Liveropolis

To Liverpool today for the launch of books by two friends, Michael Murphy and Deryn Rees-Jones, both by Shoestring Press. Readings joined by another old friend, Matt Simpson. I have yet to read Deryn's Falls & Finds, but Michael's Allotments is a marvelous sequence. This is not a plug or an exaggeration. It really is so. I'll look to do a few brief posts on parts of it.

Probably more tomorrow.

The Eyewitness

The subject is greed. Or is it status? Or ambition? But then again it might be aspiration. Where do you start?

Here's a fat-cat. Consider him. He earns, let us say £200,000 pa. Is that well and truly fat? No, not quite grotesque enough. Let's start with a good Premier League footballer, who earns, say, £35,000 a week. He goes in for his next contract, knowing that one of his team mates is getting £40,000. Why isn't he getting the same. He demands a raise. Meanwhile, the £40,000 a week man...

And so on upwards, ad inf till you get to Frank Lampard and Cristiano Ronaldo. Is he asking for the raise because he desperately wants another £5,000 per week? Because he needs the extra spending power?

Unlikely. He wants it because he thinks he is as good as the better paid team mate. For him it's status! Respect! Self-respect! Plain justice!

He's an idiot, of course. It's mad money. But he doesn't have to be a footballer. He could be anything. Why does he consider it necessary to have madder money than the next man?

This is what Márai proposes in the voice of a woman remembering her husband in the early days of marriage, before they divorced a long time ago:

...my husband said that this man acted as the ‘eyewitness’ to his life. He tried very hard to explain this. The way he put it was that in everyone’s life there was an eyewitness, someone with whom we had met in youth, the other being the stronger, and everything we did was an attempt to hide whatever we are ashamed of from this merciless judge. The eyewitness does not believe us. He knows something about us that no-one else does. We might become ministers of state, we might be awarded the Nobel Prize, but the eyewitness just smiles. Do you really believe in all this?...

And he went on to say that everything we did was, to some extent, done for this eyewitness: it was he who had to be convinced, it is to him we must prove something. Our careers, the great struggles of our individual lives were all, first and foremost, for the benefit of the eyewitness.

The 'this man' in the case of the story, the 'eyewitness', is a successful writer. The husband is a prosperous industrialist. but, in the terms of the book, and in the opinion of his (granted, subjective) wife, a very decent man. A gentleman. And so he is, and yet... (in Márai the story is always in the and yet.)

According to Márai then, the driving force is fear - the desire to hide something from one with a God-like eye. It is the naked Adam and Eve hiding from God in Eden. Status is the fig leaf.

As regards the question of whether the desire for status is a pathological condition that could be treated, he attempts no answer. There is the religious option, making humility a virtue (yes, but I am humbler than you are!), or the collective option in which it is the self is entirely subsumed into a greater good (you are all individuals!- I'm not!).

Márai has extraordinary persistence in pursuing the human predicament down its narrowest alleyways. He is unremitting in pursuit. He also wrote an early autobiographical book Confessions of a Bourgeois (not yet in English, but in French).

Grey Goo Speaks Out

Lord Grey Goo in Liverpool


In an earlier guest post, plant biologist Anne Osbourn wrote:

We – the global community - must look objectively at the tools and resources that we have in hand and make responsible decisions about how to feed the world. This does not mean saying “Organic farming good; GM bad”. It means looking at all of the strings that we have to our bow and making responsible decisions - decisions that we are accountable for. This is not the time to bicker about the phase of the moon, small-scale farming, wide crosses, genetic engineering and biotech. These are just words. There are no scapegoats and by engaging in such bickering we leave people to starve and blame others for their demise..

Well, well, it may be so. On the other hand GM could be the underlying cause of obesity, knife crime, global warming, the Taliban, Martian raids on Windsor and premature hair loss. As for the starving, let them eat organic cake.

News from Nowhere

All purpose birthday verse, for dad's 91st tomorrow. Fully adaptable. Wears well, only occasional parts need replacing.

News in from Georgia, news about inflation,
news from the Games about nation versus nation,
news from the banks, news from the check-out queue,
but, for today, let the news be you.

News in from the country, news arrived from town,
news about David Miliband, news about Gordon Brown
news about David Cameron, who may not be True Blue
but, for today, the news is simply you.

News about the weather (rain followed by rain),
news about the guttering, news about the drain,
news about those NICE people who’ll ration jabs for flu,
but, just for today, no-one’s jabbing you.

No-one’s jabbing you today, no-one’s spreading gloom,
no bearer of ill tidings to burst into your room,
so turn off the TV, find something else to do,
today is meant for number one and, on this day, that’s you.

Party on, dude.

The Englishness of English Poetry 2

That's three posts today which might indicate far too much time on my hands but I am in fact translating fiction. It's going very well. I am moving fast through gorgeous, apparently simple prose, but I do need to take the odd break so, in between Márai and heavy showers alternating with flashes of bright sunshine, I have been coming back to this question, particularly via Pevsner.

