Moving in, flaking out

Long long day at the university, but longer still for daughter H and husband R, who have moved today from London to Norwich. About 6.30 / 6.45 - end of work C picks me up and we drive over to visit them with a hot meal C has cooked. It's still a matter of cardboard boxes and packaging but there is minimal furniture, a blow up bed and two tables borrowed from us, not to mention some folding chairs, and we can sit down in the kitchen. It's a nice house - 19th century, quiet part of Norwich, walking distance from centre, and H pregnant, baby due in May. I feel exhausted, have my winter cough but am very happy to see them here. So starts another phase of life. I enter my sixty-first as they enter their first house.

Have nothing left tonight to think with. More reading invitations, more travelling, possibly to India again. Something more sensible tomorrow.

Bad Sex Award

So this is the man who won. Jonathan Littell from his Prix Goncourt winning novel, The Kindly Ones. According to the judges:

The Kindly Ones, which tells the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of one of the executioners, beat off stiff competition from a stellar shortlist that included entries from Philip Roth, John Banville, Paul Theroux and the literary rock star Nick Cave.

The judges paid tribute to the novel's breadth and ambition, calling it "in part, a work of genius".

"However," the citation continued, "a mythologically inspired passage and lines such as 'I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg' clinched the award for The Kindly Ones. We hope he takes it in good humour."

The Kindly Ones is, of course, the ironic title for the Eumenides, aka the Erinyes, aka The Furies.

I suspect the bad sex awards are essentially British, inviting and producing a cross between a snort and a snigger. Howard Jacobson thinks, probably rightly, that (in English at least) the best sex writing is that which does not describe the act. I was writing to a friend in India who has been translating some Tamil erotic poetry, which seems to find a natural register, and in this case to locate it in the female voice (the Tamil writer being female).

It is not very much like the home life of our own dear queen.*

It may be that the often remarked-on concreteness of the English language, that tends to reject abstraction and ideas in favour of the empirical and tangible (the nation of shopkeepers being conspicuous disdainers of airy Frog waffle) produces poetically concrete metaphors that are always going to look somewhat ridiculous compared to the empirical concrete of the act itself in all its varieties. All this for THAT! cries the reader.

I haven't checked, of course, since these posts are all thrown off in a hurry, but my guess is that the best erotic writing in English will always veer to the humorous, or else avoid the act altogether and concentrate on the building up of circumstance.

In other word, I propose that all straight-faced sex-act writing in Eng Lit is, by definition, bad sex writing. Unless proved otherwise.

As concerns the politics of it, that lies with the Furies - the Kindly Ones.


*Gold and Fizdale, in their biography of Sarah Bernhardt, recount an incident from the London production: "After watching Sarah as Cleopatra, lasciviously entwined in her lover's arms, an elderly dowager was heard to say:' How unlike, how very unlike the home life of our own dear queen'."

Sunday night is 'Now we are sixty-one we...

....salute Ryan Giggs, whose birthday it also is.

C shares hers with Robert Burns but I am very happy to share mine with (Sir) Ryan. I think he is the most wonderful footballer of my adult life. He has in body and spirit what I would wish for my poetry. And, as a player, he is as honest as they come. Even those who hate the team admire Giggs, because what, after all, is there not to admire? I am sorry he could never enjoy greater fame for the international team but do admire him for sticking with Wales, not because Wales is a better entity than England but because there is an admirable way of being true to where you feel you belong, and his is admirable.

It is ten years now since that extraordinary solo goal against Arsenal (included in the video), which is up there with any solo goal you are ever like to see, and that includes Maradona and Messi, and what is more, at a more dramatic stage of the proceedings than either. But it's not just the solo graces, but the team graces. When he is playing even half-way to his best, the team changes, has more energy, more imagination.

Most players of his kind - fast, light, elusive - have retired by the time they are thirty or so. To begin with they have been cut down so often they are injured out of the game. And of course they lose speed. And the sheer will and concentration. He is thirty-six today, same age as Lord Byron when he died. Lord Giggsy. Not bad, not mad, and not dangerous to know unless you are the defender marking him.

Ancestral, on the eve of my sixty-first

...And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

- Coleridge, Kubla Khan

I am reading a PhD for examining. Interesting, applying cognitive poetics to post-colonial poetry in the hope of arriving at a deeper understanding of both the poetry and the condition of post-colonialism.

I cannot say anything about the dissertation itself but was stopped for a moment when it talked of indigenous people being forced off ancestral lands. I began to think about ancestral lands. And, inevitably, about colonialism too.

First, I wondered about my own ancestral lands. As a Central European Jew I cannot think of any place that would be mine or ancestral, unless perhaps Israel, though heaven knows when my ancestors last set foot there. I don't know the names or locations of my ancestors more than three generations back. All I know is that they didn't stand still. They drifted about Moravia, Bohemia, Transylvania and Hungary, and heaven knows where else. Now they were here, now there. Ghettos, shtetls and pogroms, I suppose. And so it went on for centuries.

My sense of ancestral lands is what Eliot describes in Gerontion:

And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.

