
I will make up for my recent almost entire lack of content by sharing with you my alarm on reading the comments column to a post Bryan Appleyard has written about why Americans may have such a high obesity rate. That is, Terry Eagleton had a theory - which is basically that, if there are superfat people everywhere in America, and Americans hardly ever leave America, they would naturally become accustomed to it and assume that everywhere is the same.* This is an argument which - though it doesn't do much to move things forward - does offer a window into why the country has been so isolationist, why air-conditioned Texans with electric can openers and SUVs think they live in roughly the same way as middle-class schoolteachers from Lyon, and why political thinking has so often been so out of kilter with the rest of the world.
These are serious issues worthy of continued thought and discussion.
Appleyard has initiated his discussion with a link to a web page titled "how fat is your country?" which reveals that 30 per cent of Americans have a BMI of over 30.** This is sad, and alarming, and not very surprising, even if I don't really know what "BMI over 30" means. His post is called "I know Americans are fat..."
It seems that this short post, innocuous although possibly titled in such a way as to encourage these stories, was like a flame to a firecracker. The readers were sparked. Americans are so stupid! So ignorant! They don't know anything! They go all over the world exposing their crassness and complacency! And it's so funny!
One goes, "They're cheap, they're unfair but they're terrific fun, so here are my two favourite Ignorant Yank stories" - and finishes, "I'll add the usual disclaimers... So it's really not their fault and there are some frighteningly smart ones."
(Frighteningly smart one here: see me waving?)
So my question - and indeed my comments (two comments, because there is a second post, entitled "I know Americans are fat 2", which makes a facetious assertion that the national obesity is down to over-consumption of marshmallow chicks at Eastertime***) pretty much run like this. Can you imagine these comments - in which I imagine the commenters wiping tears of mirth from their eyes - going down socially if, instead of "Americans" they had said "black people," "Indian people," "women," etc? If someone had said "oh I know it's unfair but here are my favourite Ignorant Kike stories?"****
Sure, the stories they are retailing are embarrassing. It's hard to hear these stories. It's also weird that people keep telling them and expecting me to laugh as uproariously as they do.
Humourless, moi?
I'll lighten the tone for ya, though. I very much enjoyed Ohio blogger Erin O'Brien's Easter posts this year. They made me happy!
She's not fat, though.
* in my experience this leads to an "instant weight-loss effect" of at least a stone every time I fly into the States, as I suddenly look so much thinner than half the people in the airport. I'm not complaining.
** the UK is running at 23 per cent and is number three in the list. Maybe time to start eating less chocolate?
*** regular readers will be delighted to know that, were I able to get hold of any Peeps in this country, I would be able to eat them: for they contain no fat. Hurrah! On this same principle I have been eating the odd meringue nest instead of a good old Hobnob with my tea. The joy.
**** I'll insert the usual disclaimer here. I like Bryan Appleyard's blog. He wasn't the person who wrote those stories, it was his readers. I'm linking here because I'm shocked at how easily people slipped into this mode, and for all I know Bryan Appleyard is just as surprised as I am.
Creaking into a sort of movement, with "real" things to do. I'm breaking myself back in after an unbelievable month of being sick.
Tasks for the day:
go to the GP for a sick note
put money on Oyster card first, so I can get there (everything's expired! And typical - didn't I end up in hospital just over a week into a one-month, £105 travelcard, which was then completely wasted?)
ring up about my remote that still doesn't work, even though they sent a new one - is this because I bought a new TV? Why doesn't the remote work??
ring up about my Council Tax that doesn't seem to include the 25% rebate, which is the only discernable advantage to living alone? (sorry to those of you who prefer it - I really would love some company, and having someone else cook sometimes, and maybe even do some of the things on this list)
ring landlords about various repairs
ring bank to pay first month's council tax and increase the standing order for the rent to whatever it has inevitably gone up to, now it's April (maybe TS Eliot was onto something there); try to do this without actually finding out balance of account, lest I have a relapse
send British Gas a meter reading
send my new energy suppliers, whose name I forget because they were bought out after I signed up with them and before they started delivering my energy (so why don't I have any energy, is the next question)
Hmm. I think I will try to do half these things today and half tomorrow. I can feel a light sweat on my upper lip just thinking about it all. Maybe even spread it over three days, the council tax thing looks like a whole day to me.
