On Blogging 1: style and attraction

I don’t much like the word. It comes from weblog but it sounds like blagging and plugging and bigging, and, as one literary website has it, Bleeugghing. The word isn’t attractive but the activity is worthwhile. Why?

I had no particular intention of writing a weblog originally. A site was suggested and I was asked what areas I would like in it. What I said then is, more or less, what you see on the site. The News was supposed to be simply a kind of listings. If anyone was interested it would tell them that I was going to do this or that public event. I tacked on Notes without a clear idea what that would be, just thinking it might be good to have a spare pocket or shelf. I still don’t quite know its proper purpose because the News section soon developed into a journal of thoughts and observations that, or so I first thought, I was chiefly writing for myself. Occasionally there would be, and is, a crop of events to list, but something else took over. Now it is a conventional blog.

I am a writer. I mean constitutionally a writer, meaning I write myself into a kind of written existence. My full existence therefore is, partly, a written existence. The old woman who said How do I know what I think till I see what I say? was a very wise old woman. How do we know what we think until we set it down and strive to develop it. Before that there are instincts, reactions, quick formulations that pass for thought. I am also, by nature, a fast thinker, sometimes faster than is comfortable. When compressed into the discipline and rhythms of poetry that can be useful. In terms of thinking through it can be too fast. The sheer manners of writing down thoughts slows and refines.

That is the reason I keep the blog up. I would not be writing a diary otherwise, and have only intermittently kept one (I found my 1996 Arizona diary on Sunday!) I like the brief flight of thought, the part poetic registering of sensory and other experience. All that will be obvious.

There was the question of language, the mode, if you like, of address. I think in most cases blogs – the interesting ones – mark out an interesting new hybrid territory of writing, somewhere between a column, a letter, and an intervention in a conversation. The best are not as formally public as a column (or a review), not as chatty as one kind of letter or as formal as another, but somewhat more formal, because more deliberate, than an intervention in a conversation. That, at least, is how I think, this particular blog has evolved.

Monday night (as opposed to Sunday night) is...

King Vidor's 1928 silent, The Crowd. Here beginneth...




The first time I saw this it struck me as great cinematic poetry. No great heroes or heroics, only the ordinary borne along on great gusts of flame. I'll put up bits of it during the week and say more later. Watch the boy coming up those stairs.

To Cheltenham and back by way of...

No, it's not like going to the Antarctic and back, but it does take a good five hours cross-country with two changes of train. That is why Sunday's post did not appear - lack of radio contact. I had been invited by Angela France to run a one hour workshop and do a reading for her group and that is what Sunday night was.

A little background. The genesis of this goes back to my complaint a good while ago about an invitation to read poems to a small group that told me, rather grumpily, that I would be paid nothing, should expect nothing, not even travel expenses, that there would be an entrance fee but that most writers donated it to the upkeep of the place, meaning, so should I. I turned it down, not because I don't do things for free - I do, when asked nicely or when there is a genuine good cause to be supported - but because I didn't like the manner of the person doing the inviting. Posh woman whistling up entertainment, I thought.

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INTERLUDE

In a similar way I recently received an invitation from a well known bookshop in Paris. Of course, I said. Nothing was said about payment but I am too much of a gentleman to ask and usually someone mentions it sooner or later. I don't hold out for minimum fees, like some. I don't insist on minimum accommodation of four star hotels. Offer me something, speak nicely to me, and I am yours.

Some time after accepting the invitation I did ask, because dates were crowding in on me. At this point it turned out there wasn't going to be a fee. They had forgotten to tell me. Very well, I shrugged, can you at least pay my travelling expenses? No, they said, but we can give you accommodation for one night and if you want to come back you can stay in the apartment another time. At this point I thought, why not? It is going to cost me about £200 but it's such a nice thing to do. A little later I received another email that said the accommodation was off too. On the other hand, by way of encouragement, they told me who else had accepted the same conditions: X and Y and Z... If these important writers were prepared to accept so should I. That was the implication. It was the implication that settled it for me. That, I thought, was arrogant of them, dropping names and leaving me with a sense of obligation.

