Let the Right One In

Image: Momentum Pictures

The producers call it

a story about emancipation. Of how love and trust build the foundation for personal growth and liberation.

The film is based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who wrote the screenplay. On the film's website he says:

Above all it's a love story. Of how Eli's love releases Oskar, how she makes him look upon himself in a different light. Not as the scared one, not as the victim. How she gives him courage to stand up for himself. But Eli is a vampire. A real one...

I still don’t really know what to make of it. It is an unforgettable film, poetic and complex, and for the most part never looks like a horror movie at all. For me, the worst horror is not what appears onscreen. It's been praised for its restraint but in fact I could have done with even less gore, and less sniggering at the back.

Horror is a genre I have never understood. Why do people laugh at horror films? How did horror become camp? And why do they laugh even when the horror isn’t camp? Why do they laugh at the most gruesome things? They can laugh because it’s unconvincing, or excessive. Perhaps they laugh when it’s too frightening, or out of relief, or simply to show their companions that they're not scared. Sometimes of course there is deliberate wit, a compact between director and knowing audience, and there was an element of that here.

As a student I went with a friend to see The Exorcist, which at the time was getting rave reviews in the grown up press. Despite the sniggering at the back, I was impressed by the night-dressed child’s passive-aggressive urination on the carpet at the cocktail party, rather shocked by the creative abuse of a crucifix, repulsed by the 360 degree head rotation (this was a generation before CGI) - but I’m afraid that by the time we got to the projectile vomiting I laughed too. It was just over the top. It didn’t make us popular with the Very Old townspeople in the audience. I had a feeling that I'd spoiled something, that they wanted to continue to be convinced by something that had now lost its spell over me. And in turn I had the feeling of having been spoilsported at times while watching this film. I wonder what the effect would have been if I'd seen it at home on DVD.

I still don’t really get horror. Violence revolts me, and I have so far resisted all blandishments to see Tarantino as I lack the sense of humour that finds severed limbs funny. (No, sorry, not even in that German fork-lift truck safety film.)

But I was persuaded to see this by the five-star reviews, one of those rare occasions when Anthony Quinn (The Independent) agrees with Nigel Andrews (the FT). They insisted this was more than a vampire movie.

It could hardly be more different from the image conjured up by the tag "teenage vampire movie". There's no sex, no glamour, very little melodrama. It’s set in a bland suburb of Stockholm in the early 1980s, tensions with Russia on the radio in the background. It is winter, bitter outside and fetid indoors. The camera is patient, allowing appreciation of composition, the almost abstract qualities of the blocks of flats. The pace is restrained, and there is a rich palette of sound. The focus is on Oskar, a twelve year old boy who is being bullied at school and fantasises about revenge.

There is a murder scene very early on, where a young man is waylaid at night in the park. There is some verismo business with scuffed plastic containers and the sound of blood knocking into them. It's all very matter of fact. But the butchery is interrupted by a dog. There is undeniably something uncomfortably funny about the way the dog is so riveted by the scene – as anyone might be – and continues to ignore its owner’s calls. Instead it sits down to watch. It’s funny not least because it’s one of those fancy manicured poodles, sitting politely, not a wild-looking mutt who'd have been getting stuck in. The streetlights are on in the background, and passing traffic. The murderer gets more and more frantic, and it’s funny too because such an effete looking creature can thwart someone so murderous. And because it’s a movie, part of you wants the man to get away with it so we can have more of the story. The scene epitomises the delicate area the film explores: the park, liminal between civilisation and the elemental, banality and evil. The horror is that it can happen within earshot of everything ordinary.

For the first twenty minutes or so, I was in the world of the movie: the housing estate, the cold, the mundanities of the kid’s life, the bullying he suffers, his halting attempts at friendship with the mysterious girl. This is what the film does best: ordinariness, alienation, suggestion. It's never exactly clear how much is going on in real life and how much in Oskar's head. The leads – Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar and Lina Leandersson as Eli – are terrific. Natural, sensitive, believable. The film is psychologically very astute. It lingers but never bores. The tension is fantastic.

The film makes beautiful pictures, whether of the suburbs, the snow, or the outback, where the boy’s father drinks vodka with a man who appears out of nowhere and may be his lover. Or maybe just a drinking buddy, and the lover is really the vodka, but at any rate the boy knows his idyll with his father is ruined.

Then a man's face is half destroyed by acid, and the students giggle. They are so grown up, students these days, and so knowledgeable.

Some of the special effects seemed unnecessary. But perhaps their ability to disrupt underlines the moral ambiguity. Eli herself is not above a bit of passive-aggressive manipulation in her bid to be accepted across the threshold.

And there are puzzles, some of which might be resolved by the book, which I haven't read. This is a film: it doesn't need a book to explain it. There are hints of a massive back story for Eli. Why, if she is so “old”, is her Pa so incompetent at bloodletting? He wears a homely plastic overcoat, has an idea of disposing of a body, but really is extraordinarily hamfisted, not reading the culture: he chooses a park with streetlights; he doesn’t realise that kids will wait for their pals to go home together after basketball practice. He is new to the city, but acts as if he is new to the century – which is the last one, not ours.

And why has Eli got that scar we glimpse for a moment? What does it mean? (Oskar is wounded twice: once by violence, and once by his own bravado.) And the jigsaw egg, which she claims is worth enough to buy a nuclear power plant, an odd measure of value?

There is a shockingly ambiguous scene in which the father goes back home to the vampire daughter and asks her to do one thing for him, not to see “that boy”. Although the narrative is skewed to suggest that he is always her gofer, here is a glimpse of an alternative abusive relationship. He is clearly jealous. She touches his cheek as if to confer a blessing; he closes his eyes as if receiving it. In his submission, we glimpse a sense of his desire.

It seems commonly agreed that in this movie vampirism is a metaphor for other sorts of difference. Both Oskar and Eli are outsiders. Neither has a normal family life. Oskar lives with a mother who seems to pay him no attention, let alone notice that he's being bullied, and a father who indulges him with a sentimental fondness until the bottle appears. Eli’s parent/guardian makes it his business to go about getting her haemoglobin rations, and doesn’t appear to have any job.

None of the adults in the film is particularly sympathetic.* The parents don’t seem to engage properly with the boy; the others are boozers, except for the teacher who can’t wait to get home when the bell rings - even though Oskar is staying behind, copying something out of an encyclopaedia. You’d think she’d want to see what he’s up to, but she leaves him to it, and he rather touchingly switches off the classroom light when he leaves. In one scene where his mother berates him, the sound wonderfully enacts how Oskar switches off.

Eli’s true nature eventually dawns on Oskar: she appears only after dark, doesn’t seem to feel the cold, and when Oskar cuts his hand in a gesture of kinship, falls to the floor to lap it up with those curious animal gutturals that come with her affliction. He accepts this, yet when later she offers him money he is scandalised. You stole it! You stole it from those people you killed!

What is going on here? He nods at murder but baulks at theft? Is vampirism so bizarre that both Oskar and we the audience can gloss over it as beyond morality, a theatrical device, a mere stroke of fate that has to be endured despite its victims (for the most part not the toothsome youngsters of tradition, but boozers and losers – the implication perhaps that none of them will be missed)? Perhaps I’m being too literalist, but it’s one thing to accept someone from an alien culture, or with an alienating label or even an antisocial addiction, but quite another to be OK around a vampire.

