At Lumb Bank 2/3

The drive at Lumb Bank

End of Thursday.  The days are too full to keep track of at night, nor is this exactly early at 11:30 and it is Election Night. One student is listening to the radio in the main sitting room. This is the office where I have access, a separate building at the end of the drive.

Today we had sun and no rain. Yesterday morning, while Monique was doing her workshop, I was writing the last blog, reading student work and writing a little myself. The afternoon was one-to-one tutorials talking over a poem or two or an idea in the usual way. It is a good tempered group, all starting from zero, at least officially, though some have been writing foryears and they have all read substantially.

Wednesday evening is when the visiting writer comes and this time it was Matthew Welton on his way down to a conference at Goldsmiths. We had only met briefly before so when he arrived at the cottage where the tutors and visiting writers stay we sat down, Monique poured some wine and we talked an hour or so. before going overfor dinner and the reading.

Monique being a little hard of hearing we are doing readings in the sitting room not the barn and it gets pretty cosy and packed there. Matthew reads a range of work along the lines of Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue which is apparently our headline tag for the course. So he begins with some older poems, then some new ones, some in which he borrows lines from Jon McGregor and ends with a poem composed entirely of four letter words in which the consonants have been exchanged, in effect a sound poem that we know contains the dreaded four-letter words. The reading is funny and inventive and technically brilliant at times, but always edging towards language rather than subject. The poems, I feel, especially those clipped from Jon McG have a kind of abrupt gentleness which may be an attribute retained from the original book or something more to do with the selections from it. The humorous, the arbitary and the obsessive, as well as the collaborative run through everything. Although this is experimental work in certain senses it is not the least rebarbative. It is, rather, playful, in the way a child may be playful given the components of some inexhaustible machine. I like it very much. I, of course, was born into a world of subjects where language was the prime mediator and guide but not in itself the subject so my later more 'experimental' work is never entirely free of themes or thematic areas.

Afterwards a few of us, including Matthew and Jack, the co-Course Director, sit around for a while with glasses of wine and keep talking. This is Arvon as I know it. The late conversations, the eventual retiring to bed.

*

This morning it is my turn again, this time to talk about form. Despite a very late night I wake early and am very much awake by 6, write a little then get up, shower, wash my hair and, having decided to have bacon for breakfast head over to the main kitchen to get some bacon from the communal fridge. The idea is to bring it back but once I'm there there is company and conversation so I find the bacon and fry it there. Eventually I return to the cottage to get my thing together and we make a start.

I have written on form before. This session starts by them reading their haiku chains which seem to have turned out very well. Those who hadn't really 'got' poetry before are getting it. It's encouraging. From haiku I move to epitaph and epigram, and get them to write some similar quatrains, complete with pointed rhymes and though they only have a few minutes to do this they come out with some crackers. Thence to Emily Dickinson and the use of counterpoint and finally to sonnets, to the three-stage-poem and to beginnings and endings. To get them started I send them back to the library to take out a book - any book - to find page 57 and look in the direction of the 12th line for a line that might serve to begin their own poem. The sheer arbitrariness of this takes attention away from the heavy responsibility of choosing a heavyweight subject. Once again, they produce some fine things, in some cases the least promising of them. Understanding poetry is really a matter of not misunderstanding it. Once the misunderstandings thin out actual poetry can make its entrance.

After lunch I have the four tutorials but by the fourth I am dead on my feet so return to my room to snooze and very quickly fall asleep (hence the wakefulness now, close to midnight). Tonight was the anthology reading. I always enjoy these - and some have a real gift for recitation too. Tomorrow we end. The end always comes abruptly. Now post this (I will add a picture as soon as I can) and to return the office key.

It's thick dark out there. Maybe the white cows will emit a faint radioactive glow - if they are still there.

At Lumb Bank 1

View from tutor's window

 
I still intend to post the keynote talk from Malatya but this week I am away at Lumb Bank teaching a Starting to Write course with Monique Roffey who is doing fiction while I do poetry. The days are full as ever, and though I wrote the brief account below late last night this morning is my first opportunity of posting it. There is no wifi in the place apart from in the office to which tutors have access and if one stays up relatively late talking to students the time is pretty well taken up.

