Guest Blog: The Flight of the Spoonbill, by Ian Starsmore

David Lincoln and Martin Skipper: Apples

The Flight of the Spoonbill is the most recent exhibition organised by the North Norfolk Exhibition Project, in Cley Church, Norfolk. Each year the curator chooses a new theme, and this year, mine comes in part from the fact that the Spoonbills are nesting for the first time for three hundred years on the marshes at Cley. Their presence seems fortuitous in this landscape, their oddity suggestive, perhaps via Edward Lear, of the magic and vulnerability of this coast, our point in history, our dislocation from nature.

In proposing the exhibition I was strongly aware of the church building itself, once a port and bordered directly by the sea. The architecture has sculptures of monkeys, some on top of the pinnacles, plants, dragons, lions, angels, owls, mice, dancing and drumming figures, musicians, foliage. There are sculptures of two masons, each displaying their arse and balls, no other words will do for their posture and gesture, as they grin at us over their shoulders and six hundred years. 

The building is animate, full of suggested movement, and most of it celebrates and warns us of nature, describing our place within it, which is not high. The creatures depicted are not images of things which can be owned.

So I sent out my call to artists and some scientists, asking for a creative response to the problem of the ecology of our situation. I was less interested in ‘art’ than in a kind of honest search. In the show there are: apple trees, some lost and some found; a vertical garden; aerial photos of the marshes, taken from a kite; the genome of wheat; a river of reeds; a confessional which contains the sea; paintings of diving, of pollen and pollution. I chose 65 makers and have come close I think to making something like a garden of odd things in the church, the work representing what I feel to be the fecund, fertile, untidy, imperfect echoes of the church of St Margaret of Antioch, its traces of wall colour, remnants of the blaze of images it once contained in textiles, glass and paint. I wanted the exhibits to fill the main body of the church in the way it once would have been filled with people and animals, each distinct and earthy, clumsy, mobile, just what they are, thought and art striving to be something, whether coming close to it or far. The building is as imminent as the exhibits. The work is reflective and conceptual as a dawn walk, as playful as a plastic spoonbill, or as plain as a map or a genome. 

Helen Breach: Spoonbills

While the exhibition has been on, the church has been in use for two weddings, two funerals and a village fete; each time the art work giving way to brides, undertakers, coffins or book stalls and this is how it should be; a reminder. Margie Britz’s Mandala, all bones and skulls is wheeled to one side, to make way for a wedding, displacing Andrew Schumann’s sculpture The Garden of Earthly Delight. I swept the floor clean and talked to mourners or wedding guests who were shocked initially, to find that there were ‘things’, ‘Bestiaries’ and ‘Bats’, a ‘Confessional’ with a trouser press, in the space there. I liked the way something allowed all these events to occur together; new art, odd things, unfamiliar, taking part in local personal, emotional and traditional rituals; the woman with the new hat. Out of these encounters came conversations and recognition and integration of art and life, present and past that seemed at any rate to me, to be fruitful, grounded in different practicalities. 

I talked to as many people as possible, maybe too much, but hopefully I spoke and went away in the right proportions. Mostly I liked to see visitors engrossed in something, peering in to look at the Mandala’s dead frogs or the cement snails on the 1901 mapped oars, or, thinking of the sea, the monument in the floor to the young man drowned three hundred years ago. I do not know what kind of stories or thoughts all these things engendered. Thanks though, to the girl from Stibbard Primary School who rushed up saying, “Ian Ian Ian.... The Confessional’s gone wrong. Come quick!”, and pulled me along to look. Or...the boy who thought that the chair attached to Sophie Dawson’s Dawn Walk was a Murderer’s Chair, because one of his mates had heard a scream from the IPod’s recording of the animal sounds of the previous dawn. I put him right and tried to turn the conversation to the imagination. He preferred his Murderer’s Chair, and so do I. 

I think England is becoming mean. I wanted a show that, whatever else it is, is generous. It was fun to do, and I hope fun to visit; raising thought;  a dark subject; a show intended to be buoyant, which appears and will go, leaving a space for new curators and makers.

Ian Starsmore

Exhibition: open each day 10.30 to 5pm; to August 4^th.