And has it struck you how none of those are even real things? And I've called this post the real world. Alas.
Since my return to Baroque Mansions nothing has happened. I arrived off the train and went collapso, and thus have remained for two days. A friend had an Easter party which was lovely, and I had fun and didn't eat the food,* and it was just like not being ill at all! Then I came home and fell asleep on the sofa at 9.30pm. Woke up four whole hours later to some godawful sub-OC California-young-person drama on the TV.
I'm not very "literary" at the moment, either. Apologies. I'm empty of ideas. I haven't read a newspaper. I haven't read more than about 10 pages of Proust. All the characters seem a little irritating. I haven't read anything, except the new Poetry Review which was waiting for me. (They've never taken anything of mine. On the whole I haven't done very well on the English Poetry Scene - whatever that is - which doesn't surprise me in one way, because I look around at the poetry that's being published and it is nothing like mine in tone or sensibility, and I'm not saying I think that's a bad thing! This business of Not-Being-English is something you can't escape from, even when you think it isn't the issue at hand: I feel I'm always doing or saying something I sort of hadn't of ought to, & then people say it's because I'm American. Even though I'm also a flop in America. They think I'm too English.)
The place is slowly getting tidier as I unpack and do some laundry. Last night I watched The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on telly, in a mindless way, while my gall bladder did a little dance behind my ribs. I hadn't eaten any fat.** But this twingeing thing, while it is still happening, is happening less than it was two weeks ago. And I'm glad to say the nausea passed off somewhere in St Ives, possibly around the first bowl of mussels.***
Argh! And I'm writing this and letting my tea (half skimmed, half semi)**** go cold!
Excelsior!
* leg of lamb, spinach pastry, roasted onions, rich chocolate cake; it's okay though, the vegetables included a heavenly, and filling, baked squash
** here's what I ate. It was a melange of sweet potato, borlotti beans, tinned tuna, chili slices, baby tomatoes cut in half, and fresh basil, with balsamic vinegar.
*** you are so lucky. You could have had a blogger who didn't whinge on about all her symptoms and aches and pains and ailments.
**** okay, I'll stop.
Is Tom wondering where he left his bag?
I called home. It was my uncle's birthday.* I was sitting on the deck of a fish restaurant over looking St Ives Harbour, waiting for my mussels with no cream & extra chillies, and the water in the bay was both turqoise and seemingly infinite, and it made me happy thinking about how it went all the way to New York. Tom answered the phone.
"Oh, it's you!" he said, in his gravelly Estonian voice.
Yep, it's me all right. Happy birthday, Tom!
"Thank you. But I don't have birthdays any more," he said; "there's no point, when you have one foot in the grave... and you always have one very dirty sock." He went on: "but anyway, I had a dream about you the other night, and it's turned into a poem."
A poem?
"Yes, Mary keeps threatening to send it to you."
He said, "I dreamed that you called me, and you were on a bus - you're always on a bus when you call, anyway." (This is the story of Ms B's life.) "In the dream you were going on a bus to Brighton, but in the poem I changed it to Bridgewater. You called me and you were describing all the contents of your holdall bag; that was the whole conversation."
I was describing the contents of my bag? But I love this! It seems wonderfully realistic!
"Yes, I thought so," said Tom. "Our conversations always are like the contents of your holdall bag."**
Now, if I regret one thing, it is that I didn't think to ask Tom what the dream contents of my bag were. That is: what did his unconscious think I had in my bag? (Was it a replacement Chanel Rouge Noir? Or is that my dream?) I want to know.
* It was also Mama Baroque's birthday, and also His Excellency the Duc de Baroque's birthday; when I was a child I used to think that when you grew up you met someone with the same birthday as you, fell in love and got married. But although I tried to call them the only person who answered his phone was Tom.
**n.b., the above illustration is a dramatic reconstruction of my holdall bag; the objects depicted are a characteristic sampling only and are not intended to represent today's - or even Friday's - bag.
