our team and George

This was among the old photographs my sister brought with her last month from our dad's house. It's a complete mystery - am I related to George? - I love the way George is standing, as if he weren't really there; the swayback of the patched-up old barn roof, the way the fences all seem to be falling down - even the snow looks halfhearted. Even the horse is looking away. Well, and there they all are, posing for the picture, which someone thought to take, and then wrote on the front of just so no one would ever forget what it was all about. So we would know.

it was 72 years ago today

The first Penguin book was published on July 30, 1935, the brainchild of publisher Allen Lane. It cost sixpence. Within a year 3,000,000 had been sold, and the demography of reading had changed utterly. Suddenly, for the first time ever, books by people like Maurois, Hemingway, Orwell, GB Shaw became widely affordable - and widely available, because a lynchpin of Lane's vision had been that the books should be sold in railway stations and other outlets that weren't bookshops.

This meant that suddenly the working classes, casual readers and students could afford to own all these books books instead of just borrowing them from the library.

You have to wonder if a similar venture nowadays (you know, involving serious literature for the non-chattering-classes?) would make any impact at all. Like free education, we now take the availability of books completely for granted.*

Thanks to Dave Hill for the prompt (hey, some of us know how to mark these lesser-known anniversaries!). I'd have marked the seventieth, two years ago, but unfortunately I had no blog then. I might still do it, though, in a different way... I've spent various amounts of time in several bookshops leafing through the addictive illustrated monograph, Penguin by Design, published for that anniversary. I might even haul off and buy it one day.

* Of course, if a bookseller came along, possessed of a similar vision... you know.

oh my God!

Ingmar Bergman - "the poet of the cinema" - has died, at 89. It's a great age, of course, but the event is important because it is the departure from our world of someone who gave us a great deal, to whom we are indebted probably in ways we don't quite know yet. The very fact that Bergman is so easy to lampoon shows that he did something new, that he gave us a way of seeing, a distinctive aesthetic framework for our own emotional experience.

I don't think this is overstating the case. Many of the most powerful and influential cultural moments of my life have been about Ingmar Bergman - and that's just the directly attributable ones.

I can't remember which was the first of his films I saw, but I know it changed the way I saw everything. Oh, wait. I remember going to see Autumn Sonata: amazing. Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullman and an absolutely engrossing emotional world.

Fanny and Alexander came out pretty early in my serious filmgoing life. It struck a huge chord with me - just at the brink of the adult world and still able to feel things as a child. I think this really is a time of susceptibility to ghosts, whether actual or psychological ones, things that mill around half-seen and felt, and this is something Bergman knew. For many years I cited it as my very favourite film.

By the time I saw The Seventh Seal it was too late, of course: the experience was necessarily corrupted by all those Woody Allen films. But isn't it stupendous? They've just re-released it on the big screen, by the way. It's on at the Curzon Soho, this week only. Seriously. I'll be going.

In 1987, after Bergman had retired from filmmaking and was the director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, his production of Miss Julie came to the NFT. I was so excited: I borrowed the play from the bookshop where I worked, walked over Waterloo Bridge, and sat in the foyer brushing up my Ibsen while waiting for the cheap on-the-day tickets to come on sale. (The guy at the desk insisted on giving me a discounted student ticket in the end - the earthly reward for all my swotting up!) It was wonderful. Watching the play in a foreign language - even with Strindberg's words floating fresh in my head - meant I was double-alert to all the other indicators. It was extra-intense and even maybe extra-dramatic.

Bergman's use of visual cues, of colour to build atmosphere, the amazing simplicity of everything he does - even if it seems ornate it is always incredibly simple - his directness coupled with his subtlety of perception - the completeness of everything he made. These are wonderful things. If I shut my eyes and think of each of these films, I can see a colour impression. In the case of The Seventh Seal, it's light and shadow.*

In 1987 I read Bergman's autobiography, The Magic Lantern. A brilliant, or at least it struck me so at the time, portrayal of how his creative life grew from childhood onwards. Bergman understood innately that everybody, no matter how insignificant they may seem to other people, has an inner life. During this part of my life I was hungry for knowledge - news, as it were - of how other people had navigated theirs, how they had translated thier experience into creation, and Bergman's was one of the most inspiring books I read. I still have my proof copy.

But actually, I've just remembered the biggest thing Bergman ever gave me. It was his Magic Flute that introduced me to Mozart when I was only 14 - changing the way I thought about movies at the same time, incidentally. My love for Mozart's operas is one of the main things in my pantheon of loves, so this was a big moment for the young Ms B!

Once again, this film conveys an incredibly subtle mix of innocence and sophistication, the darkness never quite concealed by the light, the richness and simplicity of Mozart's music and the broad music hall comedy - the stage flats, the backstage scenes... Everything fell open for me, the experience and all of its constituent parts. I can remember trying - and failing - to describe the impact it made on me to my dad, in his kitchen later. That girl in the audience, the one the camera keeps coming back to? I know she was a cinematic device to channel our experience of the play-within-a-movie, and all that, but forget that: I was her.**

Mozart was a natural chopice for Bergman: they are both very much concerned with redemption, with what is possible for the spirit precisely in the context of earthly living, both alive to the humour that co-exists with pathos, waiting to trip us up - both quintessentially alive. Both had a reputation for the ladies, too. And both made great art.

And another thing about Ingmar Bergman: people talk about the Gloomy Swede, but his films are so exuberantly observed, they are so drenched in awareness, that they seem more exhilarating to me than otherwise. And indeed, time and again in televised interviews Bergman appears giving great howls of laughter. His actors report much laughter on set. Really: however gloomy a vision may be, to communicate it, and to receive it, can be a matter of joy.***

"The people in my films are exactly like myself - creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they're talking," Bergman said. "Mostly they're body, with a little hollow for the soul."

This quote, from the Washington Post, feels apt, today.


* Of course, Sven Nyqvist is a genius too.

** Somewhere in my mind is a pesky Simon Callow as Schickaneder that won't go away: I think that must have been in Amadeus. Ah well! Simon Callow - love 'im.

*** I had this experience at the age of 17, reading Crime and Punishment. I found it actually overwhelming, and was so happy I felt I might burst. On later rereading, I found many of the passages that had had this effect on me stultifyingly sentimental and overblown - but this only goes to prove that everything in art is about capacity, taste, experience. No matter; I've never lost the experience, anyway.

(all together now:) Awwwwww...

Hmm, I've got embroiled in a discussion about sentimentality, on a messageboard elsewhere.

Here are some thoughts on the subject: i.e., my post, cruelly transplanted.

I'd say sentimentality is where something is freighted with more than its proper load of sentiment, or feeling - where the emotion expressed is out of proportion to the thing it pertains to. It's giving a thing more tenderness than it has earned.

It's a risk of earnestness, also of whimsy (on which side it overlaps with - but is not quite the same as - camp, or kitsch).

Sentimentality tells the viewer or reader how to feel about its subject. It is dangerous because it takes a specific person or thing and makes it general, applying this false emotion to all instances of that thing: kittens, old people, young lovers, the countryside. It idealises, & thus falsifies.

Then again, it can take something common and make it out to be almost unique, exaggerating the amount of feeling due to it as a type: the cult of motherhood (with its emphasis on this thing called mother-love, which is supposed to be the best kind of love in the world) is a case in point.

Fascist art is sentimental: Mussolini & Stalin loved all that stuff because it's so easy to manipulate and potentially so powerful. It's like sugar - it's absorbed quickly, all in one go, but it palls quickly too, because there is nothing left to be got from it. There's nothing left over from it.

In terms of art, sentimentality can never be successful, because in order to engage with it the viewer or reader (or listener) has to shut down his or her critical faculties, ask no questions, and just become a passive recipient of whatever feeling the artist decides to throw at them.

Some film examples. Both Forrest Gump and It's a Wonderful Life (much as I love Jimmy Stewart) are grossly sentimental, in that they both make emotional points which are false, and do so by distorting the truth. Forrest Gump, though I hate it more, can arguably be more easily redeemed, because it at least has a satirical element. ET, however, will burn forever in the hell of gross sentimentality. God I hate that film! Chaplin, eg, is shockingly sentimental where Buster Keaton is not at all. Because he understates.)