Web and blog: cleycontemporaryart.org/

Breaking the Silence: Lines on The Royal Birth

Lines On The Royal Birth 

or My Bid for the Laureateship

The duchess has given birth to a male heir 

Let there be barbecues, son et lumiere

Let bald primadonnas tie ribbons in their hair

Let garden gnomes rejoice in floral borders

Let there be würlitzers and bass recorders 

Let alcoholics put in their last orders

Let bulky policemen wear a skimpy dress

Let rectors rhapsodise and bishops bless

Let there be orgies of public happiness

Let royal correspondents set fire to their pens

Let there be Kate-theme parties in the Fens

Let men use women’s facilities and women men’s

Let windows flap, let buttons be undone 

Let obsessive punsters make the perfect pun 

Let the Windsor sun shine on the Windsor son

Behold the Commonweal’s new wealth of nations

Proclaim an end to our trials and tribulations

The male heir’s here. Begin the celebrations

In Berlin for DW Agenda programme

More time passes. On Friday Deutsche Welle sent me an email to try to arrange another occasion for a studio talk show about current affairs, in my case about Hungary. There had been three previous attempts to bring me over but I was busy each time. At last the time was clear and I could go.  I caught a plane on Monday and returned late Tuesday evening.

Arriving in Berlin about 4:30, I took the train to Berlin Zoo, then it was one stop on the U-Bahn and a short walk to the motel. The idea was to settle in and then to meet dear friend and fellow writer K at 7pm, but when she didn't turn up I rang her. It seems she hadn't read my email properly and that she thought I meant Tuesday evening. She was staying outside Berlin and she said she'd come in by car - about an hour's journey. I tried to dissuade her but she insisted. Then, about fifteen minutes later there was another call from her to say the engine was dead. So we cancelled and I went to eat by myself around the corner on a rapidly darkening night.

Soon enough there were rumbles of thunder and lightning began to play in the distance. It was quite a smart restaurant. Nearest to me was a German-speaking white mother and an English-speaking black father with a young black child who spoke both languages. The boy clearly wanted a lot of attention and kept interrupting their conversation, needling them. They handled it pretty well. I might have lost my temper. Two smiling wraith-like waiters attended on me. The food was very good. The lightning flashed. The child shouted. There was just the odd spot of rain. I ate a Wiener Schnitzel - very good it was too - with a glass of Pilsner, ran to a sweet and a coffee then headed back to the hotel and tried to sleep. The room was stuffy, but when I opened the window the traffic roared. It was about 2 or 3 before I nodded off. Breakfast was full of young people helping themselves to the continental necessities, with one or two older types like me.

After breakfast and packing I walked over to the DW studio where I discovered - I should have known - that it was TV not radio. I was made up, had gel applied to my hair, then sat in the studio with my fellow guests, a Wikileaks spokesman and a Professor of computing and robots at the Free University. It was odd to be flown over from East Anglia to Germany to be part of an entirely political programme in English. Melinda, the anchor, was a sharp minded and sharp eyed chair.

The programme was forty-five minutes long and I didn't make a fool of myself though I did pull a lot of silly faces - maybe I am always doing that, just not seeing myself do it. I liked my fellow panellists, both clearly good intelligent people. We talked about USA surveillance and about the potentially good use of drones. My own starting point was the Councl of Europe's decision not to put Hungary under formal monitoring.

This was the programme, that is if this link still works, and continues to work in the future. I enjoyed it. So much to say, so many details, so little time. It's hard to pace yourself and to select the best possible detail. You don't know the questions in advance and must think fast. They seemed pleased, but maybe it's theur business to seem pleased. I was labelled Poet and Translator at one point and Commentator at another. Was I becoming the latter?

But there will be more to talk about regarding Hungary soon. I also want to write about the Meir of Norwich launch and will try to do so tomorrow.

Berlin tomorrow, Hungary today:The struggle for the soul of Hungary

I want to write about one more event at Worlds 13, but there is no time tonight and tomorrow I am flying to take part in a radio discussion on Deutsche Welle radio about the current situation in Hungary.

What has changed in Hungary since my last piece here or the article I wrote for The Guardian?

Nothing dramatic just the same unremitting take-over of all civil and cultural institutions: art, music, theatre, literature. The EU was given the option of putting Hungary through a formal monitoring process but that was voted down in favour of a more informal watching brief. I hope they continue watching.

The take-over is by two means: first, the stuffing of the respective boards with government supporters and the non-renewal of contracts for internationally recognised leaders and directors who are not to the government's taste; second, the financial strangulation of institutions that represent different values from those espoused by the government.

The chief - in fact the only - strategy of the government and its supporters abroad is to insist that any criticism of them is an attack on honest decent Hungarians. For all purposes the government seeks to identify itself with 'the nation' and to squeeze out of public life anybody who has a different conception of the nation.

At the same time they raise the rhetorical stakes and encourage campaigns of hatred against all opposition. The fact that those they attack represent the best of Hungary to those abroad does not strike them.