We have fifteen students, one having cried off late. Thirteen of them are women, mostly on the younger side of older, and two men. The proportion is not untypical. The reasons for that must be long and complex but the territory the reasons cover is hard to venture into, chiefly because it is mined and will remain so for a long time. I will venture into the territory at some point but not now. It is late, I am back in my room. Monique and I have just done our readings and have sat around to chat, partly about novels generally, then about romance, romantic love, Le Rouchefoucauld, Robert Graves and the White Goddess even touching on Fifty Shades of Grey.

It is the end of the first full day of teaching. I have taken the first morning session on, essentially, imagery, This is preceded by a good deal of talk about the nature of the poetic process and enterprise and on the kind of things it may produce given certain circumstances. What are the differences between poems and stories. What about the relationship with language as both the visual and the auditory. I give them Karl Shapiro’s prose notes for his poem, The Fly. We talk about Imagism and Haiku. I set them a haiku to do, and suggest they extend it to a series, then we look at Vasko Popa. This is old ground to me but new to them.

This being a Starting to Write group the assumption must be that they haven’t done much writing. None of them have been on an Arvon Course before. I myself have never been on one as a student but I have been teaching them for well over thirty years. Nevertheless it is a new start every time because the people are new, the chemistry is new, the fellow tutor is new, possibly the course director is new. Jack, our cook is a virtuoso at quickly producing a classy meal out of whatever is to hand. We eat well. He just cooks the first night, the rest of the dinners are produced by teams according to set recipes, but Jack does produce the lunch.

The rain has been falling lightly, as if finely sieved, on and off most of the day. It seems appropriate here. I can hear the water gurgling in streamlets and channels. First days are ice breakers and openings that don’t mean we fall through the ice and drown.

As for me, I float. It is all floaty. One touches on things then they are gone and we’re elsewhere. Something accumulates though we can't be certain what. I write when I can. There was a poem this morning. About rain. And lo! there was rain.

To Mount Nemrut: eight photographs

At the necropolis of Perre

Room inside, bring own bedding

Boys among tombs

Climbing 1

Climbing 2 - at Cendere Bridge

Climbing 3 - at this stage with barrier

Climbing 4

From near the top of Mt Nemrut

Farewell to Turkey: 'Does the road wind uphill all the way?'

What we might have seen on Mt Nemrut on a sunny day without snow.

"For an uncatlike
Creature who has gone wrong,
Five minutes on even the nicest mountain
Are awfully long"

- W H Auden, 'Mountains' from Bucolics

Is one entirely an "uncatlike creature', a sort of pusscat under tons of elephant hide, as Auden was?

Never having lived among mountains, to me a mountain range has been what we call 'scenery', a visually realised romantic notion of something breathtaking yet essentially dreadful, like being among red-faced people who shout or yodel all the time. It is not so much the height. I have been to the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago and on the roof terrace of the tallest building in Singapore and have long conquered my childhood vertigo, the sense that if there was a ledge the only thing to do was to step off it, and the succeeding youthful dreams of precipices with a noisy chaos at the bottom, experiencing the dizzy temptation of taking flight but running instead into a dark fast-moving forests. I have toured in mountainous regions and slept in dry thunder. Still, I am not familiar with them.

The last day in Malatya involved a romantic excursion by minibus, in fact a litter of four minimbuses, to Mount Nemrut by way of Gölbasi, the ancient necropolis city of Perre, thence across the Cendere Bridge - the second largest Roman bridge still in existence - then ascending ever higher, glimpsing Kahta Castle perched on its unlikely promontory, until we reached the top of Mount  Nemrut, or as far as vehicle could reach, then to climb the rest on foot and watch the sun set from the peak which was a Commagene burial site complete with statues of the kings,  and of course the most spectacular views while drinking a glass of wine and eating a sandwich.