Critics have focused on how it is a beautiful metaphor, probably because the darker side is bleedin' obvious. And there is a deeply disturbing cultural aspect to it. Eli’s way of life is shown as different but sufficiently similar that she can live in the flat next door. She may sleep in the bath under a light-proof cover, but when the cover is lifted, she is an ordinary girl asleep. In one sense, Eli provides the kinship that Oskar, if he weren't a loner, would find in a gang. At that level, the violence isn't so remarkable. Although friendship and acceptance can redeem us, if we befriend the wrong person, one possible outcome of unconditional acceptance is corruption.


*Correction: one of the unglamorous middle aged boozers is a heroine. She makes the supreme sacrifice in one of those scenes with baffling comedic overtones, but she has been dogged (or should that be catted) by comedy all along.

A Grand Day Out

Now that the Poet Laureate's been named, attention might turn to the next Oxford Professor of Poetry. Will another male bastion fall? The election is on 16 May.

It's an archaic institution, requiring the holder to give three lectures a year, and little else. Andrew Motion rejected the idea of applying, declaring that the whole thing has been overtaken by creative writing courses, and needs radical overhaul.

For some time, poetry evangelist Ruth Padel and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott were the only candidates. Roughly speaking, their declared supporters can be characterised as poetry readers and poetry writers respectively. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is a latecomer to the fray, and brings endorsement from Tariq Ali, Amit Chaudhuri, Toby Litt, Tom Paulin. He sounds impressive too.

I'm almost sorry that Michael George Gibson didn't garner enough support. He would have ensured some frantic media coverage. He's the man who allegedly asked for his money back at Ledbury because he didn't like the poems, and attempted to report The Poetry Society to Trading Standards because they weren't dealing in what he calls poetry. But they are arguments we've heard before.

Fascinating to see who's nominated whom. Walcott is getting the poets and critics: Al Alvarez, Alan Brownjohn, Carmen Bugan, David Constantine, the sadly late UA Fanthorpe, Alan Hollinghurst, PJ Kavanagh, Grevel Lindop, Patrick McGuinness, Lucy Newlyn, Bernard & Heather O'Donoghue, Michael Schmidt, Jon Stallworthy, Oliver Taplin, DM Thomas, Anthony Thwaite, Geza Vermes, Marina Warner...

Padel appeals to everyone else, astronomers, broadcasters, classicists, journalists, musicians, philosophers: Melvyn Bragg, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Valentine Cunningham, Victoria Glendinning, AC Grayling, Jeremy Isaacs, Emma Kirkby, Libby Purves, George Steiner, John Walsh, Geoffrey Wheatcroft - and at least one real poet: Alice Oswald. (Probably others I should have recognised.)

I incline slightly to Padel: sparky, generous, less conservative, and I like her. I understand some people don't, but not their reasons. I applaud what she does with her proselytising. It's not aimed at poets but at non-poet readers who are wary of the stuff. I don't see what's such a sell-out, or so patronising, about that. She did a fantastic job sorting out the Poetry Society a few years back - not a reason for her to have this post, but it speaks of character. It was impressive how she was prepared to listen, learn, and get up to speed overnight. She never seemed to begrudge the time spent.

Her old pal John Walsh did a hatchet job the other day on Walcott's reputation. Though it touched on professorship, it had nothing to do with poetry. I haven't read any of Walcott's criticism. Maybe it's not surfaced on my radar simply because I've been asleep.

Last time I voted for Carson. She didn't get it, but it was a grand day out.


Updated to account for more names.

Update and correction
Mr Michael George Gibson's agent has contacted me:

...we were very amused to read your comment about him in Squared. Where did you get your information from? Michael never asked for his money back at Ledbury and he has never attempted to report The Poetry Society to Trading Standards. We suggest you have a look at www.michaelgeorgegibson.org to find out what he is really saying.

My apologies to Mr Gibson.
25 August 2009

A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.

Katy Evans-Bush thinks much can be learned from an unsuccessful poem about what makes poems fail. She shows us the other Ozymandias, written by Shelley's friend Horace Smith in that famous competition. One can only hope that Smith himself saw instantly how outclassed he was. Do go there and read it - it's most instructive.

I've long had a fantasy of editing an anthology of bad poems, with a commentary, as a tool of instruction, but Nicholas Parsons got there first with his Joy of bad Verse. Lack of imagination, failure of nerve, and above all a lack of sensitivity to language are the commonest failings. McGonagall is treasured for his tin ear and his heroic mastery of bathos. Smith isn't in this sort of class either. He's just not terribly good.

But perhaps it's not so much what makes Smith's poem fail, as noticing, as Katy does, that it has a couple of good bits. And it's a question of what makes Shelley's poem so good. Where Shelley makes things up, and visualises them for us, Smith's poem is for the most part literal, unimaginative. He doesn't recognise the potential in the data. Starting with the same material as Shelley, almost every decision he makes is conventional:

Here's the fragment of statue, all alone; the Leg is all that's left of the civilisation; it could be the same for London one day. Civilisations pass. Smith takes Ozymandias for granted, is uninquisitive about the nature of power, save for its transience.

The first good bit - and I concur with her judgement - is the image of the Hunter "[thro' the wilderness/ where London stood,] holding the Wolf in chace". I don't know why Katy likes this bit, but I like it because it gives us an identifiable agent in the poem in contrast to the undefined and almost abstract "We"), and a new perspective of time, a sense of the altered state of London now a forest; that lovely period diction "holding the Wolf in chace" manages to suggest a relationship between the Hunter and hunted, some kind of controlled distance, like a dog on a lead. The Hunter is skilled. There is something intimate about it.

And how distracting that Hunter would find "some fragment huge", so ill-defined and unexpected, on his purposeful quest. It distracts us too: I wondered how a bit of statue had got from Egypt to London - via the British Museum perhaps? - before I pulled myself together. Oh, and I have a weakness for post-apocalyptic scenarios.

The second good bit she identifies is the closing couplet, and I must admit it raised a smile to my lips too. The polysyllabic adjectives cling to monosyllabic, simplistic rhymes. The second adjective, in the last line, is even longer than the first, so when the second shoe drops there is a fitting sense of build-up and bathos. It's interesting that Smith felt the need to relate the desert statue back to the situation of the assumed reader. He couldn't trust the statue itself, or the reader, to do the work, but had to draw an explicit moral: "some Hunter may express/ Wonder like ours..." The switched focus leaches energy from the original image. Not that the original image is very clear; it's treated as a given. There is something almost comic about the "gigantic Leg" because it could be anything. Actually there is one other almost good bit, which is the "[gigantic Leg], which far off throws/ The only shadow that the Desart knows".

Shelley lets the statue be the focus. His Ozymandias is a story, "I met a traveller... who said..." and it is the traveller who describes the statue. By putting the words into his mouth, he manages to give it an oral immediacy, both an authority (literally) and mythic status, a distance and a reason for being told.

And thereafter the focus is on the statue. Well, not exactly - because in piecing the statue together, Shelley conjures the subject of the statue himself, zooming in on the "frown,/ And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command" and even the hapless sculptor. We are right there with the antique traveller, seeing a tyrant's statue. And its empty boast. The poem is filmic in its attention. One could use Shelley's poem as a shooting script for a short. And the genius of the ending, which leaves the poem at the point where Horace Smith started his: the bare and level sands stretch far away.

