George Szirtes

Three translations from Akhmatova

2012-02-02T21:38:00.001Z

I was asked to translate a few poems by Akhmatova for a memorial reading. I can't quite remember when it was, some eight or nine years ago, perhaps. Jo Shapcott read, and Elaine Feinstein, and Sasha Dugdale. These translations appeared somewhere, possibly in Poetry in Translation, but I have never done anything else with them. There is a cupboard full of such things. I'd like occasionally to ransack it.

Seven hundred years I’ve been away…

Seven hundred years I’ve been away
But nothing’s changed here, so to speak,
The same ineffable grace pouring
From the same impregnable peak

Same choirs of stars and waters
Same constellations, same black sky
Same seed in the same wind
Same mothers singing the same lullaby

My ancestral house stands firm
On Asian soil, why fret about it.
I’ll be back soon enough. Let hedges bloom,
Let fountains gush pure water. Let them spout it.

Tashkent 1944

Despite all your promises…

Despite all your promises
You ran off with my ring
And abandoned me in the depths,
Helpless, without a thing..

So why last night’s spectral visitation?
Why send him to me?
Young he was, cute, red-headed and lean
Wholly feminine,
Wailing like a hired mourner
And whispering insidiously
Of Rome, of Paris, and how
He really cannot do without me now.

Never mind shame, never mind the clink,

I’ll manage without him fine, I think.

1961

There is a secret line…

There is a secret line between people who are close
Beyond which doting or desire may not tread,
However the heart shatters or explodes,
However the lips fuse in silent dread.

Friendship too is useless, however fierce
Or fiery the joy of it was long ago
When nothing bound the spirit to the body’s affairs
With that langorous afterglow.

It’s madness to approach that line, and the agony
Of touching it is more than we can bear,
So you will understand why my heart suddenly
Stops beating when you put your hand on it, right there.

1915

I liked that 'right there' at the end. It implies the shock of the hand on the breast, and the ambiguity of the heart stopping, whether in excitement or rejection we don't know. Nor do I know if that is the full meaning in Russian but the line opened up under me and I wanted to go there.

The Goodwin Fall

2012-02-01T22:03:00.000Z

There has been an interesting rally to the side of ex-knight Fred Goodwin. I spent a little while in argument with a fellow writer on Twitter who was upset by what she considered the brutal vindictiveness of his accusers. And there is some sympathy for this view. Martin Rowson in The Guardian sees him as a scapegoat for the bankers and the Tories. To say, well he would, is not to say he is wrong, it's just, however brilliantly drawn as ever, that it is a kind of obligatory gesture.

The other words that come up are savage, sadistic, bitter mob, nasty, pointless, vilified, blood lust, humiliation.

The idea is that Goodwin is taking the can for everyone else who gets off blameless; that it's not him, but 'everyone' and 'the system', because 'even the rich have feelings'.

Yes, I think, but so have the poor, of whom there are very many more, many of whom are now poorer, some directly as a result of Goodwin's actions. Goodwin remains rich, secure and, no doubt employable. This little local difficulty will pass for him. It will not pass quite so easily for the jobless and dispossessed. These people will not be featuring on the news and front pages except as statistics. There will be no expression of sympathy for them because they have feelings too.

In other words I am indifferent as to the fate of Goodwin, not delirious with happiness, not dancing on the grave of his knighthood, just indifferent.

Because he is not simply himself. He is part of an ethos - a culture - that is disgraceful in itself, and however pragmatists might feel about it being, on the whole, better that some people should be very rich ('filthy rich' as Mandelson had it) in order that the poor should, as a by-product, be slightly better off than they might possibly have been otherwise, the culture remains ugly and, in the long run, deeply corrosive.

*

You are, of course, welcome to blame 'the system' though that seems to trip off the tongue rather too easily, especially if you don't explain what aspect of the system you mean and what you might be able or willing to do about it. You might well mean capitalism as a whole, in which case you ought to take the suggestion very seriously indeed. Do you mean all historical forms of capitalism or just this latest twenty- or thirty-year old model? Will you plump for another 'system', and if so which one? If you do plump for one are you willing seriously to argue for it, plan it and work for it? The old state-socialism model has not been out of the garage much since, well, 1973 say. The model pre-1989 wasn't really an option, that was the falling apart of what had remained of the 1973 model. Chinese communism is not a workable model here either, without the resources, the population, the distances, and the arbitrary application of power by the state as and when it suits it. Cuba? Venezuela? North Korea? Unlikely right now.

The only live viable alternative option, popular in Africa and the Gulf, is militant Islamism. That's clear enough as a model and plenty of people are choosing it where they are choosing it, but, honestly, I can't see it being introduced in Skegness or Warmington-on-Sea next week, not even by a popular man like Alex Salmond, who now regrets backing Goodwin.

If you want a revolution, that may happen anyway, because something is pretty close to bankrupt here, not just financially, but morally and intellectually too. 'The system' may survive through sheer mobility but it might not. Climate may do it. Shortages may do it. A fuel breakdown might do it. But maybe 'the system' is just going through a periodic wobble, chewing up and spitting out people, people not so much like Goodwin, more like those we never hear about.

Speaking flippantly of 'the system' is gesture politics. Revolutions may begin with gestures but generally involve tumbrils and bodies in the street. Nor is it guaranteed that once the revolution has taken over there will be no bodies in the streets or that no one will be tortured in the usual well-worn, well-equipped cellars. That doesn't mean that revolutions shouldn't happen - they have, and often for the long-term good - just that one should understand what one means when gesturing.

It's not really about Goodwin, it's not even so much about scapegoats, knee-jerk reactions, and political advantage: it is about trying to moderate a culture that works as an ethos in a confined space, an ethos that claims that if so-and-so doesn't get his or her bonus of £2-3 million every year on top of his or her millions per year salary, his or her reputation and that of the entire country is shot. That's the ethos and it needs discouragement.

I'm with Zoe Williams on this:

This feeling of sheepishness is unavoidable: we gave the crisis a human face because without one it would have been even more incomprehensible, alienating and frightening than it already was. But to heap so much disaster upon one man could never be proportionate, and his disgrace leaves a hysteria-hangover. I'm sure this is how it felt to drown a witch – loads of excitement, a magnificent climax, then a drab, embarrassed realisation that you just wanted her to get wet and didn't mean her to actually die.

The difference here is that Mr Goodwin did not die and was not innocent. Stripping him of his knighthood would be a tawdry sideshow if it were the end of the story. But if it's the beginning of something, the beginning of accountability, the beginning of a new way of doing things, then it's not a bad place to start.

Yes, that is the difference.

A mourning ritual: three stages & an infinity sign

2012-01-30T21:48:00.001Z

An excerpt from Yudit Kiss's, The Summer My Father Died, the book I am currently translating. This passage is from near the end of the book where the father has died and the daughter, Anna, is finding it hard to get over the grief.

Back in Switzerland where she lives and works she visits the family doctor who has suffered much worse family tragedies than her own. It's just a check-up but he can see something is wrong. She tells him about the death.

I quickly recounted the circumstances. He looked at me thoughtfully then suggested we arrange a brief ritual through which I could take leave of my father. I was a little taken aback by that but nodded automatically as I did to everything he suggested. Dr Vesely told me what should be done. The ritual would consist of three parts. In the first I would say out loud everything I loved about my father and our relationship. In the second I’d say what I didn’t like. In the third I would go through all that I had inherited from him, everything that, because, or in spite of him, had become part of my life. After this was done I should imagine an infinity sign, my father in one loop of it, myself in the other. Then I was to cut the link between them.

She returns some two weeks later and after some initial embarrassment she goes through with it.

But once I got through the agony of those first few minutes I was surprised how naturally one thing followed another. After a little while I felt as if my father were crouching in the dim yellow light, in the left hand corner of the surgery. He was there without his usual defences, more real than I had ever seen him. After the initial heart-in-the-mouth feeling I spoke to him without fear or discretion in a way I had never done before. In the torrent of liberated words and feelings there was a moment when I heard the shuffling of paper, and a gentle noise like a pen quickly passing over a smooth page. I think I must have realised that poor Dr Vesely might have had quite enough of this and was making his general medical notes. Perhaps it was a prescription he was writing, or an instruction that I should be removed immediately to the nearest locked cell. But then my thoughts returned to my father who was still squatting in the left hand corner of the room. We were at the third stage of the ritual now, where I was to say what mark my father had left on my life. Once I finished and listened in exhaustion Dr Vesely spoke again.

‘Now imagine the infinity sign with you in one loop and he in the other! Then cut the link between the loops.’

I saw the infinity sign with my father in one loop and a shape in the other that might have been me. I waited a while trying to understand what kind of arena we were occupying. When I looked over to him my father was still there, unmoving, his whole being clinging on to life. I waited a while then started speaking again. You can go now, I said. No one will threaten you there. There’ll be neither shame nor pain. You don’t need to fear anything any more. I spoke quietly, patiently, like someone persuading a child to put on his raincoat so he’d not be soaked to the skin. After a while I felt my father was no longer in the room. He hadn’t left, he had simply been slowly absorbed into the available space: he’d turned to water. I’ve no idea why specifically water, perhaps so that he might remain among us a little while longer because in our worldly lives we had always been sea monsters, always settling by the sea, always dreaming of the sea in summer. For a fortnight or so I continued to feel his presence in the lake then he vanished for good.

When, tearful and covered in perspiration I rose, dripping from the couch and tried to pull my body together, I saw Dr Vesely, perfectly politely sitting behind his desk. We looked at each other in silence for a while.

‘He didn’t want to go,’ I said at last.

‘And?’ he asked.

‘I had to persuade him.’

‘And then?’

‘Then he slowly dissolved in water’

‘What water?’

‘I don’t know. All kinds of water.’

I stood up, my muscles tense. There was no weight hanging over me now.

‘He has left this message for you,’ said Dr Vesely and gave me a scrawled prescription. My hands were shaking so much I couldn’t have read it even if his writing were more legible than usual.

Fascinating translating that because, in effect, by way of the imagination, the translator goes through a version of the psychological process of the character in the book. The process is very simple but the infinity sign is a fine touch. I don't suppose it was entirely Dr Vesely's invention.

Two 1965 pop videos where the women don't move

2012-01-29T22:06:00.001Z

Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs: Wooly Bully (1965)

The Zombies: She's Not There (1965)

I remember both of these (just) but had forgotten the still women. In Wooly Bully they stand as if they were shop dummies while the woman in She's Not There lies on a chaise longue and looks confidently enigmatic. But she doesn't move either. Sam the Sham was an oddly memorable novelty song. The Zombies were genuinely original and haunting.

But why are the women still? I'm sure a feminist analysis would offer plenty of explanations. They are sexual objects. The have no freedom of action. They have no subjectivity. They activate the idea of feminine mystique at a safe distance. They are cardboard-cutout Muses. They are trophy girlfriends. They are wallpaper, decoration, status symbols. They are the lay figures of pop-surrealism, entirely passive subjects of the potentially sadistic male gaze.

And all this would be true, or might be true, some of it or all of it, and yet it isn't enough. Or if this more or less describes the truth then the truth is deeper and stranger and not quite at safe distance.

Apparent stillness is inanimation. The last stage of inanimation is death. In how many corny ghosts films have we seen the eyes of apparently inanimate portraits begin to move? (I think of The Cat and the Canary, for instance, a comedy based on such tropes). How often, for spooky effect, have statues that we have taken for inanimate stir and threaten. This may be taking things too far but there is something a little unheimlich about those beautiful unmoving female figures who are not altogether powerless, especially the one in The Zombies video, since, surely, she must be the woman who, according to the title, is - unsettlingly - 'not there.'

Hungary, The New Theatre, Letter in The Guardian / Roma film

2012-01-27T16:38:00.002Z

The scene above is from the siege, last year, of the Roma community of Gyöngyöspata, a village in Hungary, and here a film, edited, with English subtitles, published today by The Guardian to accompany it.

The letter below is the complete text of the one published yesterday, also in The Guardian. It is an impressive collection of theatre people. I'm the bottom signatory.

Open, liberal theatre under fire in Hungary

We are alarmed by the imposition of a far-right director on one of Budapest's leading theatres, and call on our foreign secretary and the international community to put pressure on the Hungarian government to reverse the decision before 1 February, the day the theatre is scheduled to change hands. Following the election of the rightwing Fidesz party, the mayor of Budapest sacked the director of Új Színház (the New Theatre), and appointed actor György Dörner in his place. Dörner supports the anti-Roma, anti-gay and antisemitic party Jobbik. Jobbik has been forced to disband its militia, the Hungarian Guard, but its presidential candidate recently stated that Jews were "lice-infested dirty murderers". The party has 47 members of the Hungarian parliament.

Currently, the New Theatre presents both Hungarian plays and the international canon, from Schiller to Shakespeare. Dörner plans to reverse what he describes as a "degenerate, sick, liberal hegemony" in Hungary by stopping the production of "foreign garbage" and concentrating on Hungarian plays. These include the work of his friend and adviser István Csurka, an open antisemite, advocate of the Jewish conspiracy theory, and president of the Hungarian Justice and Life party. Several Hungarian writers have withdrawn their plays from the theatre in protest.

The change imposed on the New Theatre may not be the last. Jobbik and other extreme-right groups are campaigning and demonstrating against the Hungarian National Theatre, calling its work "obscene, pornographic, gay, anti-national and anti-Hungarian". The campaign against a liberal Hungarian theatre, open to the world, is part of a move in Hungary towards intolerance and against democracy. The historical parallels are obvious and chilling. We support Hungarian theatre-makers in opposing this appointment, and urge our government to demand that the Hungarian government overturn this decision.

Artistic directors:
Michael Attenborough
Michael Boyd
Dominic Cooke
Daniel Evans
Nicholas Hytner
David Lan
Nicolas Kent
Josie Rourke
Erica Whyman

Actors:
Rosalind Ayres
Eve Best
Simon Callow
Bertie Carvel
James Frain
Romola Garai
Gawn Grainger
Henry Goodman
Martin Jarvis
Toby Jones
Beverley Klein
Roger Lloyd Pack
James Purefoy
Antony Sher
Imelda Staunton
Dan Stevens
Janet Suzman
Harriet Walter
Zoë Wanamaker
Samuel West
Timothy West

Directors:
Neil Bartlett
Gregory Doran
Richard Eyre
Kevin Macdonald
Trevor Nunn
Indhu Rubasingham
Tim Supple

Playwrights:
Richard Bean
Howard Brenton
Moira Buffini
Caryl Churchill
April de Angelis
David Edgar
Michael Frayn
Lee Hall
David Hare
Terry Johnson
Mark Ravenhill
Laura Wade
Timberlake Wertenbaker
Arnold Wesker

and…
Bernie Corbett General secretary of the Writers' Guild
Christine Payne General secretary of Equity
Malcolm Sinclair President of Equity
Joan Bakewell
Don Black
Geraldine D'Amico Jewish Book Week
Jessica Duchen
Denise Epstein Daughter of Irène Némirovsky
Ruth Fainlight
Henrietta Foster
Michael Grade
Amanda Hopkinson PEN
Dennis Marks
Kate Pakenham
Sharif István Horthy
András Schiff
George Szirtes

Holocaust Day 3

2012-01-27T11:53:00.000Z

Your material is your sense of the world as it impinges on your memory and imagination. I can never completely separate memory and imagination and doubt they can be separated, except in the most naked yet vital way through research and record. But since research inevitably includes memory we are aware that, on each successive level, the imagination adapts and rewrites it, until it becomes metaphor, since it is metaphor we are constantly seeking if for no other reason that it offers meaning, connection and end.

There may be certain proprieties involved in the use of material. I have never written about conditions inside concentration camps. I don't feel I have at the right of appropriation. It could be argued that we do have such rights, and exercise them at each moment of our lives, but if I don't feel them I can't write out of them. Maybe my obligation to my parents prevents me. Maybe it is the sense of obligation to my mother that prevents me joining the rich seam of Jewish society that she rejected while being, in historical terms, part of it. I am certainly part of it. If this were 1944 it would be no use if my mother really were Lutheran, I'd be off on those cattle-wagons like the rest. Part yet not part.

In response to my poet friend who told me that the working class had suffered more than the Jews, I might have answered, 'It may be so, but no one has tried to wipe out the working class, to eradicate them entirely.' I didn't answer him then, being too taken aback, wondering if I had been guilty of something, making a false claim, 'playing the Holocaust card', turning to advantage a misfortune than was somehow, really, a kind of paradoxical fortune. And, most importantly, his idea that maybe that misfortune was nothing much after all. You're talking about my mum and her entire family there, I might have said. And didn't.

And maybe it isn't the great 'misfortune': no greater misfortune than that suffered by gypsies, gays, Armenians, and those innumerable tribes of people throughout the history of the world. The others were also mentioned and referred to at yesterday's event. It wasn't a Jewish love-in, the elevation, fetishisation and celebration of a victimhood with which Jews might blackmail the world into doing them special underhand favours. The fact was there were many present there who had lost people, were there because of lost people, or knew directly of lost people. No-one said - because this wasn't the occasion, because it never really is the occasion - that the Holocaust was not a single event in the lives of Jews, simply the biggest in a long series. Everyone there will have felt that deep in the bones, but no-one spoke of it. They don't. It's just a sense of the world.

Not even particularly a Jewish sense, by which I mean the sense born of an instinctive knowledge that one is fated to live in a constantly vulnerable minority that has survived on its wits. It may be just that Jews are likely to feel it at times like this. I mean the Elizabeth Bishop sense of the world as an icy sea in which knowledge is historical, flowing and flown. That sea freezes not only Jews. No-one survives in that sea. Jews are nothing special there.

In fact they're nothing special in the universe, the universe being the way it is. They are just like everyone else, only perhaps, at times, a little more so. The chief lesson one learns from the Holocaust is that it isn't a possession one can dispose of for credit, but a taste and an apprehension of the icy sea that washes at our shores every day of the year. This day we remember it, on other days we get on with the business of living.

Holocaust Day 2

2012-01-27T11:08:00.000Z

I have often enough written that I was not brought up as a Jew. I mean in any way at all. I was led by my mother to believe that she was a Lutheran, and that therefore we, as her children, would be, officially, of Lutheran background. Not that we ever set foot in a Lutheran church. Both my parents were, at the time of my childhood, atheists. They did not worship any God, neither the Jewish one nor the Lutheran one. We never set foot in a Synagogue either and we kept no Jewish holidays. I knew nothing about them. I think my father would have kept them but my mother insisted on complete dissociation. It was only after her death that our suspicion that she was in fact Jewish was confirmed.

That left us - and now I must talk about myself alone - in a curious position. At some stage or other the question had to arise in the poetry because, however impersonal our subject, our sense of the world is, at least partly, determined by who and what we are. It took me three books to get to the point at which I felt it important to return to Hungary (and it was important, it utterly changed my life), and it was the fifth before the sense of the Holocaust and Jewishness emerged as something pressing. Even so, it was not pressing in my own immediate experience, but as a factor in the sense of sheer being. Budapest, that most beautiful of cities, presented itself physically as scarred memorial to a past of which I was a small part. I felt the bullet- and shell-pitted surface of the buildings at my fingertips: they felt like marks under my own skin, like marks of a realisation that said: 'This is what life is like, not just your life, but life itself'. The poetry then had to go forward, first as 1956, the year of the revolution, but later as 1944, the year of the transportations and vanishings.

When I think of the sense of history in a poet I think of the awareness , under the skin, of death as a presence, death as total indifference in a world of amusement and beauty. That is why Elizabeth Bishop's 'At the Fishhouses' means so much to me. The hand dipping in the icy sea where the seal appears so comically is one of those perfect emblems. The sea to Bishop was as the walls of Budapest were to me. One doesn't have to have direct experience of such things in order to sense them and I value most those who can sense them: not just the tragedy, but the humour and the indifference and the beauty.

Holocaust Day 1

2012-01-27T10:47:00.001Z

Yesterday I took a train to London to read with Dannie Abse, Wanda Barford, Alan Brownjohn, and Lynne Hjelmsgaard for a Holocaust Memorial event. It's about three hours door to door either way so I had to leave during the interval to arrive home a little past midnight.

The reading was packed and good humoured though the underlying sense of tragedy was palpable. Wanda talked about personal experience, or rather that of her child cousins, who were murdered in Auschwitz. Dannie read from his own work as well as his powerful translation of Celan's Todesfuge, his whole voice changing as he read it. Alan read from his novel in which there is an encounter with a German Jewish optometrist and warned about developments in our own time, and Lynne, whom I didn't know, read a Karen Gershon and a Primo Levi as well as three short poems of her own. I was last and read four poems, the first parts of both Metro and of The Penig Film, adding Grandfather in Green and Children of The Ghetto. I was followed by a young violinist who played the first part of a Bach Partita, then brief coffee and away. The programme continued and by the time it ended I was well on my way to Cambridge.

I rarely read those poems in public though three of them deal with direct family experience of the Holocaust. Very briefly, my mother survived two concentration camps, Ravensbruck and Penig, despite her heart condition, and my father spent much of the war in labour brigades in the Ukraine where many died, and had he not escaped with two others on the route march back, he too would have died: the three of them were the only survivors of the brigade. On her realease my mother returned to her home in Transylvania to find her entire family wiped out and all their possessions vanished. My father's father vanished into Auschwitz. A few years ago I found some film records of the liberation of Penig on the web, which was the trigger for the writing of The Penig Film, which is primarily about the muse of history, Clio, as a film director.

I don't read these poems much in public, apart from on such occasions, because I am aware that some - an increasing number, of people, especially other poets (or so I guess) think of it as playing 'the Holocaust card' or 'the Jewish card', and, if not that, then at least a kind of privileged information, an 'advantage' in claiming attention. If something truly tragic occurred in your near proximity you should have the decency to shut up about it.

I am putting that far too strongly, possibly exaggerating. I may be describing an expectation rather than a fact, but I remember one poet describing how oddly funny it was that Jon Silkin would introduce himself by saying that he was a Jew. There was a suggestion that he was being a little overbearing, even something of a bore. I also recall another poet stressing to me, apropos of nothing, that the working class had suffered far more than the Jews. I hadn't mentioned Jews or Jewishness, but then I also recalled how he was ambivalent about Metro, which was my first venture into the area.

So the uncertainty worked on two levels: on that of taking the Holocaust as a subject at all and claiming part of it, and on that of the notion of personal advantage through the misfortunes of others close to you.

Hungary, an appeal

2012-01-26T11:19:00.000Z

The signatories - György Dalos, Miklós Haraszti, György Konrád and László Rajk - of the letter, The decline of democracy – the rise of dictatorship: An appeal quoted from below, are some the leading figures of the underground before 1989 - in other words the people who took the risks of imprisonment and exclusion.

Excerpts:

The present government has snatched the democratic political tools from the hands of those who could use these tools to ameliorate their predicament. While chanting empty patriotic slogans, the government behaves in a most unpatriotic way by reducing its citizens to inactivity and impotence...

...Viktor Orbán's government is intent on destroying the democratic rule of law, removing checks and balances, and pursuing a systematic policy of closing all autonomous institutions, including those of civil society, with the potential to criticise its omnipotence...

...With the removal of the checks and balances, the whole Hungarian state has become subservient to the government, or rather to the prime minister...While local councils have lost the better part of their clout, semi-autonomous institutions such as the Court of Auditors, the Hungarian Press Agency, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the National Cultural Fund might well be regarded today as semi-governmental agencies. Arbitration committees, including the now defunct National Conciliation Council, have been disbanded...

...Fidesz now has the exclusive right to pass any bill into law and make decisions about any issue concerning parliamentary protocol, thus rendering the existence of opposition parties a mere formality. Bills are rushed through legislation with no debate worthy of mention...

...* While retirement age has been raised across the board, a significant proportion of leading judges has been forced into retirement. The judiciary has thus become existentially dependent.
* The Chief Prosecutor, who has the exclusive right to decide which case may be forwarded to the Court of Justice and which court should hear it, is a politician of the ruling party.
* In the future, suspects and the accused may be deprived of the opportunity to consult their solicitors.

This new system marks the end of independent jurisdiction in Hungary...

The appeal goes on to deal with executive power, jurisdiction, the media, and election law. I know this looks like dry stuff and nothing to do with you but it's vital and will impinge on Europe as a whole. I have said it before, but it seems very like a return to the 1930s.

On Hungary, for German language readers, summed up

2012-01-26T10:57:00.000Z

Every so often, normal service is interrupted by news from Hungary. Today twice.

Two different accounts of the contents of Osteuropa's Hungary issue.