It was a beautiful idea which was no less beautiful despite the fact that not everything went to plan. Two of the drivers refused to take their vehicles up the steep narrow loose tracks that constituted a road in progress and the other two hesitated, or rather their occupants, including me, hesitated before resolving to go on. There were the precipices and ledges right next to us with no barricade and the track strewn with fallen rocks. But this is nothing out of the ordinary for visitors to the mountain and we reached the top as the sun began to set. Unfortunately the wine and sandwiches had remained in one of the buses that refused the ascent but there was coffee to be had where the driving ended before the climb on foot.

I confess I didn't quite make it to the top. My diabetes (type 2) makes breathing at 7,000 feet a little difficult and the best I could do was to tackle it in short runs with long hesitations. Iain Galbraith, who is a hardier man than I am, and Robyn Rowland, who is a hardier woman, did get there. I was fairly close before my chest got the better of me and I started down.  I wasn't dressed for the cold anyway because I am a careless reader of long emails.

At the coffee camp I was asked to tell a lovely woman's fortune from coffee dregs which I duly did despite having not the least notion of what I was doing. I hope my 100% intuitive predictions prove true (she was to remarry in three years time and have a second child). You know who you are. Do let me know.

On the trickier way down - in the dark this time - one of our party began to feel alarmingly ill so an ambulance had to be called and the shortest way to meet it was along another mountain path. It did meet us there and our dear leader and friend had to go with her so we never had a chance to say goodbye. (The ill person recovered after a while we are glad to say.) Our driver was marvellous. He was used to driving trucks on roads more precipitous and looser gravelled than this.

Thus the farewell next morning without proper goodbyes, departing the hotel early with John and Iain, flying first to Istabul then in our various directions. I liked them very much. I hope to see them again, as I do Berkan and many of our hosts and fellow contributors.

A post follows this, just personal photos and captions of the last day. Thank you Inonu, Malatya, Turkey. Thank you all our kind friends.

IDEA at Inönü University, Malatya 5: Bond on Gibraltar, Dora Maar slandered, Rebecca haunted

Mrs Danvers is behiiind you!

I had a non-sleeping night on the Friday. A hardly sleeping night. A minimally deep-purple pretty well white-throughout night. So I missed the first session when I might have had - and would happily have had (among much else) - more Gallipoli with, among others, the world-trekking Australian-Italian-Hungarian novelist Inez Baranay to whom I talked properly only the next day.

But I didn't miss the very first thing, Finland-based John Stotesbury's keynote on 'An Emergent Post-Colonial Cultutral Identity? The Gibraltar Case'  which started with seven minutes of Timothy Dalton as James Bond in a car chase on Gibraltar from The Living Daylights. Bond grimaces and conquers, parachute-dropping at the last from a great height onto a glamorous woman's yacht (the full glory of the last three minutes is there for your delectation in that link) to great laughter and applause from the conference audience. We know the Bond game, we allow for it, we cheer at its irony knowing that is all over and done with.

That's a fine start to a film but that is all we see of Gibraltar in it. John took us through some Gibralter history and asked how does a new post-colonial literature emerge in a heterogeneous colony of some thirty-thousand people stuck on a rock on the end of a hostile nation? And how does alpha-male Bond represent the imperial power that  made Gibraltar British in the first place? Well, there is a native crime fiction, Gibraltar Noir. Joyce refers to Gibraltar (possibly, where he had never been) in Molly Bloom's monologue at the end of Ulysses. Owing to John's great range of expertise I referred to him in an earlier post as Professor of Everything and I don't exaggarate by much. His ability to flit from one area of knowledge to another is extraordinary. So, besides Bond, Gibraltar, history, ficitional writings on Gibraltar by Paul Theroux, Anthony Burgess and Caryl Phillips among others, post-colonialism, and native Gibraltarian literature - which has, he says, only just begin to exist, we had ideas of museumification, the ideas of local speaking to global. We also discovered that Gibraltar was full of holes like cheese and that the famous Barbary macaque monkeys that inhabt it had to be re-supplied by Churchill for the sake of omens (see the ravens in The Tower of London for symbolic comparison).