Street art

Photo: Bailout by Slaminsky


Annie at Slaminsky has come back from New York with a fab slide show of street art.

Here are a few more sites for your delectation:

Brooklyn Street Art

c-monster: Eclectic, informed and witty art blog

El Celso: colourful, unpredictable, and not worksafe

wooster collective: A celebration of street art from all round the world

Bombing Science: Graffiti Pictures and Graffiti Supplies
Interesting forums. One thread on How to cook wheatpaste is enlightening about the consequences of not using the product quickly enough:

well, i'm sitting on my floor in my room watching Comedy Central when out of nowhere, i hear my backpack start to make this weird fizzing noise, it almost sounded like a zipper. anyways, i looked through my backpack for the source as it was increasing in sound, when i realized it was coming from my bottle of wheatpaste. well me being the idiot that i am i decied it would be best to pop up that littl cap thingy to give it some air.
THAT WAS THE WRONG THING TO DO!
the very second i opened it, BLAM! wheatpaste all over my room. i was left there watching the wheat paste LITERALLY spray out of the tube, as i franticly try to figure out what to do (so just seal the cap again right? well it wasn't til after the whole ordeal that i realized i should have.)

Lucky

I am a member of The Poetry Society. The confession seems in need of some justification. Years ago, it was a way of keeping in touch when I didn't have any other contacts. These days, as well as Poetry Review, a members' newsletter, a local Stanza group and the right to use club premises on certain terms, membership can have unexpected benefits. Unannounced, there arrived in my letterbox a 200+ page poetry collection, lavishly illustrated (as they say) and larded with endorsements:

X is the real thing. I love reading his verse and you will too.
Stephen Fry

This is marvellous stuff... a 21st century Kipling. He rollicks and rolls with rhyme, meter, and melody.
Tom Wolfe

Annoyingly good.
Hugh Grant

I enjoy his poetry immensely.
Mick Jagger

You feel he lived it so richly, so dangerously, that he could be wise for our delight.
Dr Robert Woof, Director of The Wordsworth Trust

A fantastic collection! Rich, sumptuous and beautifully threaded.
Jon Snow

If Waugh were still alive, he would fall on X's verse with a glad cry of recognition and approval.
John Walsh

That would be Auberon Waugh, then. I love John Walsh. He can be a devil at times.

Here's an extract from On Entering My New 'Writer's Cottage' on Mustique For The First Time:

Here in a fastness, filled with light
In view of a turquoise sea,
A fool has banished himself to write,
And, oh, that fool is me.

A fellow member of The Poetry Society came up to me the other day, apopleptic that someone could have bought the right to a PoSoc mailshot when there are so many more talented poets around crying out to be heard.

While I don't have a lot of time for the Mustique musings, such as I have read, I don't quite share her sense of outrage. Poetry isn't a zero sum game. No other poets were denied a purchase by this publicity stunt.* The mailout wrapper makes it quite clear that the gift is not from The Poetry Society, but from the generous donor. No doubt he paid handsomely for the privilege. Are they supposed to turn down such a gift on behalf of their members, and if so, who would make that decision and on what grounds? Should they turn it down if it were (just supposing any were rich enough and so inclined) from Simon Armitage, The Wordsworth Trust, Jeremy Prynne? Should they turn it down if it were a consignment of fresh coconuts? Yes to this last, presumably, on the grounds that fresh coconuts are outside the remit of The Poetry Society and the delivery of unsolicited fresh coconuts to members might amount to a nuisance. (Though personally I wouldn't mind them sending me a voucher for a free coconut, courtesy of the Mustique Development Agency, so that I could take advantage of the generous offer if I chose.)


She was almost incoherent with rage, but I think what my acquaintance was objecting to was the fact that Mr Felix Dennis (for it is he) is rich, and the further fact that publicity can be bought. And the fact that it can be bought, apparently, by anyone rich enough. Or at least by a rich poet she disapproves of. She is also exercised by the idea that the very use of The Poetry Society's mailing machine might give his publication some kind of imprimatur. (I am not sure what value should be attached to The Poetry Society's imprimatur. The Poetry Society arrogates to itself the definite article.) And not least, she is exercised by the perception that good poets can find it very hard to get published, let alone get publicity.

I haven't put it to her, but I wonder if she isn't also slightly bothered by the suspicion that innocent members of The Poetry Society might pick it up and actually like it. Dennis has made his fortune by an astute reading of popular taste.


*P.S. In fact, Dennis sponsors the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, under the auspices of the Forward Arts Foundation. This puts £5000 into the hands of a new poet, along with a fair bit of publicity.

The State of Play

Was there ever a movie about investigative journalism where the future of the paper isn't on the line?

Having missed the BBC series I could watch this with an open mind. It pushes paranoia buttons about NorthCom, corrupt defence procurement, jumbo corporations and privatised homeland security. It's a pacy political thriller, with some very familiar tropes: the maverick boozy journo, the editor anxious about the bottom line, the dodgy pols, the love interest/conflict of interest, the abrasive police, the dangerous assignation, the sleazy bar, the deadline, and so on. There is even an underground carpark sequence, so it's a lot of fun.

Russell Crowe is terrific as the slobby maverick journo. Helen Mirren as the editor is a sort of cross between Tina Brown and Anna Wintour. Ben Affleck, though well-groomed as a Congressman, lacks gravitas and steel.

The film could have ended many minutes earlier, and been a different, simpler, and perhaps more satisfying piece. There are too many improbable plot twists, and so many loose ends I gave up counting, so many circling black helicopters that never land. I wondered whether room was being made for a sequel.

At a time when print journalism is under greater threat than ever, it makes a traditional plea for inky hands. It's worth seeing the movie - which is never boring - simply for the beautiful credit sequence, following the paper to the press and on to distribution: this coda is a soaring hymn to newsprint.

La Vie Moderne

When I first visited rural southern France in the early 70s, some farmers were still ploughing with oxen. Even now, you can find old ox-ploughs rusting under a hedge – where there are still hedges. My parents have lived there nearly 30 years, and during that time we have seen farmers retire, their children move away, cattle sold, vineyards grubbed up, fields amalgamated, and the growth of tourism.

In La Vie Moderne photojournalist Raymond Depardon records the life of farmers in the Cévennes. It is part of an ongoing project dear to his heart. As a farmer's son, he has a great sympathy for them, and they open up to him as best they can, though it’s clear some of them are not completely at ease with the camera. The interiors are so familiar: the solemn pendule in the background, the open fire, the long kitchen table with the oilcloth, the plate of vanilla flavoured biscuits, the scuffed tin of sugarcubes pushed towards the visitor for the bitter coffee. You have to keep them in a tin because of mice.

The landscape is achingly beautiful. To strains of Fauré, the camera tracks up and down narrow country lanes, dives into valleys, past snowbound forests and shuttered houses, halts at a barbed wire gate. The people who scrape a living from the mountainside are dying out. Villages are ghosts of themselves. It’s heartbreaking to hear the stories, to contemplate the passing of a whole way of life, something which for generations had seemed so permanent. The way of life was backbreaking and brought little reward. Young people these days demand more. It is the loss of a culture. The loss of the language (Occitan) began even earlier.

