More Burning Reviews

This from Anna McKerrow at the Book Trust, ahead of the Eliot Prize awards in about a week and a half's time...

The title-named series of 14 poems in George Szirtes’ The Burning of the Books and other poems links neatly into a sense of place seen through the prism of species or class identification: unlike plants that are wilfully misclassified, here, books and libraries lose their power to organise and inspire and instead are collaged with cities and mobs into one chaotic and beautiful whole, which is then flayed and burned alive. The semi-narrative sequence of these 14 poems, which in themselves seem to employ a patchwork or collage structure, explores the emotive and uncompromising practice of book burning.

'By a course of intensive study in the appropriate libraries,
Those burning places of the intellect, those driers out
Of the eyes where barbarians gather with their torches
And rank upon rank of shelves, tongues and footnotes
Are burning as always, as is their nature, in the streets
Of the city that opens like a book and must itself always be burning.'

(From 'Postscriptum')

The extreme and expansive passion in these poems are what struck me, and what has me now keeping my fingers firmly crossed for Szirtes to win the prize again (he won in 2004 for Reel). Indeed, as the reader, you feel your eyes and fingers burning as you read Szirtes’ seemingly effortless yet gloriously incendiary verse. The burning of books in the title of his book relates to a hateful exercise in ignorance and intolerance carried out at many times during history, but it could also be said to reflect the burning intellect and the fire of creativity. Thus, books are symbols of the human desire for knowledge and communication, for something above the body’s basic needs – books that burn with potential:

'Life is annotation. Hunger and annotation. It is knowledge
We hunger for, letters we drink, desire in our bloodstream
For the fat, visceral, blood-bound flesh of our books.'

(From 'Consuming Passion')

The Burning of the Books and other poems is a large work that deserves an entry to itself.

It's a lovely cheering review on a cold day. I am going in to the local BBC studio on Friday morning to record three short poems (they can't be more than a minute long, which rules out all the title sequence). One of them might be used on the Today programme next week. But then again it might not.

Abel Gance's Napoleon

In the Comments under the previous post an interesting conversation has begun to develop about arthouse - or as Mark prefers it, art house - cinema. In the course of it we started talking about sheer length and the priorities of commercial production. I don't want to say much now about Gance's five and a half hour film, Napoleon (1927) just to put up three clips, the first of them being ten minutes from the actual film. It is the snowball fight scene from Napoleon's childhood.



The second is Kevin Brownlow talking about Gance's film, Brownlow having assembled a longer version and slowed it down so that the silent film moves more naturally. It is, I think, Brownlow's version with Carl Davis's music that was shown on TV, in episodes, some years back. It blew me over. I thought I had rarely seen anything so beautiful in cinema. Brownlow's own enthusiasm is clear.



The third is a personal, critical view, not of Napoleon but of another, earlier, Gance film, one that Brownlow refers to above as an influence on Eisenstein and others La Roue (1922 or 1923) by Kristin Thompson.



She is tough on his melodrama, but who wasn't melodramatic in the Twenties? Melodrama can be extraordinarily purgative as well as grossly sentimental. I also think it is a being a bit sneaky to attack someone for a minor work that seems to be a preparation for a greater one. But let that go... Do watch.

Arthouse: Northfork

I like arthouse films. I like them on principle. It is necessary to like them because unless some of us do they don't get made, and cinema can be much more than variations on the seven main plots added to whatever the zeitgeist, the state of technology and the current star system permit. I like them slow, I like them enigmatic, I like them a bit dotty. I don't mind them being portentous, I don't mind them being a little up themselves, as people say. It is fascinating to see what the visual imagination can do over a stretch given a bit of equipment, a bit of money and a lot of devotion. It doesn't mean I can't walk out of them as I did out of Derek Jarman's The Tempest many years ago. I just thought, I love this play, the one by Shakespeare, and there is only so much self-referential crap I can take at a sitting, and, come to that, there must be more comfortable places to sit. (Granted, I might have been wrong about both the film and there being more comfortable places to sit.)

And there is Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr and Jim Jarmusch...

So, yes, in principle, I am all for them. It is a civic duty - though I do sometimes lapse in practice.