One useful way to go about this might be to take Pevsner's categories one by one, quote a few key excerpts from him as a description, then see if that makes sense in poetry. It should do so, shouldn't it? But even if it does, will the case hold with twentieth century and contemporary work.

So to Pevsner and his first chapter:

Hogarth and Observed Life

Now this decision of Hogarth [to produce his great series of paintings and engravings of social life] has several aspects specially significant in relation to his Englishness. One is his resolution to turn away from the Grand Manner and the subjects connected with it. It was a wise resolution; for England has indeed never been happy with the Grand Manner… the character of the English was against it too; that quality perhaps which shows in understatement and reticence, and certainly another and apparently more permanent quality: common sense or reason.

Hogarth agreed with Dr Johnson, who once said: “I had rather see the portrait of a dog I know than all the allegories you can show me.”

“…to Hogarth art is a medium for preaching … the most effective sermon is the recounting of what the observant eye sees around.”

Pevsner then picks Gillray, Rowlandson, Millais, Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown as preachers.

He has a separate list of observers: Constable, Turner, Cozens, Cotman, Frith, Joseph Wright of Derby, (but where is Stubbs?)

He talks about “the English interest in the everyday world observed” in psalteries and misericords.

Finally he moves from these to the rationalism and plainness of the industrial revolution, such as Paxton’s Crystal Palace.

So the question is: if this is a valid grouping how do the poets fit in? Who would go in this category?

Would Chaucer be at home here? Would, say, Pope and Dryden? Would John Clare? Or Robert Browning? The territory lies somewhere between reportage and social critique. Who represents this in our time? Auden? Peter Porter? (But he's really Australian). Philip Larkin? Peter Reading? Sean O'Brien?... I'll think this over. Any thoughts welcome.

The London Initiative

For 2012, of course. James Hamilton suggests we compete by not competing, thus:

* Just have the Queen cut the tape and then cut to the sport. The “John Smiths” approach.

* A “Jack the Ripper” theme: the murders are reenacted in a reconstructed Whitechapel in the stadium, and the killer, played by his close relative, the Prince of Wales, escapes through the crowd.

* Or go for the Blitz: bomb out the trams and buses on the day of the opening ceremony, then have what Spitfires and Hurricanes remain battle it out with Heinkels and Messerschidts over the stadium whilst inside in amongst sandbags, ack-ack guns and Anderson shelters WAAFs hand out builders’ tea and hang men in nuns’ costumes from makeshift gallows

* Deliberately misconstrue the stadium’s location and make the audience sit through “Titus Andronicus”.

* Oh, I don’t know. I’m feeling uninspired this morning. Let’s just do what we did last time:

I think we could do even better:

1. Get the Real IRA to ignite a few redundant buildings

2. Cover London in mud, generate a lot of fog and do The Dickens Games.

3. Persuade the Olympic Committee to include darts and turn London into a gigantic pitted dartboard.

4. Give it a water theme and remove the Thames Barrier.

5. Invite Diana Ross to kick a football. Or anything at all.

If we can't get Diana Ross, Donny Osmond would do.

Power Plays and Turf Wars

Like everyone else I have followed the events in Georgia and South Ossetia with a mixture of puzzlement and déjà vu. Puzzlement, because the Georgian president seemed to have made an extraordinary miscalculation in escalating - if he did escalate - the tension over South Ossetia. His gamble on western support so close to the heart of Russian sphere of influence seemed - if that is what it was - reckless. Déjà vu, because we have seen this before many times in Russian realpolitik. Security, influence, power, paranoia, patriotism. Will quotes this source about the heinousness of pan-Slavism and I don't disagree. He also quotes Terry Glavin where he says:

“Although it’s hardly a secret that Russian president Vladimir Putin has turned Moscow into a kleptocrat’s playground, that’s just half the story. The other half involves his trampling of democracy across a Canada-sized swathe of the planet, east of the Urals, that takes in all of Siberia and the Russian Far East.

“Mr. Putin has embarked on an authoritarian program of eliminating up to two-thirds of Russia’s 90-odd resource-rich provinces and territories.. .”

It's just that, somehow, I never expect it to be otherwise, because that elimination is part of the security-influence-power-paranoia-patriotism chain of obsessions. The obsession is partly sincere passion, partly the worst kind of cynicism. It's a bad mixture. Passionate cynicism is worse then indifferent cynicism because it does much more harm and kills more people. Nor is that anything strange or new in the world. It's the way it was in 1956 and in 1968. It's the buffer-state syndrome.

There is only so much pressure the West can bring to bear on Russia now. Bleak? Well, yes, it is. Bases and observation posts on Russia's 'turf' don't help. There is, beside, the Ukraine, Latvia and who knows what else to worry about. We talk about democracy but the Russians actually voted for Putin and his retinue.

Janet McBride at Reuter's offers a fairly broad overview