Everybody loathes Elton

Ben Elton is often mentioned by British comedians as the most-hated man in the business. It's a bit hard to see why, exactly, it's just that he is rich, successful and mainstream, and makes musicals with Andrew Lloyd Webber (which is at least three strikes in most people's eyes, I suppose). His career has been odd, though: starting as a political firebrand and anarchist Young Ones writer, then moving to the high wit of Blackadder, before blanding out in his Man for Auntie sketch show and The Thin Blue Line anaemic police comedy, underusing Rowan Atkinson as almost a straight-main. From here it's easy to see his early radical days as a careerist stunt: that was where the buzz was at the time. I'm not sure that's right, though- his novels continue to reflect his passionate intensity, and even the Thin Blue Line was quite advanced in its philosophy considering its positioning: there were a lot of jokes about sex (that's not quite true: of the jokes there were, a lot were about sex), but the characters' sexual orientation and colour was never exploited, as it would have been in most comparable sitcoms. Given the widespread wish for Elton to fail, it's surprising how little anyone has had to say about his latest masterpiece, the couple-with-young children sitcom Blessed. Now, this may come as a revelation, but young children cry, and need feeding, and make a mess. Sometimes the parents get tetchy as a result. With hilarious consequences. Or not. Actually it's not entirely laugh-free. But what amuses is the plotting and the frustrated rants of the lead character, rather than verbal agility. One problem is the inaccuracy of the cultural references. The record producer hero has to deal with a manufactured Spice Girls grrl group, with the moral issues that raises about whether he should insist on his rights to his creative work or let them steal it in return for lots of money. The trouble with this is that he is starting from the view that groups should be talented and creative, not manufactured. It's hard to believe this when for a start, he works as a jobbing music producer churning out advertising jingles and backing tracks, and is hardly therefore at the 'art for art's sake' end of the business, but more importantly, his views are anachronistic: after all the Idols and X Factors, nobody seems to mind that stars and groups are designed by marketing consultants, publicised by publicists, and sold to the media in bite-size chunks from 'wow I won' to 'ex-singer in drug shame' to 'who?'. After Darius lost out to much laughter in the first Pop Idol, or whatever, and dismissed as a talentless poser, I thought I'd heard the last of him; I hardly expected him to crop up in 2005 as a credible and successful artist with fans and No. 1s and everything. So Elton here is being misled by what he thinks and feels, which is not believable as what his character thinks. The characterisation has another major flaw: the ageing rocker guitarist. With his wrinkled, twitching face and leathers, he models himself on Keith Richard. But Elton tries to have it both ways: sometimes, he is clearly a delusional loser whose pose is just that, masking an empty and tragically wasted life; but sometimes he really is a star, able to charm groupies and acquaintances. In general, I would think that the series owes its origins to Elton's life experiences, and would have been better if it had accepted the fact rather than mask it by, say, changing the father's job from comedian novelist living in London with his young family, to something totally different, like, record producer living...

What I don't understand, after all this, is the eerie silence. Shouldn't the airwaves be jammed with pundits queueing up to say it's terrible and Elton is finished? I can only suppose they have realised it's more cutting, in the long run, tosay nothing, just walk away.

Pranks and japes

The latest reality TV series, Space Cadets, has exposed what has lain mainly hidden in its predecessors like Game for a Laugh, Beadle's About, and Candid Camera: that its humour is derived from cruelty, or at the very least from exploitation of dramatic irony (the audience knowing something the protagonist does not). Hence it is an act of collusion by the viewers at the expense of the participants.

This is a strong but largely unexamined part of traditional humour. The attraction of the 'surprise party' is surely for the other attendees, who can smirk to themselves as they lead the dupe to believe that everyone has forgotten. And a similar pattern can be seen in the initiation of apprentices, who were sent off in search of tartan paint or for a long weight (wait): a rite of passage intended to remind the new workers that, however cocky they may be, in the workplace they are at the mercy of their bosses and colleagues. The humour is anaemic verging on albinoism: but humour is not the point.

TV programmers may not realise the danger they face. Newspapers these days very rarely present April Fool's stories; I think this is because they have realised that they rely on their readers gullibility, which offends them, or undermines the paper's credibility. If your newspaper tells you that Elvis is alive and well and living on the moon in a WW2 bomber, you are hardly likely to pay much attention when they tell you which political party to support. We do not expect, when being bombarded with information, to have to distinguish not just between hard fact and soft fact and opinion, but between fiction masquerading as fact and simple fact.

The irony is that the hapless and charmless space cadets, whose desire to be famous exceeds any talent that might justify such a desire, have proved to have some strength of character. Everyone else is smirking, but they have trusted in the
reliability and safety of Russian aeronautics, and have demonstrated that the Right Stuff can be found in all sorts of containers.

Winds of change

So Tony Blair's solution to future energy needs is the safest, cheapest and most efficient method, (nuclear energy, if you hadn't guessed). Not sure whether he's going to deal with the £4.5 billion decommissioning costs and storage of the nuclear waste from the last generation of cheap, clean energy first.

Credit where credit's due, though, he's right to take hard decisions to fulfil his Kyoto commitment to reduce CO2 emissions (and not just the hard decision of how to get out of it without anyone noticing). The tireless opposers of windfarm developments who have contributed so maturely to the energy debate over the last decade can take some comfort in their victory: for surely it is the recognition that any substantial increase in renewable exploitation would inspire protests that would make the pro-hunting lobby look like blood-stained sadists pussycats that lies behind this courageous step.

Of course, it leaves the problem of where to put the new nuclear stations- there's going to be a lot. Luckily, they don't spoil views for miles by intruding on the skyline, so presumably right next door to the NIMBYs would suit them fine. Or are they going to start whingeing about that too? Surely not!

Weasel words

The Vocabulary Reclamation Project has raised the interesting question of Word Tanking, meaning the avoidance of using thenatural or correct term because it has acquired unwanted baggage. He says:

I tend to de-emphasize the word "Christianity." Instead, I employ phrases like "following Christ" and (rather obviously) "spiritual journey." It's often awkward to speak this way, but I find myself doing it—using ambiguous terms like "friend" and "follower" and "disciple" and "journey," and then qualifying them with the word "Jesus" or "Christ." In a very real sense, "Christianity" carries with it a host of connotations that I'd just as soon not deal with. I want people to think about what I'm saying, rather than be side-tracked by negative (and unrelated) associations.

There is always a tension between pedantically insisting on the 'correct' word and being understood. Sometimes this is cultural: there is the story of the American and British students who had gone see their lecturer, and upon being told by her secretary that she would be 'with them presently', the British student went back to the library and the American waited at the office. Or as my webstats page now says "the data will be displayed momentarily", probably meaning "in a moment" rather than "for a moment" (although with BlogPatrol's reliablity you cannot be sure).

I read a comment on the news coverage of Katrina that one startling change was that people were using the word 'poor' rather than 'disadvantaged' or 'economically deprived' or whatever. And on the whole it seems a more honest word, unless (as may be the case), the rich feel that it carries with it the implication that the poor will be always with us (and so nothing need be done about them) or that they are poor because they are made that way ditto).

Other words have dropped out entire. I was shocked to hear on 'Will and Grace' someone say "So that's Dr Motley- I imagined he was an old Jew saying 'You call this dinner?'". Not because it is intrinsically shocking (the speaking character was Jewish, by the way), but because I have grown completely unaccustomed to the use of the word 'Jew' in any sort of comic sense. What is still a bit troubling is that the joke was clearly using the word to imply a stereotype. Children's joke books have problems these days- the great stock-in-trade of Irish (Polish, etc.) jokes reliant on their butts' stupidity has become almost unusable that that they have to be re-cast as "did you hear about the stupid person who did something stupid?". Small loss, perhaps. It is notable that the 19th century Punch cartoons that kicked off the Irish joke tradition was less coarse than is often said. When the Irish peasant tells the lost motorist who asks for directions "I wouldn't start from here", the joke is on the motorist. Much more objectionable are the Punch cartoons whose humour relies on the stupidity of servants in interpreting the words of their wiser, richer, lazier, and better-educated masters. Ha bloody ha.

Word fashions come and go. To UK ears, the American 'person of color' hardly seemed an improvement on Negro, although that may not have been the word it was replacing. I think it will be something of a Red Letter day, though, on the first time I actually call someone a nigger on the grounds that they would want me to.

Sometimes people resist word tanking: Bob Dylan, on 'Time out of mind' goes out of his way to use the word 'gay' in its older, non-sexual, sense: "strumming a gay guitar", "I've been to London and I've been to gay Par-ee". In general, though, we have to face the fact that communication is communication, and it is our readers' verbal associations we must consider, not our own. This is the reason I would never say "I am a poet"; "I write poetry" is not just less of an extravagant claim, it also attempts to sidestep the opinion held by many that anyone making such a statement is bound to be sentimental, alcoholic, dying, or impractical.

Human nature

This is a story from before Windows NT, and before Windows 98, and before Windows 95, and before Windows 3.1, but I think it has a timeless message. In the old days, the last word in user friendliness was to have a start screen on your computer listing numbered options which started the various programs. My computer at work had ended up with a lot of options which either didn't work or led to removed programs, so I tidied up the menu page text to create new options. For obscure reasons, I found I couldn't remove or edit one of the numbered options, only change the text label: people could press it but nothing happened. To discourage them from doing so, I re-labelled it 'Self Destruct Device'. One of my colleagues used my computer one day, and came up to me afterwards. "You know that self-destruct option on your computer?", he said, "It doesn't work!".