Just this morning my feet were in the real live sea.
The view from my balcony looks marginally more beautiful than it did a week ago: the spring air has come to London as well as St Ives, and the sunset tonight over Highgate was stratified in blues and pinks. Yellowy-green leaf-buds are opening on the trees, so that on the way back from Paddington today I almost had the impression that north London was wearing its Easter decorations.
I know many of this blog's readers, and those who don't read it, are on holiday this week. Everyone's away, it's a common condition. To me it's a miracle, going somewhere else so different, for a week of bliss and forgetting, not having to deal with the traffic and noise and Dalston... I know people who go on holiday four times a year - or certainly three, anyway - and seem to take it for granted. But I never do. I once went three years without setting foot outside London even once: I just had no money and no one to go stay with, and no one (as I imagine a boyfriend or partner might) nagging me to go away, do something fun. So I know exactly what it means to get out of this place.
So there we were, for a week! The sky is amazing and so wide. The sea so huge, and goes all the way across to the other side, with nothing between. All sorts of magical things. I had my own bedroom in the holiday house, unlike the arrangement regular readers will recall here in Baroque Mansions, where I have an (admittedly posh and luxurious) sofabed in the living room. Which is also my study. And the living room. (Lately I've been sleeping not even there, though, but on the Urban Warrior's disused futon, as I don't feel up to all the twice-daily hoiking of a sofabed... & it's just not the same.)
Does anybody else, reading this, really hate that feature in the Saturday Guardian lately, with photographs of various writer's studies, and the writers discussing their space and all their little artefacts? All their handmade desks, two-desk arrangements, oriental carpets, manual typewriters, walls and walls of books, paintings given to them by Eduardo Paolozzi, "oh this old heap", morning writing routines and nice walks after lunch before a G&T at 5pm? There was an older woman recently of whom I'd never heard. She has a small flat, apparently, and the newspaper carried a photograph of a corner of her living room, where she says she writes on a corner of her dining table, if there's a corner clear. The room was lovely. Small. Full of nice things. And with mounds of papers all over the table and chairs. And it's the only sitting room she has.
You know - I just don't think it's interesting reading about the working space of rich, pampered people. There's something about the describing of their space like that, which makes them sound very rich and pampered, spoilt even. People can't help sounding complacent. I liked the corner of the dining table in the living room far more. Remember, Harry Potter was originally written in a caff. And was it Shirley Jackson, who used to drive the car three blocks, park up, and write in the car?
Let's see, back to St Ives. In St Ives I didn't have a writing space, but I had a time. I worked on the laptop in bed in my room in the mornings before the girls were awake. It was a real house: I had to go down the stairs to make tea, and there was a real garden door I could open! Onto a perpendicular terraced garden, in which you would get waved at by the people sitting in the Tate cafe. Bit intrusive that, actually. But hours earlier, at 7.30, I'd open the door and go outside on the cold paving stones. Bare feet on a cold, damp patio: the feel of summer. Breathe the air, make the tea, go back to bed to work propped up on pillows, with the sea swishing right outside the window.
A couple of times I fell asleep again. And most days I had a sleep after lunch.
One day I set up a table in the top room by the three-sided window, and wrote there in the sunshine with a view of the sea for an hour and a half. The girls were at the beach. When I got too tired I curled up on the metre-deep window seat with a duvet and three pillows, and read Proust till I fell asleep.
We had very quiet evenings, because of course the girls weren't out raving, at 13. Early nights, lots of taking it easy and resting my poor gall bladder, and also my poor stomach.
So now we're back. I'm here all on my own in the very flat I just spent two weeks lying on the sofa in - and was in fact ill for a week in, in February - and a week in December, and one in October - I'm a little sick of the vibe in this place now. The sofa cushions are all hard and flat and I'm too tired to beat them up. I do have writing to do and it will feel like work now I'm home. I don't have a proper writing space here either. And I'm still really, really tired. Stomach not right. Colour not right. And tired. Chores. I'll take it easy and see how I go.