Even here they now use tractors. Little of the old soundscape remains now but the bells on the brebis as they scramble down over the rocks to their barn for the night.

The film makes no argument beyond presenting a few farmers and their families to talk about the hardships of their existence, their hopes and fears for the future. The first family consisted of two elderly bachelor brothers and their nephew, who had got himself a wife from up North via a lonely hearts ad. He seemed well pleased with life, apparently oblivious to the jealousy and pain occasioned by the introduction of his new family - a wife and her daughter, people from elsewhere, who didn't understand the district, or farming, and showed insufficient deference to their elders.

One of the most poignant was a man who lived alone in a state of some neglect. His hair was long and matted, and he chainsmoked. For the entire session, he was glued to his ancient television watching the funeral mass for Abbé Pierre (founder of Emmaus). Without taking his eyes off the screen, he answered the questions almost monosyllabically:
- Are you a Catholic?
- No.
- Were you baptised a Catholic?
- No. I’m Protestant.
- Do you go to church?
- No.
And so on. I found all this disconcerting. The television was clearly his constant companion, and on this occasion enabled him to share in a national day of mourning. It seemed rather rude to persist in questioning when the interviewer had dropped in unannounced on this particular day. For all his sensitivity elsewhere, Depardon seemed curiously unalert in this instance - except that it made a telling piece of film, albeit partly at his own expense.

Although the film has received rave notices, it is not an obvious hit. There is little pacing, no polemic. There are odd flashes of wit but nothing to stop the viewer from nodding off for a minute or two. The voice of the interviewer slows things down, keeping a sense of distance between audience and subject.

I never saw any of those programmes about Hannah Hauxwell, but suspect that focusing on one family in the Cévennes might have made more engaging viewing than La Vie Moderne in its dutiful progress round the valleys. But Depardon’s aim is to be more faithfully representative of the different types of farmer and family set-ups. He is more of a collector than a specialist. Nor is this a visual Akenfield. We are so used to documentaries which edit out the questions, giving the impression that the participants are speaking freely for themselves, that the questioning, with all the rephrasings, repetitions – one of the participants was pretty deaf – and awkward silences, feels rough-hewn. Perhaps the documentary maker who is also a photojournalist wishes to display more regard for the “truth” of the present moment, even if that includes the non-answer and considerable longueurs. Why not say what happened? Yet he doesn't hesitate to stage a shot, to position the camera in the best place - the far side of a cow who is crumpled on the floor with mastitis, her grieving owner beyond... And heaven knows what went on the cutting room floor. As a photographer, he'd be used to culling the one image out of a thousand. Perhaps it's a category error to want something more rigorous from a documentary too.

However, that's a personal gripe that no-one else seems to share. And this is without question a valuable record of the remnants of a community that will have disappeared the way of the ox-plough within a generation.

WoT

Robbie G1, who created the slogan, credits
jamesholden.net/billboard/, who created the app. Go there to make your own billboards.

Via Hatherley.

Gun control

Dr Omed got a gun

Jesus got a gun

True facts of the Tulsa Gun Show

Janie's Got a Gun
[Video not available in your country]

Oh shit wrong chord

South West Airlines have the rhymes

London's lease hath all too short a date

Diamond Geezer draws our attention to

The Golf Sale. The legendary never-ending Golf Sale. The sports shop down a Mayfair sidestreet near Oxford Circus. The iconic Golf Sale advertised along Oxford Street by men with sandwich boards since time immemorial. Much imitated, never beaten. The Golf Sale. Closing down. Nip down to Maddox Street fast if you want to snap up a cut-price putter...

The lease is up.

Three landowners control most of the West End:
The Portman Estate

The Portman Estate is principally located within Marylebone, central London.

It encompasses Oxford Street from Marble Arch to Orchard Street, from Edgware Road in the west to beyond Baker Street in the east, and stretches north almost to Crawford Street. The Estate includes Portman Square, Manchester Square and the residential squares of Bryanston and Montague.

The Duke of Westminster (Grosvenor Estate)

Key locations in Mayfair are: Mount Street, Grosvenor Street, North Audley Street, Duke Street, Park Street
Key locations in Belgravia are: Grosvenor Gardens, Motcomb Street, Elizabeth Street, Eaton Square, Pimlico Road, Ebury Street

and HM the Queen. Details of Crown London holdings here.

(Not forgetting Cadogan Estates' massive - though diminishing - holdings in Chelsea.)

Between them, they own enough to make the market.

The Portman website advertises retail premises to let:

Shops are available on new Full Repairing and Insuring leases for 5 years, without rent review and outside the Security of tenure provisions of the Landlord & Tenant Act 1954.

Are we just starting to see the effects of the 2004 amendments to the Landlord & Tenant Act 1954? And we've just passed Lady Day, when rents are due... I'd love to know more, but alas do not have a subscription to Estates Gazette. What sort of business is prepared to take on a five year full repairing lease without right of renewal? Someone selling Olympic tschotskes, maybe? You'd have to be reckless, unless there were no choice.

The erosion of tenants' rights that began under the Tories has continued apace under New Labour. Under the guise of market liberalisation, most new residential lets are unprotected; new agricultural and business lettings suffer the same sort of insecurity. It doesn't allow a business to put down roots. It doesn't make for cohesive communities. It can cause dreadful hardship. It took generations to build up security of tenure but it seems to have been pissed away in under twenty years.

On their website (which doesn't let me link to a specific page) the Cadogan Estate exonerates itself from blame for the homogenisation of the High Street:

Today, Cadogan's holding in Chelsea is substantial in value, but is nevertheless still patchy. The assumption, for instance, that Cadogan owns everything on the King's Road is wrong. And the associated assumption that Cadogan is therefore responsible for the influx of High Street brands is profoundly inaccurate.

Not their fault, then. No-one's fault.

Not a day longer

from 10 Downing Street
to e-petition signatories

date 3 April 2009 15:44
subject Government response to petition 'notadaylonger'
mailed-bypetitions.pm.gov.uk

hide details 3 Apr (2 days ago) Reply

You signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to "Stop seeking to further extend pre-charge detention."

The Prime Minister's Office has responded to that petition and you can view it here:

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page18895

Prime Minister's Office

Petition information - http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/notadaylonger/


Bastards.

Cambridge poets

I thought Plane Debris was terrific, in the top Heliogabalus class. Sweat ran out of my ears, and still does, a sheer delirium.

J H Prynne


Back in the early nineties I joined a workshop run by Stephen Rodefer, who was then Judith E Wilson Fellow at Magdalene. (At the time, he'd only published in the States, but recently Carcanet has brought out a Selected, Call it Thought.) At our first seminar, he wrote on the board the names of some English poets with whom we should all be familiar. I've still got the notes somewhere, but from memory they included John Wilkinson, Denise Riley, John Riley, Tom Raworth, Veronica Forrest-Thompson, Rod Mengham... there were about a dozen names, and I hadn't heard of any of them - though I was familiar with names in the PBS catalogue, Poetry Review and so on. I can't for the life of me remember whether Prynne's name was on the list or whether he was taken as a given - certainly he was a presiding spirit, and Rodefer was glad to be breathing the Cambridge air. Most of my fellow students were familiar with many of these poets (a couple were Prynne's students), and with Americans like Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley etc, whom I'd never heard of. [Shamed.] My reading in those days was random, and I had a sense it was a bit restricted which is one of the reasons I joined this course.