A Christmas present from H & R, we watched Northfork a couple of nights ago with a certain gawky fascination. Rather than try to describe events in it I want to take a commenter from IMBd, one machineart, who sums it up like this:

"Northfork" tells the story of a '50s era small town in the middle of nowhere that is two days shy of being inundated and submerged thanks to the U.S. government's desire to make a reservoir on the place where the town stands. It's a wry parable about loss and remembrance, featuring angels, dreams, premonitions, and the most hilarious government reclamation functionaries since "Repo Man."

Adumbrated by another commenter, psychdiva1, who says:

Whether you wish to view the more fanciful scenes as literal or the product of a dying boy's imagination, one strong theme connects all the stories. Change happens. Each sub-story revolves around a profound change. The little boy is dying. The town is being evacuated. The movie illustrates how we get dragged along by changes we are powerless to stop. We should ideally make the best of them and accept whatever heartache they cause. Some look forward towards a new freedom (the little boy) and some obstinately refuse to accept them (the ark family). And Walter has to learn the lesson that there are some changes we think are over and done with that must be relived (reburying his wife). Just because we think we've buried a chapter in life under the ground doesn't make it so. This is shown so clearly by the conversations between Walter and his son Willis.

So now you have the scenario and you know about the dying little boy, and the repo men, who are really angels, as you can tell by the little white feather in each one's hatband, and the ghosts who are more or less everyone else, and Daryl Hannah who plays a ghost character called Flower Hercules who hangs around with a sinister English ghost called Cup of Tea who keeps offering everyone cups of tea, a melancholy juvenile cowboy called Cod, and a blind-as-a-bat-yet equipped with a range of fold-out spectacles character (see picture above) who can tell by very close examination whether a set of angel wings are really angel wings. His name is Happy and at one point his arms seems to fall off. Ah, well..

But I haven't yet told you about the man with two wives who lives in an ark, or that brief moment of sex in a deserted house (they are all deserted houses) and about the woman with a strange driftwood face, straight out of David Lynch, via Nosferatu, who serves the repo men soup in a deserted empty eaterie. And there is a strange creature, like a neckless giraffe made out of an old broken laundry rack and a lot of old pyjamas that teeters here and there for about five minutes without amounting to much then finally keels over. David Lynch's man, Kyle MacLachlan, gets a little less screen time than the pyjama-giraffe, but you also get Nick Nolte as Father Harlan who prays a lot for the boy and may actually be alive, or at some stage between life and death, though I wouldn't put much firm money either way.

As for the narrative (why havent I mentioned the narrative?) it consists of the repo men trying to get all the remaining ghost folk out of the valley before it's turned into a reservoir. And the little dead boy, who is dead.

When I put it like that you will see that Northfork does not lack for variety and invention, and why it is everything an arthouse film can be (see list above). The black and white photography is insistent and edgy, sometimes comically yet statuesquely beautiful, the acting is generally fifties-deadpan, the pace - it does have pace of a sort - is quirky, slow and properly dreamlike, because, I suppose, a heavily symbolic yet enigmatic, elegiac dream is what it is supposed to be. The dream is of death and vanishing and lingering human presence.

People have compared it to Jarmusch's Dead Man(which is marvellous) and Wenders's Wings of Desire, which is also rather splendid. In fact both Dead Man and Wings of Desire - two films about ghosts and angels, haunted places and dream journeys - are considerably grander than Northfork. But Northfork is not bad. I wouldn't unwish Northfork . I'm glad it's there. I might even watch it again just to see what the giraffe was up to.

Oh, and Daryl Hannah wears a wig. There is no suspense about this, it is clear from the start.

Pressan Ambo

In their letter to to the people of Wootton Bassett, Islam4UK write:

We begin by inviting all non-Muslims to Islam, the perfect and most beautiful way of life, a favour from Allah (God) to mankind to take him out of the darkness of worshipping his own desires to the exclusive worship, submission and obedience of Allah alone, without partners and to testify the Messengership of the final Prophet Muhammad (may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him). We urge you to embrace Islam and save yourselves and your family from the hellfire and not to believe the lies and distortions which the Western media and non-Islamic regimes would have you believe about Muslims and their true intentions. Islam means submission and the Muslim is the one who submits to the will of God in his life. Verily the Messenger Muhammad told us that whoever heard his name from the Jews and Christians and did not believe would be held accountable for that on the day of judgement.