Was I flattered to be asked? Yes, of course. I am always flattered to be asked anywhere and this, given the history and reputation of the bookshop, was particularly flattering, but I wasn't sure whether I was prepared to pay a lot of money to be flattered, not during term time, in the winter, when I am away a lot anyway.

I must say I felt mean thinking this. But then I thought, surely they are the ones being mean. I would go if they paid just part of my fare but I didn't want that 'greater folk than you have done this, sonny' business. In the end I felt quite angry. Yes, they would guarantee a large audience and sell lots of books. So they said. Well, they might sell a lot of books, but it would be they who would be selling them. A bookshop is a commercial business. They have money. Much more than I will ever have. They could at least make a gesture of hospitality. We pitiful, easily flattered, poets are suckers for gestures. But we should not be assumed to be pitiful. It wasn't even the proprietor or the manager who had written to me. He / she / it, presumably, was above such things.

Martin Bell once cursed the head of the institution I attended as a student. The head of the institution immediately fell ill. Beware the power of poets, pitiful as they are. They can curse, and flyte and rain misfortunes down on you.

And so my anger grew. Why should I be bullied by the supposed flattery? I have read in many places the equal, and more, of the bookshop and they weren't expecting me to come running out of sheer joy at being flattered. Let the others go if they want. I won't. Stuff them. If it is fame to be summoned to famous places, bugger fame. And so it stands.

Juvenile, I know.

END OF INTERLUDE
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The group in Cheltenham have very little money but they offered me a fee without traveling expenses and when they found out the cost of the journey they brought the fee up. The very kind proprietor of a guest house, a member of the workshop, offered me B & B for free. Both B's were good. It was generous. They were good people and the evening was a real pleasure. Alison Brackenbury and Nigel McLoughlin were in the audience. I drop their names because it's always nice to guide people to good books. And because it is genuinely flattering that they should come along.

I was thinking of an interesting exercise for them and came up with something - a couple of things - that I might put up as a post since they spring from some ideas about the narrative structure of lyric poems. The other thing I was going to do on Sunday was add to the Sunday night series of music or films, so I will do that tonight instead. In fact right now. The space above this.

Martin Amis: The Second Plane

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided : who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.

I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."

That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was most important ? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said : I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.


So wrote Patrick Kavanagh in 1938, speaking in passing - knowingly in passing - about 'the Munich bother'. Well, yes, we have lived in important places too and have the hindsight to know what became of the Munich bother, which, despite Gods making their own importance, turned out to have been a very significant bother.

Martin Amis has certainly been in important places and written importantly about them. He and we, both, are aware of that importance in the writing and, to greater or lesser degree, are wary of it. I should say I bought the book yesterday on an impulse, on popping into our little local bookshop and feeling I should buy something to help keep it going. So, Amis it was.

And Amis does not disappoint. He sometimes irritates but he does not disappoint. He held me through the night and the morning.

The book is a collection of his published work in the form of essay, report and fiction on the subject of 9/11. Let me get out of the way what irritates first.

Small stylistic twitches, for one thing. The deployment of obscure words where a perfectly good non-obscure one is ready to hand. I can't be bothered here to pick out the examples, as I would in a paper review, but it strikes me as an unworthy trick, an old one, and over-effortful.

The second irritation is less easily identified, but is, I think, a kind of conceit in the writing, a reaching after ponderous epigrammatic certainty, which is partly what the wary reader might well be wary of.

Then there is the quibble about the term 9/11. It's an American term because it was an American event. I think we can all get over that. Interesting things get said in the course of his essay, 'September 11' but the least interesting is the quibble about the styling of dates that is supposed to serve as framework.