The rhetorical terms of what I increasingly think of as Orbánia, develop naturally out of an Orbánian language that is capacious enough to include more extreme related forms, such as that used by the now officially anti-Semite, Zsolt Bayer, call it Bayerian, and the language of the fascist Jobbik, say Jobbikisch.

Or so one thinks in a charitable mood. In another mood it seems ever more likely to me that Bayerian is the true core language and the official Orbanian is just the polite form of it.

*

On a personal level I was extraordinarily honoured to be voted to become an associate member of the Széchenyi Literary and Arts Academy, the academy to which the finest Hungarian writers, composers, visual artists, film directors and architects have belonged and do belong (check those lists of names: they are a roll-call of what Hungarian culture has meant Hungary and abroad in the last and present centuries), and among whom anyone would be proud to be numbered.

But the Széchenyi is not a government tool so, like any other not entirely loyal institution,  it must be financially strangled, great writers, artists and all. When the Academy wanted to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of its new constitution and looked to put together a programme of events it applied for a grant and was immediately turned down with no reason offered.

Just imagine this, for a second, in this country.

This is the story I am about to pursue and I want to get it dead right before writing it.

Make no mistake. This is not about attacking Hungary or Hungarians: it is a battle for the soul of Hungary, a Hungary that exists beyond the definition of the so-called patriots. (See such 'patriot' comments here.)

In the meantime I have a translation to finish and have almost finished.

Tomorrow morning Berlin then.

Literary Festival Worlds 13: Geoff Dyer and myself, summing up

 

Day Four

Since Geoff Dyer came directly before me it was hard to do any kind of justice to his provocation which was, as ever, the full value Dyer, meaning it was a series of probing, funny, perceptive, ironic yet passionate points that rained down on the field below as if from a plane that was simultaneously performing aerobatics. In other words Geoff is sui generis and summing him up without actually becoming him is very difficult. 

At the core of his provocation was the connection between book and self, the way books communicated with each other, in fact how any work of art communicates with another. He paid homage to his great mentor, John Berger, who was, he said, the English equivalent of Barthes and Benjamin. He cited George Steiner's "Latent in every act of reading is the compulsion to write a book in reply". He talked of his own But Beautiful in which he completes or invents meetings between great jazz musicians. He showed us photographs of jazz musicians together - Ben Webster with John Coltrane for example - and played us a YouTube of Webster playing Chelsea Bridge, over which he began to read a part of his own writing about the Webster (this irritating Rozalie Hirs, the one poet-musician writer among us). 

He talked of themes in photography and how they sparked responses in other photographers, and of his own book on photographs featuring blind people, hats, backs, fences, and so forth. How does one reconcile the successive and the simultaneous (how in fact does one distinguish one from the other sometimes)? Artists quote each other, riff on each other, criticise each other. His own 'greatest achievement', he told us, was turning a book about tennis into a book about Tarkovsky's Stalker.

The discussion that followed turned for a while to the problems of branding and copyright, and why words might be more subject to such trademarking than images or musical phrases are. (Titles are apparently not copyrightable). David Szalay asked a fascinating question that has sometimes occured to me, 'Can too much criticism interfere with the creative process?' How does theory inform or determine writing? How far does any criticism influence the writer? How far does it make her self-conscious?


Nothing of the two paragraphs above was written as part of the summing up. I was too busy thinking about Geoff's provocation, the summing up itself, and very aware of the shortness of time. If I had to sum up Geoff's provocation now I might come up with a comic image if only because his provocation invites us to laugh at the performance of what I sometimes think of as the mischievous dramatic character 'Geoff Dyer' - but that wouldn't do justice to the clarity of his ideas, the way he presents them, the extent of his scholarship and the passion and energy he applies to any subject whether that is the First World War, D H Lawrence, photography, music or film.

The seriousness comprises the apparent lack of seriousness. I remember Geoff some other time on the subject of The Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert. I think there is something of that burning about both the man and the provocation. In the spirit of the provocation, and very much after the event, I offer him the image of a burning match. It's only a match in a wooden mannequin's fingers, but it can set fire to a great many things.

The conclusion of my summing up follows. Those who want to listen to it as a continuous single piece can find it here. It is about 20 minutes long.

I want to write two more blogs about the festival - about the readings as a whole, and about the launch of Into the Light, the Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Meir of Norwich.

*

Conclusion of summary

I sometimes feel that, as a poet among novelists - there are just two of us here - we are like children who have been allowed to come away from our free-to-experiment best-contemporary educational sandpits to engage in conversation with serious adults, who, like, actually make a living from their art, so we too can talk about their serious art. 

We poets tend to think that the world of language began with two equally important imaginative acts, the poetic act and the story-telling act: Mr What’s This, and Mrs What’s Next if you like and that furthermore that in our heart of hearts we all know this to be the true. 