Submission, obedience, hellfire, accountable...A nice line in threats. The march probably won't happen since everyone is against it from the Prime Minister down to the local mayor, but the threat has been made, and that changes things beyond the publicity grab of Anjem Choudary's pretty little group. Wootton Bassett becomes a symbol. Choudary has made it so.

I was thinking of Pressan Ambo in Auden and Isherwood's The Dog Beneath the Skin. Pressan Ambo was a microcosm of British rural hierarchy: what Auden and Isherwood felt they were up against. Today, Wootton Bassett is something else, but it has begun to assume a function beyond what it normally is and does. The town remains itself but it functions as an organ through which the stream of dead soldiers passes. Its people remain real people, best defined by themselves, but now, at another level, through the threats of Islam4UK, they become the people, or shall we say, an aspect of the people, of Britain. I don't think I am making this up: I suspect that is the inevitable role the town must now play, for however long or however briefly. That is the way its existence will be generally addressed, though in veiled terms, in public discourse. When people talk of Wootton Bassett they will mean more than a small Wiltshire town through which a route happens to pass.

So the question is: what is that aspect? What lines of power run through it? I will be thinking about this for a while yet. Maybe scribbling a bit too just to see where it leads.

Sunday night is.... Jethro Tull, and the beach at Winterton

Still living in the past, but with some bravura...



...and some pictures of Winterton Beach, yesterday..


1. The beach




2. Young seal, mother in sea



3. L-R, Tomas, Amanda, me (in ridiculous cap), Nick, Luke with Adele




4. C maintains elegance (note empty beach and blue blue gloves)




5. Tomas (age 5) about to throw a snowball at me




6. Looking back towards land, light fading, clouds building

A Picture: A poem and some notes

A Picture of My Parent with Their First Television

I see them before the television, the proud owners
of a wooden case in which the four-o-five
presents its milky versions of success
with the last official faces of a time
that was always more dead than alive,
when Hanratty cleaned the windows and a crime
was solved by men with briefcases and bowlers,
when gentlemen made jokes in evening dress.

They fought their way to this, to Lady Barnett,
to Bernard Braden and John Freeman, Kathie Kay
and Alan Breeze, to all those names of power
that solved nothing but could somehow fill
the hours before they slipped away
to private lives that grew more private still,
past old reliable faces by which they set
their clocks precisely to the latest hour.

Some blurred depth in their eyes won't come to rest:
perhaps they're trapped in what they bought,
in all their trappings, in the slim white frame
of the square photograph they sent back home
to show the television. Now they're caught
and solemn. Slowly they become
the stillness by which they are both possessed.
They're listening intently for a name

that once had power, on lips that formed the sound
in darkened flats, in beds in which they slept
and touched each other. Some act of violence
has pitched them here before the screen.
The actors know their speeches, are adept
at pulling faces, know when to go. They've been
elsewhere and are there still, on neutral ground,
of which this patch of grey is evidence.

Notes

Verse 1
That was indeed our first television, in a terraced house in Colindale, London. The television picture was then comprised of 405 lines (four-o-five). Some years after this photo was taken (I think I myself took it, under my mother's instructions, the low angle seems about right) the screen was upgraded to 625 lines when BBC2 came along and the picture was suddenly much sharper. James Hanratty was found guilty of the A6 murders and hanged. Later evidence proved him innocent. He had been my piano teacher's window cleaner, I learned. There was a TV series called Murder Bag, that later became, No Hiding Place, starring Raymond Francis that my parents, particularly my mother, were addicted to. The policeman there wore a bowler. Evening dress was often worn on television for entertainment.