The saying (I think from Oscar Wilde, himself a great sentimentalist) is that idealism is born of cynicism - and I think sentimentality (the close relative of idealism, which is the condition of valuing things not as they are, but how you wish they were - this is the type of sentimentalism that so mars the final section of The Colour Purple) is also born of cynicism, because if a person is in touch with his or her feelings, there's no need to distort them to make a point. In my experience of life, the people who are the most sentimental - who assign most emotional weight to things that haven't earned it - often don't assign enough to those things that have. It's a corruption of real feeling, or anyway of the accurate expression of feeling.

This element of distortion is the thing that makes sentimentality potentially creepy (a useful device for the purposes of portraying something as sinister), and makes clowns so frightening.

it was a dark and stormy night

I don't know... a tiny kitten arrives - maybe I found it in a coffee shop. (There's a coffee shop scene, complete with me trying to juggle too many things, including a cardboard box of vegetables, and some dishy guy very kindly offering to carry half of it to my seat for me. I wanted a mini-danish, but there are none; this is my breakfast, I'm off to a big wedding.)

From somewhere else, an even tinier hamster - from a child, I think. I'm in a flat with the ex-ex Mr B and he has also just bought a gigantic black Great Dane. No; it's not the ex-ex Mr B! Someone else I know, a poet, but after a rather steamy clinch he has suddenly turned into the ex-ex Mr B.

The doorbell goes, he goes to answer it. The animals get out, and I forget what - another animal, I think - he goes chases something down the middle of the black road. It's raining.

The kitten is out. The Great Dane is out, and he's huge, and he's not wearing a collar, and I try to call him back - but he's so new he doesn't even have a name! I'm going, "come here sweetie, come here puppy, come on... come on!" He's in the road with his paws tucked under him like a sphinx, looking at me. All haunch. A 4x4 full of children comes along but he doesn;t move. The car nudges him with a wheel, stops, nudges him again, but he doesn't move. I look at the driver. The driver rolls the 4x4 right over - first the front wheels, then - I'm petrified on the pavement, holding this increasingly alarmed and squirming kitten - the back wheels - over the dog. But the dog seems miraculously able to bear the weight, he is so powerful.

I turn to go inside, and then I see the dog beginning to move. As he pulls himself towards the pavement on his front paws a trail of blood stretches out behind him - his back legs are immobile - he was only mortal after all. I run inside to get a number for a 999 vet. No ex-ex Mr B, I'm not sure where I am, I don't even have a key so I keep trying to leave the door on the latch...

Get the number. The operator wants to know where I am, & I'm running up and down this anonymous London street trying to find a sign (good, isn't it?). All I can see is an estate with some hoodies hanging out & graffiti everywhere, and it is raining so hard - everything is sheets of grey, my eyebrows are streaming (thanks Chippy) - I can't read even the signs on the housing blocks. I'm going, "I can't see, it's kind of like Mayfair, but down a bit."

Run back to the flat, where I have put the kitten and hamster back in their little boxes (I narrowly missed stepping on the hamster at one point, a very fluffy thing) - the kitten is very snug with its mummy, now - and the poor dog is lying in the shrubbery now, he's so well hidden I almost think he's dead... I realise I need a canine ambulance, I can't lift him even if I knew how, or what was wrong with him, and there is no sign of anyone coming back to help me - but I can't seem to get the number again. I'm dialling, dialling. I'm coaxing the dog. I name him, so I can coax him: "Lionel! come here Lionel? Come on sweetie? Liiii-onel...! Come on!"

Lionel!

By the way, I must say that practically the only thing I did yesterday was watch La Reine Margot, a rather sensationalist French film about the Medicis, starring Isabelle Adjani and featuring a prolonged portrayal of the St Bartholemew's Day massacre of the Huguenots.

But enough of that, I have to get ready: I've got a wedding to go to! A poetry wedding! I must leave in time to get a coffee...

anniversary weekend special

Look! One of them even has a little dog!

Sixty-one years ago today, on July 27, 1946 - the year Mama Baroque turned 8, and on my own sister's birthday* of many years later - Gertrude Stein died.** Beatrix Potter, meanwhile, had been born eighty years (but for one day) earlier on July 28, 1866.***

One of these women moved from Indiana or somewhere to Paris, where she set the avant-garde tone for many years with her fractured prose, her Dada friends and her eggs scrambled in pure cream over a very low flame for half an hour; and one bought the Lake District off the proceeds of the safest little bunny watercolours you'll ever hope to see, and - aside from nearly marrying Ewan MacGregor**** - never did a a shocking thing in her life.

Strange? Having never thought of these two doughty women in the same moment, I now wonder if they are by any chance related?

If you're not sure, look again:










Happy birthday for tomorrow , Miss Potter! Rest in peace, Miss Stein! And happy birthday, Sissy!

* Yes, that's today.

** I can remember a book by Stein - A Rose is a Rose is a Rose - given by the baroque parents to said sister at some early point. Its syntactical logic seemed a bit circular to me - I was not in the spirit of Dada - but she loved it and went around quoting it to all and sundry, much to the delight of the grownups.

*** 141 years ago tomorrow, in other words - a good twenty years even before the birth of the baroque grandfather (who was very old indeed and, legend has it, saw Queen Victoria's funeral procession in London as a teenager). (And speaking of whom, I can tell you that one of my earliest books - which maddened me, just as I was learning to read, by remaining impenetrable - was called Hanes Benda Bynni. That's Benjamin Bunny, in Welsh, to you.)

**** A descendent, coincidentally, of the famous Farmer (Hannibal) MacGregor who turned Peter Rabbit's father into a pie.

the power of words

Someone today gained access to the magical Towers of Baroque by uttering the key words (I mean typed them, which is a kind of uttering, into Google), "Frederick Seidel I know the power of words it is nothing."

Well, I have an insight here, & I'd like to share it with Frederick Seidel (though I somehow think he won't be very interested). The power of words might depend on what words they are. Judging from the rest of my stats over the past few weeks, I'd say the most powerful words in the English language are "cold meatloaf sandwich."

Thank you Erin!

elegantly dressed art, with the right underthings

Elizabeth Bowen: always impeccable

I know this is primarily a poetry blog - and indeed this is an EDW post - but Chip Dale's very successful guest post not long ago, where he talked about his tips & tricks for writing novels, reminded me of something. I've been meaning to write about it ever since.

Back in the mists of time, your own correspondent - yes, that's me - was still too embarrassed to walk into a room and announce to all and sundry that she liked writing poems. (This phenomenon, called 15-year-old-girl syndrome, has been corroborated verbally by other poets, including big strapping guys.) So to that end, when her decade-long writers block cleared up, she started writing stories, and even a novel. It was a bloody good novel, except for one thing: it never got finished.

Of course if I'd had Chip to guide me with his common sense about not getting bogged down, or being too perfectionist, I might have finished it. But possibly not, because, as it turns out, my mental structures seem to be more those of poems than of stories - though oddly enough I do write narrative poems. Because I still love, I guess, character and incident. But I was unable to move a plot along through a whole, long, bewildering novel. I read and read and thought and thought and wrote and wrote, and I am about to share with you something that did help me a lot.* It still helps me a lot.

There is a wonderful little book, edited by Walter Allen, called Writers on Writing (Phoenix House, 1948),** which has both long and short quotes from almost every writer you can think of, pre-forties. Proust is in there, Henry James of course, Chekhov, Fielding, Coleridge, Maupassant, Ford Madox Ford, Dickens... the quotes are taken from letters, notebooks, prefaces, essays, and from novels themselves.

My favourite thing in the whole book is a little gem I've never seen anywhere else, before or since, headed Miss Bowen Sums It Up (originally published in Orion II as "Notes on Writing a Novel"). It's fifteen pages long so I can't give you the whole thing. In it Elizabeth Bowen spells out the moral, imaginative, structural, technical and other issues which must be addressed by a writer. Not, I stress, just a novelist, though this is what she was overtly writing about. Many things are interchangeable, and many issues are universal to the creation of written art, whether you call it "plot" or "the trajectory," "character" or "the narrator."