(It was another 6-7 years before I got online, and people tend to forget what it was like back in those days.)

It was an enriching experience. It was there that I first encountered a personification of OuLiPo, the legendary Harry Mathews, who featured in the terrific series of readings that Rodefer organised for us. We also heard Rod Mengham, John Wilkinson, Denise Riley, Christopher Middleton, Wendy Mulford and others. It was wider than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, though all his guests had that passion for words as words first, rather than simply as means to an end. For the first time since student magazines, I was brought face to face with poetry that didn't make sense in any obvious way. Some of it was non-linear, some was syntactically disrupted, some played with the sounds words made:

An error is mirror to the truth
than any statement claiming to be true.

Rodefer, Plane Debris (Four Lectures)

At one seminar Rodefer produced for especial scorn a recent TLS with a poem by (let's call him) JG. Although it was quite vivid it wasn't, to be honest, a remarkable poem, particularly in retrospect now I have read so many other poems a bit like it - about dealing with the effects of an elderly relative as a consequence of their going into a nursing home. It began with an image of the narrator and his siblings picking over the household effects like gulls. "See!" said Rodefer, "that's what I really hate about this sort of poem: it gets a little movie camera going in your head" [here he makes cranking motions with his hand near his ear] - "poets should leave that kind of thing to the movies. Movies do it much better. We can't be satisfied with the visual now. Poets have to move on. It's our duty to foreground language."

(Of course he was a real film buff, and fascinated by the interaction between poem and film - but that's another story.)

So while we have our mainstream workshops urging things like Show don't Tell and all the other orthodox mantra, LangPo is doing something rather different. I read quite a lot of stuff around then, and went to a lot of readings, but on the whole it didn't excite me enough. I could never work out how to tell whether it was being done well or badly, because I never really "got" the point of much of it. At the same time, I was keen to pick up anything that might be useful, but heaven knows whether it shows. I doubt it. (I try to remember his advice: "Be bolder along the axis of selection.")

What I couldn't bear was the animosity that so often went with LangPo - that the Mainstream had sold out to Mammon, that the Mainstream pandered to the lowest common denominator, that the Mainstream was capitalist and anti-socialist, that the Mainstream perpetuated archaic values, that Mainstream writers were beneath contempt. At the same time, I was going to mainstream poetry readings and it was interesting in Q & A sessions to drop my bit of sodium into the water by asking them what they thought of Prynne.

The loathing was mutual, and it still baffles me. It may well be a testosterone thing, as it's not simply political. Now Bloodaxe has published Prynne's Collected (a book whose purchase-to-reading ratio must be close to A Brief History of Time) perhaps the barriers have come down a bit. While they remain, it's sad and an impoverishment of poetry. There are poets who earn respect from both sides, such as Geoffrey Hill, Roy Fisher, WS Graham, John Kinsella, Christopher Middleton, Denise Riley....

Hell, this is worth more than a cursory anecdote. I'll return to the subject when I've collected my thoughts more intelligently.

Village life

The Party Planner's shop has closed. I only patronised it once (for Hallowe'en, and not for me, and it's a long story), because it didn't sell anything I wanted. It appears it didn't sell enough of what other villagers wanted either. Not for them the party poppers, bouncy castle, personalised helium balloons. Not for them the dream wedding limo hire. Perhaps the reality was just too cruel.

Il Divo

Quite a contrast with last week's movie, this stylish piece from Sorrentino foregrounds cinematographic technique with clever background music to make a drama which never pretends to the documentary. It deals with the top end of society, its manners, masks and gross corruptions. The children in Entre les Murs are saints by comparison. Knowing little of Italian politics - though I remember the perennial Andreotti, the whiff of corruption that hung about him, the tragedies of Aldo Moro and Falcone, and the endlessly interrogated mystery of Calvi (and how can any of these be called "politics"? Oh, and I recall learning back in school that Italy's system of proportional representation led to inherently unstable government and unpalatable dealmaking) - even knowing so little, I found it compelling. A huge amount must have been over my head. I don't know enough to know what percentage that might be but guess it's well north of 50: I don't speak Italian; I know precious little about their political structures; I don't know the names of the politicians, nor remember them from one scene to the next so was frequently lost. But I'd gladly go again, and not just to pick up a few of the threads I missed first time round. For the most part, it's fascinating viewing. The very few longueurs are places where too much explanation is being given, and are defined only by the drive of the rest of the film.

Jumpcuts, flashbacks, flashforwards and leitmotifs create depth and texture. The fizzing glass of migraine cure marks the end of an Act. The focus on his curious hands has its own strange language once his secretary explains it to his inexplicable visitor.

Let's take her as an example of the ambiguity the film revels in. A woman appears at his office, sur commande. She is attractive, very nervous - frightened even. Her blouse is undone by one too many buttons for her to be respectable. Yet she has crows' feet - she must be fortyfive if she's a day, far too old to be a prostitute. What other explanation can there be? She seeks advice from the loyal secretary as if an ingénue from a madam. When she meets Andreotti she is shy, but embraces him. They talk of intimacy, she says she explores herself... The camera focuses on his hair, his physicality. The next time we see her she is on the arm of an Ambassador, and when someone asks her about her painting dismisses it: "I just dabble." Can we believe that Andreotti, whose power could command whomsoever he could choose, would choose a woman d'un certain age to be his companion of the night, or a "dabbler" to paint his portait?

This is a drama, so we can take it only as a means to the construction of a character - one who is undemonstrative, enigmatic.

And yes, so much comes down to the physical presence. Much as there's a hint of The West Wing in that encounter on the diplomat's arm at the ball, even though it's taking the trope of embarrassed recognition to put a different spin on it, so there is an inescapable comparison with Richard III. At least for the English. Er, well, there's the intelligence, the dead bodies strewn on the path to power. And the hunchback. I am ashamed to mention it. Yet it's undeniably there. If we're going to be politically incorrect here, let's go the whole hog and suggest that the Italians, in common with their French neighbours, are much less bothered by political correctness than the Anglo-Saxons.

But like Entre les Murs, it is an intelligent film, treats its audience like adults. And engaged. Whereas Entre les Murs listens to children for once, and shows teachers to be fallible - and neither of them perfect - this film ironises Andreotti's claims to innocence. He is never seen to mandate anything. Enemies die right and left; he prays. The only hint of guilt is circumstantial: the kiss. Later, he jokes that a politician must take care whom he associates with: think of Jesus and Judas. Later still, there is a parody of Leonardo's Last Supper where associates meet to anoint him presidential candidate. No-one kisses and betrays him. They all toast him with wine, white and red, even the cardinal, while he toasts with migraine remedy, his cup of bitterness and guilt.

And his physicality is amazing. Toni Servillo as Andreotti manages to make his neck disappear. He wears a hunchback. His curious hands have a role of their own: praying, or marking pleasure or displeasure. He holds his body still as if nothing could move him. His stillness exemplifies his power - and occasionally his vulnerability.

It's overdone in places, no question. The ears are too much. The abject senator whose name I forget (the ugly, stupid one who complains that A never showed him any affection) is a caricature. No-one would vote for him. The kingmaker whose name I forget wouldn't have tested the slide of the marble floor IRL even if he fancied himself as a funky dancer. The scene after Andreotti is indicted, where he is sitting with his wife who is channel-hopping to avoid the appalling news - very stagey, but effective. After many channel-hops she finds a station playing a torch song and as the two of them sit there and she reaches out a hand to him and tears up, you can't be sure whether she is weeping for her husband, or the man she thought he was.

