Gloria Stuart (actually Winifred Shaw) and Tony Curtis

Two of my favourite movie sequences of all time, the first in two parts. Busby Berkeley's work of brilliant vulgar prophetic genius, the Lullaby of Broadway number from Gold Diggers of 1935. (Dali? Pah! Infinitely cruder than Berkeley who is twice the Surrealist that he is!) I have written about it before, in fact wrote an entire radio programme in verse about it: it touches so many levers. Not that this is Gloria Stuart, who starred in the film, but Winifred Shaw who sang the song that is at the core of it, and does the haunting here.



I shudder every time I watch this, especially part 2, where something quite transformative and nightmarish happens while remaining perfectly and beautifully in keeping. I can't help but think of the three male dancers as Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. I don't know if anyone has done a comparison with Leni Riefenstahl but it's there for the taking.



And Tony Curtis. Curtis as Cary Grant as Shell Oil in one of the greatest of all screen comedies, because, like all good things, it is much more than that, lighter, more burlesque than Berkeley, but still moving on several levels. I don't mean it's darn clever (though it is) just more joyful and witty and sad than it has any right to be. Billy Wilder is the genius this time. And Monroe too. And Jack Lemmon. What a script! And such marvellous timing! I know everyone has scene this scene hundreds of times before but it remains as fresh as ever. If I were Curtis I wouldn't mind being remembered for this.



And the seduction scene on board the yacht?... More delight.

Train Dialogue

Swoop down to London to meet J at the European Commission, the Commission having kindly commissioned me to write a poem, for the opening of their new headquarters in Smith Square, in fact the old Tory HQ. The visit was to make contact and have a look at the building that is still in preparation. It is, I should say, a hard commission because it has a function: celebration. I have had one go at it which was not thought quite right. It was a sonnet that took as its subject the ruins and rebuilding of Europe after the last war. Formal, ceremonial, but maybe not quite celebratory. I wouldn't take on anything like this unless I actually believed in the project, but it is still hard. I keep thinking some kind of verse is called for, more than a poem, but there must be a poem in there.

From there straight to Shepherd's Bush to record an early poem, 'English Words' for use in the BBC programme, Something Understood. The recording is not at the BBC but at an independent studio in a small street near Shepherd's Bush underground station. I had looked it up before, but once at Shepherd's Bush I discover that, though the street is listed in the gazetteer at the back, it is too small to appear on the actual map. So I ring the studio to ask where it is. It's a busy thoroughfare, a noisy main road, and I can't hear the voice at the other end, so I tell them to hang on while I duck into the next quiet street. 'Where are you?' asks H, my contact. I look up at the street name and realise I am exactly where I'm supposed to be. I walk past the studio which is in a house. H pops out and calls me back. The recording takes only about as long as it takes to read the poem once, then a couple of lines to be patched and it's all over. I finish a cup of coffee they have kindly given me.

I had arranged to meet Jenny, a recent MA student, at Shepherd's Bush at 2pm but am early, so nip into a Kentucky Fried Chicken. This is of course Low Food, not High Food, but an abiding part of me loves Low Food and cheap friendly joints, and this is friendly, entirely Asian. Two bits of chicken with chips does very well, while slurping a Coke. Customers come and go. I read Poetry Review (am in the current issue) and feel comfortable and pleased with the cheap food world. There is a kind of low level democracy about the atmosphere, not exactly nostalgie de la boue, which would be too romantic a notion, nor am I high class enough to be looking down from any height, thank heaven. Jenny Joseph will wear purple when she's old. When I am truly old I will eat chips and KFC.

Jenny takes me to a higher class place altogether where I eat a higher class piece of tiramisu accompanied by a double espresso. We talk jobs and PhD's, then I'm off home.