She begins:

"PLOT: (Essential. The Pre-essential.) Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot for the particular novel is something the novelist is driven to. It is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives. The novelist is confronted, at a moment (or at what appears to be the moment: actually its extension may be indefinite) by the impossibility of saying what is to be said in any other way.

He is forced towards his plot. By what? By 'what is to be said'. What is 'what is to be said'? A mass of subjective matter that has accumulated - impressions received, feelings about experience, distorted results of ordinary observation, and something else - x. This matter is extra matter. It is superfluous to the non-writing life of the writer. It is luggage left in the hall between two journeys, as opposed to the perpetual furniture of rooms. It is destined to be elsewhere. It cannot move until its destination is known. Plot is the knowing of destination.

Plot is diction. Action of language, language of action."

(KEB here: Michael Donaghy would leap up right now and say: "Notice that chiasmus? That's how Elizabeth Bowen is getting you to remember this point!")

"Plot is story. It is also 'a story' in the nursery sense - lie. The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie."

(KEB again:) There's so much in here that can be taken apart and really examined - within oneself, of course - all this has to happen in oneself: the whittling away of alternatives, for a start. The emotional truth that makes it all worthwhile. The nature of one's material. What is it that is of no use in one's writing life?

Further down Bowen writes something that made a huge impression on me: that is, I kept looking at myself in light of it for years, until it had become part of me in the same way that Bootstrap Bill Turner is part of the Flying Dutchman.

Bowen continues:

"Plot, story, is itself un-poetic. At best it can only be not anti-poetic. It cannot claim a single poetic licence. It must be reasoned - only from the moment when its non-otherness, its only-possibleness has become apparent. Novelist must always have one foot, sheer circumstantiality, to stand on, whatever the other foot may be doing. (N.B. Much to be learned from storytelling to children. Much to be learned from detective story - especially non-irrelevance.) (See Relevance.)

Flaubert's 'Il faut interesser'. Stress on manner of telling: keep in mind, 'I will a tale unfold'. Inerest of watching a dress that has been well-packed unpacked from a dress-box. Interest of watching silk handkerchiefs drawn from a conjurer's watch."

(KEB again:) Can you see Donaghy here too? (A connection I'd never made until typing this out.) This image of the dress being unpacked stayed with me for years, and the handkerchiefs drawn from the watch are right there in his poems, like (for example, obviously) Upon a Claude Glass, or Caliban's Books. All good poetry has this quality of something magical, something transforming itself before your eyes, and transforming you a little with it.

Now, here is something really interesting. There is so much more in here that it's hard to choose, but I'll end with this, as a structural note. Chippy wrote about structure, and I am intensely interested in it myself. I think structure is a form of truth - the form of truth: a scaffold, without which no building can be built.

Bowen writes:

"Plot must not cease to move forward. (See Advance.) The actual speed of movement must be even. Apparent variations in speed are good, necessary, but there must be no actual variations in speed. To obtain these paparent variatons is part of the illusion - task of the novel. Variations in texture can give the effect of variations in speed. Why are apparent variations necessary? (a) for emphasis. (b) for non-resistance, or 'give', to the nervous time-variations of the reader. Why is actual evenness, non-variation of speed, necessary? For the sake of internal evenness for its own sake. Perfection of evenness = perfection of control. The tautness of the taut string is equal (or even) all along and at any part of the string's length."

(KEB) This principle is the reason why reviewers talk of something being "flabby in the middle" or movie-goers say it's "slow." Those are the places where the actual speed slowed down, and the momentum was lost. It is wonderful to think of this speed/tautness thing in conjunction with the dress thing. And it is crucially, critically important in poetry. In fact, it is the essence of elegance.

* Not so much that I actually finished the novel, mind.

** There are other books called Writers on Writing: popular title! I own a couple more. Also good, if you're into this kind of thing, are the Paris Review Interviews, published as books and now available online; Henry James' Notebooks and prefaces; Keats' wonderful letters; Don't Ask Me What I Mean (ed. Paterson & Brown); and a funny thing I have, A Piece of Work: Five Writers Discuss Their Revisions (U. of Iowa Press).

poetry pigeon post; or, post-pigeon poetry; or maybe post-poetry pigeons

Amazingly, I slept in yesterday morning! At least, I thought it was amazing at the time. I was woken by a very runny-eyed and rheumy Mlle B croaking from the doorway, "Mummy, it's 10.30... Do we have any of that Nurofen you don't have to swallow?"

Completely disoriented in the manner of, say, Buster Keaton woken from a deep slumber, I threw on some clothes and went up to the ABC pharmacy. (I love the ABC pharmacy at the top of Stamford Hill, with its late hours and its shelves upon shelves of odd bath products and colourful hair things. It feels like a sleepy suburban drugstore in New Jersey in 1980; I realise that this has nothing to do with Buster Keaton.)

So there I was, my hair all over the place, my T shirt (yes, slept-in) a bit too low, my jacket just plain wrong, and I noticed a couple of young Hassidic women staring at me... oh the shame. I'm sure I had raccoon eyes too. Altogether a state of deshabillé which it is hard to imagine the great stonefaced one having to contend with. Anyway, like Florence Nightingale (but with a considerably lower death rate, and without either the owl or the private income) I got the Nurofen and some Strepsils (and some tiny mini-buns from the Sharon Bakery) and arrived home to find the girls tucked up in the living room under two enormous duvets, Kitty announcing cheerfully: "Kate, I'm not feeling well either!" and beaming with joy when I felt her forehead (it was fine). Great fun squirting the Vicks into Mlle B's throat. The girls were delighted with their baby bagels and mini-croissants.

Changed clothes. Made breakfast for them & tea for me, still strangely numb in the manner of someone who is, in fact, still partly sleeping. Went for a long coffee with a friend in the Blue Legume (aka "the end of the world" - as in, it'll be the end of the world if certain people are ever seen in there among the off-road three-wheeled buggies et cetera; Ms B has nothing to lose, of course, having been cheerfully subverting the stereotype from well within for years). In fact, it was a long chat, and very nice, and two black coffees had little impact. There was much rational, interesting, gossipy and even erudite talk of all sorts of matters poetic. I even had an idea about Wallace Stevens! The memory of this is a great comfort, today, when the previously-baroque brain is more derelict than an old poetry warehouse full of pigeon droppings.

Made spinach soup. Made some phone calls. Sorted out some stuff. Hard to say where a day goes, but yesterday was yet another non-writing one, and when I suddenly had to lie down I found my lying-down space full of girls. Girls who were a little hyper from having done nothing all day.

Today I slept in again and was less surprised. I was slightly more surprised when I had an overwhelming need to lie down at around noon, and again when just lying down wasn't enough: I just had to sleep. But when, after waking up once, I felt I had to go back to sleep again at around 2pm, there was no point in doing anything other than taking it in my (as it were) stride. This is just what it's like, now.

Seriously: two operations, three and a half weeks ago. Will it ever end??

Meanwhile, emails and phone calls and bills and essays and poems and household tasks and the grocery shopping are all going unfinished, unrepliedto, unopened, undone.

Antonia Quirke on poetry

Last week in these virtual pages I wrote an open letter to the film critic Antonia Quirke, whose zany, madcap memoir Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers had filled me with such joy the week before.

One of the things I really liked about her book was the way poetry is a recurring, natural, just-part-of-the-soup element in her narrative - in terms of both her personal life and her approach ti film, to acting, to the way we make things. She frames things in terms of poetic practice; she quotes lines of all sorts of poems, just in passing, without feeling the need to identify them; she even refers to prosody! In short, she talks about poetry like someone who knows it and takes its presence for granted.

This is as it should be, and might well be if we had the reversed cultural experience Michael Donaghy hints at in his monograph Wallflowers (both wonderfully erudite and funny) - a world where poetry is simply enjoyed the way we enjoy music currently, without hush-voiced tuition, without separating it from everything else, without this fear of somehow getting it wrong. You know: poetry playing on the radio, in lifts, on hold.

Anyway, I have given my copy of Antonia Quirke's book to my best friend, Ms Rational Self-Determinism, and she is very excited about it. But before I parted with it, I typed out this couple of quotes from the book.