Blogs and usability

Jakob Nielsen is a leading proponent of usability: the principle that the design of website and user interfaces should be based on how users behave, rather than how a crazed web designer wants to impress other crazed web designers. His website is usually a fount of common sense in a world where such things are still rare. However, in his most recent column, he addresses the principles of usability as applied to blogs. He says some sensible things: that a 'journal', sequential, structure, may be easy to set up but is a real pain for latecomers trying to find popular entries, so you really need to provide links to favourite old posts (it is no coincidence that I have done this already). But he also claims that users will judge a blog partly on its domain name, and be very sniffy about those who really of free resources like Blogger. To me this smacks of the mentality of those who buy a gold fountain pen to lend their writing style, or buy an expensive sports car so that they can sit in a traffic jam in style. The whole issue of domain squatting has a nostalgic feel to it these days- as if anyone tried to find Charles Dickens' website by typing in www.charlesdickens.com. They certainly wouldn't try it twice, since this would inevitably lead to a strange Biblical prophecy site, online poker, or dating (interesting sidelight on who they think uses the Internet, isn't it?).


UPDATE
Nielsen's comments have led to many responses, predicatbly, since he has been annoying web designers for years by saying things like 'Flash is crap'. I understand he now believes Flash is great, but, no, he was right first time. There's an interesting
parody of a usability report on a portal to initiate nuclear war. The authors do not realise, however, that they actually support what Nielsen is saying- that website users do not want to have to learn to use every new website from scratch, that poor usablity will discourage less-motivated users, and users need to be able to control their visiting experience. In recommending that (commercial) websites avoid 'cutting edge' untried innovative techniques in favour of established, dull, run-of-the-mill ones that work, he is giving good advice to the world outside the design community. I sometimes wonder whether Gutenberg spent his entire life trying to persuade his unadventurous customers to explore the potential of his new technology: "oh, sure, you can read it- but I have these flashy new typefaces which give a real trendy feeling-or we could print pages alternately up and down so that the reader isn't constrained by that stale old left-to-right start-to-finish straitjacket- or we could print on light-degradable papers so the user can experience the book falling apart as a he read it"

Yes, his site looks crap- it is simple and text-based. It's almost like a blog, strangely enough.

Theology 101

The Garden of Eden story is strange, isn't it. I assume you have a copy of Genesis 3 to hand:

v3 God says to Eve "You musn't eat the fruit of the tree of life or you will die"
v4 The serpent says "You won't die if you do"

v22 God says he must send Man out of Eden "lest he eat of the tree of life and live for ever"

So God was wrong in v3 and the serpent was right- eating the fruit does NOT kill you, it makes you live for ever.

They say that lies make a poor basis for a relationship.

Absolute power corrupts? Oh, absolutely!

As the ID Bill trundles inexorably on, we are finding out the cost of freedom. About £30 each, the charge to be imposed by the government on those applying for a card they are legally obliged to have. And legally obliged to replace whenever they move house. For some people, this hardly matters, since they are rich and have stable jobs and live in one place. For poor families, moving more frequently, this is a significant additional cost. But at least it will keep us safe.

The true cost of the cards is a bit higher: initial government estimates had put it at about £80, but it's now figured to be £300. So every time someone moves house, not only will they have to pay out, the government will too, spending tax money. But at least it will keep us safe.

One scene you don't see on CSI or Without a Trace, as they search across the criminal records database or look at the interactive street map or 3D model of virtual Miami, is the one where the master-criminal evades justice because someone has input his surname as 'Terry O'Rist' rather than Terrence O. Wrist. The government has cited as one of the benefits of ID cards that it can bring together all the data already held separately by various departments and agencies. So not only can we catch terrorists, we can fine them for not having a TV licence, and reclaim some tax credits, like those from people who spent money PAID OUT IN ERROR BECAUSE THE COMPUTER SYSTEM WASN'T WORKING PROPERLY. But at least it will keep us safe.

The trouble with wide-ranging arbitrary powers is not that it criminalises everyone. States wielding absolute powers have not all been draconian. For all the idiosyncratic power of a Roman emperor, his writ only really extended to the court. His plans, however mad, for the millions of citizens could only be carried out by his subordinates, whose efficiency and keenness depended on their view of the wisdom of the policy. Even in feudal states, where serfs belonged to their lords, tyranny was limited, since serfs could run away to other masters, or to towns, if it got too bad, and although their lords might hope for support from their peers, class solidarity seldom overcame personal interest. Even East Germany, where I understand 25% of the population was employed by or informants for the secret police, people slipped through. There was plenty of information, but no way to manage it. There is a paradox within Orwell's vision of 1984; even if surveillance was focused on the Party members, the Ministry of Truth employed a lot of people, who needed to be watched by another Ministry of Truth. So I do not believe that suddenly the government will micro-manage the entire population. No. It too will focus. It will focus on the poor, the black, the immigrant, the excluded. But at least it will keep us safe.

Now there are those who say that identity theft is an established part of terrorist operations, and therefore fake ID cards will be manufactured, which may not match the real ones but will be better than nothing. And there are those who say that the July 7 bombers were UK citizens and would no doubt have had ID cards anyway. And there are those who say that criminalizing the excluded does little to make them less excluded. And there are those who say that the government's record on data collection and the creation of large computer systems is appalling. And there are even those who say that pretending that the costs have been accurately estimated and will not eat significantly into spending money on more useful things is a deliberate attempt to side-step the issue. I'm one.

Wisdom

If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because man, they're gone.

SNL Deep thoughts

Say it isn't so

As well as being a novelist-who-can't-finish-a-novel and a mainly unpublished poet, I am also a songwriter manque (or, as someone said, a manky songwriter). I have put together a demo of songs, which I would rate (as far as I can tell) as very good songs played moderately well and sang borderline bearably. (The songs include Have to remember to forget you and Cuts both ways.)

But I have been encouraged by Erin Monahan's more generous view:

Now, in his note he warns me that he can't sing, which as far as I can tell is pure English modesty, or a good ole crock'o'shit because I thoroughly enjoyed each song.

If anyone is interested enough to want a copy, just leave a message so I can get in touch.

The long and the short of it

It is not hard to make it seem as if you know that of which you write if you use long words- in the mind of some, they are signs of truth. Can all life be shrunk to words of one short sound? I'm not sure. The Word of God is, for the most part, a short one: Thou shalt not kill; Let there be light. Which is not to say that long words are just used in Hell. They turn up in board rooms, schools, blogs- in fact, all sorts of place where, as the quote says, one man speaks in the sleep of the rest.

It used to be good style to go to great lengths to find terms so that you did not use the same word twice on the same page. Such tricks are taught no more- most would choose to call a spade a spade, not a tool to dig soil with (or a tool with which to dig soil, as some would say was right). But this has a price- the clang-clang-clang of the one word can drive you mad, or at least take your mind off the sense while the sound grates and pounds.
Some who take up their pens will not mind. But those who read will!

Overheard in a supermarket, late Saturday

MAN: I'm looking for a will to live - I've lost mine
WOMAN: If you see one, get one for me too.


(All right, it was me!)

My sporting heroes

I don't like sport, as I have said before. That's not quite true- I do enjoy some sport as a participant (those which do not feature mud, rain or physical injury). But spectatorship has always baffled me. I'm not sure quite what the frighteningly large proportion of the world's population that says it supports Manchester United mean when they say it- apart from in the captitalist sense of supporting the owners of the club through their purchase of overpriced merchandise. Even if their good wishes were somehow assisting the team, it seems doubtful that the most expensive players in the world would need much assistance, any more than gravity, death or taxes need supporters clubs. 'Good team beats bad team' is hardly news, any more than 'bad team beats worse team'. Those who are triumphally lording the English cricket team as the best in the world are missing the point. The thrill of their victory derives from the knowledge that it was barely deserved. Even back in the 1970s, before things got apparently irreversibly bad, England was known for its knack of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, usually by a batting collapse. Essenetially, therefore, the national rejoicing is the result of the success of the underdog. This is always cited as a specifically British trait, certainly a non-American trait, wrongly, I think. The maverick-who-needs-to-defeat-his-personal-demons-before-he-can-defeat-his-rival is a stock of Hollywood sports and other films (Top Gun) and one which goes some ditance to the saying "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser". The maverick storyline always seems a con-trick to me, since it implies that the troubled genius is better than their carefully trained untroubled opponent. No wonder kids today... Having said that, it is of course perfectly true that the clinical perfection of Bjorn Borg or Pete Sampras, for all its record-breaking reliability, can inspire no feeling warmer than a mild admiration, while watching England try to win a Test match is like watching your child take their first steps- a mixture of pride, doubt and fear.

In some ways, the new popularity of cricket will be cursed by those who have been watching since the 1970s. They have not suffered as we have suffered. They have not been in the wilderness. They have not seen hope after hope sink under the weight of better, fitter, faster opposition. On the other hand, even the constant mention of 'sportsmanship' cannot conceal the genuinely friendly nature of the competition- what would have been called 'sporting' if that word did not, these days, mean drug-fuelled, cash-obsessed and violent. Now they are superstars, I wonder how long it will last.