Along with the swooping and savvy camera work, an extraordinarily eclectic range of incidental music, sometimes so brief it was over before I noticed it.

The credits played to this:


Update
Why I walked out of my own biopic: an interview with Andreotti about the film here.

Entre les Murs

Compelling movie. I knew nothing about it when I went. I loved the documentary feel of it, the absence of music (save the poignant offstage Schubert during the parents' evening, a telling counterpoint to the dialogue). I loved the ambiguity of the teacher's role. He is idealistic but an insensitive loudmouth. He fucks up. He compromises himself with the disciplinary board, and even before that he is faking good in his account of the run-up to Suleiman's disastrous outburst. The earlier grading meeting is similarly compromised by the vested interests of the student representatives: a lovely piece of symmetry. I loved the vitality of the kids, all the more so thinking that this was largely improvised.

And I loved the subtitles. Someone had thought about them. At one point, a pupil has to conjugate "croire", so the subtitler went for an equivalent irregular verb rather than a straight translation, and had a lot of fun with "swim". It kept all the fun of the mistakes, and wouldn't have mattered a bit to anyone who doesn't know French, but flattered anyone who does.

I despaired of the bureaucracy. Of the low expectations. Of the student representatives on the grading committee, even though they are bright girls. Of the slovenliness. Should it matter that a teacher goes to school in t-shirt, jeans and trainers? Hmf, in my young day teachers wore suits, or at least sports jackets and flannels or cavalry twills. They certainly wore a tie. And Mr Brown wore a linen jacket in the summer term, and a panama hat. The past is another country.

Danger

The book is due out in April.

O'Ryan's Belt

That's four pubs down, three to go. We lost one in the last credit crunch in the early nineties, and three in the past six months. We have also lost in the past six months: two freesheets, an estate agent, a shop selling nursery goods, a shop selling dresses sizes 16+, a shop selling sports gear, and our independent bookshop. This last was an amazing place in its heyday - they would order anything for you, often going to a great deal of trouble to track it down, with most things being available the next day. And we had poetry readings. It was tiny, and there were only about 3 stools available, so it was très intime. The owner had some kind of direct line to OUP in the good old days when they published poetry. So we had visits from Anne Stevenson, Michael Donaghy, Peter Porter, Stephen Romer, Katherine Porteous (who had only just had her first collection out) and, anomalously, Kevin Crossley-Holland.

The reading I remember best - it must have been at least 15 years ago now - was Michael Donaghy's. It was the first time I'd heard him, and he was witty and wild. Anyone who's ever heard him will know how privileged we were. He is the measure of performance.

And after many draughts of white wine from a plastic cup, he took out his tin whistle. That is what it should be like - conviviality, poetry and music.

Beheaded

I return to the village after a few days' absence to find another pub boarded up. I say "boarded up" but like the other pub in the village that went dry overnight, this one has perforated metal sheets nailed to window- and door-frame. Everything bears the signs of hasty departure: a pile of beer kegs in the yard, picnic tables stacked at the far end of the carpark. Hefty concrete blocks dumped inside the security fencing deter any ramraider or passing caravans. They boast the legend "BLOCK AID". Does anyone in this business have a gram of compassion?

It's one of the village's signature buildings: half-timbered with a jetty storey at head-bashing height. In fact, one corner has been bashed by something more substantial than a head, and has remained unrepaired since the tenant before last, along with various scabs of plaster, which have fallen off over the years. The Queen's Head sign looks rather better for her veil of green lichen.

So who is the queen? Anne Boleyn? Lady Jane Grey? Or Mary I? I waste time trying to find out. An entry in Wikipedia asserts (citation needed) that all pubs in the village are owned and run by drug dealers. I wouldn't know, I never go to village pubs.

Update
Of course, if I'd bothered to look up, I'd have seen that whoever secured the pub with its grilles and fencing had also taken a Kärcher to the sign and jetted off the accumulation of moss to reveal the necklace and the wobbly legend Lady Jane Grey.

Update 2 And on the other side of the sign is Mary I. The sign fixed to the gable end is of yet another queen. OH says it should be "Queens' Head" and there ensues an unseemly battle about grammar. I win, but the pub is still shut.

Baffleboard

A present from my sister, acquired in Bordeaux market. This is her photograph. She understands me very well.

Made in China of course. Just look at the size of that car! (Click image to enlarge.) I imagine the manufacturer had overstocks as he had so few orders from the catalogue. Alas, no instructions were included, but I'm just being greedy.

Morph

Why Bolero of all things?

Using lists

Perusing the list of BNP members induced a mixture of emotions. Schadenfreude, because I detest them and all they stand for, and it was an odd sort of poetic justice to see them exposed like that. Ridicule that they'd let it happen. Shame, because however awful they are, ordinary members deserve their privacy. Anxiety that I might find someone I know there, or someone from my own village. Revulsion at the large numbers of people from the same family, again and again, with teenagers signed up to the youth group. A grudging respect for all the volunteering that it represented: every one of those thousands of entries had been compiled by someone knocking on a door, filling in a form, and someone else collating it.

I wasn't looking at the original file, but one that someone else had copied and posted up, so there was minimal formatting, no tablulation. But it was clear that there were fields for title, first name, surname, qualifications, address, and comments. These last were pathetically illuminating:

Accountancy skills
Activist (discretion requested)
Activist. Ex-Independent candidate (General Election May 05). Good networker
Activist. Former Lib Dem agent. Change of address 21/3/07
Activist. Letter sent re. temporary activity ban (Southampton area) of six months
Activist. Previously listed as Alfred
Activist. Upgrade from Standard to Gold m/ship 3/4/07
Aged 17 (06). Change of address 18/6/07
Body piercer/retailer (self-employed). BA (Hons) Business Enterprise. City & Guilds Adult Teaching Cert. Diplomas in Aromatherapy/Reflexology. Former nurse. Hobbies: dancing, swimming, walking, caravanning
Borough councillor.
Bounced cheque: membership cancelled 4/11/05.
Business owner
Candidate
Candidate willing
Candidate willing Has meeting venue available
Carpenter/builder
Cert Ed. (Law/Accounting). Hobbies: researcher/writer modern philosophy & pre-historic mysteries. Poetry. Yoga, martial arts, body-building (former competitor). Occasional martial arts/fitness instructor
Chartered town planner
Civil servant
Commercial artist.
Company director
Composer/musician/lecurer. Doctor of Philosophy (Composition) PhD. Cert. ED:FE, BA (Hons), BTEC computer software. Soundtrack writer, ethnomusicologist. Hobbies: music (performance), rambling/hiking, ornithology, history, poetry
Computer skills (web design)
Computer skills (web design)
Director (small company). ANZIQS, NZATC, NZCQS, NZCB. Hobbies: lay-reading (C of E)
Director a tatoo [sic] & body piercing studio. Qualified mountaineering instructor (AMI). Hobbies: DIY
Donation £35 (07). Original birth cert returned 29/3/07
Donation £5 (07)
Engineer. City & Guilds (motor engineering).
Ex-serviceman (Army). Hobbies DIY, dogs
Experience of legal, constitutional & european law. Publishing skills
Ex-serviceman (MoD Police). Abex
Ex-serviceman. Hobbies: woodwork/metalwork. Proof-reader
Ex-serviceman. Retired docker
Ex-serviceman. Retired lecturer. Abex
Factory manager
Family: (name). Comps slip: gold/family membership
Film maker (amateur) with own recording studio
Fluent French/Dutch
Fluent German
Former Conservative councillor (13 years).
Former police/prison officer
Former policeman (international security/counter terrorism)
Gold badge not received - replacement sent 12/2/07
Graphic design/desktop publishing
Housewife. Hobbies: walking, water colour painting
Illustrator/graphic designer (professional)
IT experience
Jobbing builder, cabinet maker, boat builder, restorer. Hobbies: boating, fishing
Joiner (placards/boards etc.). Security
Joiner. Slater. Tiler (self-employed). Hobbies: fishing, darts, pool
Law graduate. Teacher (English literature)
Locksmith/carpenter
Manager (building site). City & Guilds (plastering, floor laying). Hobbies: karate (2nd Dan instructor), clay pidgeon[sic] shooting. Lead singer/drummer with band
Manager (senior)
Manufacturing company owner
Marketing skills
Mechanic/manufacturing engineer (self-employed)
Military/social historian
Mobile DJ with singing partner, snakes & spiders
Musician (professional)
Nick's double
Office manager
Parish councillor
Party chairman
Pilot (helicopter/aeroplane)
Plumber/gas engineer
Printing company owner
Refrigeration and air conditioning engineer
Resigned 02/06/04. Will not be renewing 07 (unhappy with his reception within the Party - reports not published, etc.) Journalist
Retired clerical worker/fireman on British Railways. Hobbies: railways
Retired fitter
Retired Head of Mathematics
Retired male nurse
Retired martial arts instructor. Plasterer
Retired primary teacher. Cert. Ed/Teaching. Hobbies: knitting, walking
Retired R & D engineer. Former chief engineer &; consultant (engineering/environmental). BSc Mechanical Engineering. Hobbies: archaeology, English history/literature
Sales/marketing
Security officer
Self-employed
Senior citizen: paid full rate
Serviceman
Serviceman (Army)
Singer/musician (English Folk)
Site manager (construction)
Teacher (secondary school) (discretion requested)
Teacher. Cert. Ed. Hobbies: astronomy, wildlife, ancient history, handwriting
Video editing equipment
Will not be renewing 07 (took offence to newspaper reports about the Party)
Will not be renewing. Now supporting UKIP
Will not be renewing 07 (court case pending)
Will not be renewing 07 (emigrating)

By contrast, I learn from Huffington Post that Obama's team emailed everyone on their campaign list on Monday:

The campaign was letting me know that barackobama.com was directing visitors to volunteer for -- or donate to -- relief efforts to aid the victims of the Southern California fires.

Huffington adds:

There are, of course, some on the political fringes already mounting their pushback, as Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia did, comparing Obama's call for national service to "what Hitler did in Nazi Germany" and "what the Soviet Union did." Jonah Goldberg likened it to "slavery" (of course, Goldberg's latest advice on dealing with the financial meltdown is for Obama to do nothing).

Perhaps one good thing that will come out of the hard times will be a collective willingness to ignore such bleating -- and to do what so clearly needs to be done to ameliorate the human suffering those hard times have brought.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Galveston

This song has been on my mind. I last heard it in the 60s, and didn't know then that it was more than a love song. And all I could remember of it lately was the refrain, that half sob in the voice. It was a shock to hear it now, with all that cheesy backing that the memory had edited out.

The media over here has gone a bit quiet on what's happening over there. I haven't seen any appeals for help, but there must be people out there who have lost everything. I hope other people are around to pick them up.

And the first shall be last

Just one of the brief essays on underside of Vulcan fuselage.

Methuen's Anthology of Modern Verse

I've just been indulging myself with An Anthology of Modern Verse (Methuen, 1921). My Oxfam copy is from 1940, the 30th edition. Staggering to think of how popular it must have been. It's full of the famous: Chesterton and Belloc, Kipling, Hardy, Thomas. And people I've never heard of - and on this meagre evidence, rightly so: Fyleman, Hopewood, Turner. This anthology, obviously enormously popular, has one striking omission: Housman. It is curious but oddly satisfying to see Eliot, Hopkins, Graves, Lawrence, Hardy, Owen, Thomas, Yeats rubbing shoulders with Kipling, Masefield, Stevenson. But why no Housman? His work was current, hugely popular.

92 poets, of whom there are 14 women, most of whom are justly neglected - as indeed, are most of the men.

Chapeau

Was in Ribérac, down a back street. The shop was shut, with its grille down - you can see it in the photograph, along with the reflection of the wall opposite. The model is in a dream within a dream: she's not real; she's in a shop; the shop is closed. She is beyond reach, and from another time.

Tuscan whole milk

It's good milk if you drink it right away, but I'm only giving it one star because it spoiled when I left it [on] the counter when I went away for the weekend. They really should put this in the description. I've bought a lot of products from Amazon (books, CD's, etc.) and I've never had this problem with anything else.

Human creativity knows no bounds. Any new technology will quickly attract populations to exploit it beyond its original purpose, whether they use it to sell things, to rob people blind, to perform new acts of vandalism, or simply to have fun. While facebook attracts its share of spammers, spivs and satirists, it's heartening to know that the wilder reaches of amazon.com have their own colony of creative writers squatting in Gourmet Food.

I was in two minds blogging about it - it's like a small microclimate one hesitates to disturb by sending tourists trampling over it. I've hardly begun to explore its wilder reaches myself yet, but I love the way people adapt creatively to hostile environments. A quick google reveals that I'm late to the party as usual: Boing Boing blogged about it nearly two years ago.

perms

Why isn't it simple? Why can't I just write a straight sheaf of addresses off the stack, and bung the same things into each envelope? Indeed, why do I have to write the addresses by hand - surely any competent organisation would have them on the computer?

Um. I do have them on the computer.
But.

Well. There are contributors. They get first crack of the whip. With a light heart, I start sending mags out to the valiant souls who make it happen. I am glad to, and very grateful to them. And to you, with your sparky poems, and to you and your lightsome reviews.

Then there are the contributors who are also subscribers (less than a handful) - and subscribers are our lifeblood - and they get an extra copy, which is a different postal rate. Then there is the contributor who is also a subscriber whose sub is up for renewal, who gets a reminder because I am hardnosed like that. Then there are the contributors who live abroad, and you have to queue up to get it weighed, and does the scrawled comps slip mean that it no longer counts as 'printed matter'?

And indeed, there are the contributors who are subscribers whose subs lapsed with the last issue, but whom (for obvious reasons) I don't want to let go, so I have a special letter to send to them.

And the impecunious contributors who are also subscribers who prefer not to have a second copy of the mag but to roll over their sub to the next issue. I don't like to think about what this tells me about how they value this particular issue.

And then there are the subscribers, the vast majority of course, who fit into none of those categories. Including those whose subs are due, and those whose subs have lapsed. And those in each category who live abroad.

There are 16 permutations...