Quirke writes:

"Actors never seem to capture lawyers or teachers very well, possibly because they think they would make great lawyers or teachers. Great orators. But they're too musical, too fearful of monotony. That's why they can never read poetry. None of them. Why your toes are always curling throughout Radio 4's Poetry Week. No, there is one: the magnificent Stephen Dillane, whom I once saw play Hamlet as if he were a guy disappearing into the words, delivering the lines like he was reading a railway timetable, as Eliot recommends a poet should read poetry. The artlessness of Dillane's voice! You listen to Eliot or Auden or Larkin doing so little with their own stuff - or Bob Dylan singing, or even Tennyson captured on a wax cylinder in 1890 chanting The Charge of the Light Brigade - and you realise how the very purpose of the voice is to make the reciter disappear, to abolish everything but theear. Actors are never quite happy being all words."

(I totally agree with her there on reading style; I found this to my horror during my bad eye patch last autumn, when I tried to listen to several audio books of poetry, and ended up really understanding why so many people think they hate it. Unfortunately, it was far more painful than simply reading a book, even with my glaucoma. And the "poetry voice" adopted by so many poets when they read is just as galling.)

She also writes:

"Gérard Depardieu was a true poet, like Richard Burton had been. Because Gérard understood the endlessness of poetry he didn't overcook it, just as a great Shakespearean must be immersed in the whole ocean of Shakespeare in order not to be fazed by the smaller-scale brilliancies. You have to understand that poetry is being constantly transmitted in a casual voice to us by the universe 24/7, 24/7, in order to speak it properly. You have to understand this. You have to! But Gérard does."

She's very fresh, isn't she. And fun! I love that casual voice of the universe. I wish poetry cropped up more in things like this.

vanity fair and an open mic

As my readers know, here at Baroque Mansions we live to serve. In this public service mode, as an act of generosity, I am pleased to share with you a list of guidelines for middle-aged poets published by Rob Mackenzie last week on his blog, Surroundings. (n.b., I think these guidelines refer less to those poets whose long-established gravitas renders them unimpeachable than to those of us still trying tp prove we're interesting. For example, I don't think Seamus Heaney will have to give up his tweed jackets...)

Here's a taster:

6. If you are married, refer to your spouse as your ‘partner’ and talk uninhibitedly about your love life.

7. If you are unattached, sleep around. Or at least say you’re sleeping around. If you repeat anything, people will believe it. Cultivate an ambiguous sexuality.

8. Invent stories about how a poem got you laid. Never tell exactly the same story twice. Even better, write a poem about how a poem got you laid. Have it translated into a dozen languages.

12. Never use the word ‘crisis’ of yourself. But use it liberally to describe friends of a similar age, especially other poets.

Now (and there is more of note in his list) I think this is great advice. But it doesn't say what to do about your kids. Sooner or later you'll have to start darkly intimating that they're nieces and nephews of a much older, tragic sibling who left them to be brought up by you, or possibly that they themselves are your siblings (now that's tragic).

This conundrum reminds me of my favourite anecdote, which I think is about Lillian Lux, matriarch of the New York Yiddish performing family the Bursteins (whose hits included The Megillah of Itzik Manger and A Khasene in Shtetl).

Apparently Lillian (if it is she, and I think it is) became ill and retired from the stage for some years. When she made her comeback a journalist sent to interview her asked her how old she was. "I'm 65," she said.

"That's funny," said the reporter. "I interviewed your son last week and he told me he was 55!"

"Eh!" she said, with a shrug. "He has his life, I have mine."

Anyway, I was a child bride. I'm keeping these guidelines handy for when I get older.

Newsflash: Potter casts incredible spell on Royal Mail

This morning I was in a deep sleep, tucked snugly beneath my feathery paisley-covered duvet, with my curls in complete repose on my new red gingham pillowcases; I can remember, I was having a dream, though I'm no longer sure what it was about.

Suddenly, catastrophe - the door buzzer, which crouches handily on the wall right outside the door of my room - God, that thing sounds loud when you're asleep! Thinking, "ohmigod what time is it have I slept till 11 or something where are my glasses what was that dream I'm coming who is it what the hell where am I," I struggle, manage to find my reading glasses, and get to the door right after a second very loud and impatient buzz.

"Hello," I mumble.

"Postman, I have a packet for you," says a voice.

I stand by the door. A postman comes up the stairs and thrusts quite a fat little Amazon parcel into my hands, addressed to the Urban Warrior, the Tall Blond Rock God and Mlle B. He doesn't have an owl with him.

I dump it unceremoniously onto the sideboard. Back in my bed, I look at the clock: it is 6.55.

Thanks Mom.

the new Brando?

All-new best-ever EastEnders moment: Phil Mitchell, mad with fury, lurching along the rooftop of a disused factory shouting, "Stella! STELLA!"

partying with the pen pushers

Oh, la! After two days of feeling worse than ever, yesterday the light at the end of the tunnel (that's life after gall stones, not a near-death experience) shone just that bit brighter. Thank God for that.

And thank God again, because I had a magazine launch to go to last night! I didn't want to miss it. Pen Pusher is a new literary magazine - very much, at this stage, what you'd call a 'little magazine', as it's even free for the time being - just coming out in its sixth issue. Yours truly here has a poem in it, and the editors (Anna Goodall and Felicity Cloake) are friends of the estimable Tim Wells, who was the person who put me onto it in the first place, so naturally I went along. (I also picked up a couple of copies of Tim's free mag, Rising, while I was there ("tough on poetry, tough on the causes of poetry"): the new issue has also got one of mine in it. Two poems, two magazines, one evening! Not bad.)

So, as a party correspondent I'm utter crap, because I sat on a bench all night at the edge of this very pretty pub garden* (packed with drunk City types, I'm very sorry to say) in this outrageously overpriced pub in Spitalfields called - appropriately - The Water Poet, talking to the same three people all night, unless someone came over to say hi (which several did, so that was fine - at least I got to meet the two editors and the wonderful designer (Hape Mueller) who does such a great job with the single-colour format... ).

I couldn't have been in better company, anyway: on one side of me sat Mr Wells (fresh from what sounds like a triumphant set at the Latitude festival), on the other side the equally impressive Andy Ching, who runs Donut Press, and on the other side of Andy the novelist Ray Robinson, whose first book Electricity (Picador) has just been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, ad his next one is coming out next summer... I didn't realise who he was until Andy showed me the novel (American edition) and I recognised its fabulous cover - I'd only just been reading a big interview Ray gave Scott Pack last week!

Clearly I should get this book (but from an independent bookshop, not Amazon) and read it.

Talk was of many thing, as they say - cabbages, kings, the Forward shortlists, novelising, publishing, poetry friends, my wonderful manuscript, the City drunks, the bar prices, the fabulousness of Pen Pusher, gall stones, haemmorhoids, gout, and the free champagne (well, free to us, anyway - and who's complaining!).

Not bad for a girl who had to sit down and give up the mingling...

I think Pen Pusher is one to watch. The content's great - varied, interesting and high quality - and, as I say, the magazine looks beautiful. It's available free (for the time being - talk was also of funding) from good independent bookshops in London - or if you went to their website and asked for one I'm sure they'd send it.

* There was a tall brick wall with vines growing up it in vast profusion, and the vines were full of little blue lights... beyond the Stella Artois umbrella we could see the clouds turning a strange orange colour in front of a darkening sky. Felicity wore a lovely skirt that reminded me of beach huts, and I wore my silver satin smock top. As it is England in July, we both wore jumpers; hers was even wool.

forward excelsior!

The shortlist for this year's Forward Prizes were announced yesterday. While we all know that prizes are a lottery, can't possibly give recognition to all who deserve it, etc etc, it is still jolly interesting to see what comes up on the lists. Not only that: it doesn't matter how much you've been reading or how up-to-the-minute you might have thought you were, you will never have read most of the books.

Or is that just me?