And there is the one work of fiction, 'The Last Days of Muhammad Atta', which, I think, is poor. Poor, because I don't believe any of it. I don't mean by that that it is improbable. I am sure Amis did his research and I fully understand that it is an attempt to imagine the condition of the real figure, Muhammad Atta. I don't believe it because I know it is a work of fiction and that what he presents as events are things he has made up. True, that is the condition of fiction, but Atta was not fiction. There is a historical process, I think, that has to take place before life, and particularly a life so filled out with intent and intervention, can become fiction. It's not always a salutary process. Amis here reminds me of the boy who rushes in to grab the best seat in front of the TV because something important is on and he must be first. Frankly, Amis and his imagination simply don't matter in context. He is not only secondary to the event, he is utterly insignificant and doesn't know it. Not that he is more insignificant than anyone else, it's just that he should know the degree of his insignificance. He did something like this in Time's Arrow, which was also dodgy and presumptuous. And he wrote a book called The War Against Cliché, so he should know what a cliché is. Hard to see it in oneself, I grant that.

But the book remains compulsively readable, not so much because of what he argues (it isn't always clear to me what he is arguing), but because the mind at work is dramatically engaged. When he takes off the Great Journalist / Public Figure hat he is just a man like any other - albeit a highly gifted, intelligent, passionate and elegant man - trying to understand what is happening in the world.

The reason I am not clear about what he is arguing is that the terms Islamism, Islam and religion generally, flitter in and out of the discourse. He casts a fearful, furious, horror-sated eye now at one, now at the other, now at the third. It is hard to argue with his feelings about jihadist Islam. I suspect it would take considerable hypocrisy for any liberal or socialist to dismiss his position. It is not a good position but we are in it. Amis has done a fair degree of research into the roots of jihadism and the history seems right. It is the reading of the psychological condition that is the issue. Is he right on that? We shall never know, but I find the reading convincing. The lesson is that it seems more appropriate, somehow more proper, to attempt this understanding through the essay rather than through fiction. For now.

I am not sure he knows what he thinks of religion generally. He is rightly suspicious, but he doesn't quite work himself into the Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, Dennett position. And after all, the world has got so far with religion: the windings and focusings of the spirit in organised pursuit of transcendence don't necessarily lead to mass murder, nor have they very often done so. Bach and George Herbert and Farid ud-Din Attar, writer of The Conference of the Birds, do not share a bed with Sayyid Qutb. Religious zealotry - much like ideological zealotry - does lead to murder, but the common denominator there is zealotry. Zealotry tells us we are doing God's will, or the Party's will, or history's will, and that that is far more important than the next man's life.

Amis is a damn smart writer, there is no doubt, and every writer is allowed his or her weaknesses both as a writer and as a mind (though failures of mind eventually do tell in the writing). In the end what Amis is, indirectly, writing about is what defines us. We don't know that yet, but it may be an idea to come up with some definitions before we are wrongly defined by others. We are currently living in times when Gods are busy making their own importance. What do we say to them?

The Iron Fist

Late Saturday, thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons. (Associated Press, Dec. 27)


Charles Krauthammer article in Washington Post, via Tom Carew.

Jingle Jangle

Not from me personally. Title of track by Shur-i-Kan, aka son Tom, currently in darkest Brazil, DJing, but soon on his way back.



No animation, just the music. Here is his MySpace address. I know I should be too old for this, but somehow I am not.

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Reading Martin Amis's The Second Plane. More about that later.

Fairly typical BBC presentation of current Gaza situation this morning. Ehud Olmert says: 'We will treat the population with silk gloves, but will apply an iron fist to Hamas.' The BBC leaves out the silk gloves and leaves the iron fist for the whole population. Not that silk gloves describes the situation anywhere in Gaza, but Olmert does imply an intention and a distinction. But then the BBC make no use of the UN figures regarding military and civilian deaths (about 4:1 in terms of military to civilian at the moment) Why not? No, don't tell me.

Home movie palace

Since C has had flu she has felt like watching DVDs so we sit down together and watch them. That's in between work. Here they are, our Grand Entertainments, with comments.