1.
Writing in the new issue of Osteuropa – entitled Quo vadis, Hungaria? – András Bozóki explains how, after 1989, the Hungarian political system was founded on consensus and a deep distrust of power: hence the retention of so-called "cardinal laws" – laws alterable only with a two-thirds parliamentary majority – from the socialist-era constitution. However, formal stability came at a price, writes the political scientist and former culture minister: "The constitution prevented the system from correcting itself. Accordingly, when Fidesz obtained the two-thirds parliamentary majority in 2010, Viktor Orbán talked not about a correction but about a revolution." What was originally meant to guarantee democracy now does the opposite: "The new government sees the constitution solely as a technical body of laws that they are able to adapt to whatever their political ideas might be. When they pass a law that turns out to be unconstitutional, they don't adapt the law but change the constitution."

The letter of the law: The new constitution that entered into force on 1 January contradicts European requirements of democracy, constitutionalism and the protection of fundamental rights on several counts, writes Gábor Halmai. It allows the current government to set in stone its economic and social policy on areas including taxation, the pension system and families and marriage, so that any subsequent government possessing only a simple majority will not be able to alter these. Second, the newly defined subject of the constitution – Hungary as national community – allows no place for other nationalities living within the territory of the Hungarian state, while entitling Hungarians living beyond Hungary's borders. Perhaps most starkly anti-democratically, the constitution undermines the independence of regulatory institutions ranging from the national bank to the constitutional court and media, and hence the separation of powers.

The upperworld: Bálint Magyar, former minister of education and co-signatory of the "New Year's appeal" issued by former dissidents, recalls Fidesz's first stint in power from 1998-2002: "[Back then] I called the Hungarian phenomenon the organized upperworld, where, unlike the oligarchic organizations of Socialists, the power operating within the framework of a network of democratic institutions extended its fields of operation downwards, using Mafia methods and state support. In the organized upperworld, the state is not an instrument of the Mafia, but it is the Mafia itself." Nothing much has changed in the nature of Fidesz, writes Magyar, except that a two-thirds majority now place sole power in a single person: "When [Orbán] speaks about certain decisions not as his own but of the Parliament, he finds it very hard to suppress an ironic smile."

*

2.
The new Osteuropa magazine is dedicated to Hungary, which is threatening to turn its back on the West. Sociologist Balint Magyar describes how under Victor Orban, first the Fidesz Party and then the whole country landed in the populist trap - and is now floundering. "What national and social populism have in common is that they pass responsibility onto others. The nation 'which has not been spared by fate' and the man on the street who is exposed to fate unite to lament their bitter lot. Critical reflection of history and a rational approach to thinking about the future have been systematically banned from Hungary's political culture. They have been replaced by self-pity and the search for scapegoats: communists, bankers, oligarchs, liberals, Jews, gays, gypsies."

The writer Laszlo Darvasi tells the story of a country where strange things are afoot. The story begins: "The next morning strange developments were underway in the country. On the building site where the walls were growing upwards, on the steps of the ladders looming high, on the scaffolding and on the public buildings, loud speakers had been attached overnight. These loudspeakers, however rusty and worn out they looked, were buzzing clearly and intelligibly. They had been lying around in old sound archives…"

In further articles, Krisztina Koenen writes about the world as Victor Orban sees it, Esther Kinsky writes about the hinterland, Gabor Halmai on the new constitution, and Kornelia Magyar on the hardships of the Roma.

Clarissa's Birthday 25 January

2012-01-24T23:32:00.001Z

Last year's birthday

As If We Could Choose

     As if we could choose the moment we choose the moment.
     At one moment turn, at one moment speak, at one smile.
     At one you turn to me, at one you speak, then you smile.
     It is all we have, this succession of moments after moment.

     So you turn for this photograph. Pose, I say, and you laugh
     because posing is serious and laughable. What we love
     turns and poses and laughs because it is what we love.
     So the pose, the solemnity, the turn and the laugh.

     We sink into moments. The moments are soft, made for sinking.
     Time is quicksand, we lie out flat on it as if on blank paper.
     Look how we float over reams, whole moments, of paper.
     And there is the sun to our right, now rising, now sinking.

     Or is it the night with its lightbulbs, awake or asleep,
     just coming to wake and snap into moments like this one?
     How full you are of a life that is so much like this one.
     How bright the eyes in the picture that smile without sleep.

,

This year's birthday

London via Ely

2012-01-23T22:54:00.001Z

After morning at university, I drive back and hop on the train to London. I prefer to go Kings Cross via Cambridge now rather than down to Liverpool Street, one good reason being that the route goes right past Ely Cathedral which looks ethereal whatever the weather, even in bright sunshine. You approach it on the right, its great choir of delicate verticals looking to ease away from the earth as if the whole building were some medieval vertical-take-off machine powered entirely by angels. As the train slows into the station the cathedral manoeuvres itself into position behind the marina. The huddle of small white boats offers a brilliant visual response to the cathedral. The cathedral points up, the boats point towards the horizon. It is the most perfect view you could wish for.

Then you're past the cathedral in the glooms of Ely Station where once on a freezing winter's night I spent a miserable forty minutes having just returned from Germany via Stansted, exhausted, to find everything locked, toilets, waiting room, everything, the wind roaring through and the rain looking to eat up anything in its way. That's when the two drunk hog-roast men arrived, cheerful and fresh from buying hog-roast equipment from Preston, Lancs, and asked me to play Scrabble on the train, thereby cheering me up too.

This time I was going to meet S in the Museum Tavern opposite the BM and talk about a US edition of the poems, or at least some of them. I arrived early, ordered my Jameson's, sat, read and listened half-attentively to the general conversation. S arrived when he said he would, a little later than arranged, a tall, distinguished looking man of about 80. I asked what he'd like to drink and he asked for a half, then fancied some 'bangers', a word that sounds odd in an American mouth. OI ordered some sausages and chips. We talked intensely for an hour and half about everything and parted eventually with some kind of understanding as to what kind of book we were considering. I dashed across Russell Square and just made the train home.

On the second leg of the return journey three older Norfolk women a few seats in front of me were having a loud conversation. Their language was rich and sweary and I wondered at it for a minute then reminded myself that when I say older, I actually mean about my own age. Their mothers wouldn't have sworn on a train, but to them it's not swearing anymore, it's just talk. At one point they'd got onto one of their fellow workers.

- She gone online
- Everybody gone online nowdays.
- Yea but she gone on that Facebook thing
- What she bloody done that for, she never speaks to anyone anyway?

They talked about looking after the old ones and what presents they got their relatives, and what Montreux was like for the holiday ('Not that cold').

Montreux.

I thought they were probably very nice women, kindly, rough tongued. You'd trust them

Crow Country

2012-01-22T22:35:00.001Z

Today we went to Claxton for dinner then for a walk by the river waiting for the great swirling and gathering of rooks.

Television shows us every spectacular act of nature but it is different being there and watching it yourself through a pair of binoculars, a much finer pair of binoculars than we have at home, by the way. I suppose we spent a couple of hours or so walking there and back, waiting for the rooks to rise, and then they did rise, some 30,000 or so according to our friend & host.

The weather was kind, bright at moments, the wind hard on the ears. It tends to drop as it gets dark, said our host, and I suppose it did. As the sky moved through dusk, which doesn't take very long, shapes became silhouettes, and the river glowed all the more brightly under starlight and a largely clear sky. The pub at the bend glittered as if it were still Christmas, and two or three smaller lit houses were pinpoint sharp.

We were working out which painter would have painted the late dusk in this way. If it were a city Atkinson Grimshaw would have done it, near the sea it might have been William Dyce. Norman Ackroyd might have etched it, but the pools of water were steely and electric, or maybe not so much steel as mercury, and though there was hardly any colour left, except in the river that was now reflecting the starlight, you still felt - crazy as it sounds - the pressure of colour, that the medium of the marshes wasn't black and white but deep sombre tones of green. Looking at the illuminated pub further down the path there was even a touch of Magritte about the scene, not so much pastoral as filmic.

I am so unfamiliar with nature - I can recognise a decent number of birds if they come near enough - that meeting it is like being on the other side of a mirror, inhabiting not one's own subjective imagination but the domain of a different subjectivity; being aware of oneself as a minor phenomenon in the eyes of something with views of its own.

Maybe this is the kind of mysticism that settles on urban people when put down by a rural river at night. It is a mysticism about which I feel as sceptical as I do about most other kinds of mysticism, but that doesn't mean I fail to notice it's there in me. And our hosts and friends, who are proper wide-cultured scientists, would probably do well to dismiss such mystical feeling, pointing to deeper and more intricate workings, to the multiple systems and microcosms of a world that, to a visitor, seems to constitute a unity.

In the end we thank our host for taking us to the place and feel privileged to have seen it. On the other side of the river, by the small brightly lit station that is not expecting any trains, small groups of people were standing, observing exactly the same events as we were, both of us possibly influencing the events we were noting by our presence, noting each others presence too, just as the rooks note ours before retiring to their roosts in woods to which they have returned for generations.

Hungary: now the right marches but what of the right to march

2012-01-21T22:06:00.000Z

Zsolt Bayer & kindred spirits

Chinese Crienglish.com reports 100,000 pro government marchers in Budapest tonight, saying:

The marchers, coming from all over Hungary and neighboring countries with large ethnic Hungarian minorities, met at Budapest's Heroes Square, by a monument to heroes of Hungarian history.

Newswire MTI reported tens of thousands in the crowd of marchers and thousands more cheering along the sidelines.

The marchers, carried posters supporting Prime Minister Viktor Orban who has been criticized by the opposition as well as the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the United States and others for moves they believe violate the independence of Hungary's central bank, judiciary, data protection ombudsman and the media.

"We refuse to become a colony!" argued some of the signs.

A second crowd waited at Parliament, the marchers' destination, to greet them.

Adding that:

The march was organized by journalist Zsolt Bayer, who writes for the right-wing Magyar Hirlap and has often been charged with overt anti-Semitism, Andras Bencsik, editor-in-chief of the conservative and nationalistic journal Magyar Demokrata, Andras's brother Gabor Bencsik, a historian who has written extensively about problems with the Roma (Gypsy) population, and Gabor Szeles, owner of the Magyar Hirlap newspaper

.
A flavour of Mr Bayer, as follows:

András Schiff's letter to the editor of The Washington Post gave Bayer a wonderful opportunity to vent against Hungarian Jews. I will translate some passages, but I'm not sure whether I will be able to give the flavor of Bayer's writing in English. It is hard for me to be that base.

The piece, entitled "The same stench," begins this way: "A stinking excrement called something like Cohen from somewhere in England writes that 'foul stench wafts' from Hungary. Cohen [he means Nick Cohen, the UK journalist], and Cohn-Bendit, and Schiff. Népszava appears with the red figure of the man with the hammer and demands freedom of the press. Most people think that this is something new and that war like that didn't take place before. Nonsense. There is nothing new under the sun. Unfortunately, they were not all buried up to their necks in the forest of Orgovány." A brief explanation. Orgovány, a small village on the Great Plains, was the place of massacres committed by the leaders of the Hungarian White Terror in 1919-1920. In plain language, Bayer is expressing his sorrow that not all the Jews were killed in those days.

That's my emphasis there.

Also worth adding is that the government, under the heading of electoral reform, has proposed giving ethnic Hungarians living outside Hungary (see pt 5 here), in other words the citizens of other countries, a vote on their party preference. Since over 4 million Hungarians fall into this category this should ensure more Fidesz support for a long time. The injustice of the Trianon treaty is certainly a major issue but there is the ideal of a Greater Hungary behind this. I mention it because of the Hungarians abroad a representation of whom are mentioned as being present on this march.

This is not to claim that Fidesz voters are all anti-Semites and proto-fascists - by no means - but it's as well to know who organises your march

*

On the other hand we could also read this yesterday.

A civic group said Friday it would file an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights because authorities are blocking it from holding a protest on the March 15 national holiday by reserving all likely locations in downtown Budapest for official use.

Peter Juhasz, a spokesman for One Million for the Freedom of Press in Hungary, said the group is turning to the Strasbourg, France-based court because authorities are limiting its right to assembly.

Budapest Mayor Istvan Tarlos said in a statement he does not want to block the March 15 protest rally near Elizabeth Bridge and is willing to discuss the issue with the One Million group.

15 March is the key date for demonstrations. It marks the outbreak of the 1848 revolution. I myself was on the one in 1989. Crowding out the opposition is the strategy. Take up every available major public space. No need then for police or baton charges. Sorry, old man, that space is reserved for us.

The time of the counter-demonstrations has arrived. The government will want big shows of strength. It was done in Libya and Egypt. It's a common recourse. Things might or might not begin to get more violent from now so the world should keep watching. I trust the EU is watching and noting all this. And that it keeps track of Mr Bayer.

Etta James

2012-01-20T21:33:00.000Z

Etta James January 25, 1938 – January 20, 2012

It is wonderful to have made one heart-stopping classic but to have made three is a claim to greatness. This is not an obituary, most of what you want to know about Etta James can be found on Wiki which will do for now.

Here are the three I mean:

At Last (1960)

I Just Wanna Make Love to You (1961)

I'd Rather Go Blind (1968)

There may have been more beautiful voices but few as heart-breaking, as convincing, or as perfect in its own chosen terms. (The arrangements for all three are part of the perfection)

The Artist: some thoughts

2012-01-19T21:40:00.002Z

What is The Artist about? Well, it's about silence as metaphor for a start, but before I start polishing my glasses and setting off into the heart of darkness, I should say the film, as style, was light, soufflé light; somewhat knowing of course, as how could a film like this not be, winking at various earlier films along the way (Singing in the Rain, of course, but also Citizen Kane, the Zorro series, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and all too many to mention without sounding pretentious about it) - but not so as to get nudgingly annoying.

What made it light was the absolute acceptance of the conventions of filmic melodrama on the one hand and a glorious delight in directorial and writerly invention on the other.

The melodrama is both in the story - the old, ever moving story of fall and salvation - and in the delicately underplayed acting that paid tribute to silent film without sending it up or wrapping it in candy. The direction was delightful: it was as if Nick Park had got together with Jean-Louis Barrault over a few glasses of champagne. Everywhere you looked in a shot there was perfect placing without heavy self-consciousness. The music was great, the dancing at the end was graceful and joyous, the narrative well sustained. It was a marvellous late afternoon's entertainment.

*

The plot, like that of Singing in the Rain, concentrates on the moment when talkies put silent films and their stars out of business. Funny, genuinely gifted egotist star who loves his life misses his chance to move into sound while the girl he helped on a whim, and had fallen in love with, goes on to eclipse him by adapting and exploiting the new.

The contrary movement in fortunes is another old story, as old as fall and salvation. The film does nothing with these themes, they are taken for granted. They are serious. They only have to be reactivated so they don't look corny and tired.

Invention is the key. There was the splendid incidental invention (the Nick Park element) - for example, the way the wife of the central character, George Valentin, kept blacking out his teeth in newspaper photographs. There is the lovely moment when Valentin sees the heroine, Peppy Miller's legs behind a screen and starts dancing with them. Again there is a precedent to this, but it was carried off with genuine freshness.

The real inventions however - the moving ones - were those touching the key theme of the film: the movement from silence to sound and all that such a transition implies. The key shot is the one where Valentin first hears the sound of a glass as he puts it down on the table. He has never actually heard sound - not the meaning of sound, not in that way. All noises are suddenly amplified, and while this becomes a running joke it is also an aspect of the tragedy-as-melodrama. Something breaks through to Valentin, breaks in on him with a crash, and it bodes no good.

All the key moments from here on are associated with the intrusion of sound into a silent world. Valentin cannot speak. He mouths, he shouts, he screams at the mirror but no sound comes out. At one level, of course, this is no more than a metaphor for the plot (silent film actor finds no place in the world of talkies), but at another level - and I am not trying to be clever, I think we actually feel this level - it is about the sense of precipitous, calamitous loss. The loss is inarticulable. We cannot speak as we used to. We know George Valentin is a silent film character in a melodrama but that doesn't mean his experience is detached from ours. We find in him what we find in dreams and in masks. His decline to the point at which even his shadow walks off is equally dreamlike. The silence that was once a comfort becomes a disaster if you cannot speak. You no longer know who you are. You shadow - your very soul - walks off without you.

The film, however carries on its light way, with witty use of titling; with the miraculously cute dog (and Valentin is in fact a kind of miraculous cute dog) that acts as his fleshly alter ego; and with the slightly cadaverous, kindly driver Clifton, who remains as loyal to Valentin as the dog does. It's hard to act opposite a cute performing dog. Jean Dujardin, who plays Valentin, brings it off by acting to the dog as well as with it.

I won't write a spoiler here. A friend thinks The Artist (why is it called that?) not Oscar material. In a way he's right, but it is rather extraordinary that within a few minutes we forget we are watching something, well, extraordinary: a silent film in black and white full of all the old silent film tropes we thought we knew so well. All around it in the trailers the normal film world goes on. The new Clooney, the new Eastwood, the new Polansky, but this stands everything on its head. It's not sentimental. It's not too cute. It's not too pleased with itself. It's not irony.

I don't expect a run of imitations, or if there is one I expect them to be far worse. There is a touch of genius here. I think I might give it a vote. Not for the humour and grace alone but for opening up the depth at which lightness can work in us. Some people have talked of it in terms of charm. It goes a lot deeper than charm does. And Jean Dujardin as George Valentin is excellent, moving from John Gilbert to Douglas Fairbanks, to Erroll Flynn to Gene Kelly with effortless ease. You should hear him speak!

And because dancing is wonderful, here is Astaire in my favourite clip that I put up at least once a year. The hell with it! Let's dance.

Hungary, the EU and the international press 2: Fighting back

2012-01-18T22:16:00.000Z

Forgive the frequency, and sometimes the length of these posts, but this isn't 'just politics'. It is a serious struggle. If in doubt read this about the growth of the extreme Right in the whole region.

There are various ways of establishing authoritarianism as a norm. There is finance, there is the law, there is the press, and there is culture. The Hungarian government has been working at all these levels at a furious speed, hoping that by the time the world has noticed what it is doing, especially in the current economic chaos, the deed will have been done and the changes become irreversible. It has tried to keep the momentum going at home through the usual paranoid, patriotic bluster.

Some of it will be familiar here. It concentrates on interference from the EU, since what have a country's internal affairs to do with them? (The answer that Hungary joined the EU of its own free will and is a member of a group that works within the rules of the group doesn't suit them to occur to them), on the depredations of international finance (and we can guess who that will come to mean, in fact already does mean to some), and on all those cynical godless liberal dictatorships outside the sacred borders of the country - which are not wide enough, of course - whose representatives will insist on asking questions.

The cultural take-over goes on. Orchestras, theatres, magazines, radio stations and newspapers are subject to sackings and political appointments. Most recently the internationally admired director of Trafó, György Szabó has been pushed aside for a government backed appointee. If you can control it, control it, if it's awkward make the lives of those you regard as awkward as difficult as possible until it becomes impossible.

Can you imagine a far right wing Tory government (and I don't mean Cameron), supported by the BNP, replacing the leading figures of law, media, finance, the arts, and the rest of the state apparatus with their own candidates, ensuring that the laws they passed cannot be repealed, and handing the BNP a theatre or two just as as a start? That is exactly what the Fidesz government is doing now.

But the Hungarian government has finally come up against stiffer opposition at the EU, as reported, for example by The New York Times where, Stephen Castle writes:

On Tuesday, the European Commission, the union’s executive arm, said it was starting proceedings over Hungarian measures that threaten the independence of the country’s central bank and its data-protection authority, and over rules on the retirement age of judges. Ultimately, Hungary can be forced to change rules that breach European law or, if it refuses, can be taken to the European Court of Justice.

But the dispute has ignited a broader debate. While the union insists that countries meet democratic standards to join, there are few sanctions once a nation is a member. After talks on Monday, Belgium and the Netherlands suggested that European ministers could discuss the situation next week...

...“Hungary is a key member of the European family,” Mr. Barroso said in a statement on Tuesday. “We do not want the shadow of doubt on respect for democratic principles and values to remain over the country any longer.”

This seems limited but it's a start and it was enough to send the Hungarian government scuttling back while pretending nothing had happened, as reported through the Associated Press, here today:

Hungary plans to change parts of its legislation that has prompted EU threats of court action and sparked Western fears about democratic rights, a top European official said Wednesday, but the promise did nothing to appease critics...

...After a heated three-hour debate at the EU parliament Wednesday, Orban said Barroso's complaints about the central bank were "not a matter of life or death for us. If the commission believes this is problematic then we have no problem."

The letter was sent only hours before Orbán faced stinging criticism from the European Parliament and a day after the Commission, the European Union's executive, threatened to take Budapest to court over some of its new laws.

"We are willing to factor in the European Commission position," Orbán said of the criticism of the judiciary.

In other words OK, it's not that important, so yeh, we'll compromise, but actually we'll do it anyway. The article goes on:

The Hungarian leader was met with widespread derision as he sought to convince the legislature that the new constitution and laws were necessary to get closer to European democratic principles.

Orban said he expected to find a solution soon to the EU Commission's legal challenges, well before they would reach the stage of going to court.

Hungary could, in theory, be expelled from the EU using article 7 (Respect for and promotion of the values of the Union) of the TEU.

I hope they push Hungary hard on that.

In the meantime there is this excellent Guardian article by the author I am currently translating, Yudit Kiss. She writes::

As is customary in authoritarian regimes, the system's ears are sharp and its arms are long; people think twice before signing a petition, a newspaper article or taking part in public actions where they can be identified. Against this background, the large demonstrations of the last few months, as well as multiplying manifestations of civil courage, have an extraordinary value.

Hungary, the EU and the international press: progress report 1

2012-01-18T21:20:00.000Z

At last there are people looking quizzically at developments in Hungary. I have posted on it a number of times. On 19 December on the clash with the IMF; on 23 December about the beginning of the protest movement; on 1 January about a quotation from Endre Ady passed around Hungary; on 3 January about the continuing protests, including the video below which very simply and clearly lays out the ways in which democracy is being threatened, and which I insert again as background...

...on 4 January with the newly translated text of an Ottó Orbán poem recited at the protests; on 7 January I quoted a Guardian piece; on 8 January from an Independent article; and on 14 January I gathered a couple more articles, about the changes at the New Theatre, and about the image of the prime minister Viktor Orbán.

Since then, to my delight, the articles have been flowing in and good friends have been keeping me supplied with them. Let me catalogue the main ones this last month before saying something about the situation in the next post.

The Guardian: 25 December, 17 January
The Economist: 11th, 17th
The Irish Times: 11th
RTE: 11th
The New York Times: 11th, 17th
Presseurop 18th and again 18th
Politics HU 15th
Der Spiegel 18th and again 18th

Considering my post on Scottish Nationalism below, it is no great surprise that one big dissenting voice should come from Bill Jamieson in The Scotsman, 15 January, which shows some Scots appreciate a bit of authoritarian right-wingery providing it is national and romantic.

God damns the English, says Scot

2012-01-18T13:02:00.003Z

I heard the 07:48 Thought for the Day from John Bell of the Iona Community (no BBC link provided). His thought summed up was this. Independence is a sacred cause. The English are moral scum. The English are entirely to be represented by the South East of England, by which we don't mean hop-pickers and ex-miners and people in seasonal jobs in Margate, but the kind of people Braveheart was fighting, plus bowler hats and umbrellas. The Scots, he believes, are a downtrodden people, and, what is worse, the butt of cruel patronising English jokes. They are altogether nobler than the English. And what is more this is so because God says so.

It was this last point that particularly struck me. God, that is. The way God hates some people.

My first encounter with Scottish hatred of England was at the end of the 1966 World Cup when the Scots deservedly beat England, then freshly World Champions, at Wembley. Good for them. What followed was a mass invasion of the pitch and the breaking of the goals, and marching round with the goalpost and bits of turf as trophies. I was seventeen at the time. It was my first British experience of visceral mass hatred. It stuck in my mind if only because I had not heard anyone say a bad word about Scots in England. I might, of course, have led a sheltered life, with relatively few corpses in Hungarian streets.

Then there were other occasions. The translation conference at Cambridge where a young Scottish academic announced that Scotland was one with Africa in being the victim of English colonialism and that the only thing Scots had done in the cause of Empire was build a few ships. They hadn't actually run any of it nor did they benefit from any of it. Scots were on a par with the poorest Africans. She further worried that she wasn't herself quite Scottish enough and opened the notion of deep Scottishness which rang with me in terms of deep Hungarianness, a subject dear to the heart of Hungarian nationalists and indeed racists. She of course was, so she said, coming at this from a left wing point of view. I did put the deep Hungarian question to her which slightly puzzled her. 'How can that be? We're good people,' she implied in her answer.

There was also the Scottish student in my art school class the first sentence of one of whose stories began 'The English ran over our cat'. It was, you understand, the cruel English nation that ran her cat over, because that's the kind of thing the English do.