The whole was very like Bond's, skeetering down the precipitous path on that apparently endless road in Gibraltar. The next day's events, by a curious irony, were to echo the same precipitous progress. There was the parachute at the end and no lack of glamorous female scholars in the audience. It was all very uncanny, or, as scholars tend to say, unheimlich.

*
After John I was kindly rushed home in a car, slept an hour or so, then returned to the fray to catch a session I very much wanted to hear on Ekphrasis. Having written and delivered an MA course  titled Writing the Visual on the subject it was of considerable interest to me. The trouble was I missed the firts paper by the poet Nazmi Agil, about ekphrastic poetry as an agon between competing poets, in other words the poem being more about poetry than about art.

The second paper  by Özlem Uzundemir was thorough and pretty well convincing in a way I have been convinced before. It was a study of Picasso's relationship with the Argentinian photographer Dora Maar and how that relationship was treated by the poet Grace Nichols in her book, Picasso, I want my face back. Big bullying male Midas oppresses female talent. He defines her. She is defined by him. It's a fair enough thesis accompanied by some of Picasso's portraits of Maar in that late Cubist-Expressionist styleof his where everything is jagged and jarring (not just Dora Maar of course). The case is worth making each time and it was made.

I was immediately on stage to chair a session on Romantic poetry, the first paper (by Suna Özcan) comparing Keats' Ode to a Nightingale to Hardy's The Darkling Thrush, the second (by Seçil Erkoç) on Keats, tragedy and death, the third by Professor Rajeswar Pal on American Romanticism, specifically Freneau, but a great range of others, developing the view that American Romanticism precedes the English. The first two papers were good, solid work; Professor Pal's, as you might expect from a senior academic, packed in a great deal more, which is no shame at all on Özcan or Erkoç. I have a fondness for ideas that take a leap into the dark, risk running against the tide and being wrong. Being wrong is how we get to being right, I suspect.

That's a lot to ask. As it was I was in the chair trying to keep time while listening. I do listen, and listen hard because I am fascinated by ideas and arguments. It is satisfying to hear a well-made case but I would always be tempted to advise a touch of idiosyncratic madness.

Easy for me to say at this end of a life.

*

The very last session included a well-organised paper by Gaye Kuru on Salman Rushdie and the idea of monstrosity via Foucault, and a reflection by Mustafa Demirel on Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist in which, after various wrestlings, the west (colonialism and capitalism) turned out to bad and the east (Pakistan and Islam) good, which was an implicit binary in many papers. The middle paper of the three, by Nil Korkut-Nayki, was for me the best. It partook of both feminism and post-colonialism but its central concern was with a Derridean hauntology in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. I thought this paper was beyond dutiful in that it was beautifully constructed and felt like discovery throughout. The tendency of some theory is to cut its subject according to its tenet. We are invited to observe how well an idea works when any inconvenient  feature in the work is removed so the art may be deomstrated to fit the idea. That may still make for real interest in terms of proficiency. You can do this well but if it is less interesting to me that may be because I am a poet not a scholar and like things to go flash, bang and boom now and then. Nil Korkut-Nayki's paper was exhilarating to follow: ghosts and hauntings always are.

*

In the evening to the caravanserai for poetry. Here Robyn Rowland and her translator Mehmet Ali Çelikel perform six poems from This Intimate War: Gallipoli / Çanakkale 1915.Like all Robyn's work it is humane, highly charged and empathetic. It is the product of much research among the papers of both Anzac and Ottoman Turkish soliders and their relatives. The hall is cold but the feeling is warm. Here are some lines from one of the poems in the book, Sky fighting:

Fat and solid under wood and straw hats,
old stone windmills of Tenedos throw their fabric sails
to the wind, dance for the living, grinding flour.
Below their hil, Göztepe,
strange insects are uncracking from larva cages...

...Four-inch pointed steel with fins,
dropped by boxloads of 500, they hail terror,
can pierce a man from his head through his organs to his feet.
Silent, a hard rain and deadly, one kills Turan, son of Mehmed.