*

On the second leg of the train journey I am marking MA scripts but feel exhausted. A group of school, or FE, students are all around me. Right in front of me stands a tall black American girl with a big stud under her lips. She is talking to a tall white American boy, slightly gawky but self-confident. As a matter of fact they both are because they talk at the top of their voices. They could sit down but choose to remain standing. Boy and girl rap - they throw brief hard challenges at each other. It's a kind of hard flirting, mutual machismo. She uses an expression I hadn't heard before: crotch pocket, then changes to middle pocket. I listen now because the language is interesting. It's pretty clear what crotch pocket is, it's also pretty clear it is a kind of challenge, not only to the boy but to anyone in earshot. Sheer bravado. You can practically feel her glowing with it. Her speech, his speech, both, are fast and inventive. The boy queries the expression for a second then brazens up to it. She is clearly enjoying the confrontation. 'I'm hard core,' she declares at one point. I can see that's the idea. Sitting behind her I only catch the odd glimpse of her face. It is not a beautiful or even pretty face, but it has life. She has a keen feminist ear and wants to elicit a sexist comment from the boy so she can round on him. He is wise to this, so she turns her ready-for-offence ire to a third person, not present, only reported. The boy is not fazed but continues grinning and responding. The train has been moving for a long time now and standing up is clearly a kind of dare. Eventually the girl in the seat next to the tall American girl stands up too, a blonde Englsh girl, much quieter, probably a bit embarrassed and it becomes a colloquy, the black girl directing more and more of her conversation at the other girl. Still standing, the boy says, 'I'm going to sit down. But only because I'm bored.' This represents a kind of victory for the tall black girl, and she too sits down, only just in time to get up again for Ely where the train half empties. They too go.

Both boy and girl are clearly intelligent. They both have pride. They get off together with mutual respect. I find I have enjoyed all this and felt like giving a small round of applause after each motormouth sally. Stichomythia, the Greeks would have called it. Crotch pocket is pretty good, I think. A little Shakespearean. 'I pray you, bring your hand to the buttery-bar and let it drink,' say Maria, the maid, in Twelfth Night. I must look up crotch pocket and see if it's established use.

The miracle of You Tube and BBC's The Forum presents...

Rehearsing for the day I become ruler of the universe (Scruffy Stalinists Party). Had I known I was going to be filmed I'd have worn better clothes and had plastic surgery.

Triliband, Thriliband

It was not a night of high excitement discovering that Ed had pipped David. 'Very capable politician' is not a term that sets my pulses racing. The union vote swung it for Ed but if Ed does anything of a pale red nature, or even mild-pink for that matter, I will be astonished.

The fact is Ed needn't propose anything for now and he won't. He can do the 'Tory cuts!' chorus in the happy knowledge that he would have cut a little later and maybe a little less but would still have cut. There is not a vast moral chasm between cutting now as opposed to a year later. He knows this is a long rough cruise in which it might be better to be passenger than crew, to be steered rather than to steer. Perhaps Ed could learn to play the violin on the voyage. The cuts will bite, some unions might go on strike for a while, and the boat might rock a little more but at least we'll have some music.

One thing certain. The ugly things will get uglier still. The big bonuses, the repulsively rich bankers who are all-so-necessary to us and who we must, at all costs (hah!) prevent from going abroad in case we lose the benefits of their considerable talents, will continue being rich bankers and directors with bonuses worth millions. The contrast between their life styles (imagine dozens of episodes of Grand Designs one after the other, ever more magnificent, ever more meaningless) and the suffering to come for those who are not only poor but are simply not rich, for those honest median citizens who tried to save money and who have, as they say, been utterly screwed over, will grow ever more stark. It will make a pretty cabinet of horrors.

I don't think Ed Miliband is in any position to change that, nor is he, I suspect, of the disposition. I suspect the contrast between one Miliband and the other has been a little over-dramatised and over-scripted. So now we know that Ed was against the Iraq War? Glory be! He has been washed in the Blood of the Lamb. Interviews with Party members who had heard his speech to the conference revealed a strangely febrile atmosphere of giddy excitement.

It's very peculiar all this. I have never felt such indifference to the winner of the race to be leader of the Labour Party. The ship limps on. Capitalism has hit an iceberg. It's not yet clear how big the iceberg or how big the hole in the ship. It is even less clear what might happen should the ship slowly start to sink.