I could provide several instances but this will do. I only add - no true Scot will believe me of course - that I still haven't heard the English, any of them in public, or to me in private, or in my presence, badmouthing Scots or Scotland. In fact we learn that the English trust the Scots voice, have a high regard for Scottish virtues,and that more English than Scots support Scottish independence. But this only makes it worse for some Scots, who would hate to support anything the English support, even it if it is Scottish independence. Who do you support? Anyone playing England (sic Andy Murray before his PR makeover).

*

Personally I have nothing against Scottish independence, any more than I had against Slovakian, Czech, Slovenian, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Ukranian, Georgian, etc etc. I am far more interested in the human race than in in their flags and national anthems, though I can quite see why people gather round emblems, habits, traditions, places and languages. I can even see why people take pride in them. They should take pride. A certain pride in the best of one's ancestors combined with a certain honesty (the best honesty that can be managed in the circumstances) is to the good. Though maybe pride isn't quite the word.

Maybe the right word is pleasure. I do take pleasure in Hungarian powers of invention, in the fifties football team, in 1956, in the remarkably surviving Hungarian language and its literature. It's nice to say 'I am one of those'. 'That's my language'. 'They lived where I lived and saw the same houses, the same river.'

And there are times when pleasure and pride can be legitimately harnessed in conflict with enemies. There is no history without the battle for survival or expansion. Calamities of nature, lack of resources, external military pressures, and sheer desire, have usually been behind the drive to expansion. We are where we are because of such battles and I cannot personally feel quite pious enough to condemn them all form the safety of retrospect. All I insist on remembering is that the status quo is always interim and even the map of a thousand year reich or empire, even in China, is constantly being nibbled away by mice with very sharp teeth.

The hoarded resentments of history are, as I understand it, a source of social energy and solidarity. It's just that my time as an adult has been dominated by the omnipresent sense of righteous victimhood. The young Scottish academic was proclaiming the wounds of her nation while wearing the comfortable clothes of righteousness. She was also lying about the past by substituting one truth for all the others.

*

I like most of the Scots of my acquaintance, and, in so far as one can generalise in this way, I admire much about the Scottish tradition of intellectual energy and forthrightness. Listening to Alex Salmond, though, is like hearing a stream of bile and contempt for anything south of Hadrian's Wall. The idea of Scottish independence he preaches is contingent on the idea of English wickedness. And in so far as Scots subscribe to this they are best left to themselves. I'll certainly not be visiting the Iona Community.

Just one final word. The economic argument for or against independence is a low argument either way. There are certainly practical considerations but in such emotional matters they are secondary. If people really want something on moral grounds then blow the economics.

The great Scottish hope, often referred to, is North Sea oil. To some degree it is independence. It will make Scotland rich. Scotland will be able to say to the contemptible English: You can't have it. Not unless you pay through the nose, you Sassenach bastards.

Oil is, as you see, a moral issue.

Why do I say these things? Because I like the English people I live among. I don't think they are scum. I expect someone will inform me that there are hordes of English motorists looking to run over Scottish cats. I'll look out for them.

The Pram in the Hall

2012-01-17T10:43:00.004Z

Lukas's feet, first day of life.

A poem about grandparenthood, as requested for a possible BBC radio programme. The title refers to Cyril Connolly's idea - not a precise quotation - about the enemy of promise being the pram in the hall, in other words a kind of stunting. Picture later.

The Pram in the Hall

      The pram in the hall is pushed through the front door.
      Dear enemies of promise, how beautiful you are,
      and all the more so now, seen from the further shore,
      not yet of life, just a street and a parked car.
      Dear enemies of promise how beautiful you are.

      First crawling, first steps. Second on the scene,
      we look both ways at parents, our children once, before
      your crashed-into-life appearance, your perfectly serene
      sense of completion that brings us to the door.
      Dear enemies of promise we’re eager to see more.

      Your fragility anticipates our own by a few years.
      To us you are transfusions of charm, the meadow star,
      the yew and the tower, the moon with its bright shears,
      the waxing light we enter as if from very far.
      Dear enemies of promise how beautiful you are.

Jackboot

2012-01-16T23:03:00.000Z

A long day at university. Drop C off at her work and arrive at UEA at 8. Straight on with admin and marking the whole day, then home and more of the same. But the new Everyman Book of Villanelles arrives with my own contribution, the one about the children of the ghetto. I begin to scan the book and can see what a remarkable range of feeling and mood there is in it. But at the same time I hear the insistence due to repetition. The lines come back, the same lines, and somewhere in the very far distance it's like hearing jackboots.

I know this is fanciful but I write it down on Twitter now, where all the short thoughts go, and Bill Herbert replies in his playful way and talks about dance, along with a lovely verse. And I not only have to admit he is right, but rejoice in him being right, since it is dance I too look for in form.

And yet there is statement in poetry too: a declarative quality I associate with Shakespeare's sonnets, Marvell, Pope and Empson. Even in Bishop's great villanelle, One Art, there is the demand that the poem actually satisfies at the end. Write it!

Meanwhile, somewhere off to one side of it, the right side, there is a drunk who keeps saying the same thing over and over again. He shifts my mind to Jobbik, the Hungarian fascist party, and a line creeps into my head that goes, I hate the gyppos and the fucking Jews, as indeed they do, and, despite myself, a whole villanelle grows from that first line, something that horrifies me with precisely the jackboot insistence I first heard. I can't help writing it, because formally it stands to be written. I wonder if it is worth anything as a weapon against the very thing it says. If it is to be so it requires a subtle wit that undermines itself as it blusters, while at the same time being true to itself as a poem.

I am sitting on this villanelle for now. It's in a bad place in my head. It is right as it is, as form, but I don't know whether it can dance its way out.

Sunday night is....But Beautiful

2012-01-15T20:13:00.000Z

A day of reading, marking, cross-marking, and writing: a possibly final draft of a poem for a radio programme and words for a Morning Canticle for the new Festival music project, one that works through the day and moves through the streets.

So this is a breath on the spirit, the wonderful Bill Evans (in 1979) and one of the loveliest standards, But Beautiful. Tis brief, my lord.

A Year Quite Round

2012-01-14T21:45:00.000Z

A poem for daughter Helen who celebrated her birthday yesterday, just a week after giving birth to Lukas.

A Year Quite Round

So life balloons, deflates, and just as well.
You’re born and grow and reach a stable size,
the world meanwhile shows no sign of surprise:
the clock moves on, the hammer strikes the bell,
the hour arrives and goes with no more fuss
than you’d expect. Black holes and stars look on;
the galaxies expand and soon are gone
without a proper leave-taking. For us
time is ourselves, our body clocks tight wound,
not digital but analogue, with springs.
Mechanical and fallible, we bust,
require repair, are liable to rust,
but frankly we’re not bothered by these things.
What goes around, we figure, comes around.

In your case, darling, round has meant quite round
(this year at least, balloons have been the rage).
Ballooned with life, not air, the body-cage
expands into the grand maternal mound
it has since the beginning when the earth
was busy swelling continents and seas,
and simian forebears scampered down from trees
to walk upright and measure time and birth
through their own bodies. What the planets know,
remains beyond us. Certainly we’re born,
that much we celebrate the usual way,
and year by year we look to mark the day
with loud celestial hymn and harp and horn
and all the brass the cosmic winds might blow.

Two more snippets about Hungary

2012-01-14T11:51:00.000Z

Compare and contrast: Two photos of Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán (see Economist link below)

From another friend:

Unfortunately, there are too many things which are more outrageous and will have graver consequences than the case of the HQ [Hungarian Quarterly]. One is the large-scale dismantling of public collections - museums, monument protection, archeological sites - by hair-raising cuts and cynical reorganizations, and in the spirit of crudely nationalistic ideas. "Heroes, Kings and Saints" is the title of the new exhibiton at the National Gallery, mounted in a style as if time had stopped in the 1860s, and coupled with the show of paintings specially ordered by Orban to celebrate the new constitution.

The Uj Szinhaz story - [The New Theatre directorship I mentioned before] - is the tip of the iceberg with the theatres - at the provincial ones the old directors have all been sacked, and for Budapest there is the time-honoured method of not giving money to the fringe theatres and the ensembles they do not like.

Another, even more injurious case is the new law on higher education, which drastically reduces the number of entering university students and couples it with the introduction of exorbitant tuition fees.

*

In the meantime, for light relief, there is always this from The Economist:

Yesterday Hír TV, a Hungarian television channel, ran a news story [click the link below "Videók" to view the broadcast story] alleging that we had digitally manipulated the image of Mr Orbán before publication to materially alter his appearance. This is untrue. The uncropped picture, as purchased from the AFP news agency, is above, left. The image as it appeared in The Economist is to its right.

Earlier today we sent a letter to the editor-in-chief of Hír TV denying the allegation. The text is reproduced in full below.

Dear Sir,
I write to reject a completely unfounded and defamatory allegation you broadcast yesterday. Your report accused us of “manipulating” a photograph of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. This is not true, as our photo editor explained to your reporter yesterday before you ran the piece.

Your piece accepts that all publications edit photographs in some ways. Indeed, as in every magazine, all our pictures are colour-corrected for print production. We also cropped this picture to fit the column size: again, every magazine does this and nothing of any significance was left out. But the piece alleges that we went beyond this routine process to change the picture content fundamentally.

I attach the original wire picture from AFP and our cropped picture as it went to the printers. It is obvious that there is no manipulation.

Your piece reflected a dismal standard of reporting. Your journalist acknowledged to our photo editor that he had not actually compared the original with our cropped picture and he would not say how we were supposed to have manipulated the picture. After he rang off, he then failed to follow up this cursory interview, despite his assurances that he would be getting back to her. That was presumably because he would still have been unable to point to any signs of manipulation. It is true that our photo editor spoke to your reporter on an off-the-record basis. But your report failed to reflect her assurances that we had not manipulated the picture. And you never followed up to seek an official comment from us.

Nothing is more valuable to The Economist than our hard-earned reputation for objective and fair reporting. By impugning our actions, for what appears to be some political gain, you defame us and do your viewers a profound disservice.

To put that right, we have also published this letter on our website. Other media outlets in Hungary may want to pursue the objectivity of your reporting a little more thoroughly than you pursued ours.Yours sincerely

John Micklethwait
Editor-in-chief

Episodes on the picturesque onward march of the Party of Vilified and Misunderstood Patriots.

A footnote apropos poetry

2012-01-12T23:24:00.001Z

From the 1999 Cirque Du Soleil show "Dralion" (Victor Kee)

Because this too is poetry. It's the circus and it's dance and it is most certainly juggling. If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, you might say (and Keats too), then it is mere show, but the leaves come if you dance, and as my friend Peter Scupham wrote a long time ago, it is string not magic, but what if the string is magic too?

Often the most beautiful lyric poems are the simplest in appearance, the plain-spoken poetry of what happens, and I, like others, find it beautiful. But then this too happens in the theatre of the imagination and it is right that it should sometimes so happen that a movement so strenuous, so exhausting, so stylised, develops into a grace that is not just style but energy transformed.

And while we're at it there is this too:

Yes, I've shown it before, it is the great Jean Vigo's Zéro de Conduite

Sometimes - and I feel this in myself - we have as much decency and moderation as we can bear. There must be a place in heaven where Piero della Francesca, Johannes Vermeer, Pablo Picasso and Peter Paul Rubens get together for a drink and a cafe in another district of the same where George Herbert buys John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, a coffee and T S Eliot buys John Milton and Emily Dickinson a cake.

Some circus, some chaos, chaos-as-ballet if you like, is always present in great art. We could try going there.

The Consolation of Yourcenar

2012-01-11T22:26:00.000Z

I am nearing the end of the translation of Yudit Kiss's The Summer my Father Died. In this passage the father of the narrator, Anna Holló, is dying in hospital and conversation has become difficult so she offers to read to him. It would be nice to think art had this power. Sometimes, often too late, it has.

In the last days at the hospital I was constantly waiting for my father to speak, to reveal at last the great truths and secrets, and define his inheritance. But our intimate conversations, when they didn’t concern his manuscript, consisted of minor banalities and we were often stuck for words. On day when the gaps in conversation were unusually long I asked him if it was difficult for him to speak.

‘Yes, ever more difficult,’ he said with signs of panic in his eyes.

The havoc in his body was sending unmistakeable messages to his brain but it seemed he was still set on ignoring them. I pulled from my back-pack a thin book, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Oriental Tales, that my friend Justine had brought me the day before I left.

‘Would you like me to read some of it for you?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know what it’s like, my friend lent it to me. But Yourcenar’s a good writer, we can rely on her.

My father nodded, relieved. I took the book and started to read. The story concerned the painter Wang Fo and his students. Wang Fo can paint so well that after a while it is said that with the last stroke of his brush his pictures come alive. Propertied people want him to paint guard dogs, the nobles want fully armed soldiers, priests regard him as a saint, and common people fear him because they fear he can conjure up all kinds of terrible things. One dawn they drag Wang Fo in front of the Emperor who condemns him to death. His crime is that his painted world is more perfect than the real one where the Son of Heaven exercises absolute power. The world is nothing but a mass of scribbles the mad painter has committed to canvas, and our tears are always smudging it, says the Heavenly Dragon. As a last act of grace the emperor allows the old master to complete a half-finished picture that is kept in the palace. While the executioner heats up his iron in the fire, Wang Fo sets to painting the sky-high mountains, the waves of the sea, and the clouds gathering at dawn. As soon as he moves his brush the water breaks into waves and slowly covers the emperor’s palace. Soon a light little barque appears with Wang Fo’s faithful disciple Ling sitting in it. Under the astonished gaze of the courtiers he helps the master into the craft and starts rowing. When the two men disappear behind the cliffs on the horizon and the last plash of oars is heard the water slowly withdraws from the palace. There are only a few damp patches left of the so recent flood.

Art can speak to power by outshining it and outlasting it - and power knows it.

Reading thousands of poems: precepts on the hoof

2012-01-10T23:01:00.000Z

As one does, one is drawn to reflect on certain things, such as:

1. People get lost in tangles of craft. When craft is art it disappears like the ground you are standing on.

2. Else turn the craft into a magic show, dance on the cracks in the pavement.

3. The Songs of Experience are worth nothing without The Songs of Innocence.

4. Never believe yourself at your gravest or most profound. The planets move on, the odd star occasionally giggling.

5. You can only have your heart warmed once, very lightly, after that the goddess thinks you're getting rather too matey.

6. Your voice is not your voice. It should come at you as from the far end of a wind tunnel so your hardly recognise it.

7. There's such a thing as being poked in the 'I'.

8. I'll just wait around while you describe things. Oops, where have you gone? I seem to have been walking for hours.

9. If your metaphors are any good hang around with them & see where they go, don't go tarting after the next.

10. Why do deathless bad lines refuse to die?

11. Yes you're nice, you're humane, you'd probably be a very good neighbour, but the poem is elsewhere. It's colder there.

12. Occasionally I long for what Joyce called "chune'. The importance of not being earnest, of prose not shuffling its feet.

13. Don't spell it out, let me guess. Especially if I have spelled it before you've finished spelling. Touch and move.

14. Is it a coincidence that the shorter the better in most cases? Certainly more concentrated, words cleaner, brighter.

15. You turn masochist. You wait for poems to slap you in the face. Hit me again, but not just yet.

16. Still being slapped around. Most of my face is gone, turning into a percussion instrument.

17. Some short poems are too short: most long poems are too long. The chief cuts should be at the beginning, then sharpen the end.

This is the end.

"Introducing...

2012-01-09T15:25:00.000Z

...Lukas Hal Szirtes Horne. For those who didn't know, Lukas has a cleft lip which will be fixed in April. He is otherwise extremely well and big, and getting bigger by the day."

From daughter H and her FB page. Thus Lukas: not the Marxist philosopher, not Inspector Maigret's sidekick, but a full-blown patent original. Accept no substitutes. The boy is new in town but the gang has closed ranks and is taking care of him.

Welcome, Cool Hand Lukas. Your third day in the world. They come faster after this. Some of them.

Sunday night is...Double David Bowie

2012-01-08T22:33:00.000Z

,
Oh You Pretty Things, via James Hamilton

And this, Starman, just because many Bowie songs have a kind of end-of-the-world of sadness, not just in the words but musically, a sadness that seems ever more poignant and yet full of energy and invention.

I have picked these two for his sixty-fifth but there are plenty of others to pick from. Glad to have shared the kitchen with you once, Mr Jones.

Independent piece on Hungary

2012-01-08T11:07:00.000Z

The statue of Attila József by the Danube, next to Parliament. It may not remain there for very long. (Source)

Normal service will be resumed but these are important times in Hungary and I would like to do my small part in keeping our attention on it. I am grateful for any links offered by readers. This article is by Tony Paterson in yesterday's Independent, thanks to commentator Anne. Excerpts:

In the centre of Budapest yesterday, the number 26 stood picked out in big red letters above the magnificent blue and gold Art Nouveau facade of the city's renowned New Theatre, where Schiller's Don Carlos is on its final run.

The number is the liberals' last stand.

It tells passers-by just how many days the New Theatre's leftist director, Istvan Marta, has left before he is forcibly evicted on the orders of Hungary's new conservative nationalist government. He is to be replaced by a dramatist notorious for his anti-Semitic views and an actor who recently campaigned for Hungary's neo-fascist Jobbik party...

...The nationalist Fidesz government of Viktor Orban is not merely interested in wielding greater control over financial institutions. It has embarked on a Kulturkampf – a cultural revolution – which seems bent on imposing its right-wing and xenophobic ideology on all walks of life, ranging from minorities and religions to the media, judiciary and arts.

Thousands of demonstrators thronged the streets of Budapest on Monday night to protest against the battery of political and cultural reforms that were formally enshrined in the constitution by parliament and came into force on 1 January.

While the Prime Minister celebrated the occasion inside the Budapest Opera House, the protesters gathered outside, forcing him and his entourage to leave by the back door. It was the biggest political protest Hungary has witnessed since 1989...

..Anything that smacks of unacceptable left-wing thinking is being singled out as a target for denunciation or destruction by the Orban government's culture police. Appropriately, its Kulturkampf starts right in front of Budapest's magnificent neo-Gothic parliament building where Fidesz was swept into office with an apparently omnipotent two-thirds majority in 2010.

On a patch of grass outside stands a monument to the working class poet Attila Jozsef, depicting him humbly sitting on the ground. Jozsef committed suicide by throwing himself under a train in 1937, but his poems are regarded as classic examples of Marxist humanist writing. Yet the Orban government has plans to permanently remove the Jozsef monument from its present commanding position. Fidesz MPs have let it be known they object to monuments to such left-wing icons being displayed outside parliament...

...Mr Orban's Kulturkampf does not end with theatres. His government is investigating 82-year-old Agnes Heller, a former dissident and one of Hungary's most renowned philosophers. She stands accused of wasting EU subsidies and has been subjected to a vigorous denunciation campaign by the right-wing press.

The media is another key target. Critical voices are unwelcome. Budapest's Klubradio is a prime example. The station was one of the few broadcasters critical of the government and had about half a million listeners. The station suddenly lost its licence last year and was replaced by Autoradio, a pro-government broadcaster. Andras Arato, former owner of Klubradio, accused the government of destroying freedom of opinion. "We are experiencing a war between Viktor Orban and democrats," he said.

The new constitution also withdraws official recognition from over 300 religious denominations, including Islam, Buddhism and several Catholic orders.

And a small piece of vox pop from an academic researcher:

"Orban is like Italy's Berlusconi – many voted for him, not because they like him, but because they are like him. We are all little Orbans, doing in small what he does on a great scale: big words, but small steps, improvising instead of planning, martyrdom instead of responsibility."

From the removal of the statue of Attila József - universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest European poets of the 20th century - to the burning of his books is not a very big step. That is the kind of disgrace the country is becoming.

Guardian piece on Hungary

2012-01-07T10:20:00.000Z

I'm glad to see this story running and staying big, thanks here to The Guardian's Helen Pidd:

Surrounded by half-drunk flasks of tea and bundled up in three pairs of trousers apiece, the hunger strikers entered their 26th night of protest outside the Hungarian state broadcaster on Wednesday evening. Temperatures were hovering around freezing and icy rain had started to spit. But it had been much worse, said Balazs Nagy Navarro. "At least they have turned the music off now," he said, pointing to a sandbox suspended from an upstairs window.

Inside the box was a speaker that for "five or six days solid" around Christmas had blasted Jingle Bells at top volume. It wasn't the only eviction tactic. Behind the glass of the MTVA reception area were reflectors that had been used to try to dazzle the protesters outside and prevent photographers from getting a good picture when private security guards came – and failed – to clear the camp....

...While ordinary Hungarians worry most about what will happen to that mortgage they took out in Swiss francs, for many foreign observers the new constitution is the source of most anguish. It came into effect on 1 January, and, combined with at least 350 laws that have been rushed through during Fidesz's 20 months in power, has, say critics, all but removed checks and balances to the power of the government and ruling party. The independence of the central bank has been compromised and Fidesz loyalists now head powerful councils overseeing the media, the judiciary and budget. There have been crackdowns on Roma rights, and funds for education and social care have been shredded, campaigners say.

Some of the world's most powerful people and institutions have also had enough. On Thursday, a spokesman for the European Union confirmed that without a promise from Hungary that some laws would be changed or repealed, neither the EU nor the International Monetary Fund would even discuss giving it the multibillion-euro bailout even Orbán knows it needs (though he calls it an "insurance contract"). EU lawyers are going through the latest legislation with a fine-tooth comb and will soon pronounce on whether it is incompatible with European law....

...Economists believe Orbán has no choice but to promise to repeal laws in return for the €15-50bn he needs to borrow to repay an earlier loan the IMF granted last time the country was bailed out, in 2008. The Hungarian government is now having enormous problems borrowing money after two ratings agencies declared its bonds to be "trash" at the end of last year. Couple that with the fact that the value of the forint is falling off a cliff, and you have the makings of a particularly toxic crisis.

My friend in Hungary, who has attended the demonstrations, talked about the difficulty of overcoming the noise and the bright lights. I understood her to mean this but wasn't sure. Now it is clear. 'If you can't beat them or shoot them, deafen them with Jingle Bells played ad inf.' I think it was the US blasting trash metal that did for Noriega. I'm not sure which is worse.

In any case, the story is not going to go away. I'll insert pieces as and when there's something new.

Grandson arrives

2012-01-06T23:10:00.000Z

We expected him, being the second and, by the looks of his mother, very big, to be early but he was a day and a half late. It had been very hard work for H, our daughter, carrying him in the last few weeks. She went into hospital about noon yesterday and the baby was born at 1:15 in the morning.

I had stayed up at home till 1 at which point I went to bed and immediately fell asleep.

I woke at about 3am and looked at the phone. R had texted about the birth. I stayed awake a little while reading then slept again till almost 8 when C rang. I worked a little in the morning, but chiefly wrote notes here and there for far longer that I thought I could, to the extent that I completely forgot lunch.

So I caught the early afternoon fast bus into Norwich, reading Charles Boyle's The Age of Cardboard and String that I received in the morning post, along the way. I had to keep myself from laughing out loud at times, laughing silently instead. It wasn't gags, it was a wonderful sense of the poignantly, sometimes dangerously ludicrous. I thought there must be a line to draw between Michael Hofmann, CB and Hugo Williams that would define what I loved about English writing, the understatement, the nonsense, the faint desperation and disorientation, the rejection of bombast, the sudden jaggedness of life, and the perfect register of the perfect word, and that this was somehow (given Michael H is German) intrinsically English, though then I thought of two younger Hungarian poets, Andrés Imreh and G. István László, who might have been English in that way, given that description, and that seemed to negate my hunch about Englishness, until I thought about young Tim Cockburn's poems, Appearances in the Bentinck Hotel, also just received in the Salt edition, and of Tim's own love of Larkin and Bennett and how that sat with his equal love for Frank O'Hara, thinking that somehow Tim was very English too, and in this happily confused state I walked the 20 minutes or so to H & R's house.

It was cold but beautifully bright, a fast paced walk, not really thinking much. Going down the last stretch towards their street I passed a young man in shirtsleeves, the way young men are often in shirtsleeves, but wearing a furry cap with ear flaps. It didn't make much sense, I thought, unless he was convinced that all the heat was escaping through either a bald scalp or a still-open fontanelle, and then I thought I recognised a figure moving towards me, and indeed it was him, though I thought he had moved to London. We stopped for a moment because he too was in a hurry somewhere. We grinned, exchanged a few words, then moved off in opposite directions

C ran to open the door for me. R was asleep upstairs and soon Marlie would be up too. We had a cup of tea then got her up. She was immediately smiling, immediately asking for books and fetching them herself. Her passive vocabulary is very wide now and the active is increasing almost daily. C told me she had called for mummy and daddy but when C explained to her that they were in hospital where mummy was going to have her baby Marlie seemed to understand, and stopped asking. Then H rang from hospital asking to speak to R and eventually we got in the car and drove over.