So, this year's shortlists are as follows:

Best collection prize (£10,000)

Domestic Violence by Eavan Boland

(Carcanet)
Gift Songs by John Burnside (Jonathan Cape)
The Drowned Book by Sean O'Brien (Picador)
Birds with a Broken Wing by Adam Thorpe (Jonathan Cape)
The Harbour Beyond the Movie by Luke Kennard (Salt Publishing)
Beasts of Nalunga by Jack Mapanje (Bloodaxe)

Best first collection prize (£5,000)

Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues on Dimitri Shostakovich by Joanna Boulter (Arc Publications)
Galatea by Melanie Challenger (Salt Publishing)
Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra (Faber and Faber)
Andraste's Hair by Eleanor Rees (Salt Publishing)

Best single poem prize (£1,000)

The Hut in Question by David Harsent (Poetry Review)
Thursday by Lorraine Mariner (The Rialto)
Dunt by Alice Oswald (Poetry London)
The Day I Knew I Wouldn't Live Forever by Carole Satyamurti (The Interpreter's House)
Goulash by Myra Schneider (The North)
The Birkdale Nightingale by Jean Sprackland (Poetry Review)

Okay, so the awful truth is that of all these books the only one I've read is Daljit Nagra. To which end, I will try to celebrate by writing a little thing about it over the weekend.

There are two news angles that are being picked up in the main newspapers (see links above): one, Jack Mapanje is an ex-political prisoner who is just now proving to the UK that sometimes giving people asylum can be good for the host country as well; and two, Luke Kennard is, by ten years, the youngest person ever to have been shortlisted for Best Collection. So it's pretty exciting.

There's a third news angle, though, and one the papers aren't picking up even though I remember it from last year when Donut Press had two books shortlisted for Best First Collection. It's simply the rise of the small/independent publisher in poetry. Of course it's good news for me, in a way: Salt, who will be publishing my book, have got three out of the ten books on the list. (Of course, the capacity of Salt to do that was one reason I went to them in the first place.)

I wonder why no one is discussing it, though. Booksellers normally love a prize. Here's a prestigious prize, worth ten grand to the main winner, and over a third of the shortlistees are from small indie presses, just at this critical moment when we're all talking about the stranglehold the big multinationals have on the book trade - and neither the booksellers nor the review sections in the papers seem to be picking that story up.

Everyone knows that the Booker is a great opportunity for sales for its shortlisted authors. The shops do big displays, the publishers push the books. So where's the trade support for the shortlisted poetry books? Eh? All this talk about how no one "reads" or "buys" (take your pick of operative verb) - let's see the money. What encouragement are the readers/book-buyers getting? Are the reps all extra-busy this week with shortlisted poets? Waterstones window, anyone?

This feels like a relatively incoherent post. I have to lie down (yes, all this talk of poetry sales has given Ms B the vapours!). I'll edit it later if it needs it...

PS - Salt has set up a blog to keep track of the two months until the announcement of the winners. Check it out here. As well as fab author pics and info, the site also lists links to reviews, and articles about the prize, in the mainstream press and on blogs. Very informative.

In the mean time I will be acquiring and reading the books and discussing their various charms and merits.

one easy lesson

Recently there has been a very small storm in a very small teacup about the UCU's boycott of Israeli academics - and also, in Baroque Mansions, an even smaller one about the tiny print at the very bottom of an email about the AGM of MY union, the NUJ - so much for impartiality, boys! - saying that the NUJ supported a boycott of Israel.

This has, following an uprising of NUJ members which alas I had nothing to do with - I've been so out of it - been rescinded. (Thank God, because it was cracked.) There was even a blog! Who knew! It was written by BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones, who in his final post gives an admirable account of just why the boycott idea was so cracked. (If you weren't sure.)

The papers say anti-semitism is on the increase. Anecdotally, anti-semitism is on the increase. Most of my friends on the left are so rabidly anti-Israeli that it makes me very uncomfortable, and I'm not even Jewish (though, as the joke goes, I pass).

Anyway, Dina Rabinovitch has a couple of humdingers of examples on her blog, fresh from the streets of Hendon (where, by the way, she is also on a quest for a really good blow-dry, a project we here at Baroque can only support).

She also has a link to a video of her husband, Anthony Julius, describing the "new anti-semitism" and why we find it hard to recognise, acknowledge properly, or deal with. Of course he says "we" and he means Jews, but I think "we" is everybody. One of the most prominent lawyers in the land, he is no slouch at putting together a position, and this little ten-minute video outlines brilliantly a particular way in which anti-semitism creeps in under the door, as it were. Watch it below and ask yourself a few questions.



By the way, I think the ideas Anthony raises, if applied to the position Muslims find themselves in today, might equally well apply. The truth is that we are in a rationalising age, where all sorts of polemics are being used to give intellectual support to all sorts of irrational prejudices and fears. This speech gives the beginnings of a cogent analysis of part of this tendency.

The speech was made at a meeting in Euston last week, run by Engage. To see the other speakers click here.

dear Antonia Quirke...

It's not often that I get the impulse to write to the author of a book I've been reading.* Well, you know: we'd all like to write a letter to Louis MacNeice (I can do with poets what you do with movie stars; don't you agree that Louis is divine? I originally read him just because he was so handsome),** of course. At least, I would if he were alive.

But this week I've been reading your book, and I want to write to you because I have a feeling you'd like to hear how much you've made me laugh! And weep with delirious recognition! I feel as if I know you (not in a creepy stalker way, rather in a girls-living-this-strange-life-in-London too kind of way. By the way).

Your memoir, covering your romantic history interlaced with your rather madcap career as a film critic (and incidentally I never could stomach Jaws, but now I want to get your book on it: is it really underrated??), really brings out the crazy way in which some of us - I admit, I think it is just some of us - seem to experience our own lives through some sort of a filter. (You have a great name for it: the "perforated screening mechanism." I LOVE this.) You know, was it the movies that were more real, or the boyfriends? And how do these models create our lives? (I think I had a flash of this the other day when I was watching The History Boys. The part where Posner starts performing as Celia Johnson in the last scene in Brief Encounter took me so aback that I was in tears! It was so familiar, as if written on my own skin - though, since what happened to Ewan MacGregor in that Peter Greenaway film, let's not mention that idea - it was almost more real than anything else.)

There were so many bits in "this mad, marvellous, film-crazed memoir" (Kate Saunders, The Times) that had me laughing out loud inappropriately - on buses, in the hospital outpatients corridor, even in shops I was laughing as I read - that I can't even think of half of them. I loved your "men-bender" - the Cuban bartender, Ilana's divorce lawyer (Ilana sounds great), and all the others, all rolled (in the hay) up in one overthetoply long sentence that goes on forever and ever just like that day, or was it three days, all in one... Oh my God! It made me wish I was 25 again. (It takes a lot to do that.) That scene where you got so drunk with Tom Paulin before going on the Late Show is so deliciously exquisite that I felt it like pain. All those italics! and that jab! "... some kind of - I don't know, a Boody Mary or something, some kind of new-fangled intravenous hangover cure" - just too much. I loved you then.

I have to mention your opening scene, the one where you hyperventilate watching Brando at the age of ten, so that everybody thinks you're dying and they call the ambulance. This makes me laugh every single time I think of it. I wish I'd done that. I was too busy being Harriet the Spy.

Mind you , sweetie, I think you got a couple of those film stars wrong. I know - strong words - but really. (BTW, loved the Jeff Bridges-as-Aslan bit.) In short, I think you've misread Sam Neill! He does have that amazing solidity, but he is always, always, tinged with menace - or inadequacy, rather, a certain dangerous kind of inadequacy. Of course that's why they gave him the part in The Piano, to say nothing of My Brilliant Career (a film that had such an effect on me when I was 17 that it virtually changed the way I perceived the whole world. I felt I had just been born in that cinema! Alas, I had afterwards to change the way I perceived Judy Davis; isn't she boring?). The whole reason that film works, you could say, is because of Sam Neill: she simply can't accept him. He looks right, but he can't be. No matter how much we love him, and we do, there's always that thing underneath, with him, that he is so delicate in his expression of - that thing that says, even while you know that he is a large man for portraying it, "I will be small, smaller than you, smaller than your world." And that's why your academic didn't work out.

I thought your read on Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver was amazing. I wanted more, though - more solidity - but maybe that's just it, no more solidity, he simply isn't solid. That performance is a shimmering thing. Of course the whole movie is a shimmering thing. You could write a book about that.