But we must after all be children because here you see what I have brought you from the sandpit - poet’s toys. A plain fork, a toy cabin, a second-hand book on which someone has scribbled, a plastic wrestler known sold in a cheap shop, an everyday bottle, and this piece of tissue that I will take back so I might put it to its proper use. 

And this one short poem, which is in fact a piece of marginalia, one based on a translation out of the Arabic of Mahmoud Darwish that I was handed by Mimi Khalvati as a technical exercise. Mine isn’t a translation but a transplantation as, for all I know, his original poem might have been from something he had long read and forgotten. The life that he loves in his poem, We Love Life Whenever We Can, is what he knows and sees around him. My small annotation or piece of marginalia is composed of what I see about me. (Click on the poem to magnifiy it.)

I end with a photograph I took of the developing perigee moon at 3am on the night before the last day of the festival when I couldn't sleep. It's how thinking looked then.

Literary Festival Worlds 13: Peng Lun / Eric Abrahamsen and Masashi Matsuie / Michael Emmerich

                                              Peng Lun                                   Eric Abrahamsen

                                                       Masashi Matsuie                            Michael Emmerich

Day Three

In Peng Lun and Eric Abrahamsen's provocation we were introduced to Han Han, a teen prodigy who was not much good at school. In the 1980s China introduced a one-child-per-family policy and Han Han is one of the first of that generation of single children. His generation is the one that fully embraced the internet with all its implication of freedom. Han Han was no good at school but while at school produced teenage novels using the slang of his contemporaries and became a phenomenon by doing so.  In 2003 he set up a blog that dealt out advice and criticised the government as a result of which some of his blogs were deleted. In 2010 he established a magazine called The Party, the first issue of which sold a million and was immediately banned because of its politics. Han Han was credited with introducing the concept of irony, which, much to my surprise, was apparently missing in Chinese society. He moved into China's Twitter equivalent - then he did a lot of other stuff. The question was whether he is a bluffer, a hollow vessel.

In fact the question behind the question is whether any technology that deploys such short texts can say anything of substance at all. When everything is reduced to a tweet the whole rhythm of thought was likely to be endangered. Would it be possible to find a technology that slowed us down?

In the discussion Ruth made her point about technology defeating time. We talked about the idea of the serialisation of longer work and the way longer formats work on television. Nicky Harman mentioned some very wordy blogs. I, of course, brought up the question of poetry (Eric having said before the session that he didn't have a poetic muscle in his body) which then covered the tweet as a potential literary form. Just as the sonnet comprises 14 lines, so the tweet comprises 14 characters. Both are constraints.


It was undoubtedly the ill-educated boy with his genius for hitting on formats his own rebellious generation would instinctively understand who stole the show. He being a product of the single-child policy in China was addressing his cyber-brothers and sisters in the language of a shared yet lonely virtual adolescence, a world that was in revolt with the authority that created it and was seizing on the nature of electronic social communication as if it were discovering  and creating messages in bottles - it was only that the bottles were by their nature small so the message could not convey the full meaning of, say, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Poetry appeared here very briefly as something you might find in one of these bottles and I want to return to that bottle at the end. Poetry is the message in the bottle.

*

We returned to the issue of the first person novel - the 'I' novel - in Masashi Matsuie and Michael Emmerich's provocation. The complexity of the I form in Japanese involves very many different words for, as well as uses of, and implications of, the first person singular. Masashi Matsuie (as translated by Michael Emmerich) began by referring to a speech by the nationalist mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto, in which he defended the use of comfort women - a form of female enslavement - during the war. Finding his opinion fiercely opposed he called on the complexity of the first person singular as a defence, suggesting that it wasn't he who had said it but some other 'I' figure.

From here we proceeded to a discussion of the various uses of I, and indeed its occasional absence in general discourse as well as in novels. One might exclude any version of the pronoun unless it were absolutely necessary to incude it.  Social relations govern use, as one would expect. The negotiation between self and others has many shades of grey. A novel might move from one form of I to another depending on contexts such as time and occasion. This makes it hard for the translator into English who has a much narrower choice. Translations, Michael E stressed, were very different from the originals. My personal thought was that subtle shades of social relationship might not be peculiar to Japan and that most languages will have ways other than the pronoun to indicate such shades. It also brought to mind my parents' early comment on the use of capital I in English as opposed to the lower case 'you', since in Hungarian I takes the fom of the lower case én, whereas 'you' in its various direct forms (Te, Maga, Ön) deploys capitals. "In England the speaker is more important than the listener."