Between poems Robyn asks one of the audience to sing. She has heard her sing before. Here is a snatch of that singing.

Tomorrow: an excursion, after that, when I can, the text of my keynote.

IDEA at Inönü University, Malatya 4: Frankenstein's Monster, Golden Tickets, Howl

From hotel to university, from university to meal, from meal to hotel. It is late. It is inevitably late. The mind is active (mine tends to whirr like a mad toyshop) and, while the bed is inviting, sleep may not come, or rather come fitfully, in small deep-purple patches, in between a night that is white and blinding. It is increasingly in those blinding white patches that I start writing poems or texts. It is then that they arrange themselves into a convincing dreamlike yet logical pattern. I am still in bed, and when I am home, C is beside me, stirring occasionally but asleep, the light on the phone set to dim. I write then eventually I turn over, put the phone down and, with luck, enter the deep purple.

But here in Malatya, the day begins and it's from hotel to university again.

My own keynote address came first this morning but in order not to interrupt the sequence of events I will save the text of it to the end of the series. (It was some forty minutes long so will take a few posts.)

Academic conferences are generally runs of papers grouped according to some perceived thematic link. The mind carries the freight of one paper over into another that way, not so much as a mess of miscellaneous notes, more a coherent narrative, easier to comprehend.

But there are papers that stand out, that are radically different, and Laurence Raw's first paper in the Grand Hall was one of those. He stood, he walked about, he spoke rather than read, he had a radio mic, and he talked about a term new to me, mesearch. His official title was 'Frankenstein, Radio and the Gothic Imagination' and  those were indeed the themes he explored but via the self.

Raw's own experience was of a recurrent cancer that meant he lost his voice and had to learn to speak all over again. He was effectively his own body of research. He was, as he put it, Frankenstein's monster.  He went on to recall a radio version of the Mary Shelley classic that brought the sensation of the monster and its movements closer to him. In the course of his paper he referred to my own keynote a little earlier, particularly - and in fact natutrally - to those parts of it that postulated unseen presences and shiftings of voice. His own writings in this area, he stressed, were therapeutic, which is a brave thing to assert in an academic conference where the concerns of the first person singular are usually left at the door. But there was a nakedness to this that showed academic procedure in a new light. His own well-established academic background was being interrogated by a non-academic persona. Was it self-indulgent? Yes, but that was the whole point. The complete field of human enquiry must include the self-as-other. We are our own Frankenstein's monsters: both Frankenstein and monster.

The papers that followed, on Gothic and 'the Paradigm Shift' about 'the emergence of horror literature', an essentially Marxist analysis by Entugrul Koç, and about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (now through Dahl, now in the Tim Burton - Johnny Depp film) as an aspect of Post-Colonial literature (those Oompa-Loompas recruited from the colonies to slave away in the high church of industrial capitalism), by Elçin Kandilci, were convincing - not that I needed much convincing in most respects - but were bound to seem a little conventional after that start. It all fitted except, in the case of Charlie, the poor family's own relationship to the Golden Ticket. They must see something in it beyond the rewards of capitalism and the desires of those 'hard-working families' we are currently hearing so much about.

The problem with most papers is that having chosen a methodology they snip and chisel away until the subject fits it. The two above didn't do that but one can see how cases are made and justified.

After a coffee break we moved on to the Gallipoli Panel. Since today - the precise day I am writing this - is in fact Gallipoli Day, the hundredth anniversary no less of that campaign and an occasion therefore of great pride for Turkish people, as well the day of commemoration of, shall we call it, the Armenian Genocide (as Wikipedia does) I am happy for the reader to follow his or her own links according to preference. Nations are institutions in which the official left hand is often best not knowing - or rather prevented from acknowledging - what the official right hand does or has done, nor is Turkey unique in this respect.