Without a trace

They are now showing the third series of Without a Trace on UK TV, which some have criticised for having too much personal stuff, but is still way ahead of most programmes. Last night's episode, 'American Goddess', featured Elizabeth Berkley as the post-surgery dumb blonde. I'm not sure why her agent suggested she make a career comeback in a show called 'without a trace', but then you're talking about someone whose career went downhill after Saved by the Bell (into Showgirls and then... that's about it). The producers didn't have the courage of their convictions, employing someone else to do the pre-op stuff and covering her face in bandages for the last scene. It's hard to pin down what is so good about the programme. Partly I think it benefited from the focus on the story rather than the team: the rot set in in ER when the patients became incidental events to break up the child custody wrangles, sex changes, partner swapping, dying etc of the staff. Of course Anthony LaPaglia does a lot, by doing almost nothing- he has saint's eyes, understanding all, forgiving all, suffering, but still caring. You would not recognise him from 'Frasier', where he played Daphne's Cockney brother, any more than you'd recognise his Cockney accent (closest I can get is drunk Australian). (and how did Daphne have a Cockney brother?).

George Orwell wrote in praise of the English murder (actually real murders as reported in the sensational press of the 1930s), reflecting as they did the code of morals that said that to get divorced would incur social disgrace so murder becomes the better option. These days, of course, fictional murder has become the main form of TV programme and a major form of fiction. Death is usually necessary: attempts to write crime fiction based on other crimes lack the apepal, mainly, I think, because there's no point pondering over a mystery when the victim can turn up at the end to explin what happened.

The cleverness of Without a Trace is to take the strong narrative line of the murder story (with a death acting as an opening into a particular social milieu) and then , by using the 24-style countdown (enough on its own to start adrenaline pumping) allow itself the option of different endings, so that there is, for once, real uncertainty about where a plot is heading. Catharsis, I don't know about - heart attack, sure.

Clive James on books and civilisation

There's a very good defence of the importance of books and libraries to any civilized society at Lecture: Our First Book, which is also hilariously funny.

Clive James and me

Me and Clive James go back a long way- back to the mid 1970s, when his weekly TV reviews in The Observer were the cleverest and funniest critical writing to be found. I was surprised to discover his credentials as a literary critic, characterised by deep knowledge and common sense (not as common a pairing as one might think). And his Unreliable Memoirs were a definitive roman a clef of adolescence, if a little self-indulgent. Self indulgence, alas, was to become the theme of his later work, including an embarassing comic/satirical poem for the Royal Wedding in 1980, and then his TV series. Initially, his elaborate sardonic riffs applied to popular culture were refreshing, but solidified into a pose. And he admitted that he was star-struck by Hollywood. The point at which I switched off was when he interviewed Jane Fonda, smirking at his good fortune to be spending time talking to such a personality, having forgotten, presumably, that he once wrote that Jane Fonda as an activist was a superb consciousness-raiser, on the grounds that if he found himself sharing an opinion she held he immediately examined it.

But to judge from his website www. clivejames.com, he is now back in the land of the sane, and his literary reviews are amusing and perceptive. As he says on the home page "It might seem strange to say so, in the face of the evidence, but this project is not meant entirely as an ego trip, although I suppose the Pharaohs said the same when they were approving the designs for their individual pyramids." His poetry has improved, too.

Thoughtcrime

I have always been rather wary of those advancing arguments to restrict freedom of speech. This may have started out, a long time ago, as simple self-interest, since I was once more radical than I am now, and wished to retain the opportunity to express my views (whatever they were: I'm not sure now, and may not have been sure then). It seemed to me obvious, though, that this freedom is as near-as-possible absolute, since as soon as you start restricting it, you are effectively imposing censorship by the government, the police and the courts, and while one would not of course suggest that this was their intention, the principle, once established, that politicians have a right and mechanism to gag their electorate, seems a dangerous one. For of course it is easy to allow freedom to those who agree with you: the test for a liberal democracy has to be its willingness to allow its citizens to voice dissent. I can remember in the 1980s that the Anti-Nazi League sought to prevent right-wing politicians from addressing student meetings under the banner of their "no platform for racists" policy. I can remember at the time being dubious of this argument: freedom of speech should not be so lightly surrendered just because you don't like how it is used. For the same reason, attempts to beef up prohibitions on racist and religious bigotry have caused alarm. Comedians have rightly quetioned whether the government really wants to get involved in deciding which individuals or groups of people can be safely lampooned and which cannot. And now with the anti-terror legislation, we are facing a government intent on stopping people saying some things as "incitement to commit terrorism" and even "glorifying terrorism".

This is wrong, as the opposition parties have noted. Identifying and punishing new criminal acts is one things. But the government is effectively criminalising the holding of certain beliefs. In doing so, it is making up law to suit its own agenda. One of the threadbare rights of a UK citizen is to complain about the government, or even to argue that the system is wrong and should be changed, if necessary by completing the works of Guy Fawkes, "burnt in effigy to remind the Parliament that it would have been a Good Thing", as those notorious anarchist subversives Sellars and Yeatman put it in 1066 And All That. These thoughts can be expressed through speech, letters, pamphlets, letters to newspaper editors written in green ink, or in the manifestos of new political parties. I would rather the BNP were open in their racism than for them to adopt the appearance of being a reasonable right-ist anti-European party whose members just happen to be white skinheads.

Because what the government is trying to do by targetting the rhetoric of terror is to control people's beliefs. I would say that rhetoric of war and imperialism (ie officially approved rhetoric) does not provide the basis for confidence in the application of common sense. There is a world of difference between saying that cars are crimes against the environment and blowing up a motor factory. A sensible view would be that people are allowed to think what they like as long as their actions remain legal. To do otherwise is to actually reduce the culpability of the terrorists, since they can argue "it wasn't my idea- he told me to!" as if this was some excuse. If we want people to take responsibility for their actions, then we must focus on their choice about whether to follow a belief into practice, not on some inflammatory preacher they once heard speak. If only Tony Blair were a lawyer, or knew one.*


* A note for non-UK readers. Blair was a lawyer, is married to a lawyer, and his best friends are lawyers.

A computer interface for real life

Things you wish your computer had:

http://www.tobynopoly.com/wish/computer.html

That's entertainment

One thing they say about the film industry is that "Nobody knows anything". It is impossible to predict which of the under-written over-hyped star vehicles that Hollywood churns out will turn into a billion-dollar money spinner and which will be a Heaven's Gate or Waterworld. Everybody says it, everybody knows it, but nobody wonders why. The reason why is simple: nobody knows anything because nobody learns anything. It seems just a week ago (but is in fact two years) that the BBC decided to re-launch Top of the Pops on Friday night to halt the decline in audience and in particular to recapture the elusive hip young audience (aka the dim and ignorant); their secret weapon was Fearne Cotton, who is as intelligent as she is talented (see my Live 8 post for details). Unfortunately, the radical redesign only accelerated the decline, and so the programme was moved: new channel, new time, new day, new look, new--no, same presenters. And what happens? New TOTP loses half its audience. If there's a common factor, I just can't think of it.

This reminds me of the story of the man in the hospital talikng to his wife "You were with me when I lost my job; you were with me when my dog died; you were with me when the roof fell off the house; you were with me when I was in a car crash; and now you're with me when I'm sick. Face it, woman, you're a f***ing jinx!"

NASA sure make a fuss about the Shuttle launch-

I mean, it's hardly rocket science.

Change and decay - work in progress 3

I woke the next morning to the scraping and chattering of birds on the roof-ridge above the skylight. The thin curtain muted rather than blocked the sunlight, and it shivered in the draught. My back ached. The bed had proved to be old, damp, and broken; the blankets, starched, rough and dubiously scented. I dressed and crossed the landing to the bathroom, and then made my way downstairs. The house was scattered with furniture in that strange aristocratic manner, where a writing desk is placed in the hallway in case a visitor needs to compose a letter before removing their coat, and where chairs are placed around the rooms for the comfort of those who wish to pause on the journey from one door to the next. As I descended, I passed shabby cupboards, brass instruments of obscure and ill-omened purpose, landscape paintings of brown fields under khaki skies.

The kitchen was empty. Margaret had said that she usually rose early, taking the dogs around the grounds; Charles seldom stirred until 11. I cut an uneven slice of bread from the loaf and jammed it into the toaster. In contrast to the rest of the house, the room was clean and modern, apart from the heavily-muddied floor. The instant coffee proved to be cheap and bland. I didn't linger; it was time to get started.

All about meme

1. Why did you start blogging?

I realised that I was only spending 8 hours a day staring at a computer screen, and was hoping to double or triple that.

No, I started blogging as a creative outlet. I had always felt that I would like to write a weekly column in a newspaper or magazine, since I discovered early in life that I was blessed with large numbers of strong opinions and the desire to share them with an audience. Although I had found platforms for various bits of technical writing, there was still a gap.