*

At first you don't see the baby as it is suckling and covered in a blanket. It seems too small to be human, just an extra fold of cloth. H smiles faintly, because she is weak and tired and still in some pain, otherwise perfectly fine and happy. We kiss her and arrange ourselves in the small curtained space. Eventually the baby is released from the breast and appears out of the blanket, his eyes closed against the light, the fists coming up to cover them, then an eye opening, and a roll of the head. His eyes are much like Marlie's were. Big, wide, long lashes. He has patches of still damp dark hair. His legs and arms move automatically. He doesn't yet know what his limbs are, or that they belong to him. We stay for half an hour or so, taking turns to hold him. He tolerates this with good grace and indifference. As long as he is securely held he is fine and does not feel choosy as to who does the holding.

I reflect how different an experience this must be for me as a man. Our agency is quickly done and gone, our attention is all on the mother and whatever business there is in hand outside. Hers is partly dominated by what is within and resides there close on a year, affecting everything. And now here is the product, so new and so complete a body in miniature it seems almost too good, too sudden, a complex mixture of the utterly normal and the phenomenon just beyond understanding.

Outside the cubicle the voices of the mother, baby and visitor in the next cubicle, foreign voices, unplaceable. Their phone ring tone suggests India, Asia, its faintly like the call of a muezzin. Their baby is constantly crying - this one makes a few noises, moves, snuffles a little then claws at the air as babies do. He's fine.

No pictures for now - that will be up to the parents. He spends tonight in hospital, out next afternoon most likely. Then help will be needed.

Time for bed here too. So a new life - not named yet but waiting on a name. Another January birth (that's three now). And the wind has died down.

Light Relief

2012-01-05T10:22:00.001Z

It was a great pleasure to be asked to write this piece by philosopher Damon Young for his website darkly wise, rudely great. It could be a busy day in Norfolk so, with Damon's approval, I extend the life of this brief sally into the realm of writers' fetishes, including the dreadful pun of the title above, and recommend a visit to Damon's site for the rest of the series and other things.

I didn’t think I had any particular fetish until I realised my desk-light was on. It is always on when I am at the desk, whatever the light conditions. Let me describe it.

It is an old anglepoise. It’s clamped to the windowsill in front of me and whenever I look the clamp seems to have slipped a little further off the sill so the lamp’s hold on it appears precarious. I tighten the clamp a little and push the lamp back again

I once thought I wanted a more atmospheric lamp, not one of those giggly Tiffany things, but something more austere and altogether more classy, a banker’s lamp with a green shade, such as my friend has in Budapest. I think of his desk swimming with papers, books and notes. It seems unworkable, close-to-chaotic, but the banker’s lamp somehow authorises the mess, lending it a genuine gravitas. My desk isn’t as dignified, and the lamp is the reason.

Perhaps the banker’s lamp is just too much the thing for me. Perhaps its invitation is too Edwardian, too stylish. Perhaps the old anglepoise, always on the edge of calamity, is more my style, both as a man and as a writer. Who are the ideal banker’s-lamp men? (I think they are more likely to be men than women). Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Anthony Hecht, Julian Barnes: that imagined range.

But then there is something ramshackle about my whole desk, in fact about the entire room. Common apocryphal objects, like misplaced footnotes, have been adapted to different purposes. It’s not chaotic, just scrappy. It is not the room of a man of letters, not a meditative room. It’s an in-a-hurry, strike-now kind of room.

And the light is on, as it always is. The first thing I do on entering the room is switch on the anglepoise. The light is a focus that partly, but not entirely, shuts the room out. I don’t want to get fancy about this – you wouldn’t want me to – but it is, now I come to think of it, a kind of drama. The finest performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream I have ever seen was in a tin hut where the lighting board was in view at the back and creaked every time a light was brought up or down. The consciousness of the circumstances somehow made the performance in the lit circle all the more autumnal, more powerful. I wondered afterwards whether this wasn’t a perversity on my part, like listening to old scratchy records of O parigi O cara sung by John McCormack and Lucrezia Bori, or Fats Waller performing Cinders. The scratches were mortality clearing its throat in the background, I grandly thought.

I hate fluorescent lighting, I hate any light too general and bright. Bright focus, dark corner with some not-too-arty clutter suits me better. It isn’t classy and it can’t afford to get carried away with itself. It reminds me of a sweet joke.

- Help me doctor, I think I am a moth!
- I am a doctor of medicine, the psychiatrist is next door.
- I know, but your light was on.

A Poem Recited at the Budapest Demonstrations

2012-01-04T12:17:00.000Z

Ottó Orbán, 1936-2002
The Chief Auditor’s Report on the firm of Fortinbras & Fortinbras

The most depressing thing is they could have made a decent first team
newborns born at the right time
the first sentence of a new story
a blank page without the watermark of dictatorship
they became neither this nor that
young foxes fresh out of foxholes
with views worthy of foxes
adapting history to their own purposes
and grinding losers into the deepest mud imaginable
so they wouldn’t have to put up with backchat
they grew up in a police state
their idea of freedom being that the cops would serve them now
and that people were iron filings
that could be arranged into the required pattern by use of a magnet
youth was always heaven-sent
except when it wasn’t
except when blinded by the devil
there should be nothing to see in the river
but Narcissus, a self-loving reflection
that’s how it has always been in Denmark, how it would always be
the state machinery is broken, something is rotten
something is lost an opportunity gone for ever
throw in the balance the crown nicked off the shelf
the spirit’s armour is new, but it’s the same old method
as is the outcome
corpses everywhere, orange peel, dogshit, pages of burned books.

New translation by GS. Ottó Orbán was generally acknowledged a major Hungarian poet who wrote about Hungarian public and private life almost daily in his long last illness. I part translated and edited his Bloodaxe collection, The Blood of the Walsungs. He was also a good friend.

Granddaughter Marlie at nineteen months

2012-01-03T16:43:00.001Z

She walks, she runs, she speaks Greek, Latin, and Mandarin. She has a particular fondness for the Moon. She drives a Porsche when her parents' 1995 Honda Civic is unavailable. Will she pose for photographs? She won't get out of bed for under £10,000 or at least a breakfast. She is happy that James Joyce is now out of copyright. Her take on Finnegan's Wake is entirely original. Currently awaiting baby brother.

ps The shoe on the table? Either she is recalling Kruschev's speech to the United Nations or she is bartering her designer footwear for some bacon & eggs. In either case it's an assertive gesture.

Hungary: the protests go on

2012-01-03T09:14:00.000Z

Yesterday, in Budapest. A good clear summary of why:

More background here (neutral toned BBC report), here (the New Theatre story), here (Hilary Clinton's letter), here (a quiet putsch) , and here (hunger strikes).

Do drop in to those sites. And watch Hungary. The movement towards fascism gathers pace and it is good to see crowds protesting.

Monday Night Is... Goobye Pork Pie Hat

2012-01-02T22:44:00.000Z

Live at Montreux 1975 Charles Mingus [b] Don Pullen [p] George Adams [s] Gerry Mulligen [bs] Benny Bailey [t] Danny Richmond [d]

C and I out with 19 month-old granddaughter in the park. Moon, she points. Moon. It's still daylight. The half moon is there, a touch blurry on the bitten-off side. Every so often she stops to check it's still there. Moon. Moon.

Currently being passed around in Hungary

2012-01-01T10:15:00.002Z

The passage at the bottom of this blog by one of the greatest of all Hungarian poets, Endre Ady (1877-1919) - more here. Ady's poems are so melodic and allusive they are very difficult to translate. Most translations fail to catch any significant part of the voice. I have tried a few but am only (partially) pleased with this one.

Autumn appeared in Paris

Autumn appeared in Paris yesterday,
Silent down St Michel its swift advance,
In stifling heat under unmoving branches
We met as if by chance.

Ambling in the direction of the Seine
My soul was brent with tiny shreds of song:
Gypsy airs, oddments, squibs, laments, which whispered
That death would not be long.

Autumn caught up and mumbled in my ear,
The entire boulevard trembled to the eaves,
Ts, ts... along the street as if half jesting
Flew bright-eyed civic leaves.

A moment; Summer hardly had drawn breath
But Autumn was on its cackling way and now
Was gone and I the only living witness
Under the creaking bough.

But that's by way of introduction. A quotation from Ady, dating to 1902, has been passing round the more liberal section of the population (it's much quoted in Google) and a friend passed it on to me. I translate it as below:

The civilised nations observe us. They see how we never move forward, how we behave like rottweilers, how we gesture and bluster in the middle of Europe like something left behind by the middle ages; they see how empty and inconsequential we are; how, whenever we want to do great things we start by beating up Jews; how, once we sober up a little, we rush to take a nostalgic draught of the glories of our millennium; how feeble and useless we are; how that great bastion of the people, parliament, is only fit for our abuse. And what will all this lead to, my dear fellow patriots? Because I myself am Hungarian through and through, not a low, cheating Jew, which is what you call anyone better than you. The result will be that they politely kick us out as if we had never existed.

The reference to the millennium concerns the 1896 celebrations of one thousand years of the settlement of the territory and the establishment of the Hungarian state. The 'they' at the end is Europe. The rest is, surely, coincidence.

Tap dancing in the dark 2012 and the stick of dynamite

2012-01-01T09:02:00.000Z

I stole this from Mick Hartley. Tap dancing in the dark as a form of haunting, as in Gold Diggers of 1935, which I have featured before and have never tired of watching.

I don't know anything about Billy Burt except that he may be the specialty dancer in this film. (See bottom of cast list, IMDb)

Copy from Weird Videos website:

The composer of this piece Lothar Perl was perhaps the best German composer of novelty piano music of all time. Unfortunately, he had to flee the Nazis during World War II and moved to America, where he found steady work as a studio musician and film composer, but unfortunately apparently never composed any more of the delightful, pensive, and masterful piano miniatures that (I think) had helped make his career in Germany, and certainly are his main legacy today.

The pianist Alex Hassan has recorded all 14 or so of his novelty piano solos on CD .

In addition, Alex had previously recorded a few of the best of them, "Hollywood Stars", and the suite "Three Syncopated Romances", on his previous CD "Phantom Fingers."

Of all these recordings, in my opinion, the best performer of Perl's music is Lothar Perl himself, and fortunately, two of the three solo piano 78's he made are known to exist and are heard on the following compilation CD (so, that's two 78's = four tunes).

Most importantly, eight of Perl's solos are available in one folio of sheet music: "Lothar Perl: Syncopated Impressions", edited by Rosilee Walker and available from Schott Music Corporation.

After he moved to America, Lothar Perl settled in Hollywood where he wrote music for movies (which is why he is listed on the IMDB):

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0674142/

...and a few concert pieces. In the 1950's he also became the musical director (or at least one of them) for the Ernie Kovacs TV show, even appearing in-person in at least one episode, having to play Chopin's "Minute Waltz" in under a minute, because of a stick of dynamite under the piano bench!

His widow, Gitta Wallerstein, passed away in the last few years. I believe she was 97. Alex Hassan was a friend of hers and I guess she had some interesting stories about her late husband (who had passed away in 1970). You can ask Alex for more info on Mr. Perl; he might be tickled to see this film short is now on Youtube!

http://www.noveltypiano.com/

I should mention that there is a nice article on Lothar Perl by Leroi Cortot in his excellent Novelty and Syncopated Piano blog; in fact, he mentions and links to the "Jazz Etude" video you posted, and that's how I found out about it! Mr. Cortot also explains in detailed adjectives why he personally considers Mr. Perl's compositions to be so excellent, making this a must-read.

HERE:

[caution: blog is entirely in French!]

http://leroicortot.musicblog.fr/691666/Lothar-Perl-1910-1974/

anyway, I hope this information helps you, and feel free to edit and/or use it on your page as you see fit.

- Andrew Barrett

The generosity of the web.

For New Year's Eve, 2011

2011-12-31T20:20:00.000Z

Louis MacNeice
Prayer Before Birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

New Year's Eve birthday

2011-12-31T09:55:00.000Z

Our son, Tom (aka Shur-i-Kan) was born on New Year's Eve. Happy Birthday, Tom!

Seven Haiku for Tom

New Year’s Eve again,
a threshold to trip over
before tumbling through.

Unboxed just five days
after Boxing Day, like a
late Christmas present,

child of the winter,
of stables, stars, and Magi,
son of the old year.

The very next day
the year begins. You enter
it without knowing.

Nobody knows it.
We slip into the future
like newborns, eyes closed

while the year opens
again, again, and again,
as for the first time,

under the same stars,
tripping over the threshhold
tumbling through, through, through.

Becket and Malthus: two Toms

2011-12-29T23:16:00.000Z

Thomas a Becket and Thomas Malthus

from Chambers' Book of Days for 30 December

LEGEND OF BECKET'S PARENTS

In connection with the renowned Thomas Becket, a curious story is related of the marriage of his parents. It is said that Gilbert, his father, had in his youth followed the Crusaders to Palestine, and while in the East had been taken prisoner by a Saracen or Moor of high rank. Confined by the latter within his own castle, the young Englishman's personal attractions and miserable condition alike melted the heart of his captor's daughter, a fair Mohammedan, who enabled him to escape from prison and regain his native country. Not wholly disinterested, however, in the part which she acted in this matter, the Moor's daughter obtained a promise from Gilbert, that as soon as he had settled quietly in his own land, he should send for, and marry his protectress. Years passed on, but no message ever arrived to cheer the heart of the love-lorn maiden, who there-upon resolved to proceed to England and remind the forgetful knight of his engagement.

This perilous enterprise she actually accomplished; and though knowing nothing of the English language beyond the Christian name of her lover and his place of residence in London, which was Cheap-side, she contrived to search him out and with greater success than could possibly have been anticipated, found him ready to fulfil his former promise by making her his wife. Previous to the marriage taking place, she professed her conversion to Christianity, and was baptized with great solemnity in St. Paul's Cathedral, no less than six bishops assisting at the ceremony. The only child of this union was the celebrated Thomas Becket, whose devotion in after-years to the cause of the church, may be said to have been a befitting recompense for the attention which her ministers had shewn in watching over the spiritual welfare of his mother.

THOMAS MALTHUS

The first edition of the work, which has conferred on him such notoriety, appeared in 1798, under the title of An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other Writers. In subsequent issues, the title of the work was changed to its present form: An Essay on the Principle of Population; or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness, with an Inquiry into our Prospects respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which it occasions.

The leading principle in this work is, that population, when unchecked, doubles itself at the end of every period of twenty-five years, and thus increases, in a geometrical progression, or the ratio of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32; whilst the means of subsistence increases only, in an arithmetical progression, or the ratio of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The author discusses the question of the various restrictions, physical and moral, which tend to keep population from increasing, and thus prevent it outstripping the means of subsistence in the race of life. A misapprehension of the writer's views, combined with his apparent tendency to pessimism in the regarding of misery and suffering as the normal condition of humanity, has contributed, notwithstanding the philosophical soundness of many of his theories, to invest the name of Malthus with much opprobrium.

When the common or vulgar impression regarding Mr. Malthus's celebrated essay is considered, it is surprising to find that the man was one of the most humane and amiable of mortals. His biographer tells us, it would be difficult to overestimate the beauty of his private life and character. His life:

'a perpetual flow of enlightened benevolence, contentment, and peace;' 'his temper mild and placid, his allowances for others large and considerate, his desires moderate, and his command over his own passions complete.' 'No unkind or uncharitable expression respecting any one, either present or absent, ever fell from his lips All the members of his family loved and honoured him; his servants lived with him till their marriage or settlement in life; and the humble and poor within his influence always found him disposed, not only to assist and improve them, but to treat them with kindness and respect' 'To his intimate friends, his loss can rarely, if ever, be supplied; there was in him a union of truth, judgment, and warmth of heart, which at once invited confidence, and set at nought all fear of being ridiculed or betrayed. You were always sure of his sympathy; and wherever the case allowed it, his assistance was as prompt and effective as his advice was sound and good.'

Becket's connection with Wymondham is described in Wiki, here. The Chapel was, until recently, the library. Now it is a successful art centre. The house by the railway crossing is called Becketswell Cottage. Between Thomas and Samuel of almost the same name, Wymondham ought to find some common ground. Perhaps it might yet.

As to Malthus, more another time. It is late and we have been swimming in the social stream all day so I feel I have grown scales and gills.

Cards

2011-12-28T22:33:00.000Z

More from Chambers' Book of Days

The kind of advertisements, now called circulars, were often, formerly, printed on the backs of playing-cards. Visiting cards, too, were improvised, by writing the name on the back of playing cards. About twenty years ago, when a house in Dean Street, Soho, was under repair, several visiting cards of this description were found behind a marble chimney-piece, one of them bearing the name of Isaac Newton. Cards of invitation were written in a similar manner. In the fourth picture, in Hogarth's series of 'Marriage-a-la-Mode,' several are seen lying on the floor, upon one of which is inscribed: 'Count Basset begs to no how Lade Squander sleapt last niter Hogarth,' when he painted this inscription, was most probably thinking of Mrs. Centlivre's play, The Basset Table, which a critic describes as containing a great deal of plot and business, without much sentiment or delicacy.

An animated description of a round game at cards, among a party of young people in a Scottish farmhouse, is given in Wilson's ever-memorable Nodes. It is the Shepherd who is represented speaking in this wise:

'As for young folks—lads and lasses, like—when the gudeman and his wife are gaen to bed, what 's the harm in a ggem at cairds? It's a chearfu', noisy, sicht o' comfort and confusion. Sic luckin' into anither's banns! Sic fause shufflin'! Sic unfair dealin'! Sic winkin' to tell your pairtner that ye hae the king or the ace! And when that wunna do, sic kickin' o' shins and treadin' on taes aneath the table—often the wrong anes! Then down wi' your haun' o' cairds in a clash on the boord, because you've ane ower few, and the coof maun lose his deal ! Then what gigglin' amang the lasses! What amicable, nay, love-quarrels, between pairtners! Jokin', and jeestin', and tauntin', and toozlin'—the cawnel blown out, and the soun' o' a thousan' kisses!—That's caird-playing in the kintra,Mr. North; and where's the manamang ye that wull dour to say that it's no a pleasant pastime o' a winter's nicht, when the snow is cumin' doon the lum, or the speat's rearm' amang the mirk mountains.'

...There are few who sit down to a quiet rubber that are aware of the possible combinations of the pack of fifty-two cards. As a curious fact, not found in Hoyle, it is worth recording here, that the possible combinations of a pack of cards cannot be numerically represented by less than forty-seven figures, arrayed in the following order: 16, 250, 563, 659, 176, 029, 962, 568, 164, 794, 000, 749, 006, 367, 006, 400.

*

One thing I have often regretted when abroad is not having a proper business card / calling card. It's awkward handing them round in England - like holding a formal speech - but in Asia it is vital. People come all the way round a big circular table to hand you their card and, to tell the truth, it is useful, not so much for business purposes as to remember who they are. I have brought back several from China, some of them entirely in Chinese so I forget the person, but next to others I have written the occasion of our meeting.

I suppose the university could give cards to its teaching staff but universities in England are not like that. Professors tend to wear leisure clothes, say things like 'Hi' and leave it at that. In China the cards bear full titles. Somewhere in between might be the ideal.

As for actually playing cards I used to do more of that than I do now. At school I gambled for pennies and shillings, occasionally pounds, at pontoon and three-card brag. At home on sacred family Sundays, we played bridge or rummy for no stakes. I like cards as potentially numinous objects. Especially old Hungarian cards such as these:

.

St John

2011-12-27T20:53:00.000Z

A short series of excerpts from Chambers' Book of Days for the specific dates, with subjoined miscellanea and news.

Various fathers of the church, among others Tertullian and St. Jerome, relate that in the reign of Domitian, the Evangelist, having been accused of attempting to subvert the religion of the Roman Empire, was transported from Asia to Rome, and there, in presence of the emperor and senate, before the gate called Porta Latina, or the Latin Gate, he was cast into a caldron of boiling oil, which he not only remained in for a long time uninjured, but ultimately emerged from, with renovated health and vigour...

...Partly in reference to the angelic and amiable disposition of St. John, partly also, apparently, in allusion to the circumstance of his having been the youngest of the apostles, this evangelist is always represented as a young man, with a heavenly mien and beautiful features. He is very generally represented holding in his left hand an urn, from which a demoniacal figure is escaping. This device appears to bear reference to a legend which states that, a priest of Diana having denied the divine origin of the apostolic miracles, and challenged St. John to drink a cup of poison which he had prepared, the Evangelist, to remove his skepticism, after having first made on the vessel the sign of the cross, emptied it to the last drop without receiving the least injury. The purging of the cup from all evil is typified in the flight from it of Satan, the father of mischief; as represented in the medieval emblem. From this legend, a superstitious custom seems to have sprung of obtaining, on St. John's Day, supplies of hallowed wine, which was both drunk and used in the manufacture of manchets or little loaves; the individuals who partook of which were deemed secure from all danger of poison throughout the ensuing year...

The core days of Christmas are so filled with family and social gathering that thought and feeling tend to come in micro pulses rather than tides. Hence the fiddling with Twitter and the short burst on Facebook. The spaces and constraints of Twitter are interesting. Every form offers its notions of completion, and brevity is no different. Perhaps the brevities will join together in some way to make some kind of song.

Pantomimes

2011-12-26T22:40:00.002Z

From Chambers Book of Days for 26 December:

Pantomimic acting had its place in the ancient drama, but the grotesque performances associated with our English Christmas, are peculiar to this country. Cibber says that they originated in an attempt to make stage-dancing something more than motion without meaning. In the early part of the last century, a ballet was produced at Drury Lane, called the Loves of Mars and Venus, 'wherein the passions were so happily expressed, and the whole store so intelligibly told by a mute narration of gesture only, that even thinking-spectators allowed it both a pleasing and rational entertainment. From this sprung forth that succession of monstrous medleys that have so long infested the stage, and which arise upon one another alternately at both houses, outlying in expense, like contending bribes at both sides at an election, to secure a majority of the multitude'

He's behind you! No, he isn't! Oh yes, he is! Oh no, he isn't!

There is something of a liturgical feel to these exchanges. The gestures too suggest a vulgar sacred space. I think of wrestling with its poses and attitudes: attempts to codify communal emotions.

Christmas Poem: Wish List

2011-12-25T10:03:00.000Z

Wish List

Winter. The festive season. Notional snow.
Winter and sledges and stars. Crystal domes.
Ice crystals. Mountains of ice. Cosy homes
With log fires. Ah winter, how will we know
You? How will our bones recognize the freezing
Fog that tightens round them? How can we grow old
In the climate prepared for us when the cold
Within wants out, when winter starts easing
The locks of the flesh? Bring us your fairy lights
And tinsel. Bring us the shower of cards you promised.
Bring out the wrapping paper. Show us your wish-list
To keep us warm in our dotage on bad nights.
Let the residual gods do something useful.
Let them sing carols to us. Let them be youthful.

Art, detail from 'Red' by Clarissa Upchurch, Poem by George Szirtes

With our very best wishes to all visitors and returning readers. Let Christmas Day roll on!

Clarissa's China pictures: Going round in Circles

2011-12-24T10:33:00.000Z

A selection from the garden palaces. All in Yangzhou. You can see more here, and, under Gallery at her website here

Hungary & the closing down of democracy

2011-12-23T21:07:00.000Z

"Democracy ends in Hungary today," LMP deputy Benedek Javor told the BBC, before he was taken away by police.

The opposition objects to key laws on elections, taxation and the central bank, set to be adopted by parliament.

They say the laws will tighten the ruling Fidesz party's grip on power.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban's centre-right Fidesz has an unprecedented two-thirds majority in parliament. It used a fast-track procedure leaving little time for debate on the new laws...

The European Commission, European Central Bank and credit rating agency Standard & Poor's (S&P) have voiced fears that Mr Orban's planned reforms of the Hungarian central bank could undermine its independence.

The parliament approved several government-proposed changes to the central bank bill on Friday to address the criticisms, Reuters reports. It is set to become law next week. (BBC)

There is more about the demonstration here and here and more about the EU / economic background here.

After the various curbs on press freedom, the demonstration was not merely about the closing down of the greatest remaining opposition voice, Klubrádió, but it certainly offered a focus.

Hungary doesn't have a long tradition of democracy and the fingers of government, and most particularly the present government, Fidesz, are never too far from the trigger. With the closing down of Klubrádió the safety catch is well and truly off and Hungary has entered the next stage of its shift towards authoritarianism and dictatorship. The main opposition in parliament is currently Jobbik, the equivalent of the BNP, so it is not difficult for the prime minister, Victor Orbán, to push through legislation to silence the left and left-of-centre as effectively as possible.