But what about Jimmy Stewart? As much as you have articulated the whys and wherefores of devotion to Gerard Depardieu which I have carried since I was in school and went to see Préparez Vos Mouchoirs (and you have: I think it is his soul; his happiness, and his soul; his gusto, pain, and soul), you have let us all down badly on the Rear Window front! You know, Jimmy Stewart taught me a great big life lesson. You know that amazing drunk scene with him and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story? It's astonishing, isn't it: like ballet. Well, somebody interviewed him about it, saying how did you do that great thing, and Stewart answered that the one thing you have to remember when you play a drunk is that all drunks are trying to act sober.

Brilliant.

And his wonderful voice. And his kind, yet piercing, eyes. Ahh... I really wish you'd written about him.

The other thing I loved, if I'm not giving too much away to anyone who reads this, is the way the book suddenly reveals itself during your Wales sojourn to be modelled on a romantic comedy - of course it is! I know you have little good to say about them earlier on when you deconstruct them from a girls' point of view, but I also feel how you love them. Of course I love them too.

One of the ones you mention, Crossing Delancy, is a movie I thought no one knew about but me; for years I pulled it out whenever I felt low. I'm a little disappointed that you didn't mention Sam the pickle man. He really is the kind of guy: he's totally solid, stable, dependable, but he has flair and imagination. Even with his bad haircut he's sexy. And he's great with her Bubba. A star.

In short, darling, your whole book is like an extended conversation on an evening out over a few bottles of wine with my very best friend, Ms Rational Self-Determinism. That's saying something. And I love her more than anyone else in the world!***

I'm giving her your book on Friday.


* Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers, Harper Perennial, £7.99 and worth every penny

** I use this word advisedly, because he is a bit like your "handsome" Gregory Peck in a way - now I think of it - though of course a bit sexier, just because he projected himself more that way.

*** Attention my family members plus kids. We'll talk.

still a Scrabble champion! but not gloating

Facebook! Who knew?!? I thought it was just some timewasting MySpace for grownups. It turns out you can play Scrabble on there!

Scrabble is one of the things I miss most in my current life. You need a partner, or someone with some time, or someone who isn't emailing you to arrange a drink next Tuesday week, to play Scrabble. You need sad, nerdy kids, not cool ones with too much music for their iPods and multiple MySpaces.

I was taught by the best, in possibly the best circumstances. My uncle, Tom Vink-Lainas, is, or used to be, a near-championship-level Scrabble player. He and my aunt Mary, to whom I am also very close, spent several of my most formative years living in an old frame house in the Catskill mountains with no electricity or running water, and three little kids. I used to go and stay a lot. I'd babysit my cousins, pump water from the well, tend to the enormous aluminium pot of hot water on the stove, make the bread (it was two miles to the shop: you try doing the uphill return journey with two kids under five!) and, in the evenings, play endless Scrabble on the living room table by the light of a kerosene lamp. Mary played too. I think I only saw her beat Tom once. My then boyfriend, the now ex-ex Mr B, also played, and I can't recall if he ever beat Tom. I stretched and stretched my limits, I spent the intervening days dreaming of seven-letter words and red squares, and I think I might have beat Tom twice.

Well, I'm happy to report that in my first (online) game of Scrabble in many years, I have beat our own fellow Hackney blogger Ben Locker, 353-309. (Remember, it was my first game for years! Watch those numbers now I'm dusting off my rapier-sharp Scrabble gloves.) A most worthy opponent he is, too.

On the other hand, if you want to know how it can really get, check out this article from Slate. Apparently, no matter even if you've just broken three world records with one game - including 365 points for one word, QUIXOTRY - if you haven't memorised the entire Scrabble dictionary with its lists of words-of-two-(three, four, etc)-letters, you're just considered to be "no good."

What I want to know is, where's the magic there? If it comes to devoting that much mental energy to it, I'd rather use my words for something a little more fulfilling. Poetry, anyone? I wonder how many points in that...

Anyway, must dash, Ben's starting a new game...

Me and the Dead

I think that's going to be the title of my book: Me and the Dead (out next spring from Salt). It's the title of what I hope will be the final poem in the book, and it also works with my other stuff in about three ways: I have a lot of poems, both elegies and other things, about people I know who've died. I also write about the deep past, sometimes - Nero, Louis II of France, the monks who lived in a Gothic cathedral - and those people are by definition the dead. The past is incredibly alive to me.* It never goes away. Plus there are poems about relationships that are over, no longer felt, dead.

Anyway, I was reading the other day, a novel from the fifites called A World of Love, by the wonderful Elizabeth Bowen, and I ame across this passage. As usual, Miss Bowen sums it up. More on that later in the week.

She writes:

"Life works to dispossess the dead, to dislodge and oust them. Their places fill themselves up; all the room is wanted. Feeling alters its course, is drawn elsewhere or seeks renewal from other sources. When of love there is not enough to go round, inevitably it is the dead who must go without: we tell ourselves that they do not depend on us, or that they have not our requirements. Their continuous dying while we live, their repeated deaths as each of us die who knew them, are not in nature to be withstood. Obstinate rememberers of the dead seem to queer themselves or show some signs of a malady; in part they come to share the dead's isolation from the rest of us, so necessary is it to let the dead go that we expect they may be glad to be gone. Greatest of our denials to them is a part to play: it appears that they now cannot touch or alter whatever may be the existent scene - not only are they not here to participate, but there would be disorder if they were here. Their being left behind in their own time caused estrangement between them and us, who must live in ours."

One thing I love about this paragraph is the way it works empirically on one level and ironically on others. But it's the last sentence, isn't it, that's the (as it were) killer.

* Of course I realise this means it isn't really the dead. And in that sense, it really isn't. I was talking to someone about this the other day, how in one sense you can feel that something that happened in a place is always still happening in it, like chiaroscuro. Rooms can feel crowded, but in a benign way, as being among one's people. And I think that's one reason I feel more comfortable in England. Certainly, old houses. I know this sounds like high romantic folderol but it is how the world feels to me. The woods I grew up in, in New York and Connecticut, always seemed troubled.

I love my balcony

summer 2007: or, me me me

It seems, briefly, to be with us in some form or another.

One sign: I went and had a pedicure today. I wouldn't have done it if my friend hadn't rung up wanting to know where to go and what to do: she has some intensely glamorous party to go to, peopled by people from Vogue, and she is quite right to think they can tell the difference. (It's all right: her shoes are Miu Miu.) Naturally I went with her, and we had a delightful girly time chatting on the big chairs; and equally naturally we both decided mid-peddy to go for a manny too (I know; anyone offering?); I'm hoping this will induce me to cease and desist the gallish (and galling) nailbiting I've been doing in recent weeks (there hardly seemed any point - & it is nobody's business how much your cuticles dry out and crack on a no-fat diet - but I'm hoping all that will begin to change now).

Another sign: I was too hot in my linen jacket. It's lightly lined with lining material, and what a delight when that begins to seem thick!

Sign three: Nobody's answering their phones. They're all at parties, festivals, weddings, sitting in pub gardens, or belatedly doing their shopping because they've been drinking prosecco in the park all afternoon.

Sign four: I'm bored. Bored bored bored and fed up of sitting here with odd rumbling pains in the place where my gall bladder used to be, punched-in-the-gut feelings behind all my incisions and the energy level of a granny who just finished the tour de France.

I think that signs one and four are also signs that I'm beginning to be better, despite all the weird pains. Other signs of that include:

1. I ate a macaroon. I know I felt sick after, but I did eat it. God I felt sick.

2. I have the Wedding of the Year to go to, in two weeks exactly. Today I suddenly (partly I admit because it was the bride's daughter I was in the nail bar with) started worrying about what to wear to it. Like, bigtime. Suddenly I want the most blowout glammy drop-dead gorgeous outfit you ever saw, a whole year's worth of posh frocks in one, not that I ever have call for that many posh frocks even in a year - and what's with that?? - and I want a tiny hat with a little veil. There is a dress I've seen... Oh my God, this little dress. Fitted cream gosgrain with a black empire-waist belt and bow, & a pencil skirt. I don't have the money. Oh, and I want to get off with someone fabulous at the wedding. Someone who loves my frock (& no, I don't mean either a girl or anybody gay).