Verse 2
For Lady Isobel Barnett, Bernard Braden, John Freeman, Kathie Kay and Alan Breeze, see links as provided by the wondrous Wiki, that does have its uses. They were names of power in various senses: a name of power is something you conjure spirits by; they were well-known so their names were memorable and therefore powerful; they exerted a power over my parents; television is run on electric power. (Is that enough reasons? ) And, of course, the shows on which they appeared were at regular times. You could set the clock by them. As to private lives, everyone's life is private, but the first sense of privacy you ever get is the privacy within which your parents lie cocooned.

Verse 3
More punning on 'trappings' of course. Puns and poems are close allied. The photograph is not exactly square, though I remembered it as such. There is, I think, a certain ceremonial solemnity about the way my parents pose. All photographs have this solemnity in one way (think of Barthes' idea of photographs asmemento mori), but this, I feel, is a special solemnity, appropriate to the ceremony of coming through. The television meant we had come through. That's why we had several copies of the photo. They were sent to friends back in Hungary as reassurance.

Verse 4
Some act of violence. Literally the Revolution of 1956, but I knew of the earlier violence of concentration camp and labour camp. And, on quite another level, I had the haunting feeling - one I still have - that life pitches us up in places, and that nowhere more is this evident than in photographs. The pitched moment. Who are the actors here? Those on television or the figures in front of the television? That is the question that really lies at the core of the poem.

*

The poem was written over twenty years ago and appeared in Bridge Passages (1988) so it is easier to talk about it now than it would have been then, and, in any case, I happen to have uploaded the photograph. It was one of a set of poems for which I devised a rhyme scheme: ABCDBDAC. I have no idea now why it was specifically that, except that I must have thought / felt, that the eye and ear would move into the first four lines thinking nothing was going to join up, but then it would all join up in a slightly unexpected way, nothing too symmetrical. A bit like life, in fact.

The set, titled 'Appropriations', numbered seven poems, all in the same form, though I suspect there were more than seven originally. They were about early memories of England: the language, the taste of salt by the sea at our first place of landing (Westgate-on-Sea), about the bodies of adults in the out-of-season boarding house where we were put up, especially when they tried to seduce each other; two poems about two early teachers; one about acclimatising to the seaside and being chased by a dog; and the one that is above to end with, once we were in London.

The poem was written a long time ago but the photograph shows a scene about thirty years before the poem. The set was called 'Appropriations' because the two teachers I wrote about were real enough and I was conscious of appropriating their lives - or that part of their lives that overlapped with mine - to my own purpose of shaping, which, no doubt, would have been misshaping as far as they were concerned.

I suspect one reason I am not a novelist is because of my uneasiness about appropriating others too readily.

Twenty-ten

Happy New Year to all those who read or follow this blog!

On New Year's Eve, the abbey bells start ringing at about 11;45, grant a brief silence, sound the twelve bells for midnight, then go a little wild for a few minutes before subsiding. Fireworks sputter and thud between the clangour, like drums that can't quite keep time. This morning we find a sprinkling of snow on frozen pavements. A harder frost is forecast for tonight, minus a few degrees.

My resolution is to finish the two novels I am translating from the Hungarian then leave translating novels altogether. One I may be able to finish before term starts, the other will last well into summer. I will sit down and write the prose book of memory, fiction and ideas I have long meant to write, but I will continue to translate poetry because there are poets I particularly want to translate and so few of us are available to do it.

C's resolution is to see the flocking of countless rooks as described in Crow Country. It's not far away, just a few miles. We could do it any day.

We usually walk the beach at Winterton to visit the seals in the first few days of January, always with good friends A and N, and anyone else who happens along: family, friends, visitors, publishers... Tomorrow is likely. Also tomorrow The Guardian will print (has printed) my suggestion of four lesser known places to visit in Norfolk, along with a picture of the abbey above, or so I am told, and, since Winterton is one of the four places, it might become less known, but that is the way of such articles and requests.

C and I went for a walk in the sunlit but icy early afternoon and met no-one until we suddenly came across a whole party of people walking together - presumably family plus friends - then no-one again, until the next group.

The rest of the day I have been working at Márai. The end is in sight.

There is something lovely about this dead time of year just after New Year's Eve. It's the silence. The well-wrapped soul curls up within itself and hovers. It is like being in a room with every window open, the snow drifting in. The snow and rooks.