Very Chagallesque, don't you think, those goats in the field overhead? Lovers float in the sky, there are the soulful eyes of cows and, look, there through the window, rises the Eiffel Tower with a cockerel crowing behind it. I am squatting on the window sill, squatting I suppose, on other people's ancestral lands, with only my lower case j to keep me company, regarding patched and peeled London, thinking of rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron and merds, particularly merds, while the weather continues charming.

How many of us actually have ancestral lands? How far back do you go? Four generations? Five generations? Few people in Europe have had that stability, not since industrialisation. And before that there were other movements, trade movements, war movements, plague movements, pilgrimage movements, a great whirlwind of peoples blowing through fields and streets.

That seems to me one of the ur-patterns of life. Movement and dream and parting and arrival. Millennia of it. Even the Arabs, whose ancestral lands are part of the PhD thesis, are, the thesis tells us, ancient wanderers.

Now I don't know which is better. Long, stable, unchanged communities (shall we say five generations? six? seven?) or stray and windblown. The catalysed or the catalysers? The soil or the pollen?

Being of the pollen I can't always see the fuss about the soil. The making of the English landscape has been well documented. Look, let's build a hill! Let's divert a river! Elsewhere, another time, people were shifting sand and stone, putting up pyramids or cathedrals. Is that Ozymandias in the distance? On this spot I planted a cherry tree. On this spot perished my paternal grandfather. Or was it another spot?

I can't always see the fuss but I understand human distress and how being uprooted after years of stability causes distress. Broken movements, broken dreams.

*

Colonialism didn't suddenly just happen. It wasn't specifically a European capitalist venture. The human race has moved and made camp, displaced, absorbed, then moved on again. Some camps just last longer.

There was no Eden, no Paradise.

Except in our minds, because we make such places there, and understand the importance of Eden to those who have dwelt there, in some real space, real location, their minds lodged between the material and the imagined. There they lived with each other, protecting each other, talking to each other, singing to each other, every so often swearing at each other and even killing each other, like all tribes do, dividing and uniting, looking on this or that tree thinking: that's part of me, that is. That is part of us, the descendants of the ancestors. And they said and sang this in the ancestral language. And some of them moved on and some of them stayed for a while, and the language modified and absorbed the languages of those they displaced or were displaced by.

Meteors and shooting stars and bits of rock: moss, stonecrop, iron and merds. All things peeled and patched. Meanwhile the mind proposes numbers and sentences and music.

*

It is dark outside, and cold. I know this small town quite well. I am very fond of it. The desk-light has an intimate glow. This is where I live and where my ancestors lived. Desks, and lights, the intimate glow. And the language of that brief intimacy. C with me, now upstairs, moving a chair about. Son T currently in Ireland, in Cork tonight. H and her husband R preparing to move to Norfolk three days from now. And outside, the Chinese family with the struggling take-away, and the old man with the chewed up face in the betting shop who has been standing in its doorway as long as I can remember.

Marred Product

Andrew Marr

About this time on a Friday I catch Andrew Marr's 'The Making of Modern Britain' on TV. The archive footage is good and there is a broad narrative that seems reasonable most of the time, albeit deeply bent by retrospective wisdom.

Retrospective wisdom is annoying because it reads the future into the past when it wasn't there. Chamberlain was, it seems, a dolt for believing Hitler and everyone who cheered him was a minor insignificant dolt for believing there'd be no war. Dolts, the lot of them. We know there was a war so we know exactly what dolts they were. That's TV history. The next moment the British are shown preparing for war. No particular reason given, just a change of tone. No explanation. That's also TV history.

Mustn't bore them, you know. Not for a second.

What the combination of retrospective wisdom, the desperate desire to not bore us, and the fatal love affair with celebrity results in is less the Making of Modern Britain than the Making of Faces. Marr's face.

Marr's programme consists of Marr gurning in between clips of film. He gurns as himself and he gurns in costume. He gurns in funny voices, meaning he puts on silly voices for those who were wrong. And he does it all the time, every five minutes or less. Nothing is possible without a gurn and a silly voice. In today's programme alone we had Marr gurning as a Greenshirt, as a Butlin's camper, as a thirties bather and a great many other things. Silly voices all round even when not in costume. He has ridden a merry-go-round and he has gone round in dodgems. He is a ham actor. He hams it up leaving no minute unhammed. I fully expect to see him hamming it up in a concentration camp, doing funny Jew or funny German,

No, I don't fully expect that. But it's just round the corner, Andrew, if you want a go at it.

Genteel readers please close your eyes now. The fact is, every time he goes into a gurn or a silly voice I just wish he would fuck off.

Marr is not the star of history. He is not even an original interpreter of it. He is an intelligent man who knows perfectly well he is being a prat. I doubt it is even his fault. There is some producer prodding and daring him: Go on Andrew! G'wan! Terrific!

Much the best thing was the footage of the battle of Cable Street. At least he didn't pretend to be Mosley or an East Ender. How tempting that must have been.

I have practically stopped watching television. It fills me with despair even to think of it most of the time.