On the plus side, I've been living on fresh fish, which is expensive but great. Mussels with the white wine and the garlic, but no cream. I could live on that.
Good morning campers! Not only is it Good Friday today, but it is also a good Friday: I have booked myself and Mlle B (no longer 'Little" Mlle B; she is taller than I am and often can't get on the bus for free because the drivers don't believe she's under 16) into just about the only bed and breakfast room free tonight in all of St Ives. And oh, it is lovely. Two brass beds, one double and one single, with gorgeous bedding and an antique oak wardrobe and commode set. We also love the landlady, Lydia. We gave her all the food left over from our little house (which we wept - in a virtual way - to leave). She says she can do me a no-fat breakfast - roasting my tomatoes with the rosemary I have given her - and she had palpitations, poor thing, when she found out Mlle B was only 13! "Oooh," she said, "I don't think I could cope with girls..."
Yesterday we lay in the grass on a rocky hilltop which is an island, on which stands a centuries-old chapel, with turquoise sea on three sides and seagulls squawking all around, reading. Proust: perfect. Not far away is another tiny island, on which stands a lighthouse, and it is Virginia Woolf's lighthouse.
Did her characters ever reach the lighthouse? I've tried five times to read that book and never succeeded beyond the first two chapters; but I have a fondness for the book born of, perhaps, sheer endeavour.
Now, Ms B has never read Proust before. But somehow there was the glimmer of an idea of doing so in 2007, I think because someone said something that made me think I'd like him, or maybe something was gravitating to me through the ether. So when I saw a secondhand copy of The Way by Swann's - the title of Vol I in the new Penguin translation - I snapped it up. I brought it with me on a whim and it has proved to be the best-ever holiday reading, especially as most of it describes the village of Combray at Eastertime, and it is essentially descriptions of a boy's holiday leisure, and his internal life, and country walks and flowers. Not sure the Victoria Line would be the best place to introduce myself to this material, but in St Ives it is flying into my brain whole. This is simply the best description I have ever read of what it's like being an introspective child. It feels like a discovery - as if no one had ever found it before me, as if it had been waiting all these years just for me to come along and read it. It's essentially, of course, poetry. It is poetic in its structure and in its attention to language (this is something the translator has respected, and written at length about in the introduction) - and, which I hadn't been expecting particularly, it's also funny.
Proust! My nbf!
I was going to write something here about the wonderful parish church in St Ives - built in 1410, consecrated in 1426, and absolutely magical, with painted carvings of the saints, in gold robes, around the base of the carved wooden ribbing of the ceiling - especially as it is Holy Week. But I don't have time now. I will try soon to do this, maybe on Easter itself.
In the mean time, happy weekend all!
This post comes to you from the only place in St Ives with a public internet connection, aside from the library, which doesn't open again till Tuesday. It's a very old, black-beamed and black-panelled pub called the Sloop Inn, just on the waterfront and thus very crowded, with execrable music.* I have had to sit six feet away from a very noisy and cretinous group of drunken louts - and that's not name-calling. Speaking of the bliss that is Anywhere Outside London, when I sat down and opened my iBook the louts had a loutish conversation of grunts, laughter and pointing, all about its pristine beauty and how much fun it would be to "get it."
In other news, I know it's bad form, but I do eke hours of enjoyment from the senders' names in my spam box. The days are gone when people could get a chuckle from the punning or symbolic names of fictional characters: it's all realism now. So my innocent little game has an almost illicit feel, as I imagine what someone like Dickens or Henry James would do with some of these names.
Here is a list of some of the best names I have received spam from in the last two days alone! So sue me.
Hangnail F Bumbled
Banefuller L Impeccable
Cabinet B Upstart
Farmer Q Shick
Leslie Friedman
Ebony Goins
Lucien L Hickok
Now, that is a book I'd love to write! Or to read. Maybe I should put Chip Dale onto it.
(n.b. two days later. Today's spam names are: Venally U. Shuttlecock, Krikorian M. Dement, Goodwater Blandville and Pollack P. Rhein. Any of these would do a novel proud.)
* edited in to say that that next time I went into the Sloop they were playing Amy Winehouse. So it was fine.