3. I'm bored. Did I mention that?

4. But not so bored or well that I can remember to pick up the thing I went into the room for, or actually write down the whole entire poem I composed in my head as I was falling asleep last night (though the fact that I can remember most of it is definitely a good sign) or indeed even walk all the way down to Church Street without getting a horrendous stitch in my side and feeling like I have to have a little lie down (though I don't indulge that, there in the alleyway).

And all you people who have listed me as a "literary blog:" don't expect me to write about poetry! I haven't looked at a poem in two weeks. Hm, no, I guess I did last week, when I did that mini-reading, but aside from that it is Low-Brow Central chez Ms B. I'm sure I will, one day, but not today.

Movies I have watched: even these are pitifully few. The History Boys. Vera Drake (I love Imelda Staunton). Shakepeare in Love. Tonight, maybe Cyrano: I fancy a bit of Depardieu.

5. I fancy a bit of Depardieu.

6. Well, I might write a bit tomorrow. But I said that yesterday. But it does seem that some words are tentatively returning.

(n.b. this "most galling" labels just runs and runs! It really is my 2007: the Theme.)

national treasure love shock!

Do you know? I almost forgot why Alan Bennett is the so-called National Treasure he is, so bored had I become with the constant adulation one encounters whenever his name is mentioned. But I've seen his plays, watched his movies, read his books. I should have remembered.

And now I've just finished watching - so belatedly (this is one play I didn't make it to) - The History Boys. I wish, now, badly, that I had seen it on the stage. I love it. It is full of scenes of immense delicacy and power. It's subtle, but I can't help thinking it must have been more so on the stage. There's a slickefying thing that happens when they turn something into a movie, especially something by Alan Bennett, I feel. The intimacy is lost. Reading his books he whispers into your ear; seeing a play the actors speak only to you; and you can see them, really see them: it's warts and all. But on the screen there have been too many opportunities to make it perfect, which always means making it that bit more bland, corporate, safe.

I remember reading some reviews when the film came out that put it very cogently, all the flaws, a catalogue of "things that were better in the play;" but here are some things that are really working in the film.

Richard Griffiths is astounding, as always, and as large with humanity and love as with - ahem - corpulence. Sure, he's a caricature, but he's alive. Oh, and increasingly I idolise Frances de la Tour; can that be so wrong??

And as "ye will know the tree by its fruits," so the serial surprise of all that Griffiths' teacher Hector has given the boys, the sight of it sticking to each of them in his own way, keeps surprising in a way mere caricature can't. One scene, in fact, surprised me into tears: the two boys suddenly breaking into a pitch-perfect rendition of the closing scene of Brief Encounter. Deliciously cheesy, painfully brilliant, gorgeously done. In its own small way, as poignant as the original. (This is, as someone was asking the other day for a definition, exactly what ekphrastic art should be and do: take a work of art as a starting place and then spring off into your own thing.)

It's code, of course: not only is the film about the point where an old style of teaching (and learning) lost the fight to the Thatcherite (now Blairite) way, it is also about the old and new styles of being homosexual; the boy in this scene, Posner, is realising that he is gay, and is doomed to follow in the footsteps of Hector's particular tragedy. It strikes me that I have read reviews that cavilled with this (and other elements of the play), that said it was too anachronistic to work. Of course the roots of the story lie in the fifties, but that was felt too remote, so it was moved to 1983. I think in this knowledge one might afford Bennett a little latitude: the emotional power of this piece is so strong and true that even a slight suspension of disbelief is more than enough.

The boys are wonderful. The younger, cynical, new-style teacher, Irwin - who is overtly placed as Griffiths' successor - turns out also to be gay, but even post-Stonewall this is portrayed as slightly tragic... I remember 1983, I remember how even in London it seemed a little risqué to be really openly gay... people made much more of a fuss of it than they do now.

So, the boys. Dominic Cooper as Dakin, the sex-crazed - no, power-hungry - boy (Frances de la Tour in the film calls him "cunt-struck,", but by the end of the film he's asking the new teacher to suck him off, and this is another scene where I was gasping: Stephen Campbell Moore, as Irwin, is so scared here that you can feel the sweat, and it is all so incredibly sexy that even watching it you're afraid, remembering who the boy is); even though you can see what Dakin's like you can't help feeling the attraction. (Yet another scene that blew me away, without giving anything away, is near the end, in the hallway, when Hector and Irwin have a deep, deeply honest, and almost unspoken conversation about their feelings for the boys. This is before the propositioning scene, and sets us up for it of course, because.... no, see the film.)

Samuel Barnett as Posner, the gay boy, is beautiful. He sings like an angel. (Hector teaches them songs; when Posner sings "Bewitched, Botherd and Bewildered," mainly to Dakin, with whom he is openly in unrequited love, it does in fact function dramatically, and emotionally.)

(Aside: You know. John Sutherland might have been right up to a point when he said in a review that the music was wrong for 1983, and even goes so far as to suggest that Posner would have liked Boy George! Good grief. The boys are frequently seen with Walkman earphones; but we're being shown their life in the classroom. and not long at all after 1983 we had a huge craze for Nina Simone; even in 1983 Bryan Ferry was covering old songs; so I think it's fine.)

Oh, in short, I think it's a fine film! It's a film about love. And loss, as each of the boys is about to lose their childhood - it's that drenched cusp. And mortality, realising who and what you really are. It's visually beautiful. And it has totally reminded me why I love Alan Bennett.

Oh, and by the way: you may be reading this and feeling like you want to be reminded of Dead Poets' Society; don't be. Just don't.

elegantly dressed grandparents

Well, I don't think anyone has ever said these grandparents of mine were elegant (the others were, rather, though not so much in the clothes department even then). They were simple people in a small working-class town way upstate, and had - and declared they had - no pretensions whatsoever.


















At least half of what now looks like elegance in these kinds of old pictures lies in fact in our reading of them: it is our nostalgia for a time when no one except Stanley Kowalski (and a relatively new kind of disreputable people called "teenagers") wore T shirts, and even their T shirts had no cartoon characters or sexually explicit sloganeering on them. People wore proper shoes; jeans weren't considered townwear; fabrics were simpler and were also of better quality; and, frankly, the tailoring and finishing were better. Clothes, like everything else, were made to last.

Look at these coats! And both my grandparents, snapped this snowy day in January 1958, are wearing hats. Not the panic-hats we now wear if it gets cold - wear resentfully, convinced they are ruining out hair, or apprehensive that they look funny, aren't flattering, or diffidently, because really we are a bit embarrassed to be wearing anything as recherché as a hat - and wear only because it has got cold. No. These are proper, unironic, unembarrassed, hatlike hats.

And don't even get me started on Grandma's white gloves, her hard little handbag, her shawl collar and that brooch - which I may find, if I look at it closely enough, is sitting even now in my jewellery box. I just think she looks beautiful.

Here are my grandparents a year and a half later, arriving - we think - at my other grandfather, the Reverend's, church in White Plains for my parents' wedding. In this picture what passes for elegance is in fact happiness. Look at it! My grandparents are resplendent with it. (And the sweet frock doesn't hurt, either.)

in which the magic forest begins to thin strangely out, revealing ghostly everyday furniture among the silver and golden trees

Well, today is the 11th and I have just bundled the baroque sister into a car to be taken to the airport and away from me. It seems implausible at the least; I had got used to having her around, even the smell of fags that now permeates my boudoir, and my balcony seems to belong to her, gazing thoughtfully out over my North London vista as she exhales. Now I have to get used to living here without her again, and - like - just being home alone when the kids aren't here... I even think in her voice now.

Also, it's now almost two weeks since I was last under the knife: really, time to be getting better, don't you think? And finishing all my outstanding articles (the MacNeice, the Ruth Fainlight interview, the other stuff) and editing my manuscript, and taking full responsibility once again for my blog? And putting all that never-managing-to-do-anything phase behind me?

So that's what I'm doing! This post is step one of my fifty-part plan. Thanks for being there.

