Sunday Night is.. the Bethnal Green Bambinos...

...otherwise engaged in Passport to Pimlico, about as British as Jacques Tati was French. The title sequence is a fond reminder of who was who in cinema at the time. Britain was Stanley Holloway and Margaret Rutherford and John Slater and Raymond Huntley, but also Hermione Baddeley and Sidney Tafler. You begin with a quick J. Arthur gong, music by Georges Auric (Les Six). The Bethnal Green Bambinos, who sound mightily like Buena Vista Social Club, drift incongruously, yet perfectly appropriately, in after about two minutes. I have long been a fully signed up member of the Bethnal Green Bambinos Fan Club.

Much of the film is a recap of post-war conditions, but the core of it is about state versus locality, not so much who is who, but what is what; the small versus the great. Your first ties, the film firmly states, are to your neighbours and to history.

I loved it the first time I saw it, for much the same reasons as I loved Frank Capra films. They were instinctively egalitarian, democratic and generous, a kind of idyll. Tribal? Yes. Sentimental? Yes, that too. But it was a broad tribe and the sentiments were, it seemed to me, good sentiments. Such sentiments were what, I suspect, the war was popularly thought to be about.

Meanwhile, "... the most remarkable thing about the bream is when he's courting..."

The Verb

BBCi recording is here.

Conversation on a train - the kindness of...

Periodically I return to the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680). A byword for cynicism, disillusion, dry wit and general downbeatness, he seemed cold and wrong at first, but as the years have gone on I have started to think of him as a rather passionate, sharp-witted, man observing himself as much as the rest of society. Of some 772 maxims, 25 are on the subject of women, a number of those about coquetry, which he does not particularly condemn, no more than he does pride or vanity in men. He does not condemn: he observes.


In the introduction by George H. Powell, we find the following:

What is called political life under such a regime seems devoid alike of liberty and honesty; and if society - upper class society, that is - presents, on the surface, a brighter prospect, this seems, on nearer view, a cold and hard brilliance, which has little of the warmth of living humanity about it. A deeply corrosive class-selfishness, a want of the common feelings most essential to the union of the social fabric - these are noticeable traits. When we find the amiable and cultured Madame de Sévigné writing, with such unconcealed delight, of the hideous barbarities inflicted on the poor, defenceless Breton peasantry, as if massacre and hanging were a good joke, as long as she was left to enjoy in peace the shade of her beloved woods, we are perhaps less surprised to find her friend, M. de La Rochefoucauld, speaking with contempt of pity itself.

*


I am travelling home from one of the innumerable journeys recently. Beside me a young woman - perhaps no more than a girl of eighteen or nineteen - is talking to her friend across the aisle, she being of the same age. Both are pretty in the normal nothing-out-of-the-unusual way in which everyone young and confident, of regular features, seems to be pretty. They have no particular accent, if anything they're comfortable middle-class. Their conversation zooms in and out of focus over my new iPod (I am listening to the Mahavishnu Orhestra). Mostly they are talking about being drunk absolutely stupid and how great this is. Later, this is what I catch, entirely from the, louder, Girl 1:

Girl 1: ...and I'd get lifts there regularly with this, like, bloke, from... but then later this bloke, like he's older, and I think he's getting, you know, and I think... well, he's sort of middle aged and, anyway, you know what, he's killed in a car crash next week. It's so funny [she actually laughs and her friend laughs too], I mean, it's like, you know, but it's really funny [more laughter from both]. Of course I don't, like, get the lifts now...

They continue talking and laughing about the dead man for a while then move on back to being pissed out of their heads and how their parents are so understanding about this. By this time I thoroughly hate them, with a hate I have not felt for a long time. As far as I can gather nothing happened between the man who gave the girl lifts, except that he might have had a slightly lower social rank (an employee of dad's perhaps) and that he might have been attracted by her. These things happen. But the smug repulsive laughter hits me hard. And I think of Madame de Sévigné. Just a little.

Wednesday into Thursday: two books into studio into four books

Bad night, less than four hours sleep. Train from Canterbury in the morning to Charing Cross, within easy walk of the Hungarian Cultural Centre. I leave my travelling bag there and pick up a gorgeous copy of the bilingual Corvina edition of English Words / Angol Szavak, so as to work out a programme for the evening. There is a Hungarian delicatessen just around the corner, so an espresso and a poppy-seed cake before considering the next move which has to be the BBC. Tube to Oxford Circus and lunch in All Bar One until it's time to go into Broadcasting House for The Verb.