Two and a half hours: Instead of Sleep

I had just two and a half hours sleep last night, so the mind is a touch tired. I go to a poem I wrote for daughter Helen's birthday in 2004, just to show the problem is not new.

Instead of Sleep

I want to be a cat, Clarissa said,
meaning: it’d be nice to go to bed.
I too think sleep is welcome,
sometimes whole days of it.
I think I could write odes, sonnets,
ballads and epics in praise of it.
Now, feeling sleepy, I think it is time
I woke up and scrawled my darling girl a rhyme,
just a short one, like this, a silly small thing,
a birthday offering,
in which I reflect on how great
it must be to be only twenty-eight;
in which there is a spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings of the kind we know;
in which alliterations, puns and ambiguities
are not mere decorations or superfluities;
in which there is creative tension,
wit, grace, charm, and other virtues I could mention.

That is what I would like to write. Perhaps
that is indeed what I have written,
and as well as it could be by all those other chaps
currently scribbling for Great Britain,
a poem ending in one mighty pentasyllable...

alas, that dream is unfulfillable.

All those chaps, eh? Goodnight, chaps.

Sunday night is... John Berryman, drunk, talking and reading

Berryman talking to Al Alvarez in Dublin, in 1967.

Dream Song 14
John Berryman

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the green sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & his tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

The Man Who Drank The Band's Champagne

H. M. Bateman

The man who..., the girl who..., the family who... The thing is the convention breakers go about their business with such insouciance. They gaily break custom and taboo while others look on in horror. They quaff the band's champagne, they order milk at the Café Royal, they arrive at grand affairs in charabancs. And everywhere the same look of horror greets them.

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, wrote Jenny Joseph. Some time ago it was voted the nation's favourite poem, anticipating Kipling's If... by a year or two.

Wearing purple is a private matter, but it is intended to produce an effect, and people like producing effects. Or they think they might, one day, like to produce an effect. The thought consoles them. It would be their act of rebellion. When I am an old woman I shall wear floral dresses and knitted cardigans lacks the right heroic spirit. When I am an old woman I shall wear white, sound a little too much like Miss Havisham. As for, When I am an old woman I shall wear black... that opens possibilities, none of which is entirely positive and cheerful. No, let's go purple instead.

*

But there is another form of non-conformity: the desire to go against the accepted opinions of your circle. I mean the opinions of your best and closest friends, who are the very nicest people, or else you wouldn't have made friends with them in the first place..

For instance, I see this post by Mick Hartley on the stoning of a woman by the Taliban. Or I read a book in progress about Israel and Palestine by a friend.

The view among nice people is often that the Taliban are awful but it's their culture, and our glass house culture is not in a position to, er, throw stones, especially given Dubya and Bliar. In this case I would quite like to be the man who volunteers the opinion that the glass house of UK, European, and indeed American society, for all its faults, smudges, cracks and dead plants, is an infinitely better place than any in which the Taliban look after the tomatoes. (The closest Wymondham got to stoning women in recent years was when builders pebble-dashed a woman's bungalow near the town centre. She hadn't buttoned her coat properly. Next time it will be the garden, the builders warned her.They were moral builders. It was very public.)

Similarly with Israel, I would like to be the man who says Israel is not much different from any other country surrounded by hostile states. It can act brutally, it can act unreasonably, it can act stupidly and violently, but it doesn't always act against entirely innocent, defenceless forces, who only want to live in peace. Sometimes it does, it is true, or it seems to be true, but that doesn't seem to be the main intention. It is not evil. Zionism is not Nazism. Zionism is not a wish to liquidate all people of Arabic origin in every part of the world. It began as the longing of an often-persecuted people for a homeland in which, for once in two millennia, they would not be in a minority. After the actual Nazis had killed half the Jewish population of the earth they were, more or less, not without a lot of violence and expulsions on both sides, granted their wish. Armenians once had that wish. Kurds still have it. Maybe the Roma have it.

This doesn't mean... well, there is a host of things it doesn't mean. But meaning works by association, and I am not as insouciant as the man drinking the band's champagne. So insouciance goes out of the window.

The friend's book seems very good to me. But it is far from finished.