1. No Country For Old Men Absolutely riveting, I think, and so did C. I had seen it before on a plane heading somewhere and it grabbed me then. It is really a very dark metaphysical piece about death arising, as it were, out of the soil itself in a pretty unforgiving landscape. A very neat touch putting the worst violence right up front, since ever after we are waiting to be faced with it again and by the end we don't need to see it at all to feel it. This being Coen Brothers there is throughout a kind of dangerous droll quality. It is not just entertainment: it is a proper work of movie art, not in the pretentious sense, but through sheer power of vision. Five stars *****

2. Michael Clayton. Very superior piece of film, we thought. Another I first saw as in-flight entertainment on the way to somewhere sufficiently far to show films, but it looked better this time round. Nothing looks very good in flight. Drum-tight pace and subtly folded narrative with the main film told from a point quite late on in the story, so we have to work our way forward to it. A general low-lit crippledness to the whole suits it well. It is a finely-pitched moral dilemma. Big agrochemicals versus one crazy enlightened lawyer, mediated by Clooney's Clayton. Clooney is excellent, as is Tom Wilkinson, and so is Tilda Swinton. Growlier and quieter than a thriller like LA Confidential, not really a thriller as such, but damn authoritative. Four stars ****

3. The Orphanage. This comes heralded and garlanded but is nowhere near as good as the film with which it is compared, The Others. An orphaned woman, now grown up, returns to the long empty orphanage with her doctor husband to help other misfit children. They themselves have an adopted child with HIV. The ghosts of earlier children, her long lost childhood friends, appear. Murder, bones, staircases, darkness, lightning flashes, cellars... All the apparatus is there without any particular freshness. Everyone walks about in the dark as it is scarier that way. Husband is clearly an idiot. The whole thing felt like a clumsy set up for the sake of a few faintly arty-gothic moments. One star *

4. The Man Who Wasn't There. Coen Brothers again, 2001. It is the third time we have watched this, the first time being when it came out on big screen and I am still trying to squeeze something extra out of it. I am not sure it's there to be squeezed though. Insignifcant people find themselves doing terrible things. The banality of evil. Droll evil. Heavy on film noir devices so everything comes at you in inverted commas. The performances are very good, it is beautifully shot, the atmosphere is dark. Billy Bob Thornton mumbles and dozes his way through it, James Gandolfini is nicely unctuous and Frances McDormand, as always, is terrific. Scarlett Johansson appears as a very average schoolgirl pianist. There is nothing really wrong with it at all. It's just that I suspect the tongue is in the wrong cheek. Hmm. Three stars ***

5. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock 1934. Now this appears fresh throughout, full of surprises. It is period, of a period roughly with the brilliant The Thirty-Nine Steps which was to follow a year later. It is not artily sophisticated like the The Man Who Wasn't There, it just goes ahead and does what it does, which is tell the story of an abduction ahead of a coming war. The characters are constantly surprising and disconcerting from the first scene onwards. Character is a wilder, freer concept here. Plot mechanics are more the issue. Leslie Banks is a proto Richard Hannay figure, Edna Best is his flirtatious, clay-pigeon shooting, liberated wife, and Peter Lorre is as transparently Peter Lorre as only Peter Lorre can be. It all feels a little too short perhaps, a little jerky, but it's a real live tidbit of genius. Not a major Hitchcock but four stars. And a bit. ****+

6. The Italian Job. The original 1969 version. Not sure why we chose to put it on. Wanted something light, facetious, fast and undemanding. I have never ever been as keen on the late 1960s post-imperial presentation of Cool Britannia as others seem to have been. Yes, it's camp and knowing and Michael Caine is a joy in the first flush of youth. Really it's a cartoon acted, if that's the word, by a bunch of lay figures, possibly including Rodney Marsh, Bobby Keetch, Charlie George and Alan Hudson. What do you mean they're not in the film? Oh yes, but there's a nice car chase. Did I mention the car chase? There is a car chase. On the whole I far prefer The Blues Brothers. I feel like a traitor saying that but it is very very true. Very well then. Two stars **