2. Are the reasons you blog now the same as when you started? If not, what's changed?

Pretty much. I take writing more seriously. I never really planned to do the daily journal "had cornflakes for breakfast" thing, but I am keener to exploit the freedom of the format to include interesting/funny websites I come across and silly jokes alongside more serious and considered pieces.

3. What would make blogging better for you?

More readers. More comments. Reading blogs like Monster Sarcasm Rally, the Hot Librarian, and Poetic Acceptance, half the fun is the regular commenters and their dialogue with the author.

4. Do you have comments on your blog? Why or why not? Do you comment on other blogs? What motivates you to post a comment?

Yes, at the moment, although I hate spam comments. I like to have debates about what I've written. Sometimes, I get things wrong. Shocking, huh? I comment on other blogs when I can think of something relevant, clever, and funny, so not that often. I occasionally comment to dispute something really wrong-headed, but I try not to get into it. I can't single-handed save Western democracy from its defenders. I don't comment much on poetry because I find I have to think about and re-read a poem before I get a grip on it.

5. What is your philosophy of the blogroll?

I don't have time to surf the blogosphere regularly, so I just have hard links to my 'daily fix' blogs. If I have time, I follow the blogrolls from them to my other favourites. I have to discipline myself to stop reading and start writing. But the more linking-in the better.

Adelaide Crapsey: The Warning

I have written about Crapsey previously , and that post has led to a steady trickle of readers who find that there are few other Internet references to her (partly because a lot of longer literary content can only be accessed by typing queries into the search pages of individual resources, which is therefore invisible to Google's crawlers which can only follow hyperlinks, and is part of the 'hidden' or 'deep' web).

Judging from the specific terms searched for, it appears that many of these searchers are doing so because they have been given an assignment to interpret her poem 'The Warning'. So I thought I'd have a go.

The warning

1 Just now,
2 Out of the strange
3 Still dusk . . . as strange, as still . . .
4 A white moth flew. Why am I grown
5 So cold?

It is a characteristic of Crapsey's work that she manages to condense a great deal of meaning into a very short form, and evokes very specific locales (as Alkalay-Gut notes about the poem 'Niagara'). To deal with practicalities first: it is dusk (l3), in autumn (moth in l4) she is indoors ("out" in l2), looking through an open window (moth flew in: l2). But this is not a single moment in time: there is an implied sequence of events, which goes: I dusk II moth flies into room III poet becomes cold.

This prepares us to look at the more mysterious elements in the poem. In l3, we have the fragmentary "as strange, as still", echoing the "strange still dusk" of l2&3, which requires as a complement "as strange, as still, as something", something like an autumn dusk, an ending, a quietude: Death. The moth is The Warning of the title, of the coming of death.

Why would a moth fly into the room? To go towards a light or a flame. What was in the room that would attract it? Possibly a real lamp, but possibly not. In lines 4 and 5, stage III of the sequence, the poet's body is becoming cold in a way that is mystifying to the poet. What is happening? The spirit is leaving the body after death. It is the light of spirit that attracted the moth; the warning is not of approaching death, but of the start of the after-life.

*

It would be easy to read the poem as mundanely autobiographical; no doubt in her last year, dying of tuberculosis and writing cinquains, she did indeed often sit with the window open to the evening, despairing. (As an aside, in the 1930s it was discovered that TB bacteria could not survive in cold dry air, leading to the creation of "Fresh Air" hospitals where TB patients' beds would be wheeled outside during the day, and large windows would be left open whenever possible [ BBC story ]. Crapsey died before this).

But the poem is better than that. It is a warning to all that time is short, and a reckoning will come. Let that guide your life.

*

Virginia Woolf, probably independently of Crapsey, wrote about moths and death in The Death of the Moth :

Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange. The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.

*

A note to students. This is MY interpretation, not yours. And it might not get many marks, anyway.

Overheard

I just want to finish putting the washing out on the line before it starts raining.

Change and decay - work in progress 2

Part 1.

The taxi turned round in the turning circle and sped off in a cloud of dust- there as clearly some urgent sitting next to the station to be done. I admired the main facade, cleanly elegant and Classical inspiration, apart from the bow window, which lent a suburban air to the whole. Off to the left was a stable block, now a car park and junk yard. I looked back at the facade to determine which entrance to approach: the large, multi-paned door with a portico in the centre, or the small door off to the side. The main door looked unused, so I went to the other. I tried the doorbell, with no audible effect, and then knocked on the door. I heard the sound of barking approach, interspersed with shouts, and befre long there were a pair of dogs swirling around in the doorway, leaping and barking in excitement. "Oh shut up, Bugger! Shut up, Rugger!", the approaching woman scolded, pausing for breath after every few steps. She was middle-aged, dressed in a faded brown housecoat and Wellington boots. She peered out at me and then started to unlock and unlatch the door.

"Hallo there! You're the archive chap?"

I said I was, and asked if the Shelons were home. She snorted and shrugged.

"Sorry, forgot to say- I'm Margaret Sheldon. Follow me through- we're just having tea".

I stepped in, pushing the door to behind me, and fended the dogs away from my legs with my bags. We shuffled down a stone-flagged passage and into a high-ceilinged room at the back of the house. An electric fire singed the air. Margaret called out.
"Charles- here's that fellow- move the dogs".

Charles, sat in a decrepit winged chair, turned and rose, kicked a dog from his feet. "Ah, Mr Williams, Derek, is it?". We shook hands and he looked around for a chair. "Good to see you. The Trust grant came through, then?"

"Yes, Mr Sheldon- I believe they wrote to you?"

Charles' vague denial was countermanded by Margaret, who told him clearly that the letter had arrived, and that indeed it was a result of it that I was expected.

"Sorry about the mess- in the winter, we more or less live in here. The other rooms get too cold. You would have thought it might have crossed someone's mind that translating a building style from southern Italy to England might have had some serious disadvantages!"

Margaret sorted out the tea things on a tray, much interrupted by the need to toss snacks to the digs.

"There's just us here today- the children are out and about- you'll meet them soon enough. But I suppose you'll want to get on with looking at the papers?"

I said I did, but ended up listening anyway to a long and disjointed discussion of forthcoming social events, not helped by the participants' use of nicknames and poor grasp of dates and places. But eventually Margaret broke off to show me up to the bedroom they'd sorted out for me, at the top of the house.

The poetry of acceptance (Book review)

Poetic Acceptance by Erin Monahan (2005, Meeting of the Minds Publications , Pittsburgh PA, USA, $10, 30pp)

The term 'Internet poetry' sprang into existence as a pejorative, and is felt by some to be an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. The explosion of post-anything forums, like the earlier vanity press anthology scams, has shown that the previous restrictions on publication by economics and reasons of space was keeping out not a small pool of competent but ignored poets, but a mass of would-be poets without either something to say or the means with which to say it. Interestingly, this has been recognised by the online poetry community, which is beginning to establish ground rules of literacy and coherence, to the annoyance of those who feel that poetry is self-expression which need take no notice of the views of readers.

But quality will prevail. One of the virtues of the internet is that it allows people's work to be judged on its merits, without preconceptions about whether it ought to be good or important. Another virtue is the possibility of fine-tuning from user feedback, so that confusions and complexities can be resolved dynamically before the poem reaches its final form.

Monahan is a beneficiary of both these factors. Her education was cut short by early marriage and motherhood, but she was inspired to return to writing poetry after the post-natal death of her child, and she has developed a distinctive style of allusive, emotionally-tough, short narrative poems, derived from her experience. The title of her collection reflects her moral stance: she realises that the world is not perfect, and there is no other, but aims for an equanamity of spirit through active engagement with it. This is not to say that her poems are doom-ridden or depressive; quite the opposite. Although she references the Beat poet Charles Bukowski and Sylvia Plath, she establishes a distance from despair and sorrow, through a forward-looking enjoyment of life in the moment. Thus "Saturday Morning Flea Market" describes a shopping expedition in simple terms, but manages to define a moment of luxuriating in the exotic appeal of foreign things and words; "Anchored" recounts a moment of reflection:

"Karma kills / like broken air conditioners and broken / hearts".

Other poems deal with love, sex, and lust: in "Absentia", she says

"There is an absence / in the room tonight- / it is the want / of your lips on mine"

, closely allied to her explorations of the connections between words and feelings (From "Permanent": "I suppose it's all about / being needed").

But the core of this collection is the series of poems addressing the death of her child. These display a range of approaches and responses, from her anger at her mother's Christian platitudes ("Mother's love", perhaps more shocking in the God-fearing USA), bleak despair ("Free": "There were: / no miracles/ in the desert"), to comfort in fantasy ("Fantasia": "She smiles in rock-crystal / and giggles on the breeze"), and closure ("Wisdom": "You were never in pain"). In 'Time: A study in grief', the longest, most ambitious, and best poem in the collection, she traces her reactions from (literal) speechlessness:

"Now there is nothing/ and it's too much, / everything, and not nearly enough / at the same time, and the words / come out wrong, because there are / no words at all."

through anger, to the acceptance of her title, shown to be not some unconsidered optimism but an accommodation of reality which allows for both grief and future happiness.

Monahan's work reflects the development of her skills as a poet to set out her responses to personal tragedy but is not limited to the ghetto of therapeutic writing. Her poetry is funny, sexy and clever, and deserves to reach a wide audience.