The parliamentary balance being as it is Fidesz has hurried to change the constitutions of the major civil bodies, appointing its members and supporters into long term positions extending well beyond the life of the parliament, so that even should Fidesz lose an election the incoming government would be rendered ineffective.

Hungary has a highly developed, liberal intelligentsia, as well as a decent-sized liberal working urban population that finds itself less and less able to voice its opinion. Klubrádió was an important outlet for such opinion so it had to go.

What is also worrying is that young people in neighbouring Austria are turning in considerable numbers to the right wing (some say, far-right) FPÖ. It seems that 42% of the under thirties support it. (See page 2a here) Thanks to Poet in Residence for the link.

The old Austro-Hungarian Empire is gathering its ragged robes, adjusting its crooked crown, and priming its beer halls.

*

There is a petition to support Klubrádió here with my own statement. Írd alá a peticiót on the left means 'Sign the petition'. I have signed it and have put links to it on both my Facebook page and Twitter. If you care about such things, do sign. The Facebook link carries the following translation of the text of the petition:

*Say No to shutting down Klubrádió*

The panjandrums of the Department of National News and Media led by Annamaria Szalai have obediently followed the instructions of the Victor Orbán regime to close down Klubrádió, one of the last bastions of the free press in Hungary.

The Orbán regime wants to silence all dissent and clear the way to building an autocratic system of government free of all criticism.

We will not yield to the absolutes of power. We will raise our voice against the new despotism, Let us all say NO!

*I am signing this petition to protest against the shutting down of Klubrádió.*

Shakespeare's Songs from the plays: Full fathom five

2011-12-22T21:09:00.001Z

Vaughan Williams 'Full Fathom Five' (from Three Shakespeare Songs) Performed by Sonitus Chamber Choir

Ariel's song from Shakepeare's 'The Tempest' in Peter Greenaway's 'Prospero's Books'. Music by Michael Nyman, vocal by Sarah Leonard.

      Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations. 50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring....

....

                 'Do
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
'Nothing?'

        I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?'

Full flotsam firth, thy feathers lour / fool flitter fro, thy fillies lay / flee fellows fro, thy fervent lure...

Ariel's song from the play that is most thoroughly a poem. Yes, I know about the colonial aspect and how, in some readings, you might regard Caliban, the slave, as the true hero. You might do that, though a heavily polemical reading sets you facing one way only. Magic and manipulation, the ideal society, lost and usurped power, the ceremony of innocence that is almost drowned, the opposition of mischievous spirit and lusting flesh... All that and more is in there because it is poetry as well as action and idea.

The idea that we become exotic, rich and strange, with pearls for eyes - even to ourselves, at the end - is important to the poem / song. We are, after all strange, very strange, most of all to ourselves. We may drown but we get the music and the pearls.

Late, tomorrow one last Shakespeare song

2011-12-22T00:16:00.001Z

Late back, a bit more Shakespeare tomorrow, in the meantime some of Michael Wolf's haunting photographs of people on crowded Hong Kong trains, here:

Faces pressed agains windows. Explore more.

Shakespeare's songs from the plays 4: Blow blow thou winter wind X 3 and a death

2011-12-20T22:24:00.000Z

The New Mexico Music Educators Association All State Mixed Chorus 2003 Conducted by Dr. Janet Galvan...Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind from "When Icicles Hang" by John Rutter

"Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind" (Shakespeare) Gervase Elwes (arranged by Roger Quilter) / Recorded: 1916

"Blow, blow, thou winter wind" by Anna Pope 2011. Performed by Lumina Vocal Ensemble, Musical Director Anna Pope

Blow, Blow thou Winter Wind

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho! the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember'd not.
Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho! the holly!
This life is most jolly.

It has been a terrible year in the world by most counts and this song seems appropriate. For a reminder of that see this marvellous horrifying set of photographs (via Norm's tweet).

I love the Elwes / Quilter best but it's cheating by crackling in the background which always does for me. Mortality clearing its throat again.

All those deaths, not just at the end of the year, but throughout the year!

Last night, in macabre fashion, a phone call from C's cousin to say that C's aunt - her father's sister - has died, suddenly, at 99, falling out of her bed. Mentally top condition, no carer, in a flat by herself. It is so sudden that, at 99, it is almost cheering. One roll out of bed and out for ever. She was full of life, came to any gig I did in Bath, was interested in everything and made her own Christmas cards. She drew rather well. Sharp eyed and sharp minded.

And of course, this morning, the card from her duly arrives, saying she didn't make the one this year because the ends of her fingers were numb. Our card to her will be unopened by her. So three Blow Blows for her. Let it blow. Sing heigh-ho unto the green holly.

Meanwhile in Hungary...

2011-12-19T18:50:00.000Z

...the political clocks go back neatly bridging the gap between 1944 and 1949. From Adam Le Bor in The Economist:

GYÖRGY MATOLCSY, Hungary’s economy minister, wanted a war with the International Monetary Fund, and now he has got one.

Officials from the fund and the European Union have broken off preliminary talks with the Hungarian government over a financial safety net for the country. Why? Because the parliament, where the ruling Fidesz party has a two-thirds majority, has accelerated plans to change the management of the central bank and to expand membership of the monetary council, which sets interest rates....

...Fidesz allies have now been appointed to the presidency, the State Audit Office, the State Prosecutor, the National Media Authority, the new fiscal council and the new National Courts Authority, among others. Officials say that party backgrounds are irrelevant and that office-holders will exercise their mandates independently. Democracy in Hungary, they claim, is safe.

Opposition politicians, international watchdogs, the EU and the United States disagree. They argue that the government's attempt to limit the independence of the central bank near-completes Fidesz's steady undermining of Hungary's formerly independent institutions and its removal of the checks and balances found in most European democracies.

An overwhelming victory at the polls, which Fidesz won last year, does not, say Western officials, give the party a mandate for a long-term (the new appointees will hold office for between nine and 12 years) takeover of legislative and executive functions. Government officials have not explained why it seems that only Fidesz allies can be trusted to exercise their mandates independently....

...Wags in the capital joke that the Hungarian legislative process works as follows. The prime minister has an idea in the morning, Mr Matolcsy announces it as policy in the afternoon, by the end of the week Mr Lázár is piloting it through parliament and it becomes law on Monday. An exaggeration, to be sure, but not by much.

The bold type is mine. My poor country of which I had hoped rather better.

Shakespeare's songs from the plays 3: It was a lover and his lass

2011-12-19T14:36:00.000Z

Martha Tilton in 1943.

I have loved this Arthur Young arrangement since I heard Cleo Laine singing it with Johnny Dankworth. So much fun, just as it should be. Go for it, pretty country folk! The rest, in any case, is all hey nonino and ding ding. I'd also like to know who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp and who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong? I'd like to thank the guy. I'd like to shake his hand.

It was a Lover and his Lass

It was a lover and his lass,
    With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green corn-field did pass,
    In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

Between the acres of the rye,
    With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
These pretty country folks would lie,
    In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

This carol they began that hour,
    With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that life was but a flower
    In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

And, therefore, take the present time
    With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
For love is crown`d with the prime
    In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

So therefore take the present time has a personal meaning too. Our current house, when we bought it, was a gift shop trading under the name Present Time. We found the house by accident having come into town to look at another one we didn't like so much. It was a Sunday and the estate agent was open. The house was advertised in the window. Can we see it? we asked. The owner, young Kate with the husky voice, was in. She had sublet two of the rooms, and she took us into her room, the biggest, with a view of the romantic ruined abbey behind. It was sunny. We fell in love with it. It seemed perfect but we hesitated. As we left I looked up at the shop sign and there was the cue for the song. Carpe diem, it said and meant it. So we took it.

Shakespeare's songs from the plays 2: Gerald Finzi (for Vaclav Havel)

2011-12-18T16:14:00.003Z

Bryn Terfel singing Gerald Finzi's composition. How fitting for Havel's death! Perhaps more than anyone Havel was the emblem of hope and light in 1989 and the few years following. I am much moved by his death.

This song is possibly Shakespeare's greatest, right down - and precisely because of - the pun on chimney sweepers 'coming to dust'. Genius comprises lightness and humour, however dark.

More on Havel in due course.

Fear No More

Fear no more the heat o' the sun;
    Nor the furious winter's rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
    Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney sweepers come to dust.

Fear no more the frown of the great,
    Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
    To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning-flash,
    Nor the all-dread thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
    Thou hast finished joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
    Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
    Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!

- from Cymbeline Act Iv, Scene 2

And renowned be thy grave indeed.

Shakespeare's songs from the plays 1

2011-12-17T22:18:00.000Z

A rather lovely thing and apt for the weather: saxophonist John Harle, featuring Elvis Costello on vocals. Nothing to see, just listening. One of my favourite songs from Shakespeare. Feste's song from Twelfth Night.

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut the gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.

Those toss-pots with their drunken heads, the swaggering, the knaves and thieves and the rain, and the wind. The songs distill something so deep beneath the text it is like coming upon an organic world with its own life.

Christopher Hitchens 13 April 1949 - 15 December 2011

2011-12-16T22:29:00.001Z

>
Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton, Martin Amis, Paris 1979

I admired Christopher Hitchens, as did even those who came to disagree with him after 9/11. There is, in Martin Amis's Experience, a photo of Amis, Fenton and Hitch together, three brilliant people, all radical in their ways, all glamorous, all somewhat Byronic, all exactly my age. The photograph is 1979, the year my first book came out.

For someone like me they were unattainable larger-than-life figures, supremely educated (Hitchens left Oxford with a Third, like Auden), privileged, with several heads start. I considered Fenton - and still do - the most gifted, most princely English-language poet of the latter end of the twentieth century, as well as a sharp writer on theatre, not to mention his background as foreign correspondent in Vietnam. Amis was not only the major force in fiction but, inventive and dominant, he more or less 'named' the Martian poets, more of my exact contemporaries. Hitchens? I knew less of him then of the other two, but maybe only because he entered public consciousness, or my public consciousness at any rate, later than they did.

The obituaries today all recognised the loss of an important figure. The comparison with Orwell was recalled and confirmed. For me, he was as much Swift as Orwell. The fierceness, passion and sheer display of his polemic was charged with Swift's saaeva indignatio, that savage indignation inherited from Juvenal. His was a bigger world than Orwell's, one less concerned with England, English identity, and English history.

Hitchens was essentially a moral writer who grounded his morality in literature as well as in history, philosophy, and politics. That is to say he 'heard' language for what it is, not just as a polemical tool. The morality is in the style. A moral writer remains a moral writer even if his earlier admirers turn away from him or he turns away from them. His later opinion may be different from the earlier but the moral force is the same, in fact stronger as the style in which it is asserted develops. What made his so thrilling was his roundedness: his remarkable knowledge and memory of books, of poems, of stories, anecdotes. He drank and smoked and argued. Eloquent? He was thunderously eloquent.

Some lines of Martin Bell's in his 'Ode to Groucho' seem appropriate, not because they describe Hitchens but because they point to his world, his style:

All the shining rebels

(Prometheus, of course, and that old pauper
Refusing cake from Marie Antoinette,
And Baudelaire's fanatical toilette,
And Rimbaud, striding off the Africa,
And Auden, scowling at a cigarette...)

Striding off, scowling and shining. Then gone.

Arab Spring: democracy (a very brief note)

2011-12-14T23:35:00.001Z

Ask people what they want and they'll either shrug and ignore you or tell you. What they tell you might not be what you would prefer them to tell you. They might tell you they want public hangings or stonings, blindings, strict sexual segregation, burning of Catholics (or Protestants), institutionalised corruption based on terror, and endless re-runs of the X-Factor. If you promise them these things they are more likely to vote for you.

In what we call advanced democracies you present people with a programme they know, and you know, you won't deliver, not entirely. This is not so much a plan of action as a way of telling them who you are. Then, once you are elected, you set about what you want to do, or that part of it which is possible to do, and launch on a programme of education to persuade them that they want it too. They don't, not really, but they never thought they were going to get it anyway. They'll vote for you because of who you say you are and who they think you are. That is what an advanced democracy is. It is, in this way, tolerant and humane because it behaves the way most tolerant and humane human beings behave. Every so often you can pretend to be scandalised, and may well feel scandalised (being scandalised is a great feeling, just like being wronged) and it satisfies the need for what you yourself recognise is a personal psychodrama. If you don't recognise it you are an obsessive or, possibly, a Guardian contributor to Comment is Free.

It won't be much use expecting the less advanaced democracies to behave like you. They haven't internalised scepticism the way you have - they haven't had the chance - and, as a result, are less tolerant of other people's scepticism. You think democracy is a nice easy-going tolerant system where everyone gets to watch a hundred TV channels, shop on e-Bay and talk about justice in a properly sceptical way. The non-advanced democracies are more likely to say: more of us want executions than those who don't therefore we want executions. Executions lead to strong leaders who don't go for democracy in the way you do, or in fact any recognisable way at all.

We have to get over this and then consider our options. What to say to new democracies that are serious about fulfilling their properly elected absolute programmes? What does it mean to have aspirations to democracy?

China: Why The Slender West Lake is so called

2011-12-14T12:43:00.000Z

The full poetic explanation of the origins of the lake's name. One of those ancient, enigmatic Chinese, multi-level, deep things a westerner cannot hope to understand.

China: work, talk, travel, more food, and later more music

2011-12-13T22:05:00.002Z

Our literary task is to translate each other's poems. By the time we arrive L and K have translated two or three of ours each, we haven't done anything, for how could we? So how will this work? We decide the mornings will be given to translation (eventually some four mornings are).

So we come down in the morning and sit with our poets, L or K, with an English speaking postgrad student present to talk us through potential communication problems. Talking means taking notes, but there are so many notes and revisions of notes that within five minutes my notes become illegible with crossings-out and super- and subscripting. We start from zero so this setting down of the foundations is a long process. I wonder why we are not provided with a simple gloss or literal version with footnotes and marginalia, and then do the talking. Miraculously, by working late ad night and early in the morning we produce versions that read well in English. How close to the Chinese we cannot say nor guess. (And neither can our splendid poets, not really.) Then we take the translations to market at our first Fudan event.

Professor C introduces. I go first. I read the sonnet 'Water' followed by translation by L and a newish short poem 'We Love Life Whenever We Can' after - quite a long way after, in that it is set in England - Mahmoud Darwish, followed by translation by K. This being the department of Comparative Literature, both poets read translations of the same poem by P, then they read their own with translations by P and myself. THis is followed by discussions between ourselves on the nature of poetry and of translation, then it's open to the floor. One student asks about iambic pentameters - I recite a few lines from Gray's Elegy by way of answer - another wonders about the possibility of translating poetry at all. We agree it's impossible which is why we do it.

It all goes swimmingly, much enthusiasm, but we have to hurry as a minibus is waiting to drive us to Jin Zé (see Pascale's beautiful photographs), a village some hour and a half away. We are to stay there the night. It is dark and cold when we arrive, but the house we are driven to is extraordinary. A factory some ten years ago it is now a complex of traditional Chinese rooms, workshops and two small theatres and much more. The whole is set next to the river and a shallow decorative stream runs through it. Our room is immense and while traditional equipped with luxurious modern items such as a jacuzzi and a toilet whose lid lifts automatically. The water in the basin smells and tastes of sulphur so we have big thermos flasks of boiled water.

First we have to dash into the village for some food. That is to be obtained in a small rudimentary restaurant with a single plain room filled by one round table. The food, as ever, is excellent, as is the yellow wine. Z, one of the Chinese PhD students - an English speaker - has come with us. We drink toasts and try to write down a rough translation of the classical Chinese poem we are to translate, but it doesn't get far. On the way home we cross an ancient rainbow bridge, that is to say one continuous arch, with no rail. It is wet and steep and dark, the river rushes under. C slips but is OK.

Next morning it's sunny and cold so we walk into the village. The bridges are ancient and round, the tiny houses very basic but the river that runs through it is beautiful. We enter two temples, one that used to be dedicated to the master of the village, the other Buddhist with a huge gingko tree in the yard (again see Pascale's blog). We pass through a narrow poor shopping street-market selling essential items. On the way back we bump into L who has booked a boat. P and C don't fancy it, but Z and I get in and we go up and down the river and under some of the bridges.

Lunch is communal. Then K gives us a lightning tour of the premises that truly are extraordinary. There are gardens and vast rooms - the size of a minor cinema, filled with craft objects of all sorts. And ancient beds. And furniture. And costume. There are young people working in the costume department. In one of the vast rooms an ancient woman and her daughter are working at traditional looms. Just when you think there can't be more you go up another flight of stairs and are in another hall. Perhaps we are getting a tour of the whole of China. But China must be a billion times this. It is quite inconceivable.

The notes in my head blacken with crossings out, superscripts and subscripts. I must try to translate my own fingers into hands, my toes into feet, and my head into sense.

China, banquets and revolutions

2011-12-12T22:02:00.001Z

Not our own pic - photos wouldn't load up. This is a very small banquet compared to the extravaganzas we attended.

From the second day on we realised we were in the serious business of eating. Eating is a semi-formal occasion. The guest of honour is seated at the round table, opposite the door, the rest arrange themselves around him (it is generally him). The host pays for everything and orders all the dishes. There is a hot towel to start with, and tea which is kept topped up. Then you can choose between red wine, white wine (baiju, not really wine, more liquid fire, suitable to down in one gulp as a toast) and yellow wine (huangjiu, best served warm) which became our drink of choice. Every five or ten minutes there is a toast which involves clinking of glasses right across the table and a fair amount of courteous merriment. The food goes round and round on its carousel as the waiters bring ever new dishes, quietly shifting the old ones into the centre. The host keeps an eye on the revolving table, nudging it around now and then so guests don't have to look greedy. There are several courses of soup, a veritable undergrowth of noodles, and watermelon slices at the end (that's how you know you've got to the end.). There is no distinction between courses otherwise. You can eat sweet between spicy or delicate, you can go back to whatever dish you want providing there is some of it left. Then you can dive in with your chopsticks.

The revolutions of the table can lead to thoughts of revolution. There is official China and unofficial China, the relationship between them generally nuanced. At one of the last banquets, however, an elegant young woman declared that China would change drastically within ten years, at most twenty. It had to. The pressure was too great. This life, this banquet was not real life, she stressed, (didn't we know it!) and the poor village we had seen was nowhere near as poor as those in the west. She was smart, very elegant, had a high business position, her mind gleamed, her English was very good. The meal was provided by the restaurant owner who was sitting with us. It was all unofficial. The lights outside were dazzling and western, like a Chinese Vegas. In the airport later the China Daily was Pravda 1975. Big country: big contradictions.

Music from China: Bring on the Girls

2011-12-11T10:51:00.003Z

From Notes:

We saw gardens, we toured in boats, we explored famous houses, were shown rooms not open to the public. Our guides were beautiful with beautiful manners and beautiful clothes. It was all beautiful. But it is the music I will take away with me. First there was the master musician in the small room with its cups of hot green tea (see previous video clip), then ever more music and singing as we went along.

The strictly unofficial Red Bridge Autumn Ceremony takes place near the Red Bridge itself and involves flowers and the reading of the classical poem to celebrate the Slender West Lake. Both P and I had been put to translating it - only four lines, but heavily rhymed, with seven characters per line, which could be translated as seven stresses in English terms. The poem was read, and P and I read our translations while clutching little bouquets of grass. Two beautifully dressed, beautiful girls performed a lotus petals ceremony. People sang, then off we went on a boat trip to another garden and another mansion, a special guided tour with more zither music on the boat. We cruise along the Slender West Lake past banks of bamboo, past willows, past little islands and moor at another formal garden built by another rich businessman. Rich businessmen seem to have built everything. A beautiful girl gives us a beautiful tour that ends up in a high pavilion overlooking the lake while more beautiful girls in even more beautiful costumes play flutes and lutes and zithers.

Beauty - visual, philosophical, aesthetic and downright decadent - is clearly a central issue in the culture, especially if one has the means to indulge in it. The rich have the means. The emperor arrives on a visit and remarks how fine it would be to have a pagoda. No problem, overnight a new pagoda is raised. There are rainbow bridges, straight bridges, step bridges, screens, calligraphic inscriptions everywhere. Occasionally I feel I must be a residual puritan, but, for heaven's sake! It is undeniably beautiful. The art of the Chinese garden is complex, involving rocks, plants, water, air, time, habitation, poetry and philosophy. I have no wish to be facetious about it. Beautiful is what it is.

The poem itself in my translation

Poem for the Red Bridge Autumn Ceremony

An avenue of willow trees where green patches remain
The picture of a rainbow bridge, wild geese in one sharp skein,
The gold melts in the crucible, finds its lost domain,
And so the Slender Western Lake receives its given name.

The curious technical feature is that, in Chinese, there is a mass of material squeezed into the first two lines and practically no material in the second two, so there is abnormal strain in keeping the balance. You have to contract and expand without looking as though you are doing it. The form uses full rhyme. It is not by any means a great poem. It is conventionally picturesque, the gold in the third line refers to the actual discovery of gold near the lake, and the 'so' in the last line is a false link between the gold, the picturesqueness, and the name, which is in fact simply a description of the long narrow lake to the west of the city. But there it is. It matters because it is a focus for celebration.

More beautiful girls at the Red Bridge Autumn Ceremony...

As for the beauty and the girls? Yes, the Yangzhou people tell us, Yangzhou is the city of beautiful girls, which may well be the case. Being decorative, entertaining, exciting and soothing to the male spirit were the vocations to which many girls, from high birth to low birth, were trained. A little more from the Notes then:

Next day, Sunday, to the mountain top, though it is just a gentle hill that feels a little like a mountain because the area around Yangzhou is flat. The cabin at the top was visited by the Chinese equivalent of the Emperor Nero, who buried hundreds of girls in the valley, got beautiful girls to carry his boat when the canal ran dry, and changed the examination system. Yangzhou is famed for its beautiful girls. Some are in the valley.

Go and ask Robin to bring the girls over / to Sweetwater, wrote John Crowe Ransom in Vision by Sweetwater ending: Myself a child, old suddenly at the scream / From one of the white throats which it hid among'

*

ps Go to Pascale Petit's blog for great photographs and fine physical description. We did after all go together as the two UK poets. I tend to do too much thinking and not enough describing - she has a terrific eye.

pps I am now on Twitter. You can find me at @george_szirtes

Poets in China: Kaiyu and artists

2011-12-09T18:08:00.000Z

Pascale Petit, myself, Xiao Kaiyu and Yang Lian, November / December 2011

Pascale and I knew each other a little, I had met Lian a couple of times, Kaiyu was an entirely new acquaintance. He was the one who came out to Pudong Airport for C and I in a taxi when no-one else was around. We talked hesitatingly at first, he uncertain of his English, I uncertain how much he understood or wanted to speak. He sat in the front of the taxi, we were at the back. But I immediately warmed to him: something about his manner, quiet, reticent, but genuine. He took us to the hotel then, once we had settled in came to take us out to an artist friend's studio.

Extract from Notes:

We strive to lie down and sleep, having been awake for something like nineteen out of twenty-two hours with only a four hour sleep preceding. C manages, I don't. And soon we are downstairs with Kaiyu again, and he takes us for a very late (Chinese time 3:15 pm) lunch which turns out to be five times as large as we can eat, but then he gets us a taxi and we roar off into the very north of the city to visit the studio of his artist friend, Chen Qiang. The studio, part of a disused factory, is enormous. Qiang's work is abstract, beautiful, patient, crowded, full of small specific marks in apparent motion.

Though he speaks no English, Kaiyu's has improved a lot and he acts as interpreter for us. Qiang introduces to other artist friends in equally enormous neighbouring studios. They all work with various aspects of abstraction on a large scale. In fact the Shanghai School is primarily an abstract movement, very well known and very highly valued in China and abroad. We tour the studios, greatly impressed and determined to argue for a Shanghai School exhibition back in England.

Then Qiang drives us to a nearby restaurant where an absolutely enormous meal is ordered (by him, he is treating us), every part rather exquisite, but still impossible. The conversation moves around art and poetry and the changes in Shanghai.

Kaiyu remembers he had arranged for us to meet the head of the Shakespeare Research Institute at Fudan, Professor Tan Zheng. So Qiang drives us miles and miles back to the hotel from whence he goes home. Kaiyu, Tan Zheng, C and I adjourn for coffee in a nearb coffee place popular with international students. Talk here of Shakespeare and Wilde and influence, and history plays, and religion in China, including the growing Christian influence.