Others on the programme include Steven Hall, the writer of The Raw Shark Texts, plus Ben Goldacre and nice guy, a doctor-cum-author, just dashed across from hospital in Oxford still with his scrubs on - I'll provide his name tomorrow - to talk about the Wellcome Foundation and doctors-as-writers, as well a group called The Hot Puppies, who are late from Cardiff, so we sit around with Ian McMillan, while Steven Hall astounds with stories of Nicole Kidman hot on the phone keen to make his book into a movie. Two actors act a short radio play written for the progamme by Steven. Eventually band arrives, I do the first spot, Steven Hall's play is second, the two doctors third with music in between. The words of the songs are neat and original, the girl singer's voice quite special. The instrumentation is very simple.

Everyone says it's a good programme. Everyone always says it is a good programme. I think it's a good programme. It's probably a good programme. Ian McMillan funny, relaxed/tense, moving things on sharply. His questions come at me from an angle. It's like table tennis. Flick back, flick back. Watch the net. I am more nervous here than at any of the other occasions. Perhaps it is being watched by a very smart young writer and two doctors.

We leave the studio almost an hour later than we should. I go back to Charing Cross and head for the National Gallery and stare at The Rokeby Venus for a full half hour, my eyes occasionally drooping. On way out bump into people I know and have coffee. Finally manage to contact dear Hungarian friends who also come to the National Gallery. Chat for forty minutes or so then walk over to the HCC. Son T is already there with bassist Steve. People begin to arrive about the right time. Denise Riley turns up, old friend tall and lovely Nell, Tim Dooley from Poetry London, Ms Baroque, Peter Jay of the Anvil Press, remnants of the Hungarian literary mafia, daughter H and partner R, and, eventually, ninety-one year old father whose taxi has been delayed, appearing just as I am about to read a poem about crossing the border with him in 1956. Gets applause and embrace. About fifty people, pleasingly full considering one London launch has already happened. George Gömöri and I do a double act in middle - he reading the Hungarian versions of four poems, I the English. He does bravura. I do what I do.

Poems, music (T&S), poems, music, poems. Small birthday cake and champagne. A bowl of hot Thai soup after with Hungarian friends, plus H and R. Then a taxi dash to Liverpool Street. Just make it.

Train judders, arrives half an hour late. Nothing unusual in that. C fetches me from Norwich, bless her. It is almost 1.30 by the time we are home.

*

Full teaching from 9am this morning. Wind belts along as if intent on doing damage. Umbrella turns into sodden handkerchief. After MA group I drop into Nick's Journalism class to do an 'interview' with the assembled students. Tutorials. Then Tom C arrives with copies of Shuck, Hick, Tiffey and sets me to sign a lot of copies. Then a PhD student. Eventually home. It is Dickens night in Wymondham and the town centre is closed off. Bill Sykes has done Nancy in. I have to drive round by way of Edinburgh and Plymouth in order to get down our street.

On the way I hear policeman on car radio declare the mother of Shannon Matthews 'pure evil'. That will please The Daily Mail (note: it does please the Daily Mail). I can just see the police breaking into someone's house, announcing: We have come to arrest you for Pure Evil.

Ah, les Fleurs du Mal and Jonathan Ross and and Hitler and Ian Brady and Judas and Osama bin Laden. Get in there with the rest of them, Karen Matthews.

Enough links for several posts here. But you do get the gorgeous Kertész photograph at the top.

Canterbury and London

A fine night last night with a good bright audience including two Hungarians and the artist Jeremy Millar whose website appears as a link in the left hand column. Good questions of the more pertinent and difficult-to-answer sort. I like difficult questions that make one think and re-formulate. A really good one about 'voice' a topic I was discussing over lunch at the university just the day before. Still don't quite know what it means, apart from the obvious things such as a writer finding his or her 'voice', an obvious question but a far from simple one.

Then back to Patricia and Roderick's for supper with some friends. Roderick is a composer. Two really lively children, both musicians among other things.

This morning to London for recording then to the Hungarian Cultural Centre for the launch of the New and Collected and the bilingual English Words / Angol Szavak.

It'll be a late late frosty train ride back into the freezing fog.

Now to the station.

Diary matters

To Canterbury in an hour or so for a reading at the university, staying overnight, then to London on the morning train to record a spot on The Verb at 12:15, with the Hungarian Cultural Centre launch in the evening. Home very late to deferred teaching first thing in the morning. The next day the Norwich launch, thereby missing the actual broadcast of The Verb.

At Kent: Patricia Debney, prose-poet and short story writer, and the poet David Herd.