Change and decay - work in progress

The train muttered and grunted to a halt, and the doors hissed open. I stepped out onto the deserted platform- none of my fellow-passengers were inspired to alight. I walked through an archway, leaning to even out the weight of the laptop case and suitcase, past spare mail trolleys queued for an unexpected pre-Christmas rush. A bus timetable yellowed behind a cracked glass display, ready to be sold to some transport museum as a bygone. I began to wonder how I'd get to the Hall, but luckily the taxi rank outside wasn't completely empty. There was a beat-up car sporting a TAXI rooflight. The driver was reading a tabloid paper, or at least staring at the three-inch-high headlines with an uncomprehending frown. He looked up at my approach, and told me to jump in. I aimed for the back seat, rather than the front passenger's seat, because I'm told this discourages conversation. It didn't work, though.

After his questioning quickly established that I was visiting on business and that the weather was fine and that I had come by train, he launched into an ill-digested re-run of the paper's views. Since we weren't in London, he didn't need the Knowledge to be a cabbie- he had the lesser, more general, requirements, though: the Ignorance, the Bigotry, and the Stupidity. Perhaps, to be fair to taxi drivers across the world, their views are coloured by the people they have to deal with, the lack of respect they enjoy, the constant wheedling needed to turn a starvation wage into a living one. It reminded me of my Marxist days at university- my disbelief when I was told that the petit bourgeoisie promoted and defended the system which enslaved them. It had taken a little longer to realise that much the same was true of the proleteriat; it is a sad truth that the common factor between all hard-socialist revolutionary workers parties is that their memberships belie their title as "Popular" and that the few they can muster are students, not workers.

My reverie was interrupted as the car turned off into a grand gateway, and crunched along the gravel track. The drive was lined with trees; sheep lurked in the shadows. The view opened out and we arrived in front of a large Georgian house.

Mel Gibson, actor ordinaire

Well actually he was ok in Mad Maxes 1-2, and maybe What Women Want and that French one with Goldie Hawn that's so memorable I can't... oh, Bird on the Wire. But Write your own Mel Gibson film is cruelly accurate.

Amis on memory

Memory's a funny thing, isn't it. You don't agree? I don't agree either. Memory has never amused me much, and I find its tricks more and more wearisome as I grow older. Perhaps memory simply stays the same but has less work to do as the days fill out. My memory's in good shape, I think. It's just that my life is getting less memorable all the time. Can you remember where you left those keys? Why should you? Lying in the tub some slow afternoon, can you remember if you've washed your toes? (Taking a leak is boring, isn't it, after the first few thousand times? Whew, isn't that a drag?) I can't remember half the stuff I do anymore. But then I don't want to much.

Martin Amis, Money: A suicide note

Recipe: mushroom omelette with ginger wine

Ingredients: 2 eggs, handful of mushrooms, butter, salt and pepper, dried tarragon, ginger wine, double cream

Fry the mushrooms in a dab of butter until sft but not browned, then add a dash of ginger wine and a pinch of tarragon. Leave on the heat until half the liquid has boiled off and put to one side.

Beat the egg with salt and pepper and add to a hot frying pan with a little butter. When the bottom is becoming firm, turn it over and add the drained mushrooms and the cream. Keep cooking until the egg is opaque. Serve and eat.

[made this up and discovered it was great!]

The naming of parts

Found this parody today:

Scanning For Viri (Peter Sheil, 2003)
(In the style of Lessons of the War, Part I. "Naming of Parts" by Henry Reed - see below for the original poem)

Today we scan for viri.
Yesterday we did real work
And tomorrow, hopefully, we'll do real work
But today, today we scan for viri.

The wind blows the trees,
Waves of branches breaking against a metal fence,
And the clouds scuttle by.

First we run stinger.exe.
This removes the stinger virus
Which blocks your SQL servers
And distresses your children.

There are blue and red and silver and black
cars in the car park.
There were drops of rain, falling and blowing
whilst we scanned for viri.

And the Stinger program will find 30 other viri
When you run it on your PC;
But copy it to you C: drive first.
And if you don't have a CD drive here is a floppy disk
To scan for viri.

The car windows glitter as the sun
Moves - and clouds pass.
My eyes, blinded by reflections,
Peer at the screen
As I scan for viri.

And when you have run the Stinger.exe
You must run the FixWelch.exe
Which is found in the "Other" folder.

Sometimes, early, a white and black cat
Stalks the empty car park - owning the tarmac
And all small living things it sees.
It never scans for viri.

When the FixWelch.exe has finished
You must patch you operating system.
The patch files are in the folder with
The name of your version of Windows.

But not for Windows NT - I have to find
That patch myself, from when I patched my machine
Two days ago, before we started
Scanning for viri.

At lunch time some cars go;
Visits to the shops, the bank,
To buy tickets for the game
And cards for our loved ones.

If you are running Windows 2000
Then you must have Service Pack three or four.
The Service Pack disk is in the MSDN library
Locked in the third cupboard on the left.

There are no birds flying past today -
Too windy; too gusty to fly close
To a hard object that might
Give you a virus.

And if you are running Windows NT
Then you must have service Pack 6
But we don't have a copy of Service Pack 6
So you will not be able to patch your machine
Until you do find a copy.

A white van drives past, delivering something
From somewhere to somewhere else;
Unaware that we are
Scanning for viri.

And when you have patched your machine
You must change the administrator password
(which I will not write down here to keep it secret)
And you will remember it, and I will remember it
But the viri won't know it, for it is secret.

My hand rubs my chin, feeling the small bristles
And roughnesses that have come since the morning.
The sun dries the ground, the shadow of the building moves across the cars.
A blackbird hops among the grass at the foot of the trees
And a patterned brown butterfly flashes by.

And when you machine is finished we will stick a sticker on it
To show that you are now clean of viri and patched correctly.
And when every machine has been done and you are all clean of viri
We will allow you to reconnect to the network, a few at a time;
For we are cautious and do not trust these things electronic.

Today I've been busy; copying CDs and floppies, running programs, showing people what to do.
Yesterday we did real work
And tomorrow, hopefully, we'll do real work
But today, today we scan for viri.

Reed, Henry. "Naming of Parts." New Statesman and Nation 24, no. 598 (8 August 1942): 92.

LESSONS OF THE WAR

To Alan Michell

Vixi duellis nuper idoneus
Et militavi non sine gloria

I. NAMING OF PARTS

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.

from http://www.solearabiantree.net/namingofparts/namingofparts.html

The obligatory Live8 post

[IRONY MODE: ON]

There's been quite a backlash against the rich and famous people who used to be quite popular who took part in the concerts, suggesting that they are ignorantly and hypocritically spouting off about trendy issues without understanding them. This has annoyed political commentators, because that's their job.

I for one would rather hear a multimillionaire tell me about the importance of looking after other people than their more usual topics, encouraging gun crime, drug abuse, or vague New Age mysticism. I remember being shocked when Nelson Mandela agreed to be photographed meeting the Spice Girls; but now he's had his garden done up by Alan Titchmarsh and the Ground Force team, it's clear he's just a has-been C-list celebrity who would attend the opening of a packet of crisps if there was going to be a photographer there.

I saw in one comment the view that "Live8 has proved that miracles can happen - if the members of Pink Floyd can be persuaded to share a stage for 10 minutes then sorting out poverty and the environment will be easy".

I didn't actually catch much of the concert, partly because the BBC TV coverage seemed to assume that having assembled a panoply of stars unparalleled in the history of pop (or whatever), the music should be punctuated (and obscured) by witless interviews backstage, mainly by Fearne Cotton (who is born to do witless). (Incidentally, the BBC seem desperate to try to turn her into a happening presenter, unaware that she was disqualified for a Best New TV Personality award because she hasn't got one).

Our 4-year-old was happily dancing to Ms Dynamite, and my wife said "She would love to be there if she was older". I said that with any luck there would be another global catastrophe in 20 years time, and she could go to that.

I'd've liked to see Neil Young closing the Canada concert, but the BBC ignored that one completely. (Apparently it was very good. Thanks, BBC)

[IRONY MODE : OFF]

Overall, though, I'd have to say that any event which united the 18-25 lads and ladettes in thinking about the world, the future, and other people, is a good thing, and that the Big Brother gang cannot be taken as representing a true cross-section of the population. Thank St Bob for that.

A short history of courage

Courage used to mean a sort of blindness: acting 'with disregard for one's personal safety', a mad rage, to be admired (from a safe distance) rather than emulated.

Then it meant stoicism, like the wounded soldier who was asked by the general how he was "Well, I've lost my left leg, my right hand, and an eye, but, you know, can't complain". When people talk about 'brave' children this is usually what they mean-uncomplaining, untroublesome. This sort of courage allows those around them to deal with the suffering in their own way, interpreting it as part of The Plan, or the wages of sin, or just stuff that happens, or bad luck. You might also say this allows those who insist on looking on any available bright side to continue in their belief that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

These days there are different sorts of heroes, what you might called post-modern heroes. Yes, they say, I will probably get killed, because I am a rational person who can weigh up the odds, but I am going to do it anyway. No nonsense about not minding, or not being scared, or angry, or sad; being all these things but still insisting that the biggest defeat would be to accept defeat.