Cheng Qiang, seen here with one of his paintings:

We had no idea how successful and well-known he was, successful that is to say, in an almost Damien Hirst sense. And this is the first surprising thing about Shanghai: the art market. Who buys the works? The state? Big business? The international market? All of them.

The aesthetic: how specifically Chinese is it? How international? Those small ornate regular marks may be a version of calligraphy, a display of patience, an ornamental system or a kind of poetry. How thorough! How big! How meticulous! An art of candied brilliance. Qiang gives us two handsome catalogues as we leave, studies of his work. I see that Kaiyu has written one of the essays.

And the meal. Culinary opulence in a brightly lit modern street, in a restaurant not entirely geared to elegance. Much smoking. A small hole in the tablecloth. But friendly and likeable. One could hang out here: it's not too grand. It's just right.

More photos, videos and music to come, as well as excerpts from the Notes and reflections on them.

Music from China 1

2011-12-08T14:39:00.001Z

From Notes page:

After this to another quarter, a long narrow very straight street opposite a gate, one aimed at tourists, lined with red lanterns, with elegant clothes and expensive items for sale, but we are heading for a small room to hear a recital on the guqin, a seven stringed zither, played by a master. We gather on benches and are offered tea and the master plays and sings ancient songs. To my western ears it is a distant, sad, deeply sensitive sound, held together by some repetitions and changes of mood. The instrument is so quiet at times one can hardly hear it; at other times it is struck with great force then hushed. Our Chinese friends are clearly absorbed and moved. The owner of the house says one of the songs played by the master is the finest performance of the piece he has ever heard. The tea goes round in the growing cold. The master sings a short solo verse, then he both sings and plays. By this time I am beginning to hear motifs and imitations of human voices - a lot of vibrato, some steely sounds, much tonal whispering and sighing.

*

The absorbed figure on the left of the picture is our friend, the poet Xiao Kaiyu. The video was taken on a simple iPhone. Mao looks on.

Just Received: Video from Battle of Ideas

2011-12-08T12:17:00.000Z

Sent on from the debate on Sunday 31 October, 2011. Odd to watch oneself - I seem to be constantly moving. I put it up here at the risk of embarrassment since I haven't watched it first.

More China material to come. Some today, including videos with music.

Just Back

2011-12-07T23:15:00.000Z

Back about an hour ago. The blog continued, albeit intermittently, in the Notes part of the website, so if interested do look there. It's late, and we got up about seventeen hours ago. I'll try to gather some thoughts about China over the next few days. And put up some visual material.

Blog update whilst in China

2011-11-23T10:42:00.000Z

Just to inform you that whilst George is in China he can't update his Blogger account due to internet restrictions. However a cunning workaround is in place, so you can continue to follow him in the notes section of the main website (http://www.georgeszirtes.co.uk/index.php?page=notes).

Normal service will resume here in around 2 weeks time.

Thanks
Tom

Pictures, forms, families (6): the event

2011-11-20T13:41:00.000Z

Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery

The intensely air-conditioned lecture theatre of the Castle Museum. Martin and Helen arrive just before me and we walk up together. Chris Gribble is to be our Chair and he appears. Then Anna Green, our host together with Harriet Loffler, the Co-curator. Norwich City are playing Arsenal at home at the same time (final score an honourable 1-2 defeat), there has been no great fuss of the reading so for a while we wonder whether we will outnumber the audience. Andrea turns up. Will we have the images on the screen behind us? It turns out we won't. Technical problems. Eventually some twenty-five people enter, prepared to listen. Poetry on match-day on a Saturday afternoon. Lucky to get so many.

We have drawn two tables together at the front and arrange ourselves. Anna introduces Chris who introduces us one by one as we talk about the pictures then read our poems. We go: Martin, Andrea, Helen then me. It seems I am the only one to have chosen paintings, the others have chosen photographs or sculpture or videos, though Martin's refers to paintings too. I think it is Andrea or Helen who say the problem with having the catalogues was that there are already words there that suggest how the pictures are to be interpreted. It's the same with all the images of course so that can only be part of it. But then there is also the question of how paintings are clearly constructed whereas photographs seem simply to appear. To think about this would require many more blog-posts so I won't do that here. For me it is chiefly a matter of familiarity. If I already know something very well it makes it harder to write about, unless the work is as powerful as the Andrews. Poetry is never just saying what you know. Negative capability, said Keats. I have loads of that.

I can't speak about the poems of the others as I don't have them in front of me, but they are all vivid and sound very good. One of Martin's is in the form of a specular, the form invented by Julia Copus which runs not only the end words but every line forwards and backwards. Martin is keen to emphasise this is not just showing off or cleverness. I think to hell with that. As if cleverness were a crime or a hindrance to feeling! Form invents feeling and supercharges it. His specular sounds very well, as do his other poems. As does Andrea's ballad, a form she usually avoids, she tells us. Again, I think everything is possible and everything is possible to do well, to leap from. So why not leap? Helen moves readily into fairy tale so her subject is immediately familiar territory to her. They all sound good poems.

Chris asks about form. It is not that overt formal devices - rhymes, stanza shapes, particular rhythms - are better than what seem to be covert informal discoveries. They are not, but neither are they, as many contemporary poets know, invalid. There is no need to go into the closed versus open form arena, still less try to fit into the straitjacket of traditional versus modern (as if traditional and modern were always the same, enjoying a fixed relationship). I don't even think it is easier to be naff in form than in free verse" it just sounds more naff. There is no opposition between form and feeling or intelligence and feeling and as for the distinctions between personal and impersonal, they seem gestural pedantry to me. You may be very clever but I really feel things, is the argument. Yeh, right, I don't feel anything, is the proper answer.

The hour goes very quickly. It is brilliant sunshine outside. As I walk down St Giles the iron fencing of the church is glowing extraordinarily. It is pure gold. It is burning gold. The cause? The sun is shining on a shop front opposite and the reflected light turns black to gold.

Pictures, forms, families (5): Andrews and Struth

2011-11-20T13:00:00.001Z

The Batoni poem was a formal sonnet, more formal in some ways than many of nine. I thought of it - felt it - as the equivalent of a formal bouquet. The sonnet with its compactness, clarity and history seemed to be the right way to go, the full ABBA ABBA of the octet followed by a full CDE CDE. I don't say this was forethought - not at all - but once it began as a sonnet (the current beginning is a serious redrafting of the original idea) it felt it wanted to go that way. I have written about form often enough, how it is, like necessity, the mother of invention. You are never more than one line ahead, if that, having to look forward and behind as you go. But I knew as soon as I had drafted it that the sonnet would not be enough. There was some light beyond it.

I have long admired the Michael Andrews, in fact quite a lot of Andrews. He seems to me the poetic soul brother of Gerhardt Richter and Luc Tuymans. Sometimes I even think he was much less glib than they can sometimes be (I know, they comprehend the glibness but I can't help noticing it). In this large painting he is teaching his daughter to swim in very black water indicating great cold and depth. The daughter's face is half lost under her hair. Swimming - he is holding her up - is a matter of survival. The sea is not just the sea, the cliffs are not just the cliffs. They are domains - visual domains, language domains - in which he too must swim or sink. The Batoni poem ended with metaphors: this poem is all metaphors folding in on themselves, each section reversing its end word as if cupping some necessary space, maybe just enough space for a breath. The picture, as well as the poem, made my blood run a little cold. And yet it's about survival. And yet we survive.

The Struth is a photograph, one of a long series of photographs based on long-exposures of families so there is, naturally, a little strain in the faces and poses. But look how populous this family is, how comfortably ensconced in their room, and how they confront us. It is as if they were behind thick glass. 1989 signalled the end of history according to Francis Fukuyama, and this 1989 is a momentary dead end in the Smith family's history. It is the opposite of the first two images: it is family as armour and bastion and tribe. Each member of the family is fully mortal and sensate in himself or herself but put them together and they are a unit that has been arrested at a peak of power. The photograph is an embodied idea of what families might become. They have, as the poem puts it, made it as far as the room in which they sit. Nor is that a negligible achievement, in fact it's a great deal because, having been photographed there, they will remain there, invulnerable as image whatever happens in life. They look out at us rather than the other way round. Their gaze is the stronger. In that respect they are like those Byzantine wall paintings whose figures stare out at us reminding us we are not there as connoisseurs to appraise their aesthetic value or judge their merit as images, but as potent forces in judgment over us. They are conjurations, not art. I am still not sure of the Fukuyama reference, however it fits (and it does fit), because it is almost a pun, and it might not be that kind of pun that is required.

I write long today because we fly to China on Tuesday and I might not be able to post on Blogger there. One more piece to come on this theme though.

Pictures, forms, families (4): the poem

2011-11-20T12:27:00.000Z

Death, Survival, Persistence

Luke Fildes, The Doctor (1891)*

1. Death
Pompeo Batoni

The robes, the cloth, the vase, the veil, the bow,
The posy, the leaves, the rising cloud, the lips.
These were ourselves, this is the cloth that slips
into shapes of cowls and hoods we cannot know.
We cannot decode ourselves. We move below
our surfaces, our griefs, our flowers, the tips
of our fingers. We know what it is that grips
the child in her numbed sleep, what winds still blow
about her. We put our ears to the cloud to hear
vibrations of the air, we measure our wrists
for pulse. We mist mirrors, move in our sleep
as if awake, make energies from fear
accumulated in our veins. We have made lists
of the dead. Our metaphors run deep.

2. Survival
Michael Andrews, as before

1.
Floating is next to drowning
and though the metaphor of dark
is simply metaphor the metaphor is cold.

Look, our children float against the cold
and though we hold them against the dark
we know the sea’s own metaphors for drowning.

2.
Those tender bubbles, sea-scum, illusion
of air, the clashing rocks that contain
the sea, they are our modes, our metaphors.

We cannot help but live through metaphors.
The bay contains the sea, the clashing rocks contain
our hands and bodies, our floating, our illusion

3/
of floating, and our pale skin, pale warmth,
the metaphor of childhood we find ourselves
employing time and again, like love, like hands

that bear up bodies that terminate in hands.
Dear children you become almost ourselves –
the metaphorical sea’s notion of warmth.

4.
My feet dissolve, my lower half in water.
Her face is strewn with hair, so we are joined
in this brief act, as brief as other acts,

as if water, drowning, floating, dark, were acts,
as if my life could float, steady and joined
to yours in the bay’s cold metaphors of water.

3. Persistence
Thomas Struth: The Smith Family, Fife, Scotland 1989

What is it looks out of us
so wary, so contemplative against
the glass that keeps us from the world?

What is the glass against which we press
our faces, that looks back at us
with its own blank puzzled face?

We cannot solve it, our presence, our eyes,
though we are gathered, clannish, cloned
in attitudes of familial power.

We have made it as far as the room
in which we sit. The glass confirms
the room, our eyes confirm ourselves,

just as we are in 1989
the year history ended,
the moment, the glass, our eyes.

*The Fildes was in the exhibition but I knew it too well. I use it here instead of the Batoni that I cant find.

Pictures, forms, families (3): the threatened child

2011-11-20T12:17:00.000Z

I can't find Pompeo Batoni's moving, formal picture on the web. The couple in it were married in 1739, had one legitimate child Barbara, who died in 1749. Hoping perhaps to get over the loss they set out on a European tour. In Rome, as the catalogue note has it 'they commissioned Pompeo Batoni to paint this portrait of them watching over their dead daughter, united in their sorrow.' They had taken a miniature of her for the painter to work from.

The girl in the picture looks delightful. The painting is loaded with symbols of mourning. It is without mawkishness or melodrama. The couple contemplate the child who is more clearly defined than they are.

It is however a difficult and horrible subject. We have Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, what Toby Litt renamed as Deadkidsongs - infant mortality was common enough in the nineteenth and early twentieth century - but it's too much, too overwhelmingly much heartbreak. I can hardly bear to listen to the Mahler and I haven't yet opened up my copy of the Litt. Even here I prefer to illustrate this with a life-giving Picasso (life-giving is Picasso's great gift) rather than with a number of available Victorian deathbed scenes because Picasso always sees bigger and beyond to ever greater energy and restlessness.

The poem for the Castle Museum is divided into three parts, Death, Survival and Perseverance. The Batoni is sumptuous in its way, tragedy as a set piece with cello. Mortality with posies. What is love if not fear of losing? Love is in fact mortality, so mortality lies at the bottom of the family, as it did for mine when I was a child.

The next post will contain the poem.

Pictures, forms, families (2): going nuclear

2011-11-20T11:19:00.000Z

My mother, father, brother and myself, c. 1955

One question raised by the exhibition is whether the concept family necessarily includes children. For me the answer is clearly yes. Even if there is only a couple they are the children of parents before them though, as an independent unit, they are primarily a couple not a family. As I imagine it however (imagine intuitively, not argue it) a family includes children. In fact the family is most itself at the moment when the latest child comes into the world. In other words it includes not simply children but infants.

The implication is that the family is most itself when it has the care of the most vulnerable stage of human life, the very beginning. It is therefore tied to responsibilities (for the adults) and utter reliance (for the newborn). It is as the line in The Waste Land, as suggested to Eliot by Vivienne, goes: What you get married for if you don't want children? Again, I have no wish to argue this: it is what my bones and viscera tell me.

The arguments about - and chiefly against - nuclear families that were raging in the sixties and seventies meant little to me. My whole apprehension of life was of the family endangered. Half my family were wiped out in the war, my mother and father were almost destroyed by it. I almost died at the age of two, and here we were in a new country where we knew no-one but ourselves. That is if we knew even ourselves.

If I felt this as apprehension, my parents knew it as experience. It was a miracle that families survived, that children survived, that any of the four of us was here at all. I think it made life uncomfortable. Psychologically the pressure was acute. I sometimes think it drove my mother to the edges of madness. As an adolescent I hated it. It was strangling, obsessive. The family absolutely had to be together on Sundays. There had to be family excursions. Even after I married my mother had to be everywhere, know everything, be a presence.

I now think that was because she had been so close to being an absence.

But the visceral feeling is not about pleasure or discomfort. It is the reality sense, not the value sense. However they may overlap, they are different. The madness lies is assuming they are exactly the same. The poetry, if it comes from anywhere, also emanates from this region.

Pictures, forms, families (1)

2011-11-20T10:46:00.000Z

Michael Andrews Melanie and Me Swimming 1978-79

Along with three other poets (Martin Figura, Helen Ivory and Andrea Holland) I was commissioned to write a poem / poems for the exhibition Family Matters: The Family in British Art, currently at the Castle Museum, Norwich, The reading and discussion took place yesterday afternoon, after which I wasn't home till gone midnight so no blog yesterday.

The Great British Art Debate may not amount to much more than what the curators already know and may be keen to tell us in their missionary endeavour, but then again it might. This show was particularly well curated with paintings, prints, photographs, videos and sculpture arranged in broad themes rather than chronologically, so the catalogue itself comprises five booklets headed Childhood, Inheritance, Parenting, Couples & Kinship and Home. The well known was balanced against the hardly known and the British aspect included immigration from the Commonwealth rather than from many other possible places, but that was a reasonable and perfectly justifiable decision since the British connection is bound to be stronger from within the old empire. The fact is, it is a moving and exciting show well worth going to see.

How do we go about writing? In my case I went in with a notebook and more or less wrote out two out of three poems, finished the third at home, then drafted all three into shape. I didn't get the catalogue for some reason so it had to be more or less then and there. But that is often how it works for me anyway: start writing, follow some distant glimpsed light and gallop there without breaking pace. It's an act of almost absolute trust in the improvisatory moment-by-moment process. It is how it has always happened before, even with the long poems. Go hell for leather while the light is visible or just round the corner and stop once it is no longer there. Complete a section. Then return, because you know, or have a very strong hunch, that there is more light.

The three works that offered the prospect of light were, paradoxically, all rather dark in tone and mood were Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787) The Hon. Thomas and Mrs Barrett-Lennard with their daughter Barbra Anne, 1750, Michael Andrews (1928-1995) Melanie and Me Swimming, 1978-9 and the photographer Thomas Struth's The Smith Family, Fife, Scotland, 1989.

Why is that? A separate post for it.

Sepptic Tank

2011-11-18T09:27:00.000Z

Photograph from FIFA's own website.

I know it's 'only football' and I am sure the pun has been made before, but why not make it again? It has been clear for a good while now that Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA, has been running a corrupt organisation prone to duplicity, bribery, secrecy, high-handedness, smugness and, now it turns out, an indifference to racism. It is hard to think of an organisation as blatant in its corruption as FIFA has been since Blatter took over. Good to hear that he has been telling the IFA conference in Zurich: We have to be transparent. The corruption has been the only transparent thing so far. And then there are the damage-limitation photos.

According to Forbes magazine Blatter is the 63rd most powerful person in the world. Having suggested that women footballers should wear something more tight-fitting, he has boldly declared that the future of football is feminine. More teams in pink then.

Forbes under its Profile heading says:

FIFA recently announced a raft of reforms to restore credibility to the corruption-ridden organization. "In a nation of 300 million [soccer players], there will be some violence, doping, racism and corruption. But the institution is not corrupt."

2011 Highlight: In June Blatter won a fourth term as FIFA's president after a scandal involving cash for votes sidelined his only viable opponent.

It is perhaps no surprise that David Beckham and Gordon Taylor, or any English football figure should call for Blatter's resignation in light of the fiasco concerning the awarding of the World Cup to Dubai when the England party were promised votes they did not get, a decision that was followed by a certain sniggering by the FIFA board. Surely there could have been no question of money changing hands? Surely not with Dubai? It was a fiasco that continued to delight and amuse when everyone was astonished to discover that Dubai is too hot for football in the summer and that, in consequence, every country's winter season would probably have to be abandoned. Even greater hilarity ensued when both the FIFA Vice-President and Blatter's 'only viable opponent' in the election for the presidency were forced to resign.

It may be that Blatter is just a very old fool who feels so secure in his position that he can make 'good sportsmanship' and 'simply shake hands' noises when faced with a scandal he doesn't recognise or understand. It may be that he's just an old-fashioned charmer who has always enjoyed a nod and wink.

So all continues charming in the pile of dung.

An Old Review of Bill Brandt (2)

2011-11-17T21:17:00.000Z

Continued from yesterday. Strange to think this was written eighteen years ago. It seems no time at all, and Brandt still seems like that to me.

2.
Knowing what we now know of Brandt’s development, it is amusing to consider that his first book of photographs, The English at Home, had been turned down by one publisher in 1936 for not being ‘erotic’ enough. Eros and Thanatos are patently his tutelary gods, or so they appear to us looking back at his work from this, the wrong end of the lens. Things loom and stretch or lurk in shadows, form dark masses against light, part reveal and part hide secrets. There are many pictures of people looking, fewer of what they see. The English at Home shows social masses: the upper classes as a block of hard hats and frock coats, the lower as softer, more battered shapes. Often their backs are to us: we are creeping up on them. We creep up on the lovers in ‘Top Floor’ in 1938, or appear to. We know it is stagy, that it has been set up as a version of film noir, that Brandt often did set his subjects up, nevertheless there is discovery or at least a process of exploration. We forgive Brandt his contrivances because we know that we are being enticed into a world of fiction rather than of hard facts and that the first question we instinctively ask before his pictures is not What Really Happened but What Is Really Happening, meaning by that, what is really happening to us.

Brandt is unapologetically stagy and inward. From the empty Bermondsey street of 1938, through portraits and fashion photos, through all the lives of barmaids, miners, nippies and parlourmaids it is obvious that the events they enact are scenes from the internal dramas of an isolated psyche. Eventually, the creatures that had been the animating force in his journalism, take over entirely and desire realises itself. It does so most dramatically in the nudes.

One might complain that these, indeed all his pictures, are intrusions into real lives. After all, aren’t even these distorted nudes in the haunted rooms of the forties people after all, with their own jealously guarded inwardness? Such complaints wouldn’t be fair or even sensible. It is not as if Brandt were pretending to be objective. Think of the earlier work. A maid dips her hand into a bath; a wild couple devour each other in a shaggy bar; pretty girls lie around in a wartime holiday camp as if they were dead; naked soldiers enter ridiculous open-air contraptions for showering, boffins buzz away inside the illuminated hives of their offices, children strut on the verge of adulthood or lean like elementals out between lace curtains. Families play at death in bomb shelters, bend themselves into extraordinary shapes ; hills turn to bodies, bodies into rock; paths and hedges wind like luminous vertebrae into the dark soft sky. Images are constantly juxtaposed: like the girl carding wool in Giotto’s ‘Annunciation to Anna’, a woman weaving in one picture seems to drag closer the dark storm clouds of the neighbouring photograph with every turn of the wheel. The soldier hitching in the car’s headlight turns into a terrified rabbit in the next. Everything is electric and intangible. Naked objects of desire stretch out enormous demanding palms towards us, as commanding as Pratt the parlourmaid in her own element. Women are dominant figures; in one aspect delicate and hungry, in another vast as primal landscapes. They are secret principles more than individuals and it is useless to ask about the inwardness of principles, especially when everything else is principle.

Towards the end of his life Brandt turned his attention to assemblages. His friends were rather puzzled by these. He employed feathers, skeletons, shells, string, fragments of wings and arranged them into ambiguous patterns whose compositions remind us of Miro and Ernst. Some of these are on show at the Barbican, but most of the collection, purchased from Noya Brandt, the artist’s widow, can be seen at the Reed’s Wharf Gallery near Tower Bridge. The resultant objects are joky, threatening, fetishistic, obviously pregnant with meaning. Coming at the end of Brandt’s career they can only serve as a coda, but it would be a great mistake to imagine them as mere dabbling. To Brandt they were numinous, unknown, unknowable magical objects exciting memories and desires. Compositionally they are not unrelated to either the Hampstead nudes of the forties or the body-as-landscape nudes of the fifties. They stand a little melancholy in the cold Thames light, as I suspect Brandt might have done. Brandt’s attitude to the Other is tender, tangential and passionately evanescent. The impression of an angel is not absolutely misleading. He is certainly one of the great photographers, perhaps the most poetic and subjective of the lot. Both exhibitions should be seen. The world is richer, more melancholy and magical for them.

An old review of Bill Brandt (1)

2011-11-16T22:41:00.000Z

from The Perfect Parlourmaid

It being late and the evening filled with marking I am ransacking old articles and have found this one from 1993. It appeared originally in Modern Painters, reviewing Bill Brandt: Photographs 1928-1983 at The Barbican and Bill Brandt: The Assemblages and Associated Vintage Prints at Reeds Wharf Gallery.

There was something angelic about the elderly Bill Brandt. I only remember him from a television programme many years ago, before he died. He looked thin, white and insubstantial, spoke gently and seemed both bewildered and wise. From his photographs of nudes, which were the only works of his I knew at the time, I had imagined someone darker and racier, a David Bailey or Helmut Newton type. It was one of his pictures of The Perfect Parlourmaid he was talking about, images of children, landscapes, air-raid shelters and pubs already having passed before us on the screen. Pratt was the Brandt’s own parlourmaid, a stern, slightly sinister Mrs Danvers sort of figure. But she was not a frightener primarily. The picture had pinned her precisely behind the set table beside her assistant, She was under control, not just as a menial who ruled over little but maintained her self-respect in the ways available to her, but as a psychic force, I thought the picture understood that instinctively. Brandt looking at it, blinked, and said: Anyone could have taken that picture. Anyone. Meaning: You too would have seen what I saw. But to see thus; to remember the precise awe of the awed child and at the same time imagine being the object of that awe is not so easy. Artists do these things for us. They find and redefine the language that makes it possible. If one pays any heed to the proposition that life passes like a dream, or that history is a nightmare from which one is trying to awake (Stephen Dedalus’s words) then such photographs, which arrive like frozen moments out of a pageant of suggestions, may serve to intensify, thicken and clarify that dream.

Brandt does in fact have a photographic essay on dream which is included in his major Barbican retrospective. In a series of pictures a woman rises from her bed, meets a bearded figure on the landing, passes him, or another, on the stairs, She floats out summoned by a dreamers’ moon. It is a poor piece of work. The ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ dream sequence from Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935 has far more power and punch and makes Brandt’s look rather pallid. Perhaps he is too close to home: talking about dream rather than experiencing it. What he did experience was far closer to reportage, and therefore, paradoxically, for him, more genuinely dreamlike: its complexities reflecting the complex and marginal career of an outsider.

Brandt was that poetic archetype, a sickly and, in some ways, protected child. He was born in Germany to a father who was a British subject and a German mother with interests in the arts. His travels began following his treatment for tuberculosis in 1920, contracted when he was sixteen From Hamburg, his birthplace, he moved to Switzerland and thence to Vienna in 1927 where he was psychoanalysed by. While in Vienna he met Loos, was encouraged into photography by friends and met Ezra Pound who arranged for him to spend some time with Man Ray in Paris. Three months of Parisian Surrealism in Ray’s studio combined with journeys to England, Spain and Hungary provided him with a body of work we know little about and is sparsely represented in the exhibition, though what there is demonstrates a blend of dreamlike humour and theatrical insecurity: a pair of headless mannequins of 1929 in Paris for which Crevel wrote a text, wax figures in a museum, funerary sculpture and gestures of gypsies, beggars in Spain. In Hungary a drunken postman balances himself against the immensity of the plain and a hog rolls in mud.