A Very Modest Proposal

I know it's my fault in the following cases:


global warming
the credit crunch
bad markets
human mutations
dim children
thin women
fat women
women's eating disorders generally
bad shoes
no babies
any women (should there be any) who drive badly
women's lack of ambition
bad information / misinformation
my own health
the weather (weather girls are not to be blamed)
for not working till I die and coming home with beer on my breath
not being able to take the beer then having sex with under-age girls while knowing perfectly well what I do


Add to that my natural tendency to rape, pillage, murder, bully, fart aloud, and bring pain to my mother by being killed in some roadside bomb incident, and admitting the fact that...

"To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo."
- Valerie Solanas,

"Men love death. In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, stilling their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives."
- Andrea Dworkin

"The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race."
- Sally Miller Gearhart

...I am obliged to agree that from the cradle until adolescence I should have been kept fully informed that everything I do or think or feel is irredeemably awful, and that even as a grown-up poet, I am, as Wendy Cope has it, a TUMP (totally useless male poet).

I therefore make the following very modest proposal.

I am still in possession of a set of genitalia. I admit they're not great, or at least I have never considered them great. They have been minor agents in the production of two children (and very nice too, thanks to their mother, even the boy) but in doing so they have fulfilled and completed their natural function.

Nevertheless I think they may be properly comestible given a little care and imaginative seasoning. The Hungarian poet, Virág Erdös, in her poem, 'Vision: Game Over' (the poem is included in the New Order anthology I have just edited) suggests:

Testicle Baked in a Roll. In the Admiral Bar apparently they use male apes, but I have a suspicion they add a little something extra. I particularly like them a little overdone.

It's not a big meal but might do to for a light lunch, like tapas, maybe a little couscous and relish on the side. Being Hungarian I cannot resist a dash of paprika (must be Hungarian, cherry peppers are delicious), or at least a splash of Tabasco. Erdös likes them overdone but I suggest serving rare. Gently fry in virgin oil. Could serve in breadcrumbs though we know how fattening that is, but why not? Just this time? You deserve it!

The younger the testicles of course the fresher and less potentially fattening. The operation could be performed shortly after birth with minimal pain, much like circumcision. Serve with fresh salad and, ideally, eat outdoors. Excellent for a summer picnic.

As for the genitalia of older men - if they have got this far - the taste does not improve, but they can be used to fill out mixed grills. Alternatively preserve and tin and dispatch to the hungry in the relevant parts of the world. Waste not, want not.



*Being contrite regarding my male faults it is quite certain that I have not exhausted them, so welcome any links to further incentives to self-chastisement and mutilation.

Lost Names, with three photographs of Barry Bucknell

A rare day at home, bar a visit to the dentist. Dentist fills one tooth, photographs another, says come back. Fine. It's a beautiful sunny morning, if blowy, and I return to translate, to write yet another introduction to something, and to deal with correspondence. The sun shines. Le soleil brille.

At about one C and I decide to have hot comfort-food lunch at the caff on the corner - sausages and mash for me, followed by jam roly poly - she has scampi and chips followed by carrot cake. You are such a girl, C! Pot of strong tea for two. Nothing in the caff can have changed since about 1961. They are playing, at reasonable volume, a long selection of songs from the period: Do the Locomotion, Wonderful Land, Love Letters in the Sand, Oh Carol, Bobby's Girl, Walking Back to Happiness, Runaway, Cumberland Gap, Telstar (Telstar, begob!)... and so forth. I name them and shame them. Well, actually I don't shame them - I recognize them and give them a brief, faintly absent-minded, mental caress as I would an elderly relative of the kind I don't actually have.





C and I start talking about names. I ask her about boys' names, since she does her day-a-week whack in a boys' school. We run across the names, the lost names, the boys she never teaches, the names that ring in the far distance with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine, as T S Eliot said of of the bells of St Mary Woolnoth. Where then are the:

Stanleys, Sidneys, Alfreds, Alberts, Grahams, Malcolms, Ronalds, Colins, Brians, Rogers, Ernies, Victors, Dereks (we actually begin with Derek because of Del Shannon and Del Boy and the Dels of my schooldays, Del Mackey and Del Parrott), Maurices, Leslies, Norberts, Percies, Terrys, Barrys, Garys... where have all the flowers gone? Now it's all Jacks and Toms and Tims and Georges and Bens and Simons and Robs and Wills and Dans and Steves and Petes...

I think of Barry Bucknell in his shed, Percy Thrower in his garden, of Erle Stanley Gardner and Stanley Baxter, of Colin Welland, of Malcolm Miles, of Stan next door, of Ron Knee and Roger the Dodger and Leslie Bricusse and Leslie Norris and Les Dawson, of Terry Paine, of Maurice Norman, of Nobby Stiles, of Victor Sylvester and Brian Blessed...





It's a decent pair of Norfolk sausages swimming in the gravy. The roly poly is constructed around the appropriate suet and is accompanied by reassuringly deep-yellow custard. It's like driving an Austin A40.

I myself have one careful owner, just a few spots of rust, with MOT till August and all working parts, though you have to go a little easy on the clutch.