A heartbreaking example of this is Cancer, baby which is a beautifully-written harrowing account of someone's cancer and its effect on her and her life, which manages to be clever and funny and clear-sighted while also being profoundly moving (keep your tissues handy).

The home life of the famous

At home with the Shakespeares
"For God's sake, Will, don't be so dramatic! Why does everything have to be some great tragedy?"

Locked outside the home of illusionist Paul Daniels and his lovely wife Debbie McGee
"Oh Paul, I thought you had the keys!"
"I can't help it if they're inside- I'm not a magician!"
[significant silence]

At a party with mentalist Derren Brown and his girlfriend

"Derren, you should have known I wanted to be home to watch Desperate Housewives"
"Well, I'm not a mindreader!"
[significant silence]

In a car on the way to the Horoscope Writers Ball with Russell Grant and Mystic Meg

"How was I supposed to know you'd leave the directions at home- I'm not psychic!"
"I knew you were going to say that!"

Providence is a place in Rhode Island

John Lennon is dead. Paul Macartney is alive.

Eric Morecambe is dead. Ernie Wise is alive.

Jim Morrison is dead. The rest of the Doors are alive.

John F Kennedy is dead. Edward Kennedy is alive.

Tony Hancock is dead. Ken Dodd is alive.

Janis Joplin is dead. Cilla Black is alive.


Is it just me, or is there some sort of pattern here?

Almost famous

or "Some of these poems have previously appeared..."

Modesty is a natural thing, so much so that people assume that you are being modest when you are sticking to the literal truth. When I put in my Self definition in 30 statements that "I have published a handful of poems in very obscure places", readers instinctively interpret this as "I have published quite a few poems in a range of quite well known places but don't want to appear big-headed". And they are wrong, as I shall explain, by going through the list.


1. Ampersand

Although there have been several magazines of this name, the one to which I refer was published for two issues in 1984, in Cambridge, England. Each contained a poem by me, one worth forgetting, the other "Student Poet":

In the void before the nicotine dreams,
Noises and thoughts collide and merge
Until the random racket seems
Like a Muse's whispered urge.

Arise, young man, turn on the light,
Before the self-deluding moment goes,
Take up your fountain pen, and write
The sort of stuff too transparent for prose:

Of rain and night, love and aircraft noise,
Of barbed wire, holocaust and tanks -
Find again the self-important joys
Of borrowed woes and teenage angst.

Then lie back, turn the light off,
Dream of suicide and post-mortem fame,
To wake in the morning light, and cough,
And file the page with others, much the same.


The life cycle of the university arts magazine was a short one; essentially, a group of English and Art students would become frustrated at being unable to get their work printed by the cliques running the established magazines; those with rich parents would finance the upfront printing costs for a new one; it would appear, having disappointing sales, relying for distribution on its staff and contributors; the editorial staff would graduate, get bored, or have to start doing some studying; and then it would vanish. Although people often talk about the world of publication as a small gang where knowing the right people is an essential element in success or acceptance, meaning this figuratively, I think, in the case of these little magazines it is quite genuinely the case. So the only two issues of the magazine have vanished almost without trace- my parents I think have a copy somewhere, which now has some rarity value.


2. Gower Society Newsletter
This is perhaps a different sort of obscure. Members of the Gower Society wouldn't call it obscure at all, I suppose, but then the Society is for people who live in or are interested in a small part of Wales west of Swansea. The Society has an annual journal which publishes a range of scholarly articles. At one stage (in the 1950s) it printed topographic poetry about Gower to fill up the gaps at the end of articles, and this is what led me to submit a sort-of topographic poem about Gower (or rather about sin or the end of the world or something, but mentioning Gower) to the editor, who hastily passed it on to the newsletter editor as 'more suitable', and was duly published, sparking off a mini-tradition as subsequent issues included more conventional topographic poems written in verse.

Dead water, Oxwich Bay

The languor of a hot midday in June
Spreads to the sea, where slackwater waves
Slap ineffectually at the sand.
A moment of silence: the humid air unmoved,
All action countermanded by the heat;
And in that moment all the world stood still

A choice to be made: to start again?
Renew the tide of life and thought?
Or else to let it end, worn out
By one too many days and doubts.

My heart drummed out the seconds one by one,
Until at last an answer came -
A breeze across the water cooled the shore;
A Wind forgave the sinful land.
Gabriel unpursed his lips, lowered his horn.



So read things carefully: sometimes people say exactly what they mean!

Dooced: the radio play

'tis done, draft 1 at least: and you can read it at

Dooced: the radio play

.

It is entirely fictional, although since it deals with the sacking of somebody over comemnts on their web site, it obviously nods at Dooce. I have tried to be even-handed on the moral issues involved.

I would be genuinely grateful for comments before I submit it the BBC, especially on the fatal blog entry:

Well, that’s ruined my day. I got here bang on time (and therefore was the first in the office), to find a panicky email from Genghis Can’t, head of operations, calling me in to an emergency management team meeting this morning. No, I haven’t been admitted into the League of Very Ordinary Gentlemen of which said team is composed; he needed someone who could plug a projector into a laptop for his Powerpoint presentation, and since the company does not currently employ any monkeys trained for the purpose, it fell to me.

So I got to sit in on their deliberations as they faced the takeover crisis. The last to arrive was Teflon Man- nothing sticks to him. As they went through the Action Points from the last meeting, for his, he first denied that it had been assigned to him, and then blamed his staff for not having done it. He formed a partnership with Inaction Man, whose response to any question was to sigh and say “It’s not quite that simple…” The Silver Sofa was sat upon by everybody. He seemed more interested in my cleavage than in the discussion(understandable, perhaps, but the blatancy with which he was doing it was embarrassing, and totally gross). Eventually they agreed that the only solution to the takeover was for all staff holders of company shares to hold on to them, and they drafted a memo to be circulated to that effect. Being a young female in the room, they mistook me for a typist, so I had to write it for them. I was glad to escape back to my desk and get on with some real work, although now that I had seen our leaders up close, I didn’t give much for the long-term survival of the company.

The United States has a Criminal Justice system...

doesn't it? I ended up last week pitching in to a debate about the right of the US Child Protection Services to take a child into care because her parents refused to consent to medical treatment they considered unnecessary: see Ogres view. (My view is that before a state is granted any more powers to take control of children, it should demonstrate that it can do a good job on the ones it has already: children under the state's care should be the best clothed, fed, looked after, and housed in the country. Of course they should: what excuse has the state got not to? ) It turns out that the CPS in this case were following the law; oddly (from a UK perspective), most of those commenting took the line that they'd be happy to shoot CPS people following their legal duty; my suggestion that perhaps the law could be changed went unnoticed! It is a foreign country.

Self-denying ordinance

Message to self: get on with the other stuff

Namely:
radio play about a blogger sacked for blogging
translation of Alfred de Musset's Nuit de mai

Go on

Update
One down: see Complete and Utter Poetry. It is perhaps worth explaining quite why I ended up translating from the French a poem by a Romantic poet whose work is relatively little known in Britain. Well, I was discussing the biographical influences on the poetry of the Romantic tradition with an international literary panel, and it was suggested that.... NO, NO, NO, that's wrong! that's so wrong! I stopped studying literature formally when I was 16; since then I've only done reading. Early in my career as an archaeological fieldworker, a combination of location and finance meant that I spent a bitter autumn living in a tent in the desolate wastelands of Lincolnshire; our sole entertainment was cheap books from the secondhand bookshop. One was an anthology of French prose and poetry. A working knowledge of French was one of the few practical skills I derived from my education (I have rarely found myself called upon to describe the formation of an ox-bow lake), and so I idly leafed through it, and came across Musset's poem. Knowing nothing about him or his work, I was simply pleasantly surprised that some of it was intelligible to me without much work. After spending a short time playing with a verse translation, I gave up, feeling that it was too 'poetic' to be made relevant, and instead used it as the basis for a poetic poem of my own (Cri de couer). Twenty years on, sorting through old papers, I came across my poem, and thought that it was worth putting on the website. This led me to try to find out about the original poem, and, the volume having long since vanished, I trawled the web, and found, to my surprise, that there was no readily-accessible English translation of the full text. So I have sat down and done one myself. And now I can go to a conference on the biographical influences on the poetry of the Romantic tradition, if I haven't got a better offer, like being shot through the knees and fed raw pigs' brains.

Update 2:
Play done too!

Now, what's next- world peace? perpetual motion?

Martin Amis in "Yellow Dog is good!" shock

Well, not quite. Over at the Martin Amis discussion forum, which contains, or rather consists of, outpourings of bile by ex-Amis fans (see it at AmisWeb), there is one strand that attempts to stick up for Amis and his work. I will join this lone voice of support, in a way.

Yellow Dog does have severe problems. The main plot is driven by the London underworld, much as appeared in The Information (to supposed comic effect) and London Fields, but the sub-Eastender argot fails to convince, even if it's right (and I decline to believe that A is any more likely to know than I am). The banality of evil is sometimes worth pointing out, but this is just the banality of banality. The plane-crash/comet sub-plot feels tacked on, as does the reportage on the pornography industry, which he claims to find shocking even though in Dead Babies, 25 years ago, he professed to be unshocked by worse. At the core of the novel we are asked to accept that a New Man can be re-engineered into an Old Asshole by being hit on the head, and can then get better.