In 1931 the newly married Brandt and his Hungarian wife, Eva Rakos, settled in England, opting for obscurity in a country where he had no reputation and therefore little work. His career as a photo journalist - albeit never quite a conventional one - was to develop here. Slowly, the commissions arrived and he joined that mass of talented men sent out on assignments to photograph days in various lives, or places and events of interest to the general public. The magazines for which Brandt worked had their own agenda of course. They ranged from the populist Weekly Illustrated, through the documentary Picture Post and the respectably but slyly erotic Lilliput . The caption is always an important element in the reading of pictures and these inevitably tended to simplification: they set out to domesticate and familiarise whereas Brandt’s instinct was to alienate. This should be qualified. At this time Brandt alienates within a secondary context. One finds references to the films of Hitchcock and Cocteau, to other photographers such as Kertész and Brassai, to certain graphic artists and to visual stereotypes derived from childhood. Brandt’s language took time to evolve: it had to work through whatever imagery lay to hand. Ian Jeffrey, in his informed and imaginative catalogue essay, suggests that Stekel’s psychoanalytical method made a lasting impression on Brandt, in that it provided him with an “iconographic depository” that he could ransack. It is a moot question how far a sophisticated man who has spent some time under such analysis can avoid self-consciousness or a programmatic approach to imagery. Perhaps that is precisely why his documentary work was so valuable to him. If, as Jeffrey says, the “whole of Brandt’s career amounted to one long submission of dreams to an imaginary analyst”, and he was “a paraphiliac, in love with the symptoms of his own condition” (which is perfectly possible since his or her own condition is one of the few fixed points in any artist’s mind), it will have come as welcome relief to have been set a given task. It will also explain his progress across genres, and the rather lurching quality of his career.

(to be concluded)

Goodbye to classes

2011-11-15T23:56:00.000Z

Richard Strauss : Metamorphosen, Studie für 23 Solostreicher. Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan, direction.

Next week we are going to China. I don't know whether I will be able to blog from there. We shall see. But in the last two days I have finished two classes at university before passing them on to colleagues who will complete the term with them.

I feel quite sad at leaving them. In general I enjoy teaching very much - it's a way of talking about what I love anyway and spending time with people who are learning to love it in their own ways.

Can people be taught to write poetry? Not without hearing and reading it first, or at least being aware of it as a quality in perception, so that is where I usually start. And I don't even think of teaching it, not as the passing down of certain precepts. I think good teaching is intelligent conversation with a growing understanding of what might be said and how.

And of course there is the relationship with the people that constitute a class. You cannot get to know them thoroughly. Class isn't that kind of place. But you can like seeing them, talking to them and grow to miss them if they are not there.

People can sense if you like what you are talking about and thinking about. They can sense that the subject matters, that it is about something important, that something gets sorted through in this way of writing, saying or singing, and in talking about it. That in itself it isn't something anyone has to be taught: people know it, but they rarely speak about it. Talking about it can be taught. In poetry, the importance arises out of the speaking. It is like speaking a whale into being. Poetry is the act of speaking things into being, even, at times, becoming the thing that is coming into being.

Poetry is not like political rhetoric or advertising: it isn't there to get you to do things. It isn't even there to get you to be things. It is about how being is possible, in language if nothing else: it is about the kind of being that language can give life to.

So you toss this around the class, with this or that example, often - with luck - with some laughter. Laughter at the sheer ingenuity and cheek of the thing. I don't think poetry is a product of solemnity, but it is serious, deadly serious if you like. It is a properly serious form of laughter. Even the saddest and most tragic of songs is better for that unheard laughter.

Shall we be incongruous with the music. Why not?

After Durham

2011-11-13T17:17:00.000Z

First home for lunch and packing and then to London by car to take part in Passing Bells at Jerwood Hall, LSO St Luke's, which is quite a place, and supposedly the best acoustics in London.

The occasion was put together by Judith Chernaik of Poems on the Underground. The programme: the Apollo Chamber Orchestra, conducted by David Chernaik playing Barber's Adagio, then Cicely Herbert, Carole Satyamurti and myself reading poems, followed by Bartók's Divertimento for String Orchestra before the interval, and after. Gerard Benson, Tony Harrison reading poems, ending with Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen. It's quite a mix. The Barber is well known, the Bartók is spiky and capering and thundery and lyrical and joky, and the Strauss is labyrinthine, ever more labyrinthine, lyrical and heartbreaking.

The poetry is generally pitched towards suffering and loss but in a lively fashion. Tony Harrison in the second half is making a rare appearance, granite-like, monumental.

This note is briefly composed as we are still in London, back later tonight after dinner with friends. I'll add some music or visual later.

Peterborough, the other way - not cool, and yet...

2011-11-12T10:34:00.002Z

Not the 'third way', just the way back. Brilliant sunshine much of the way, the kind of light that transforms everything it touches, serving up a world that is practically Samuel Palmer-Edenic.

I read a while, then do some codewords, sudoku and crossword for half an hour. There are six ways of travelling: social, working, playing, daydreaming, reading and looking. One moves between these depending on circustances. I do five out of the six.

Having picked up an Indy & a Times I scan the glossy mag. Aaronovitch in hospital etc and get to Hannah Betts. She writes a small envelope sized column in which she declares that couples who think they are cool are not cool. Being single is cool.

My general view on cool is that anything referred to as cool cannot be cool. In short cool is not cool. Not-cool can be cool but as soon as it becomes cool it is not cool. Cool is possibly the least cool thing on earth.

As for Peterborough it is cool in a simple temperature sense. Sunshine gone. No Palmer. Just Peterborough. Cool.

But then at Darlington before, the man in front of me in the shop queue was Steve McClaren. Who is that? asked the girl at the till after he had gone. Steve McClaren, I answered. Her eyes widened just a little. Does it ever get cooler than that?

From Peterborough station

2011-11-11T16:10:00.001Z

Trying out iPhone Blogger. Grey, misty and cold. No- No-November, the proper service. On way to read at Colpitts in Durham. More later.

*

Reading very well attended and Many books sold which lightens my load on the way home. Gillian Allnutt there too. 20 min - break - 20 min. Afterwards an Italian meal.

Streets full of the young, the girls in tiny dresses out on the pull or just rehearsing. Boys dressed as for day, haughty or hapless. They run, they loiter, they laugh or frown.

Then it pours down.

From a forthcoming broadcast on W G Sebald

2011-11-10T21:09:00.000Z

Three hours in studios today recording a fifteen minute essay on the poetry of W G Sebald, known informally as Max. Three hours because we recorded it three times and because we - meaning Martin, the producer, and I - had to change studios because the first studio at the BBC's Norwich HQ was not only very like a cupboard, about the width of an old fashioned telephone box and full of packing cases, but was noisy with people outside and feet on the floor above. So we gathered up the recording equipment Martin had brought with him and someone kindly showed us to another studio, where we unpacked, Martin set up, and we began again. In the meantime some conversation, some corrections and an initial delay. But I enjoy recordings. I enjoy reading and catch my left hand conducting the script as though it were a lecture or a concert.

The essay is one of a series to mark the tenth anniversary of Max's death. I know Chris Bigsby and Amanda Hopkinson are two of the other essayists. The broadcasts will go out in early December when I will be away in China so I won't hear them but I hope Martin makes a disc of them for me. What I hadn't had a chance to read was what Jo at university showed me yesterday, Iain Galbraith's new translations of Max's selected poems under the title Across the Land and the Water, which comes out this month. The title rather reminds me of Patrick Leigh Fermor's marvellous Between the Woods and the Water, but that's just by the way.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the talk I recorded today:

...This double nature - the poetic shifting between fact and fiction - seemed to hang about him and about everything he wrote. He was a scholar of German literature, but he was also an author of essayistic fictions based on history and coincidence. In what I had read of him there was always a sense that the floor would fall away and that his complicated, old fashioned, melancholy yet droll voice would fall through with it and we would find ourselves altogether elsewhere in history and geography. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, said Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses. The dreams and nightmares Max was conducting us through were historical, but the history was perceived in terms of accident, coincidence, anecdote and ghosts. History was a way of feeling the world as much as knowing about it.

I sometimes think of Max’s books as haunted magical encyclopedias. It isn’t the story that holds them together, the books are not exactly working towards a climax: it is more that they present us, particularly in his last work, Austerlitz, with intensely seen and felt phenomena that come upon us without warning. Nothing is stable, not even the narrative voice, which is likely to melt into other voices in the course of a sentence. One first becomes conscious of this in The Rings of Saturn where the voices of Michael Hamburger and Sebald wind in and out of each other, with a simple, ‘he said’. Even as I write the words ‘he said’ I note how I have placed the inverted commas around them, rather than, as in normal speech, before or after, around what is actually being said. I think that is appropriate for a voice so insistent yet so evanescent, and one so likely to return to the reader as the reported speech of an encounter behind glass, that intervening glass becoming the very nature of perception...

...Max’s history, the history of the world as he presents it, is the history of suffering. The suffering happens in the real world but is immediately mediated through memory, historical record, art and narrative drift. The suffering is often at second hand but is everywhere, the very air through which we move. Remorseless power and cruelty are the animating factors in his history, leaving behind a trail of vanishings and cries.

The ghost world is, however, lodged in a material one whose physical substance is an object of wonder. The sheer welter of phenomena, the orderings of the natural system as well as the orderings of the museums and palaces of art, are constantly brought before us. The whole place shimmers with it. Reading him made it shimmer.

All summings-up are unsatisfactory. The best you can do is hit a phrase or two that seems to be right and try to knit them together as best you can. Having said that, I do like the radio essay as a voice turning things over. I hope this series goes well.

The music vanishes

2011-11-09T21:21:00.001Z

Constantin Cavafy

The god forsakes Antony

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

- Constantine P. Cavafy (1911) tr Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

The university is to close down its music department. The students staged a touching demonstration today in front of the council chamber. They had three brass, a violin and a lot of drums. At one point they broke into Miles Davis. I was watching them from my window, as it isn't my normal day in, and was about to attend the meeting which was the reason for my presence. Even from the window it was loud and poignant and sweet.

The ant said to the grasshopper: now dance! But there was no music, so the ant turned over into a dreamless sleep from which there was no waking.

Mouse Dreaming

2011-11-08T22:18:00.000Z

I will be doing a collection for children next year. In gathering together poems I came across some oddities that are not necessarily children's poems but are not quite something else either. This is one such:

Mouse Dreaming

Small as I am
I have such dreams
under the stairs,
the grey mouse screams.

In the dark hall
coats wave
empty sleeves,
enormous and grave.

But mouse just twitches
the end of his nose.
Well, dreams are for fulfilment,
I suppose.

There is a memory there of Edith Sitwell's piece from Facade:

Madam Mouse trots,
Gray in the black night!
Madam Mouse trots:
Furred is the light.
The elephant-trunks
Trumpet from the sea....
Gray in the black night
The mouse trots free.
Hoarse as a dog's bark
The heavy leaves are furled....
The cat's in his cradle,
All's well with the World!

And a very early poem of my own about silver fruit falling from branches with a soft sound

that stifles the screaming of mice

That comes from 'News for Signor Mouse', my first ever poem to appear in The Times Literary Supplement, in 1973.

But then sometimes it is people (Ladeees!!!) who scream at mice, certainly in cartoons, so screaming and mice may go together like sugar and spice.

For children? What are children? Are they those small things that run around in playground? Ah, those! There's one running around in the playground inside me. He must have written the poem. Perhaps it will please him.

*

A lot of radio work at the moment. Yesterday recorded an interview for Radio 4, a programme about poetry at time of war and other stress. Very nice producer came from Brighton. We recorded in my university office. On Thursday I record a Radio 3 essay about the poetry of W G Sebald.

One is... a flirtation

2011-11-07T23:10:00.001Z

One is, as one knows, a phenomenon among other phenomena in the world. In that respect one is strange and surprising. It is odd to find oneself here, or anywhere that constitutes a 'here'. It is odd to find oneself popping up in mirrors, in reflections in train or shop windows, in other people's photographs of one. One might be accused of a certain solipsism but one may be be both subject and object at once, the object observed by the subject, and that is peculiar, isnt it?

I write this - or one writes it - because I have got into the habit of taking an iPhone photo of myself when I am away somewhere, passing through hotels, in the mirror over the bathroom basin say, as a kind of evidence that I have, after all, been somewhere, passed through a space.

Is there vanity in this? There is always a little vanity, not in imagining any specific thing to be vain about - there isn't much after all - but in the very fact of noticing oneself / myself / yourself-as-self at all.

The world, after all, is endlessly fascinating, and now that I am at least two-thirds through my life, it seems more brilliant, more extraordinary, more temporary than ever. I look at the grass and note its greenness, and of course it is green since that is what grass is, and yet it is odd to be in a world that has green grass, and earth, and houses made of brick, and, above all, the light in which these objects sit, as though it were light that had made them. Light is strange and shapes are strange - strange that one discerns them, strange that one is oneself a shape.

I think I have felt both more loving and more detached recently. I love what I love, love the flesh of those I love, the thought of them, with a kind of lost delight, a delight that is also a losing. I also feel more detached, even from myself, from the consciousness that registers me.

It has never been different in some ways. I have been carrying around this coin with love on one side and detach on the other for as long as I can remember. Maybe it is simply getting heavier. And brighter. Like language - the language I am writing at this very moment - in which something comes into being, something perfectly transient yet always in the process of becoming.

I have seen a number of friends die. Both my parents die. And something goes with them yet the love and detachment remain. I dare call it love because I don't know what else to call it, this pain that is directed and radiant, that knows it is what we have in common. And feeling that, seeing oneself feel it, is a form of detachment.

Horseman, pass by, said Yeats. Ok then, horse. Go, horse!

Munich and forgetting: Phlebas

2011-11-06T22:10:00.001Z

Let's get this out of the way. The associations are hardly good. There are the beer halls and Hitler with his long murderous marches down Ludwigstrasse, the Manchester United Munich air crash of 1958, and the Munich Olympics of 1972.

It is one thing to remember events in an official way, another to forget them in a private way. We are almost eighty years on from those marches. I am never sure of the value of forcing one generation to take on the guilt of another, nor of bathing old streets that now bear new names in the light that once damned them. I suspect it breeds a resentment that is, in the long run (say two or three generations on) likely to fester, until it results in new hatred. I am as deeply suspicious of statements such as The Germans are... as of The English are, or the Irish are... Not that there are no characteristics of any particular people but that they are never the sole ones, and are likely to be mixed up with characteristics that are entirely contrary. To limit a group to just one set of stereotypes, however fitting the stereotype in this or that case, is to be willfully stupid. It is, in effect, to continue the Nazi example, to damn all by caricature.

Munich suffered considerable destruction in the latter stages of the war (there is a set of postcards showing some it here). Little of that heavy grandeur remains now. There is the 1860's Rathaus in Neo-Gothic style, some restrained counter-reformation baroque churches, extremely rich in detail that is neatly contained in architectural panels, and some civic and commercial buildings, but the main impression is a kind of coolness, the colours generally varieties of silver and grey, the geometry quiet but firm, based almost entirely on the unadorned rectangle, everything planned, in proportion, and neatly fitting, almost sterile.

Sometimes I thought it was a civic disappearing act, the buildings so light, so unassertive, they were hardly there. Against a neutral sky they would vanish into neutrality. But then the firm geometries would slowly bring them back into reckoning. It is an architecture that consciously refuses to refer to the dangerous grandiosities of the early to mid-twentieth century.

Underneath them the shops in the shopping streets continue their elegant dialogue with sobriety. Black, white and grey with just a dash of sober green or dark vermilion. My bright green scarf was like a shrill whistle in the middle of a secular church service. People wait conscientiously at traffic lights even when nothing is coming. It is partly fear of the police but much more a kind of social understanding that life is better when rules are, to some extent at least, internalised. It is good manners.

The conformities are civil and decent. There remain the consciously Bavarian old in their hats and hunting jackets, and the waiters and waitresses in the big beer halls with their indulgence of folklor as a submerged, or at least contained, ardency. But these are exceptions. The young are relaxed and friendly. There is a great deal more smoking than in England now. There is a readiness to smile and engage in conversation where appropriate.

Do I forget and forgive Munich for my parents and all that lost family? There is nothing to forgive as far as my own generation and anyone younger goes. We are civilised people who can be intelligent and affectionate with each other. And we remember the heroic Scholls and those who, in Hans Fallada's book, Alone in Berlin, stood up and were counted at the cost of their lives when the monster arose.

Forgetting is a different matter, but I don't make any fuss of it, nor do I prepare myself for such visits by reminding myself of histories I know perfectly well at unconscious level. There is something horribly cheap about indulging history. History, after all, is much longer than our lives or our parents' lives and reaches beyond the personal. It runs in deep currents and counter-currents. It's salutary to know - in fact it is necessary - that it is cold down there where Phlebas the Phoenician rots and that currents undersea pick his bones in whispers.

Human kindness remains, and human good intentions. Consider Phlebas then, who was handsome and tall and not altogether unlike you, smiling over a table, brimming with warmth, offering to pay for the drinks.

Main sites back on

2011-11-06T10:41:00.000Z

That was a strange vanishing act but both my main website (www.georgeszirtes.co.uk) and Clarissa's (www.clarissaupchurch.co.uk) are back on. That may be due to Tom's prestidigitation or the return of a repentant host. My money is on the former.

A little more about Munich later today.

Main site missing

2011-11-05T17:53:00.000Z

The host of my main website has vanished up its own hosting device, but the site itself is in the safe keeping of son Tom, and will shortly be up and running again with a new host.

Fortunately the archive of the blog/news part that goes back to 2003 is also safe and we may be able to make those available too. The British Library has been keeping track of the site for some years now.

The same but different for C's website that will have a new host and a new look. The change will take a couple of days or so.

After Munich 1

2011-11-05T15:45:00.002Z

Café Puck, Türkenstrasse, Munich

I couldn't get Blogger to work from my iPhone in Munich so am catching up. I did make some notes though, which follow (inset passage), with some later additions before and after.

Munich

The journey is easy. We park the car at Stansted in mid afternoon, fly on time, get the S-bahn into Marienplatz, then the U-bahn to the university - The university itself is just round the corner so the whole area is full of students - and walk the ten minutes or so to the hotel. Wide streets, not too much traffic, easy ambience, but it being dark we don't see very much except lit shops and the sky above with its half-moon waxing.

Having checked in at Das Hotel in Türkenstrasse - a nicely old fashioned hotel in some respects, with dark folk-arty colours and post-Biedermeier furniture, while perfectly modern in other respects (wifi in rooms) - we drop in to the Cafe Puck next door (pictured above). It is essentially a student bar, with lovely friendly staff, that serves food till 11 pm. The café is a typical long deep space across a roofed courtyard, the feel bohemian, the menu quite cheap. I immediately fall in love with it. We have a Spanish omelette, Bavarian style, because we are not particularly hungry. The food is good, but it was good everywhere in Munich and certainly a great deal better than the sandwich easyJet had offered as tea.

The next day, after breakfast, we went for a walk around the block before being met by my host Helge N, now professor at the LMU, and he took us through various parts of the building including the great classical atrium where Sophie and Hans Scholl of the White Rose movement publicly distributed leaflets against the Nazis for which they were beheaded.

Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst of The White Rose group.

(Munich was Bolshevik before it was Nazi, but more of that later.)

This is what I wrote but couldn't post:

Hotel room. Night after a very long day. Talk at noon was a quarter of an hour short of two hours to a packed lecture hall of well over a hundred students plus some staff with the Romanian translator and psycho-linguistics scholar Aprilia Zank in the audience, I read some poems and talked without notes about the idea of truth as we might meet it in poems, about the strangeness, provisionality and compulsiveness of language, about translation and recognition of form, and a little about form itself. I know the territory: it is mostly a matter of clarity and pitch. I think it went very well.

I had first met Helge at the Walberberg Conference that I attended in 2004 and which opened the way to Germany. I think I was invited to Berlin first but it was Helge who arranged my first German tour, starting in Dusseldorf and Munster, moving on to Regensburg. (I lose track now - a few readings in Berlin over the years, but then also Freiburg and Bonn and Cologne and Bremen and Frankfurt, all in four or five visits.) It is very good to see Helge again. He has published a history of English literature since then that is now used in universities, what is more he wrote it in English.

He had to teach after 2pm so his colleague Daniela J takes C and I, and Aprilia to the poetry library, the wonderful Lyrik Kabinett, which has not only a marvellous collection of poetry but of photographs and art works too. Here we are shown gems of the artists' books collection and sit and talk for an hour.

Afterwards we meet Helge at a nearby pastry shop and he walks us into the city centre, visiting two churches along the way. We go to Marienplatz and sit in the Glockenspiel Cafe, wait for the glockenspiel of the rathaus to work, but nothing moves. All the time we are talking - about poetry, about film, about children, about the universities, about history and politics - and end up in a very crowded, very Bavarian restaurant where our elderly waitress spills some food and brings enormous glasses of weissbier, which has all the lightness of champagne combined with all the menace of beer.

I am very tired now. More detail tomorrow.

I was indeed very tired and didn't sleep well. Nor the next night.

From Yang Lian to Munich

2011-11-02T10:58:00.001Z

Yang Lian at Pen USA

Yesterday's reading with Yang Lian was a splendid romp. We were both to read a couple of our own poems along with translations of them, plus our translations of others. It was a very hybrid, partly impromptu affair. Lian had tranaslated, and read, two of my poems, I hadn't translated any of his yet - that is to come in Shanghai, later in the month. He is, as many will know, a spirited and expressive reader, full of energy, riding the rhythms and melodic values of his poems in the Chinese. His several translators have done pretty good jobs and one of W N Herbert's translations of Lian's poem A Night in the Purple Tulip Palace (Adagio) struck me as a particularly fine, virtuosic work in itself (that sucked/duct rhyme for example is neatly piched), paralleling, through not sounding like, the original. Antoinette remarked afterwards how deep, sonorous and in fact adagio the original was. It's true that Bill's was set higher, sprightlier, being more tenor than baritone, but that gave no less pleasure.

That leaves a fascinating question hanging about voice, and demonstrates what a wide range of options there is for the translator. Options and responsibilities. At best, I suspect, translation is the meeting point of two auditory imaginations, the receiving imagination's pleasure being to release the appropriate genius of the receiving language in the act of understanding and writing. Because you can't take the writing - the process of writing the translation as a piece of writing - out of the equation. There may be a more adagio version of this poem poem that Lian desribed as 'decadent', to be discovered in translation. What we are reading in Bill's translation is the Yang Lian (W N Herbert) poem. But it's a very good poem. The poem of two very fine poets. There may be - and almost certainly are - more to be found. But I got on very well with this, and my own auditory imagination is better for it.

Off to Munich in a couple of hours.

How many legs has a centipede?

2011-10-31T22:33:00.000Z

Lithobius meccanus, the Terminator centipede

Well, if it is a hundred, (which it isn't, but could be over forty, depending) and I were a centipede I'd be down to my last three or four. Awake at 4 am, full day's work, then event, with the same to come tomorrow, then the flight to Munich. My intentionality involves sleep and cognizance of the fact that the word YES is not the only word in the dictionary.

Tomorrow I read with Yang Lian at UEA. The Munich reading is at the university on Thursday.

Tried Dylan Thomas's Fern Hill on second year undergraduates today. It doesn't cut it. It just doesn't cut it. It doesn't ring true. It feels like visionary Disneyland (nobody said that but deep down I suspect that's how they felt). I suppose it is understandable for much the same reasons as it was for Larkin, but I can't help thinking once the ecstatic disappears off the verbal radar the world of the imagination feels a little narrower. Maybe the poem seems like a supercharged advert for country life. Mr Larkin's I Remember, I remember is closer to the mark. Nothing, like something, happens anywhere, yes, but I sang in my chains like the sea. Well, occasionally.

Sunday night is...Baby, Please Don't Go

2011-10-30T22:07:00.000Z

Big Bill Broonzy, 1952

Them, with Van Morrison, 1964 (Keith Fordyce introducing)

If translation is the cover version, then Big Joe Williams, Lightnin' Hopkins, Mose Allison, Van Morrison and uncle Bob Dylan and all have translated to satisfaction. The bottom version? Oh Bottom, thou art translated, as Jan Kott joked.