Oh, and the other thing I'm going to do, now she's gone, is go back to bed & start acting the way I feel - that must be what everybody's been talking about when the tell me to "take it easy" and "look after myself" and "give myself a chance to get better." I've been planning it for days, as my activity for after my sister's departure, but last night clinched the deal. It was Ms Rational Self-Determinism's birthday (I won't even tell you how old she is!) and I kind of, in the course of festivities, forgot I was supposed to be sick... It was great! We were in an organic pub in Victoria Park! (The Lauriston, before you ask.) It was tons o' fun; we'll probably laugh about it for weeks; and I'm going to be pretty damn happy to crawl back into my bed.

Tomorrow if I can be arsed to let a languid arm peep from under the bedclothes I will take my guest bloggers off the roster; in the mean time they can do as they list. It will be lonely around here.

okay, so it's not exactly American Gothic...

Parties versus Poetry: You Decide!

(guest blogger Jane Holland writes:)

I was at the re-opening of the Poetry Library in London last week, in connection with the London Literature Festival, and had a fabulous time drinking free vino, networking with other poet-type people and listening to some stunning new poetry on the theme of 'London'. The Poetry Library is on Level Five of the Royal Festival Hall and, as you would expect, houses an extensive collection of contemporary and traditional poetry.

It also provides rather a nice open space for a poetry party ...

Between swigs of dry white wine, I made the acquaintance of three poets I'd heard of before but never had the pleasure of meeting: Matthew Sweeney, Annie Freud and Chris North.

Chris North was utterly charming, by which I mean he smiled constantly and laughed at all my jokes. Always a good and useful thing in a man, I find, being able to understand my humour. Or pretending to understand it, at least. He and his wife Marisa organise poetry courses in sunny Spain, which must be a heavenly thing to do. I'm off on a writing course myself soon, but nowhere as exotic as Alicante.

Annie Freud was ... well, exactly as I'd expected Αnnie Freud to be. Maybe a little more so. Since I'd discussed her debut poetry collection recently on my blog Raw Light, I shook her hand rather carefully. She pulled my hat - always worn at a rakish angle - down over my eyes. I complained that it was too tight for my big head. We smiled at each other, as sharks do when meeting in the water. Then she disappeared into the evening. 'Always another party to go to ...'

Matthew Sweeney. What can I say? Bristling with anecdotes and extremely funny. I'd never met him before but he - like Annie - knew me from my reviewing, this time of an anthology from which I'd singled out one of his poems for praise. Our little group discussed the humour of five year olds, considered the origins of poems at length - Sweeney is a leisurely and fascinating raconteur - poked gentle fun at some key literary figures, swilled more wine and grazed on canapes, until I suddenly realised that no one seemed to be heading towards the function room for the poetry reading.

That's when I discovered that I was the only one still there with a ticket for the poetry reading - Sean Borodale, Tobias Hill and Iain Sinclair - and that I was already late. And I couldn't possibly skip it because I'd agreed to review the reading on my blog the next day.

I made my apologies and fled, running full tilt across Level Five of the RFH to the function room and arriving just as Sean Borodale, gripping the podium with both hands, was about to launch into his first line. The entire room was utterly silent, in a way more usually associated with the oppressive reverence of a state funeral or those awful few seconds before the execution squad open fire.

I am overweight and unfit. Running even those few hundred yards from one side of the building to t'other had left me gasping for air like a diver surfacing after too long under water. I eased into my back row seat, shaking and making a sort of death-rattle noise in my chest. Dozens of heads turned, almost as one. Whites of eyes rolled in my direction. The woman next to me blenched and shrank in her seat, watching me fearfully as though afraid she would be called upon to administer first aid at any moment.

But at least I'd made it and was ready to take notes. Once I'd stopped making faces like a dying guppy, I thought, 'Okay, he's started reading. I can't rummage for my notepad now or I'll disturb even more people. I'll just wait until the end of this first poem and then ...'

What I didn't know - until roughly twelve minutes later - was that Sean Borodale's poems are long. Very, very long ...

But it was a great party. Long live the Poetry Library!

How to make a cold meatloaf sandwich

Dear M. Baroquians: Here is my last Ode to America for these hallowed pages. I am unable to convert the measurements to metric. Sorry, but it's early over here. Do note that "three good squarshy shots of ketchup" is the same in all languages. Many thanks to our lovely hostess for having me and good luck with the recipe.

Love,

Erin

1. Plop a 2-pound package of meatloaf mix (like your mom used to buy: that three-different-ground-meats thing in the butcher case, usually 1/3 beef, 1/3 pork and 1/3 veal) in a bowl.

2. Add a good shake of dry parsley, lots of salt and pepper, two or three good squarshy shots of ketchup, a shake of worcestershire, a handful or so dry bread crumbs and one very finely chopped medium yellow onion.

3. Bask in a surge of overconfidence and tell self, "self, you have made this meatloaf so many times that checking the recipe is redundant."

4. Get your damn hands in there and mix it up (use disposable latex gloves if you don't want to get icky meat stuff under your fingernails).

5. Add more ketchup if too dry and more breadcrumbs if too blucky (you just sort of have to know what is too dry and too blucky, sorry).

6. Plop resulting mixture onto a large piece of foil and form it into a loaf.

7. Discard gloves. Wash hands.

8. Wrap loaf up tightly in tinfoil.

9. Put loaf in freezer.

10. Sit down and pop a beer.

11. Realize you forgot the egg.

12. Say "aw shit" and let out a big sigh.

13. Retrieve meatloaf from freezer.

14. Say "aw shit" again when you look at the mixing bowl full of soapy water in the sink.

15. Wash and dry bowl.

16. Open meatloaf and plop into bowl.

17. Beat and add one egg.

18. Get out another pair of gloves.

19. Get your damn hands in there and mix in the egg, repeating step 5 as necessary.

20. Not wanting to use yet another pair of gloves, remove only the left one and retrieve meatloaf recipe card Mom wrote out for you 20 years ago and make sure you haven't forgotten anything else.

21. Add some oregano and basil per Mom's card.

22. Using only the one hand that remains in a glove, mix that in as best you can.

23. Plop meatloaf back onto the tinfoil you used previously.

24. Realize that the used tinfoil is too crinkly to reuse.

25. Take off other glove and say "goddamnit."

26. Fumble around in the impossible plastic-bag-and-tinfoil-and-Saran Wrap drawer and get out a new sheet of tinfoil.

27. Internally refuse to use another pair of gloves.

28. Using bare hands, form meatloaf into a loaf.

29. Wash hands, making sure to get icky meat stuff out from under fingernails.

30. Put meatloaf in freezer.

31. Finish the beer you started earlier.

32. Live your life for a few weeks.

33. Wake up one day and realize there is nothing for dinner.

34. Remember frozen meatloaf.

35. Start your day and forget to take meatloaf out of freezer to thaw.

36. End up ordering pizza for dinner.

37. Take meatloaf out of freezer for tomorrow's dinner.

38. Live another 23 hours or so.

39. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

40. Put meatloaf in shallow baking pan with 1/2" of water.

41. Bake uncovered for about an hour and a half.

42. Make some mashed potatoes or salad or something while the meatloaf is baking.

43. Open a five-dollar bottle of wine.

44. Knowing that this is nothing more than an obligatory stop on your quest for a great cold meatloaf sandwich, consume meatloaf (deluged with A1 Sauce if desired), potatoes and wine with family.

45. Refrigerate leftover meatloaf.

46. Live another 18 hours or so in sublime anticipation of forthcoming lunch.

47. Remove cold meatloaf from fridge and precisely cut one or two slices, depending on cross-sectional area of meatloaf and bread.

48. Marvel at how much easier it is to cut cold meatloaf than hot meatloaf.

49. Lightly toast two pieces of bread.

50. Slather one or both pieces of toast with mayonnaise.

51. Build sandwich: toast, meatloaf, shake of salt, shake of Tabasco, lettuce, mayonnaise-slathered toast.

52. Cut sandwich in half and part the halves such that satisfying cross section of sandwich is viewable.

53. Put a handful of Ruffles Reduced Fat potato chips on plate, along with a pickle spear.

54. Turn on some Van Morrison, set plate on kitchen table.

55. Sit down.

56. Smile and consider sandwich.

57. Bite sandwich.

58. Inflate with breath as waxen wings bloom from your back.