Michael E was very careful to preface his comments with the words "Translator's Note:" and deployed as much irony as he could to point out a sense of distance between general comment and subtlety of meaning. To illustrate his point about the difficulties and subtleties involved in the artistic act, he talked of language as a solid wall (like the wall of the cathedral behind us) and the work as a piece of tissue paper thrown at the wall.


Among all the shadows and nuances of the Japanese first person singular in Matsashi Matsuie and Michael Emmerich’s presentation I wondered how that first person singular might address itself in the mirror as it was shaving or putting on its make-up, in the primal shock of the self in its own momentary nakedness, how that endlessly shifting set of communications all languages conduct with both self and other relates to say, the shifting names and forms of the internet. This was interpreted [summer-up’s note] in the light of the deadpan translator’s note, above all in the beautiful image of the tissue paper thrown against the wall, a wall I kept straining at because, as a poet, the wall seems not quite so stable as the walls of the cathedral seem to be. The wall of course is language in the metaphor and the tissue is the work of art the artist throws at it. As a poet my sense of the wall is that it i one that it constantly making and remaking itself, parts falling off, others being patched, always something new being built. You’re just another brick in the wall, as the song had it - yes but we have our tissue paper, and I as a poet will now provide my own. It is clean - I think. And even when it isn’t it may be worth throwing at James Joyce’s snot green sea.

Literary Festival Worlds 13: Lichtenstein, Möring

Day Two

Rachel Lichtenstein brought us both a book and an application but the app was the star.  It was free for a start and we got excerpts from it. Her subject was the psychogeography of Diamond Street, Hatton Garden. The app is intended to support the book by lending it extra dimensions in terms of interviews, commentary from experts and writers like Iain Sinclair, historical photographs, video clips and trips under the streets into the sewers to see where the old rivers ran. The app uses GPS to trigger  the programme in much the same way as Words in Air does, and one may enter the selected area from any point. The whole thing was captivating, somewhere between museology, archivism, guide book and literature. 

 

The image I will carry away from Rachel Lichtenstein’s enthralling programme is an amalgam of an old diamond dealer and the moment we enter the sewers of London. It presents us less with a story than with a layering of stories, a palimpsest in fact - and that to my mind is more a kind of poetry than a work of continuous and developing narrative. It is not so much the story of how we got here, but what the sense of being here actually is. Nor is it the case that one question is more interesting than the other - both are questions we are constantly asking ourselves. 

How the app stands in relation to the book might seem to be the central question. In discussing this Rachel talked about the Talmud and the idea of marginalia, a relation between scripture and commentary. 

Here I have a copy of The Tempest I picked up in a second-hand bookshop. I bought it not because I didn’t have other copies of the play but because of this. It was the text - the marginalia was not eliminating the text. It was reflecting on it and in some ways modifying and enriching it. 

*

We began with the image of books in crisis but the claim that the literary novel was very much alive. Marcel Möring referred us to the example of Chernobyl, where despite the nuclear disaster and the following leak, nature has quickly taken over. Just so with the novel, which is, he said, an invention, not a construct. The novel is the way we see and think: it is, he said, 'urgent very urgent' The crisis was a function of the market on the one hand and - so I read between the lines of reference to France and French writing - of French theory on the other. He talked about the Dutch Reformed Church that had adopted guitars and happy-clappy services and instituted these instead of Psalm 23. Supply and demand do not work for the soul. Let us be bold, let us be puzzling, let's explore the immense freedom of thought that is the novelist's responsibility.

There was some hestitation before discussion broken by Michelle de Kretzer's, 'We feel ashamed.' Geoff Dyer wondered whether the literary novel was all that it was cracked up to be, and if literary reportage were not more interesting. Jounralism, he suggested, was the new literature. Chandrahas Choudhury was not sure that reportage should pick up too many tricks of fiction. Sjön took the discussion back to notions of 'counter-culture' and 'underground' as ways of disrupting the dominance of commercial fiction. Will Self's Umbrella mentioned as an example of innovative fiction, though others suggested that pastiches of modernism are not daring or genuinely innovative: they are pastiches. The question, Jon Cook argued, was what distinguishes the writer as an artist.

Marcel’s passionate and moving plea for a serious literature, or rather for the serious task of the literary novel in a world of commercial publishing, struck many chords. It was a cry - to link back to Shakespeare - in Henry V’s words before Agincourt, to stiffen the sinews and summon up the true blood of what we might yet be and aim for. The novel, as defined by assumption in the provocation is the blood we should summon. So my image here is of an Agincourt of the world’s bookshelves. It is Disco Inferno, the wrestler, parts of whose body can distinctly twitch.