But when I was reading it last year, there were two other things that rang absolutely false: the tabloid-footballer sub-plot and the home-life-of-the-royals. These I think can reasonably be written up now as prescient. The Wayne Rooney-Colleen saga which has dominated the Sunday papers for the last 6 months is following Amis' script to the letter: Rooney goes off the rails, Colleen stands by him, he goes off the rails, she chucks him out, they reunite for the kids, my booze and birds hell... And the royal wedding raised precisely the awkward questions that turning off the queen's life-support did, with the papers unsure which line to take.

So he gets the press right: MA is Clint Smoker!

Office politics saves the world

Or at least, it would appear that Deep Throat's motive for leaking the results of the FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in was pique from the acting second-in-command of the FBI that Nixon hadn't given him the top job.
See the article in Slate.


As the article says, this does rather transform the investigative reporters from fearless seekers for the truth into patsies involved in some private jockeying for position.

Chick-lit fragment

She woke up with a jerk. This was becoming a depressingly common experince. He grunted and rolled over.

Taking a poem apart

As I say in my Self Portrait, I believe that writing poems is, or ought to be, a literary act (ie the application of critical thinking and reason) rather than primarily a creative act. I am aware that my poems run the risk of becoming bland and cerebral from lack of extravagant language, and so I thought it would be interesting to recount from the inside how a poem ended up in its final form.

Here's the poem:

Going back 1


The gate hangs open 2
I walk the mossy path 3
To the door: its paint is blistered
Blotchy with mould 4
The windows are cracked,
The chimneys nested 5

No fire warms the hearth: 6
The guardians have departed 7
They left the gate
Hanging open. 8


1 The title had started out as "An orphan returns to his childhood home" and the poem described the changes in perspective and scale, from a bereaved standpoint. This seemed both melodramatic and over-specific, and so I shifted the focus to the physical location, leaving the context more open and ambiguous. The new title derives mainly from the traditional advice "Never go back". It's a slightly odd bit of advice, and presumably could be clarified as saying "Never go back expecting things to be the same", reflecting the mental jolt that returning expatriates feel when they find that they are no longer 'at home' in their homeland, and therefore are cut adrift, and which everyone, to a lesser degree, feels when they realise that they are now officially grown up and that nobody will kiss their knees better when they fall over. The implication is that the adult is returning hoping for some form of shelter, support, or guidance (and therefore is currently in a damaged state).

The title also echoes two songs, on a similar theme: Goffin/King's Goin' Back ("I think I'm going back/ to the things I knew so well in my youth") which contrasts the troubled adult with a simpler younger self, and Neil Young's Going Back from Comes a Time (1978) which contrasts a happy past relationship with current distance and loss ("I used to build these buildings/ I used to walk next to you/ Their shadows tore us apart/ And now we do what we do/ Driven to the mountain high / Sunken in the cities deep / Living in our sleep/ I feel like going back /Back where there's nowhere to stay").

So although going back may be a physical journey, there are clear reasons for expecting it to be a mental journey too.


2 I used to visit a lot of derelict and deserted houses which were due for demolition in advance of development, and they seemed unbearably sad. The last occupants, knowing that there would be no successors, often left the building in a strange state, either in haste, in protest, or in laziness. Leaving a gate open is an admission that no visitors are expected or that there is noone to visit. This line is intended to create a feeling of unease as well as the straightforward image of a physical gate.


3 This line surreptiously imports agency and the writer/reader into the action: there is an I that is walking (the rest of the poem is passive description). The mossy path implies disuse, reinforcing the implication of lack of human traffic, and introducing evidence of neglect

4 The door confirms neglect and pushes towards actual decay: the house is no longer maintained, and perhaps hasn't been for some time.

5 The other details, as the visitor looks up at the house, confirm not only that there is neglect and decay, but that it has been active for some time. Cumulatively, this evidence leads to the suspicion that the house is deserted.

The first stanza is intended, therefore, to present a sequence of snapshots (you could film it precisely) of someone walking up to a house, but by the accumulation of details creates a lonely, distanced feeling. It seems unlikely that the visitor will get what they came for.


6 On a practical level, this follows directly on from the blocked chimneys. However, the use of the symbolically-loaded word 'hearth' moves the poem from observation into a more conceptual realm. "Warming the hearth" is a very different thing to "heating the fireplace": its neglect implies a failure to perform the key duties of familyhood, and thus focuses the unease of the first stanza on the absence of people in general and parents in particular.


7 The visitor realises the implication, and can no longer evade it. They are no longer there. (Departed is of course a euphemism for death, although simple absence could be meant)

8 In departing, they were presumably, as noted above, either rushed, reluctant or no longer interested. This is an abdication of their role, effectively their farewell to the visitor. There is a contrast with the expression 'leaving the door open' which means that a return is expected. The line is also an echo of the opening line, so that the poem can be read as a never-ending loop, a sort of limbo.

Thus without at any point describing the emotional state or history of the visitor it tries to imply very specifically the combination of unease, dread and despair that damaged adulthood encounters when trying to solve its problems by returning to what is remembered as a simpler, happier time. This meaning is compressed into 10 short lines. I'm sure it is poetry - whether it's good poetry is another question.

Free verse: a warning from history

The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales (1986):

For [the New Poets] poetic form was unimportant and they believed that the strict metres were unsuitable for the expression of great thoughts; it was the message and the sublimity of the content that mattered. Alas, the message of the New Poet was often far from clear: his work was vitiated by verbosity and empty rhetoric, by which means he sought to ask unanswerable questions about the meaning of Life and the essence of the Universe.

Wisdom

Zen Buddhism may not be the best religion, but it certainly has the best jokes.

These are from Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones:
Ikkyu, the Zen master, was very clever even as a boy. His teacher had a precious teacup, a rare antique. Ikkyu happened to break this cup and was greatly perplexed. Hearing the footsteps of his teacher, he held the pieces of the cup behind him. when the master appeared, Ikkyu asked: 'Why do people have to die?'
'This is natural,' explained the older man. 'Everything has to die and has just so long to live.'
Ikkyu, producing the shattered cup, added: 'It was time for your cup to die.'


Tanzan and Ekido were travelling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling. Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.
'Come on, girl,' said Tansan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.
Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. then he no longer could restrain himself. 'We monks don't go near females,' he told Tanzan, 'especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?'
'I left the girl there,' said Tanzan. 'Are you still carrying her?'

Bad ideas don't die

they just move to America. In the 1980s, citizens of the UK were issued with a helpful leaflet on what to do in the event of a nuclear war, called Protect and Survive, ie storm the local centre of government bunker to get somewhere safe, no, lie down and die with a label tied around your neck so the authorities (if any) can dispose of your remains (if any) efficiently. Now the USA has followed suit, expertly parodied at Don't feed the monkeys. Warning: this will make you laugh a lot.

Unfinished novels

As we prepared to leave university, a lecturer asked what our career plans were. I said I was going to be a novelist. "Oh, you write novels?". Well, no, I had to admit, I was keener on the being-a-novelist thing that the writing-novels thing. I had accumulated a small stack of attempts to start one, which I recently found filed away, and place here for your amusement.


Literary illusions, Chapter 1: Straight from the Muse's mouth

Don't be fooled. The Dedication in the book does not Make It All Worthwhile. It makes it worse, really, after all those months living with his work, and then just one sentence with you in it. The rest is I, I, I, and seemed self-indulgent when you first saw it, and now is an unreadable mixture of disloyally-revealing and lies. And as a sop to his conscience, he dedicates it to you. Yeah, ta. Thank God no-one ever notices and blames you for the contents.

Sometimes he's withdrawn and solemn. It's not often a creative trance, though - that might at least have been some excuse. If you knew, if you really knew, he's probably either daydreaming about the day he wins the Booker prize, or else chafing at the unaccountable success of a rival.

(1984)


The Breakdown Zone, Chapter 1

Los Angeles sits in the haze of the Pacific coast, steaming in the endless summer of California, the state where the sun always shines, as they said in the 20s. But now it sprawls out, a hundred square miles of freeways, service stations, parking lots, and screaming fading billboards. This, as much as Detroit, is Motor City, where the car rules supreme. The characteristic smog is thick with the stink of exhaust, and the crumbling housing estates, all so alike, are desolate islands to those without wheels.

Forced back on themselves, the inhabitants, now mostly poor, uneducated and black, fill their jobless days with an intricate knowledge of the maze of dead-end alleys and empty demolition sites that are their walking grounds. Not only theirs by default, because noone else wants it, but theirs by right of arms - it used to be flick knives and chains, but now, like all freedom-loving Americans, they have arsenals of M1 rifles, shotguns, and heaps of hand-guns. Even the tooled-up police have renounced their dominion on the Territories, so gang kills gang undisturbed, the cops relegated to spectators and corpse-counters.

This is the secret city, the grimy ragged mess that sprawls like a bloated, wrinkled sunbather beneath the chic veneer of the Hollywood bikini. The Boulevard youths are a world away from their models- they dress for style, all in a Beach Boy party that goes on until the WASP enfants terribles fade into account executives, PR men and all the other high-pay occupations that finance their small-scale dream house lives. Hollywood, its larger-than-life nameplate peeling in the sun, smirks down from the tropically-lush hills, a shining forbidden city where dreams are knocked together by the sunglassed visionaries, and where even the air costs money.