*

Some discussion of today's session on the rebirth of the author in the comments column of yesterday's post. Nice contributions.

Reborn!

2011-10-29T22:12:00.000+01:00

The death of the author...?

Rebirth of the Author
Sunday 30 October, 12.30pm until 1.30pm, Henry Moore Gallery Lunchtime Debates, Royal College of Art

Tomorrow I am one of the panellists on this at the Battle of Ideas. There is the new idea of Intentism as expounded by artist Vittorio Pelosi among others, but there is also John Sutherland and Dolan Cummings, with Angus Kennedy in the chair. All this to be discussed at lightning speed.

I see I am leading off...

Gloat

2011-10-28T22:35:00.001+01:00

An exchange with a friend, X, a Manchester City supporter. The meat of it is here. It can serve as a kind of literary model:

X: can I mention the derby yet, George? I was very happy to be in Manchester that day.

me: I had already covered it in the blog, X. But congratulations.

X: Nice blog, George. though you clearly didn't watch the game. Second half, we destroyed you, and Dzeko also missed 3 sitters. It could easily have been double figures. Anyway, as you know, I'm not one to gloat. I'm just happy I was in Manchester for that.

me: And you had a man advantage, I believe. So that's two halves, one of which you dominated, the other that you didn't. And once you start counting missed chances you never stop. And three goals after the 90th minute when United were attacking with a man down... I'd never put you down for a gloater. But do send another email to tell me you're not and to regale me with a few more statistics, just to assure me. I am quite happy to be a gloatee.

X: well, i have to answer your points, George! So here are the points, stats in a none-gloaty way.

We had a man advantage, fairly, because of a woeful professional foul on Balotelli when he was clean through. You can't claim that as being hard done by!

Talking of goals after the 90th minute - I thought that's how champions assert their authority. You should know George that your team has scored more goals after the 90th minute than any other in the Premier league!

We destroyed you second half. And were already 1-0 up at half-time. when it was 11 v 11.

(Another short one about the Poznan from X just to keep up the pressure.)

me: Blimey, you wouldn't think you were a literary chap, X. I did not claim we were 'hard done by'. That is a classic straw man argument. Accuse a writer of saying something he did not say then tell him he was wrong to say it. Nor did I say a single word about 'fairness'. Try looking for the word in my email. 'And we were already 1-0 up at half time': I do not call that a very big deal, X. 1-0 down is not a big score. United have often been 1-0 down at half time. Soon after half-time we were a man down too. Perfectly fairly (as if I said anything to the contrary!), but it does make a difference.

As to scoring after 90 minutes, quite right. But I have never claimed that United scoring 2 or 3 goals after 90 minutes were up was a sign of anything. Another straw man. When United beat Bayern in that 1999 final with two goals in added time, I never claimed that made United the better team. I thought Bayern played better through most of the match and they did in fact hit the woodwork twice in the minutes preceding United's goals. I simply rejoiced, as you may rejoice, in winning.I didn't claim United 'destroyed' Arsenal in that 8-2 win earlier this season, nor when they beat Roma 7-0. I said it was remarkable. And so was this. This was a remarkable result. You go with your destruction metaphor, I'll stay with the ones I am comfortable with even when winning. I wish City good luck in winning. It may or may not make City champions. (I should add that I did not write to any Bayern Munich fans in either a gloaty or non-gloaty way. Mind you, that may be because I didn't know any.)

It strikes me you are making up possible objections to the win and attributing them to me, just in case I should dare even think it was unfair. It's a well worn strategy. Try quoting from what I said to see if that attribution - any attribution - stands up. Good luck with that as well.

City won fair and square. Will that do? Such things happen.

With comradely best wishes,

x: 'destroyed' was ferguson's word. nor have i ever heard him before saying they should have defended for damage limitation after 3-1! humiliated is another good word. record breaking on 11 counts.

me: X, my felicitations. You were talking about my email, not about Ferguson's words. Now I am working, and that is enough gloating for one day. There must be other straw men out there.

X: no, George, i was talking about what city did to united. despite your claims of mitigating circumstances: 11 men, ten men, kids.

balotelli has just turned 20.

At this point I turned off the tap. X is of course utterly non-gloaty. He just wants a little more blood through that tap. Comradely greetings every time. It's what friends are for, isn't it?

The Finkler Question

2011-10-27T23:50:00.000+01:00

I finished Howard Jacobson's book on the way to Nottingham and the impression of terror and foreboding as the main two driving forces of the book, allied to the themes of Jewish consciousness, exceptionalism and contemporary anti-Semitism has become ever clearer.

So there's this man who is fascinated by Jews and has two close Jewish friends from boyhood, one his teacher, the other his schoolmate. The schoolmate (Finkler) studied philosophy and has become a writer of a popular philosophical series in the Alain de Botton manner such as The Existentialist in the Kitchen, and The Little Book of Household Stoicism, which have got him on telly and made him a public man. The much older teacher (Libor) had been a Hollywood journalist photographed with all the great stars. Both men had wonderful wives but both wives have died. Treslove, the non-Jew, has never had a wife just a series of insecure relationship which have however resulted in two children neither of whom he loves. One day Treslove is mugged by an unseen assailant whom he firmly believes to be a woman who says something to him he cannot properly hear but which he becomes ever more certain was: 'You Jew'.

The story of the book is of Treslove wanting to become a Jew, learning how to be one and eventually forming the best relationship of his life with one, an ample woman called Hephziba, who is also known as Juno. Puns galore.

It turns out that the two most correct Jews in the book are neither of them Jews by birth but are so by conversion. One of the Jews (Finkler, which is Treslove's name for all Jews, hence the title of the book) is strongly against Israel which makes him ashamed to be Jewish so he joins an organisation very like Jews for Palestine and meets with people like Jacqueline Rose, and hears of people like Gilad Atzmon. Libor defends Israel but the three of them remain friends. In the course of the plot we are taken to see a play very like Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children, which is wildly cheered by its captive audience. Throughout the book there is the increasing threat of a new, liberal-left-approved anti-Semitism in a climate approaching the mood of the thirties both in intensity and ubiquity.

If we go on this way, Jacobson suggests, that is where we will end up, with only one villain in the world, Israel, and only one people guilty of the worst crimes against humanity, the Jews who are gathered in Israel. No need to list their various assumed crimes, they are in the public sphere: 9/11, organ stealing, financial corruption, transcendent powers of lobbying and opinion forming, apartheid, massacre, and, worst of all, their assumption of being 'the chosen people' and therefore superior to everyone else, as evidenced recently, according to Deborah Orr, by their willingness to swap a thousand Palestinian prisoners for one kidnapped soldier. In other words their assumption that one Jew must be worth a thousand of everyone else. Trumping everything is the Holocaust and the Jews' memorialisation of it, though there is no shortage of those who now suggest it never happened, or if it did happen it wasn't half as bad as claimed.

The underlying assumption in all this is that Jews are a duplicitious, arrogant cancer on society. In other words that maybe the Nazis got a few things right after all. That is Jacobson's terror and foreboding. The book is an engagement with that foreboding.

*

Running parallel to this is the question of Jewish consciousness and exceptionalism as experienced by Jews and as regarded by others. Treslove, the chief among those others, is much more a stereotypical Jew than the Jews are. He is Brad Pitt crossed with a non-Jewish Woody Allen who wants to become a properly Jewish Woody Allen because then, at least, he'd be among others like himself.

Jacobson here proposes the idea that some people admire Jews to the point of not only wanting to copy them, but actually to wanting to become them. This might be, he suggests, to do with Jewish success, but it is at least as much to do with death: those dead wives and the women Treslove loves to imagine dead just so he may love them more are figures of vulnerability. Non-Jewish vulnerability finds a more heroic context in Jewish vulnerability.

I find this puzzling because I don't see that people want to become Jews for any particular reason, or indeed that they want to become Jews at all. I can't follow Jacobson there. I myself have attributed the rise in anti-Semitism - and I am quite sure it is rising, since it seems everywhere round me, especially in the press, not as a matter of direct avowal, for no one admits being anti-Semitic, but as a series of corrosive stories and rumours taken as facts - partly to time.

So, as the first-hand witnesses of the Holocaust die off (I am second-hand in that it directly affected my parents not me), their stories become ever more rounded into a packaged form. This is what happens to all stories, of course, but this is a particularly horrific story. All packages breed suspicion, especially a horrific guilt package. As time passes, those with no direct stake in the contents of the package - non-Jews above all - begin to resent feeling guilty for something they themselves did not do. I've never said or done an anti-Semitic thing, they think, why do those bloody Jews hang around with their packaged suffering making me feel as though I were anti-Semitic. Bunch of liars, probably exaggerating any way, just look at that neat and handy package they keep pointing to. So they go on, then seeing Israel there, they project their hatred of the guilt package onto the one concentration of such people in the world, a concentration that is in itself a package. I hate Jews because they suggest I am an anti-Semite, is the short-hand version.

This is not Jacobson's diagnosis. But then his is an English Jew's diagnosis, not a Central European's. The Finklers' cultural and religious practices are no more peculiar than that of any other exceptions to any other norm. English Jews could be successes without being conspicuously Jewish. No Holocaust here.

For that reason maybe, brilliant a book, as in many ways this is, I simply don't believe in the central character, Julian Treslove. He seems an invented prat, his self-torture a form of hypothetical aesthetic indulgence.

I have no problem with Libor and not much with Finkler. Nor
with Jacobson. He is a keenly perceptive and elegant commentator on most contemporary matters.

And the social analysis is very good. Jacobson knows his milieu well and his recognizable anti-Semites are only a little larger than life. The foreboding and the terror are the real thing.

Newcastle journey

2011-10-26T23:04:00.000+01:00

There is a moment you have to remember to look up on the train ride to Newcastle: it is the sight of Durham Cathedral. Just passing it makes the whole journey worthwhile and if it is a sunny autumn day with the leaves in their full Andy Goldsworthy outfits it is pretty close to sublime.

The cathedral I am used to passing more regularly is Ely, which always takes my breath away. Ely is as delicate as a spider's web. It has something of the enchanted palace about it. In certain lights, when the sun is particularly dazzling, it hardly seems there at all. Durham is a kind of miraculous fortitude, a series of ascending statements that transcend reason.

All this talk of enchantment and miracle. What do we mean when we talk of these things? My journey was chiefly taken up reading through Howard Jacobson's Booker-winning, The Finkler Question, which looks and reads like a novel but is, in effect, an enquiry into Jewishness and what, if anything, constitutes the Jewish soul. I don't think he uses the word 'soul; but that is what it boils down to. In asking, as characters do throughout the book in one way or the other, what the peculiar condition of being Jewish is, they naturally consider the history of persecutions, the astonishing successes in material and spiritual terms, and the sheer tenuous survival that is never quite assuring enough. It is particularly concerned with Jewish anti-semitism, which begins as anti-Zionism, then passes into a form of self-purgation, the emptying out of an identity that can never quite be emptied out. All this is done with a very smart acerbic wit, but also a sense of melancholy and human understanding. Not to forget terror and foreboding.

On the way home, I put down the book, pick up my iPod and listen to Beethoven's String Quartet, op 132, which is one of the greatest pieces of music I know, a piece in which you can hear Beethoven ask the same question over and over again as motifs are repeated, turned upside down and inside out, that question being, or so it seemed to me on that part of the train ride: Is there a soul? Is this it? Is that it? And if I move it up an octave or run it through in minor, or shift the harmonies around a little so nothing looks as though it's quite decided, will that be it? And some of the notes rise from a great profound depth that shakes through your lower body, and some race up in agitated cries up in the endless blind allies of the ears and nerves before returning and transforming into something else. That tentative quiet beginning grows a little more certain, then rushes into action before reconsidering and setting out again and again. Am I putting this right? Have I really phrased the question properly? And is this an answer?

I suspect it may be a hoary old cliché but the artist Beethoven puts me in mind of is Rembrandt. The same introspection, the same endless self-questioning. Is this the soul then? Is it instead that other thing? And does it exist at all? Does it, like, make sense, dude?

Yes, dude, it does at certain times. At certain times it is as if nothing else existed, just the soul with its undefined limits, and whether it is your individual soul or some altogether more complex thing in which that which is you is not divided from the world but is somehow the world looking at itself, well you're not going to know.

But Ely and Durham and Beethoven and even all that neurotic anxious scrabbling away at the bare foundations of being just to check they exist at all in Jacobson and all those Finklers, are evidences that will not be easily dismissed.

Newcastle Brown and Nottingham Lace

2011-10-25T22:46:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow I shall take my honest cart and trundle up to Newcastle to deliver myself of certain relatively judicious opinions upon the works of postgraduates in that city which has at times been taken to be Peru. I look forward to a change of horse at Ely, at Peterborough, and possibly at Grantham, the city of Our Blessed Lady Margaret of the Greengrocers, proceeding northwards from thence via the Roman encampment of Doncaster and the resolute towers of Durham before plunging into the Tyne, or rather across it. It will be like bringing the good news from Ghent to Aix.

The following day I shall ride equally hard to Nottingham for to purchase some lace and while there to converse amiably with a student thereof who will delight me with his notions of Queer literature with many a verse accompanying, for I am a man of parts; and did I not spend an hour and above this morning with a maid of Romanie talking of Tristan Tzara and Eugene Ionesco and all things Absurd of whom and which my knowledge is as that of a flea, which never did prevent me building my small flea-palaces of thought and conjecture (more conjecture than thought some of the wiser sort may remark) which, looked at in a certain light, are sometimes supposed to be of greater dimensions than they are.

And next Wednesday I shall mount my wife's good broom and fly me (and us both) to Munich to deliver myself of yet more palaces of verse, in the quiet hours composing as subtil and learned article upon the works of a foreign bard as this flea-palace will allow.

But that is not before organising and presenting one reading featuring, among other luminaries, Count Thwaite of Ashwellthorpe, at the university of the Northfolk on Monday, and being part of another with the Grand Prince of China, Professor Yang Lian, at same on Tuesday, thus completing my stint as Solomon Grundy.

Is October the cruellest month, or November? Discuss.

Exercises en style no 738

On getting smashed 6-1

2011-10-24T22:31:00.000+01:00

Well, no, I didn't watch it. Too painful. (Though I certainly wouldn't have left if I had been there.) And for all I know it may be a turning of the tide, but one match has never meant that, so we shall see.

It is occasionally salutary to be smashed like this especially after the way the season began when United were smashing everyone else, including Arsenal 8-2, which was a flattering score-line, though extraordinary at the time, and the 3-1 win over Chelsea which was also flattering. In the same way this 6-1 was flattering to City with its three late goals after 90 minutes when, by all accounts United were attacking, and after most of the second half where United had just ten men following a first half when United had most of the play. Nevertheless this too was extraordinary and shows what a strong team City have become.

The medium-term effect will depend on character and discipline. If that begins to go it might be that the title will slip away but we are not even at Christmas yet. In any case I have loved this team so long and have seen them relegated and spend decades as a minor act to Liverpool or Everton, so the last twenty years have been beyond my wildest dreams. Nothing will take that away, and a little humility is a good thing.

I suspect United will be pretty close at the end and that City will have their turn to fade. It's a good open season so far, and nice to see Stoke do so well, chiefly in memory of Steve, but generally because it is good that the unfashionable should prosper. That Mr Pulisball must be a decent manager after all, as is our Norwich man, Mr Lambert.

It has not been a football day otherwise but a stream of poems, like hailstones, coming at me at university.

My next radio jaunt is an essay on W G Sebald, to be recorded some time in the next two weeks.

Sunday night is...Liszt, 'gypsy music' and GS

2011-10-23T10:30:00.000+01:00

Parno Graszt outside the family house where we recorded the music.

So finally it is on, the Sunday feature tonight is Hungary's Soul: Liszt and Gypsy Music.

Hungary has become synonymous with gypsy music. In the 200th Anniversary year of Liszt's birth, the Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes sets off to Budapest to follow Liszt's book on gypsy music, to discover what might be meant by gypsy music by other people and what it is about this music that is or is not Hungarian.

Liszt's book (1859) is the starting point of George Szirtes' search that takes in Hungary's turbulent history, through 2 world wars and communism to now. George Szirtes speaks to prominent gypsy musicians like violinist Roby Lakatos and cimbalon player Kalman Balogh, and also the internationally-renowned folk singer Marta Sebesteyen.

He also travels to the North-East region of the Great Hungarian Plain, where...

On the principle of always leaving people wanting to know something I leave you to follow the link, or better still, listen to the programme and see what you make of it. It is something like eleven hours miraculously condensed to about forty minutes by brilliant producer, Elizabeth Arno. A new poem by self at the end.

Józsi bácsi (Uncle Joe) the family patriarch and, very occasional but very touching singer.

Interesting times for Great Leaders

2011-10-22T22:26:00.000+01:00

...a nice piece by Juan Cole here, where he compares Gaddafi's end to the last days of Jim Jones and the People's Temple Cult. As he says:

Qaddafi [OK, have it your way, JC] had on more than one occasion been offered exile abroad, but sneaked off to his home town of Sirte to make a suicidal last stand. His glassy-eyed minions determinedly fired every last tank and artillery shell they had stockpiled right into the city that sheltered them in order to stall the advancing government troops. This monumentally stupid last stand turned Sirte into Beirut circa the 1980s, as gleaming edifices deteriorated into Swiss cheese and then ultimately blackened rubble. Qaddafi had favored Sirte with magnificent conference centers and wood-paneled conference rooms even as he starved some Eastern cities of funds, and in his death throes he took all his gifts back away from the city of his birth, making it drink the tainted Kool-Aid of his maniacal defiance of reality.

He adds:

Among the attackers were citizen militias from Misrata, the city of 600,000 that Qaddafi had determinedly besieged, subjecting its civilian population to cluster bombs and tank and artillery shells, even bombing it from the air before the UNSC intervened.

He further argues:

It is hard to see how the UNSC desire that the civilian population be protected from him could have been implemented solely on a defensive basis. As long as he had an offensive capability he would clearly deploy it, piling up towers of innocent’s skulls. Once he besieged and murdered the non-combatants of Misrata and Zawiya so mercilessly, all bets were off. He began with 2,000 tanks, which he sent against the demonstrators. When he had almost no tanks left, he was done, reduced to secreting himself in a sewage drain.

In contrast to Qaddafi’s encirclement of Misrata for months and use of cluster bombs in areas where children lived, the Transitional National Council troops advancing in Sirte regularly pulled back to allow local residents to evacuate, attempting to convince them to join the new Libya. Qaddafi never did a similar favor to civilians in Misrata or Zawiya.

Cole ends optimistically:

It would have been better had Qaddafi been left alive to stand trial. The exact circumstances of his death are murky, but it appears that some of his loyalists may have attempted to rescue him from government troops and he died in the firefight or was dispatched lest he be sprung from captivity and serve as a rallying point for the remaining handful of cultists.

Those who expect Libya now to fragment, or to turn into a North African Baghdad, are likely to be disappointed. It is improbable that Qaddafi’s cult will long survive him, at least on any significant scale. Libya has no sectarian divides of the Sunni-Shiite sort. Almost everyone is a Sunni Muslim. It does have an ethnic divide, as between Arabs and Berbers. But the Berbers are bilingual in Arabic, and are in no doubt as to their Libyan identity. The Berbers vigorously joined in the revolution and more or less saved it, and are very likely to be richly rewarded by the new state.

And he expands his argument to the new wave of popular politics in the Arab world.

I think we have lived in interesting times that continue interesting. The present state of affairs probably goes back to the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran in 1979, runs through the presidency of Gorbachev, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the great shifts in the Middle East, the rise of China and India and the current crisis of capital in the West. To link all this together into a seamless narrative would be wrong. Some elements are related, some not, except only in the faintest way, but we might at least, as Cole suggests, be coming to the end of the era of the autocratic Great Leader and the personality cult. I started under Stalin and Mao and now have to peer into the telescope to see the tiny mannekin figure of Kim Jong-il, with Kim Jong-un, even smaller, behind him.

But then there is Putin and Bashar al-Assad, and Ahmadinejad, plus one or two others, and as the old joke has it, Don't hatchet your counts till they've chickened. There are so many other mini-cults of personality out there. Perhaps Rihanna will lead us to the Promised Land.

Ealing, Belgravia and News from Elsewhere 3

2011-10-21T22:59:00.001+01:00

Belgravia is not Ealing, nor is Ealing Belgravia. It is when they riot in Belgravia that we can start talking of revolution. At Knightsbridge I get off and plod my weary way towards Belgrave Square and The Grenadier pub where I am to meet Elizabeth, the producer of the Liszt programme at 5pm. The Grenadiers is very small and very crowded and while there are rooms at the back I am not allowed to enter. I buy a Jamesons and ask for a glass of tap water as I have pills to take. Elizabeth arrives very soon after. She is very heavily pregnant now and while nobody offers her a seat a table falls vacant and she is allowed to take precedence. I join her. She is talking about the 1851 Great Exhibition programme of Words and Music that she is currently producing. Our Liszt programme is this weekend. I am hot and keep coughing, not in her general direction of course. When we leave she kindly walks me to the Romanian Cultural Institute which is practically opposite.

All embassies and cultural institutions resemble each other. Chandeliers, marble pillars, and gilded mirrors are the rule. A nice 18th century or Regency staircase is ideal, a few portraits, a small exhibition space, some 'below stairs', a half-hearted washroom for visitors, and above all, a general air of temporary tenancy, combined with a very faint touch of dissipation and bureaucracy. That is the whole romance of them. I wouldn't really have it another way. I don't think I have ever been awed by magnificence. The expression 'all fur coat and no knickers' comforts me. I know that no institution of magnificence has a full set of knickers.

This is very nice. I use the half-hearted washroom, leave my coat and bags in the official little under-stairs cloakroom and drift upstairs, passing the gallery where Andrea B is doing an interview. The hall is set out with chair, magnificent windows, chandeliers, marble columns and gilded etceteras, but the library behind us is reassuringly untidy. Miss Scarlet could be murdering Colonel Mustard in there and has probably done so in the long history of the building.

I do an interview too and little by little the audience arrives as does Amanda. Alan Brownjohn is there in the front row in his fawn coloured suit. The event consists of Andrea reading his poems in Romanian, a very nice actress reading them in English and every so often (six times to be precise, about one poem to Andrea's three) me chiming in with a poem that in some way responds to one of Andrea's. That is as it should be. He is the guest. I am the Welcome to England sign. He's a very good funny, sad, realist poet with a lovely touch of fantasy. I recognise the world he depicts and he, I think, recognises the one I present him with. It's a good combination.

Afterwards we drift down and I talk to some people, including one of my current MA students and his father who have come along; a couple of artists; Dorian, the director of the Institute; and Safina, a young Pakistani born poet working for Poet in the City and Graham Henderson, who have organised the event as one of series. I refrain from coughing over everyone.

I intend to walk to Victoria but see a taxi and hop in. C meets me at Stevenage. Home about 12:30am. Dozy,not quite firm on my legs. A little out of it in fact. Today transitional. Mustn't grumble.

Ealing, Belgravia and News from Elsewhere 2

2011-10-21T22:21:00.001+01:00

Well of course it's wrong if they did just shoot him dead without a trial, but dictators very rarely end with trials. Outsiders can tut as much as they like but it is fury that brings dictators down, and it is fury that tears them apart. It is a fury they themselves have generated among many, a mixture of terror and obeisance and false praise that piles up in people until something breaks. It is not good to meet a crowd in such a mood. How many, after all, has the dictator killed? How many more has he imprisoned and tortured? Or threatened to kill, imprison and torture? There will be redress. There will be blood.

Which doesn't mean that there is no calculation. A living dictator will continue to exert power, and the due process of law takes a very long time, so the new state can be destabilised. Under the circumstances fury and calculation are two sides of the same coin.

I know we talk about Blair and everyone else 'doing business' with Gaddafi. Realpolitik is not about morality, not in the short run at any rate. It is about advantage. It is about deals. Politics is mostly realpolitik with rhetoric as advertising. This does not shock me in the least. I do not approve but it does not shock. Nor does realpolitik rule out ideological or even a generally humane politics. Realpolitik needn't be the entire substance of politics, only the business end, only at times. But in our heart of hearts we know it is there, not only in them, but in us, that it is one of the basic tools in the kit and that it is used. Are we compromised by it? Of course we are. But that need not make us cynical. Compromised is what we inevitably are. But we can be working our compromises for better reasons in better ways. There remain better ways of conducting realpolitik with better people. Ideas and ideals remain valid and invigorating. But the tutting is as much rhetoric as the language of rectitude that surrounds realpolitik.

So Gaddafi is gone. Will the future be better? We hope so. Under the circumstances it stands a chance, and why not take that chance?

Or so I think as I head off to Ealing Broadway passing the bronze horse pictured in the post below.