The project of the panel is entirely praiseworthy: it is to celebrate peace and goodwill between the Anzacs and the Turkish people, to celebrate their mutual heroism, humanity and sacrifice. The project does so by investigating and gathering material from the combatants of the time in the form of poems and letters and the oral evidence of relatives. The poems by Robyn Rowland (translated by Mehmet Ali Çelikel) written for the project and based on considerable research were to come the next evening.

*

Two more sessions after lunch, the first session (my choice out of the four offered) on the idea of evil as defined by Terry Eagleton (via Sevcan Isik), one on Campus Novels, in Bakhtinian terms (via Taner Can), the third on Susan Hill, a Kohutian Approach (by Mukadder Erkan). My attention is slipping a little by this time but I like the Bakhtinian insights into the Campus Novel by way of heteroglossia, polyphony and the carnivalesque. (I just like Bakhtin generally). We can go from Lucky Jim onwards, but I wonder about Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution and, indeed, much later, Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue and about the whole idea of farce in this context.

The last session of the official day included 'Reverberations of Allen Ginsberg's Howl in Turkey' by Zeynep Ayça Germen, which was chiefly about an exhibition of Turkish art in response to Howl. Yes, America is bad, New York skyscrapers are Moloch, peace is definitely better than war, and the best minds of Ginsberg's generation might have been 'destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked' (actually starving?) but I wasn't sure that Eliot was a stroll through a well-kept civil park, which is not my memory of The Waste Land, nor that New Criticism was an academically stifling force. Howl is a terrific poem of course but I kept wanting to know what it meant to specifically Turkish readers. Was it just about monstrous America? In what way was it about its Turkish readers? Where did Howl have its roots? How far was it in Jewish texts, in the Bible (in the prophets), in Milton, in Blake, in Whitman? I didn't even ask about Turkish translations of the poem. Even so the latter were unreasonable matters to bring up in the Turkish context. I talked to Zeynep afterwards and she was delightful so I was sorry to have asked question beyond the text of the title. I ask politely of course, downright courteously in fact, or think I do. But I once I start thinking I start asking.

The evening was dinner at the Two Trees (my hotel) followed by a quiz (at which my own table did middling well) and dancing. I join the dancing. I always do, figuring out my own best appropriate steps after watching others. Dancing is delicious. I was just heading out of the hall after a first bout of dancing when a couple of women got up and invited me to join them. I did of course. They were lovely. So many are. It is good to dance.

IDEA at Inönü University, Malatya 3: Travelling exotics and simulacra

Berkan con guitar

Berkan Ulu, who was kind enough to invite me, picks me up at the hotel in a borrowed car. It is very good to see him. He had spent a semester at UEA some years ago where I befriended him and we kept in touch. We chat on the way in. He says I haven't aged. He certainly hasn't. He looks as boyish as ever. It's a respectable drive from hotel to university which is on a campus with great gates. Downstairs in the entrance hall there are two tables with books and programmes. The angels stand and serve, smiling, pleased to see us. And there is Susanne Klinger whom I first met - again briefly - at UEA where she was doing her PhD. Now she is teaching here.

Lunch is in a big hall described as the ball room. Is there dancing in it now? Perhaps there was once. Large circular tables seat some six or seven. As usual, I know no-one, but sit down with Susanne where I see a space at the same table where Ian Galbraith is sitting. I have only once met Ian and that rather briefly at a Sebald event in Norwich. He lives in Germany so we are unlikely to run in to each other too often.

My keynote is written (I will post the text at the end of this Malatya series) so I don't need to prepare for anything but I do intend to be alert. First I have to wake up. I have my notebook, as supplied by Inönü, I make conversation as we all do.

Conversation might be good or it might be difficult. I am highly aware that this is the hundredth anniversary of Gallipoli of which we will, understandably, hear a lot, including a full discussion and poems at a book launch, but also that it is, at the same time, the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian massacre (or, of course, genocide depending on where you stand - the UN calls it genocide) of which we will, understandably, hear little or nothing. I haven't come here to say anything about either but will listen with curiosity.