Los Angeles, the city of angels, tanned, blonde, always just seventeen, has had its share of sunshine now, and the fretful balance has finally cracked irrevocably: either the glass-and-concrete towers will boil in a crackling furnace of savage noon, or the night will come at last, with all the hidden warriors creeping out from their forgotten pasteboard caves, guns in hand, to take vengeance on the city that ignored them, fired with the bitter wrath of those shown a dream and then denied it. This is as far as America can get: the car-ruled coast. If that falls apart, all you can do is tear it all down and start again. And the people on the top, the penthouse dwellers, the rooftop-garden idlers, will go down too, crushed among the rubble, or hiding in furtive cellars, while the new masters walk proudly abroad, the mad lust for destruction in their eyes- for they have seen the good life, and prefer the blessed-out nightmare world of drugged trips and dark adventures to the patio'n'pool long afternoon siesta.

It's a hard city to know, stretching as it does for seemingly endless miles past dilapidated blocks, each housing some unknown world, and alien sky filled with hidden loyalties and blatant treacheries. No scientist could get to the truth: it is too various, too strange. But some can pick up on the atmosphere, feel the acid wounds rotting underneath the ugly but healthy scar tissue, smell the future inferno in the rancid grease and Coke-and-coke fizz, see the blood-happy vultures circling in the clear blue sky above the ridges. Those that came and saw this were few, but they, alone, were not surprised when the great crash came, not from some underground geological Act of God, but from the city itself, killed off by her bastard sons.

(1984)

On Hecataeus

I realised when writing my Obligatory Google Search post that I have been guilty of obscurity. Some people say that there is a place for it, but I disagree- unexplained references may give a thrill of recognition to the cognoscenti, and inspire a few others to explore a new name or concept, but everyone else is left perplexed and excluded. Again, some people would say that to write for an intelligent audience both allows and requires a complexity of discourse, and that you cannot be forever stopping to explain what a cat is, what sitting is, and what mats are. There is something to this point, perhaps, but even so, I would rather people were understanding and thinking about my ideas rather than puzzling out what those ideas might be.

As I have said before, there was a time when society placed some moral weight on 'knowledge', and implicitly criticised those who lacked what was called 'general knowledge'. But increasingly it was realised that the 'general knowledge' syllabus was arbitrary and out-dated, based on preconceptions about culture (perhaps one of the first indicators was the time (1967?) when it ceased to be possible to expect that all middle class children would know something about Classical music and Shakespeare. And so general knowledge became 'trivia', where knowing who won the FA cup in 1976 was of equal value (nil) to knowing where Samuel Pepys was buried. Which is right, of course. Facts are just facts.

I have a good memory for quotations. I have a terrible memory for many other things: friends and relatives' ages, birthdays, names, anniversaries; shopping lists; phone numbers. And I do not even try to remember anything about sport or current music or celebrities or films, so there's a bit of space spare. So what can seem like erudition may not be.

Which is a long way round to disclaiming whatever credit (or deflecting whatever debit) for bringing in Hecataeus as the author of my by-line. Feeling that I was missing out by not having read Herodotus's Histories (a near-contemporary account of the Greek-Persian war of 480BC (featuring the Battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea), I came across a copy and picked it up. Herodotus, known both as 'Father of history' and 'Father of lies', borrowed from earlier sources, including Hecataeus of Miletus, who lived in the 490sBC. Hecataeus's work (which has only survived in quotations by Herodotus and a few later writers) is 'said to have opened with the majestic statement: "I write what to me seems probable; for the tales told by the Greeks are both various and absurd"' (Penguin Classics ed., 1954, 27). This was a disclaimer for him to minimise offence caused to the various gods, cities and rulers he wrote about, since he was forced on occasion to say outright that Athens' version of how they won the war was wrong. (Incidentally, both Hecataeus and Herodotus were from Asia Minor (now Turkey), which perhaps accounts for their willingness to take an objective view of Greek claims). You could almost say that Hecataeus was the first post-modernist, since he is effectively disclaiming any monopoly on the truth.

The obligatory Google search post

Not all of the visitors here planned to come- some must have been very surprised where they ended up.

Here's a selection of the search terms:

love inspirational poetic lines
inspirational verse
inspirational song words
How desperate for inspiration you must be to put it into Google!

speeding getting caught
tut, tut, a bit late now

andrew motion poetry horrible
tell us what you really think!

blowing in the wind vietnam song
no, it isn't- the US had only just got into Vietnam in 1962, and it wasn't until 1965 that it became a major focus for protest.

commentary of The Warning by Adelaide Crapsey
you don't think that maybe this is for an essay? If so, I'd start by looking at a grammar book under "on" and "of" - which is which.

consumerism illusion
"The Illusion of Choice"
Glad someone agrees.

gwyneth lewis +poem +millenium
Hope they got what they wanted!

hecataeas
You want obscure? I can do obscure.


The odd thing is that having got a mention on a search results page, the link looked close enough to what they were after for them to click on it. Go, as they say in America, figure.

I grew up in the 70s

and so I know some odd things:

• that Elton John was bald


• that Abba was/were crap


• that punk meant an end to manufactured bands and corporate rock


• that flares were a bad idea


• that Richard Branson was a cool iconoclastic maverick


• that only diehard hippies would use the word 'cool' unironically


• that George Lucas made good films

To quote a Brinsley Schwarz song of the time:
"It's been so long since them days, And time makes its changes in so many ways"
(Nick Lowe, "Nervous on the road")

Holy writ, Batman!

I don't, in general, like fundamentalism, but one thing about it you have to admire is its clarity: if the Quran says "adulterers must be stoned to death" or "thieves should have a hand chopped off", then that is what you do. No nonsense about 'understanding the criminal's environment', and 'we're all guilty', and 'who are we to say...'

I've been looking at Christian theodicy (the explanation of evil and suffering in a world created by God), in the course of which I've come across a wide range of readings of some of the more problematic incidents in the New Testament. My poem Collateral damage deals with one of these, the Massacre of the Innocents by King Herod, as described by Matthew (2 xv-xx).

This is a tough one to reconcile with a benevolent and merciful deity (as the poem implies). I was very surprised to come across the range of commentaries by Christians, which included:

1. It never happened. Matthew was wrong. He made it up because he wanted to demonstrate that Jewish prophecies were fulfilled.
2. As 1, except that Matthew was taking the prophecy as a symbol of a new covenant, not at face value.
3. It did happen, but shows that God can save the worthy (few) from the evil actions of Man (Herod).
4. It did happen, but was just one of those things. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. (I didn't actually read this one but it seemed implied by various references to the deliberate dropping of the incident from the Nativity story by the modern Church).

But the prize for muddled thinking goes to this argument: "The Bible is true, every word of it. Because it says so in the Bible"

My award for funniest use of animation

in a website goes to http://www.montypythonsspamalot.com/
(you'll need a broadband conenction and sound to enjoy it, though).

Unsourced quotation

I can't find the source of this, but I read it recently: "Every hypochondriac picks a winner in the end".

The death of the book

Those with long memories will recall the talk in the 80s of the "paperless office" that would result from the adoption of IT. Others, if interested, can dig out the magazine articles and company documents from the filing cabinet, or the records department, or the off-site dead record storage warehouse. So it was with some scepticism that I heard the prediction that e-books would replace real, paper, books. Until this week.

I was typing at the computer, and wanted a quote from Shakespeare ("Rosemary, that's for remembrance", from Hamlet). Glancing around the room, the Complete Works wasn't there-must be upstairs. Rather than go and get it (taking perhaps 2 minutes at most), I typed it into Google, and got my answer.

But on the bright side, it must be said that Google was not definitive: a good half of the quotations were mis-worded, or attributed to the wrong character, and in some cases to the wrong play.

The curse of public poetry

Wales now has a national poet - Gwyneth Lewis (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4497491.stm ). In a way, this is only fitting, since the tradition of eisteddfod competitions and Welsh language teaching means that there is much more down-to-earth, anyone-can-do-it attitude that prevails in, say, England, where to say you are a poet is to label yourself immediately as either a teenager, an English student, or a pensioner with time on their hands. Personally, I think the pendulum has swing too far towards the demystification and deskilling of poetry, mainly through the emphasis of poetry as self-expression rather than communication, which means that you can't say a poem is no good because that is an assault on the writer, even if it is no good. Good poetry is supposed to be hard to do!

But aside from that, it goes with the job of public poet to write poems about public events. This rarely results in good work. Gwyneth Lewis' poem on the triumph of the Wales rugby team (scroll down to the bottom of the page to see it) is a case in point. Even though this was an event in which she no doubt shared the euphoria of the best result in a generation, poetically it is er...awkward, possibly because she was wary of appearing "too clever" or "too hard", so she chucked some rhymes in here and there.

Andrew Motion has similar problems as Poet Laureate.

Fundamentally, though, I think that they find it hard to get excited about many of their topics, as indeed any sane person would. Even if you decide you do have to write a poem about an event, you do need the space to decide what to say, which may not be entirely positive and celebratory: see my Millenium poem.