I am streaming, probably not with cold, but as a result of my allergy to whatever blasted itinerant irritant lurks in the house (it may of course be the cats...) in response to which I take a day-long antihystamine pill and go my merry way. C is picking up her pictures from the Palladio exhibition in London.

Couple of thoughts from a questionnaire I have just completed for an enquiry. Thinking semi-aloud, as ever:

Prose and poetry / Prose Poetry / Song Lyric and Poetry

Poetry is a specialised form of speech, some way to song, indeed could sometimes BE song, though by no means always. Generally speaking, poetry is more concerned with the state of affairs than with a story. Generally speaking, poetry thrives on ambiguity while prose does not. Poetry is generally short and semantically floating. Prose is long and, generally, fixed. Poetry is a lake. Fiction is a river. I could go on with half-ironic profundities like this for a long time. The point is they would, generally, be true...

Prose poetry can be very good indeed, but it’s a complex game that works by contrast, and by counter-intuitive means. The desire of the floating text [in poetry] to float becomes all the more strikingly clear when anchored to the expectations of prose (ie the rational forward flow of syntax). But the floating energy of that desire has no great stamina. 'Tis brief, my lord. Eventually the weight of prose expectation shackles it or makes it look simply fey...

Rock lyrics, like any lyrics can have substantial poetic qualities, but they will ultimately be judged on how they manage away from the music, away from all memory of it. There have always been great song lyricists and rock is no exception. There is a line of wit in English and American song writing that, in the twentieth century has led from music hall, through Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, to Noel Coward, to Ian Dury, to The Streets, to some rap artists. There is a line of lyricism that leads from German lieder, through Brecht / Weill, through French chansons, through Leonard Cohen, through Tom Waits. Then there are the all-rounders like Bob Dylan and John Lennon at best. There are also superbly atmospheric songs with great perfectly appropriate words that together generate a poetic sensation.

Transferring most poems (intended as poems) and turning them into lyrics is perhaps comparable to taking a book intended as a book and adapting it as a film. You lose some, you gain some. Normally the better the poem / book the worse the song / film. Though there are always exceptions. In song the music wins, in film the moving image wins. The best poetry generates its own music. Once set by a composer the meanings of the poem are modified and, to some degree, limited.

There is no SHOULD in any of this. You don’t know what happens till you try it. There are only general areas of forecast. If the weather forecast says it will probably rain in East Anglia it does not necessarily mean it will rain in Cromer. Chances are it might rain in Cromer too. But then, unless you go to Cromer, you won’t find out till you’re there. It might be the sunniest day of your life.

You want half-ironic profundities? But is there any profundity worth its name that is not half-ironic? Only half, mind. The rest is seriousness all the way.

Damned

Luca Signorelli, The Damned


Other people. Railway stations, airports, exhibitions, packed lifts, sports grounds. When I was a boy I went to matches in London sometimes with friends, occasionally on my own, and remember the pressing, tumbling and collapsing at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea's ground, the end known as The Shed. There was a sense of almost breezy panic about it. No seats in those days. Under winter floodlights the terraces looked like grim, magical theatres, the smell thick, the noise fierce, raucous, deep-in-the-belly, guttural.

Luca Signorelli (c.1445-1523) must have had a terror of overcrowding. This fresco is at S Brizio, Orvieto, where he also painted a Resurrection that is considerably less jammed. Chronologically and stylistically he is a sort of bridge from Early to High Renaissance, and you can sense Michelangelo's demons bracing themselves for a darker, altogether bulkier entrance. In Signorelli all is spikiness, the body is part latex, part steel. Wings rise like blades or sharks' fins. The demon with the green butt is playing school bully to some unfortunate sinner on all fours. Fiendishness is coded as cold, putrid green. Signorelli likes foreshortening so the lot tumble forwards with the archangels above as stewards or cops, camp commanders.

I taught Italian Renaissance art at school for some years and Signorelli was one of those artists hard to like. Maybe it was the latex and the sheer springiness. Maybe it was just his instinctive understanding what a communal hell would be. Michelangelo's Hell is solitary, everyone plummets alone down the horrible chasms of guilt. In Signorelli we have the mass model which all those perfect bodies just make worse.

I think of Signorelli now because yesterday, after the second generation had departed down the A11, I came up to find the television on and Andrew Graham Dixon talking about Signorelli.

The subjects on Desert Island Discs are asked what they would want to have with them. I think it might be an idea to ask what is the last thing they would wish to have there. Signorelli's Hell is one of them for me.