I am immediately sorry to have missed Ian's keynote as others mention it with pleasure. I hope mine might go well. But it's straight back to the Grand Hall for three papers, one on Rose Macauley's The Towers of Trebizond (I am still waking up through this one) followed by one on the travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her experience of a hammam, this being compared to a similar account by a male traveller. The title is fascinating in itself, taken directly from Wortley Montagu, A Spectacle which would Make a Hundred Painters Drop their Brushes in Astonishment. It will remain my favourite title of the week. Naturally there is reference to Ingres and other orientalising painters. And of course there is a feminist perspective, feminism being the basis of many papers, even more than post-colonialism. It is beautifully constructed by Julia Szoltysek so it works as both argument and art.

The third paper is by US Professor of Rhetoric, Sarah Orgun-Perrault. It is set in terms of rhetoric but its subject is trust. How far should we trust scientists when they are explaining things to the public? Should we ask whether a scientist is being supported by an industry that might influence the scientist's position. There is the relationship between the specialist and the specialism, there is the trust between the scientist and the scientific community and there is the relation of both to the third term: the public. Sarah is arguing for scepticism about scientists claiming to reassure the public on behalf of their own commercial interests. There is always a cui bono question, of course. Whose interests does a professional opinion serve?

My slight unease with this line of argument is that it is based on an assumption of bad faith on one side only (the good side may be, indeed it is in this case, my side, which - oddly enough - troubles me more). The trouble is that the other side simply reverses the bad faith argument and addresses it in terms of personal integrity. an integrity which they presume to possess. I can't help feeling that if we attribute all good to one side and all bad to the other we abandon argument altogether. The other side may think just the same of you. To my somewhat idealistic cast of mind it would be better to assume that the other person is acting from genuine convictions but is wrong. Then we try to prove him or her wrong.

Yes, but has always been my instinct. It gets me into trouble sometimes, especially with my own side in so far as it is a side rather than a view. On the other hand I am pretty sure that it's the yes but in me that has made me a poet.


*

There is a very good set of papers after coffee on the idea of truth in biography and memory generally, centering on Baudrillard's argument about simulacra, the idea that we live in a world of copies that we take for the real world.

There are two particularly interesting papers on Julian Barnes's book England, England where a rich businessman buys up the Isle of Wight and turns it into a theme park based on received ideas of England. In Barnes's hands this turns into a political fable with commercialism at its core. How far can a nation sell itself? The date of the book, 1998, is not discussed but it occurs to me that it will have been written the year before, the year of the election that brought Tony Blair and New Labour to power and saw the death of Princess Diana whose funeral represented - or seemed to represent - a crisis point for the monarchy. If one could have had a simulacrum of Princess Diana in 1997 one would have made a fortune. (But was she, in her way, already a simulacrum of herself, I wonder).

These are clever papers by Elzem Nazli and Yigit Sümbül, arguing along similar Baudrillardian lines. There is a reality somewhere, goes the argument, but the simulacrum has taken its place. Something (England / the empire?) has hollowed out. There is of course a clear political reading available: vested interests exert their power by leading us away from reality towards an alternative version that seems still more real while going about their wicked business.

And it's true, it's only that I have a problem with ideas like reality and authenticity. I suspect they too are constructions. I recall the chicken tikka masala argument of some years ago. This most popular of dishes in England is a fake, not a real Indian dish. I understand that but the assumption that if we only looked hard enough in a particular village, down a particular street, behind a particular door, in a particular kitchen, in a particular pot we would find an authentic ur-dish that we may call reality seems a little fake in itself.

But who cares and who knows? I don't. The papers are exciting and invite discussion especially from John Stotesbury, Professor of Everything in Finland, who was actually born on the Isle of Wight. He is an echt Vectian. In order to make England England you have to kick the locals out. He is reality in the flesh. Take that, Baudrillard!

Then we drive away away, down winding roads, rising among hills to the Kalegöl Hotel overlooking the lake produced by the dam. It is spectacular. The sun is setting. It is spectacular. I spend time talking to Susanne. The evening is fading into night for me. I need more sleep.

At Kalegöl