And then there are the inserts. Do I send them willy nilly to everyone, including the subscriber who asked me to include them, and who probably has inserts up the ying-yang? And to those abroad? (Well, not if it tips it into a different price band.) Do I send Soundblast Performance Poetry flyers to Mrs Trellis of North Wales?

Is it even worth my time wondering about such things?

Flogo

Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG posts about the nascent ability to print clouds – using a buoyant "mixture of soap-based foams and lighter-than-air gases such as helium" to create logos and messages that float like clouds across the sky until they disintegrate up to an hour later. Geoff, creative optimist that he is, writes:

there is an obvious (and, frankly, rather uninteresting) reaction to all this – i.e. please save us from yet another form of corporate advertising, we don't need logos in the sky – but there are also artistic, and even literary, implications here that go beyond mere outrage

before proceeding to riff on the glorious possibilities.

Me, I'm down there with the obvious and frankly uninteresting, trying to console myself that there will be parts of the sky unflogoed so long as there are parts of the world insufficiently inhabited and/or rich and/or influential. There are times when I even resent vapour trails. Don't get me wrong, I love the built environment, but I am cynical about what money does.

Actually, BLDGBLOG is one of my favourites, and I love Geoff's thought experiments. Many of his commenters take him to task on practicalities while ignoring the principle he's exploring. I'm guilty of this myself, here.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Factoid

H drew to my attention a recent (31 March) letter in the FT. In response to some bad press about Icelandic banks, Sigrún Davídsdóttir makes the point that Icelanders are a very homogenous and small community with a mostly shared experience and outlook. She says: "It is easy to lie with statistics, but difficult to tell the truth without them."
And then the money quote:

It is dangerous to extrapolate from statistics: an Icelandic poet can count on selling 500 copies of his book of poetry in Iceland - although the ratio of English inhabitants to Icelandic is 200:1, an English poet cannot expect to sell 100,000 copies.

Davídsdóttir is a novelist and woman of letters as well as an economist, so that may be one reason she used that particular example. But 500 books! to 313,000 people! 500 copies is a good number for an English poet to sell, unless they are really famous. Curiosity led me to this article (from 1996, when the population was smaller):

With the multiple and seemingly inexhaustible blandishments of the electronic age, poetry still holds pride of place among the seven arts with close to a hundred collections of poems published annually -- in a population of just over 260,000. Poetry may not be as politically potent today as it was during the struggle for independence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nor is it as commonly quoted in everyday conversation as it used to be, yet it is very much a living part of our existence, both at home and at public gatherings. `The President never makes a speech without quoting copiously from poems old and new, nor does a politician worth his salt ever deliver a festive talk without rich poetic ingredients. At private parties, on the radio (or even television), and in the press there are not infrequently poetic contests eliciting interest from all classes and categories of society.

Why all this interest in poetry? Attempts at explication should be made. The tradition is very old and very strong. Some of the most engrossing visions of Iceland, both past and future, have been expressed in lyric form. The natural scenery is imposing and lends itself easily to poetic descriptions. The language is sonorous, flexible and highly translucent, making it a supple instrument for poetry.

I've heard that in Korea, poetry books sell as fast as cookery books. (Co-incidentally, another very homogenous society. And there again, poems about the seasons and the weather are very popular.) Are there other places in the world where poetry sells as well?

Blimp

Already sounds like a word from a poem by Edwin Morgan. I love this idea. Never mind the impracticality of pumping water. Let gravity take care of sewage. Electricity will be conducted by astonishingly fine, astonishingly conductive rare metals. Winds will blow, and people will talk nostalgically of being grounded.

Cantuar

It's not clear from the press what Dr Williams had in mind, but it won't be the sort of thing the mad dogs have been howling over. There is no way even he, with his knees on a hassock and head in the clouds, could seriously suggest applying sharia law to anyone who doesn't consent. So it couldn't apply in matrimonial cases (children to consider, even if women can be assumed to be giving free consent) or family inheritance cases (what about potential beneficiaries who don't consent to the sharia court?) let alone in criminal cases.

There may - just - be an argument for using a sharia court as an agreed arbitrator in contract cases, much as one might have the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors written into a contract as arbiter for development disputes. Consenting adults should be able to decide how to settle their disputes. However, this would be fair only between bargainers of equal bargaining power. And even then, just imagine the hoohah when someone appeals against the decision of such a sharia court because it's partial (judges related to plaintiff), incompetent (judges comatose) or capricious (judges didn't consider evidence), just to take three examples that might happen in any tribunal. In such a case, the appeal would lie to the civil courts in the usual way. "English Law Overrules Sharia!" "English Rules OK!" Just imagine. And heaven forfend that it's a Jewish judge in the Appeal Court.

The prelate espouses a misguided pluralism, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, it doesn't take too much imagination to foresee this as encouragement and sanction for enclaves of sharia law in the sort of place where young men like Abu Izzadeen can say to the Home Secretary: "How dare you come here, to a Muslim area, after you have arrested Muslims..." It's already happening informally. There are tribal areas in New Zealand which apply tribal law with the consent of the state, and I believe there are many other places around the world with such enclaves, where colonisers have exempted certain areas from application of their Law. Should it make any difference whether such enclaves are indigenous or immigrant? Personally, I deplore that sort of separation whatever its genesis, but then I'd do away with faith schools and the established church and -- don't get me started. Let's keep one law for all, please.


Update
Here's what he said.

Rant

On one of the forums where I lurk, someone is complaining that the editors of a magazine suggested changes to their submission which would have radically altered the poem, nay changed the whole tenor. The poster adds that they never had much faith in those editors' judgement anyway.

So why are they sending their poems there?

It is easy to get enraged over exchanges like this, so I won't. It can be very dodgy offering unsolicited crit. Some people are adult enough to welcome it, but others are prickly as hell. Why do they send stuff in the first place if they don't value the editor's judgement?

As for solicited crit, you know it's going to be a disaster from the off. Anyone who needs to ask isn't going to like what you're going to say. Anyone with an ounce of sense knows that editors won't have time to write a word more than they have to unless they want to. It takes too long to work out a tactful way to tell someone their work is crap. Or just boring.

Some would-be contributors have an attitude problem: they seem to think that there's a kind of bar of general competence they have to clear.
Er, NO.
They have to write a poem that the editor thinks other people are prepared to pay money to read.

Plus, that poem has to fit in with the other poems on the shortlist. So the ten millionth brilliant poem about Alzheimer's probably ain't going to cut it.

The editor's judgement may be a bit idiosyncratic, but the editor's best placed to know the sort of people lined up prepared to pay for poems in that particular magazine, and how far to push their tolerance - so like it or not, the would-be contributor has got to accept that judgement. Anyway, why are they sending their precious poems there in the first place if they don't?

I'm well into my second year editing at Seam. It feels like a hundred. When I started out, I was more liberal with my comments than I am now. One classic response was from a man who wrote that he'd taken on board my suggestions, and had sent his revised poem to a competition where it had won a prize... (Thanks, mate, you're welcome.)

I don't know about other editors, but the biog is the last thing I read. And I'm trying to draft a catch-all rejection slip that is somewhat more gracious than the one I got from Brando's Hat, years ago, after about six months. We are sorry you have not been successful - a thin line of type crudely scissored from thirtynine identical others on a page of A4.

E J Thribb writes

So hello then 2008.
What will you bring? I can hardly wait
As Greenland doffs its ice-cap to the sea.

Create your own zoo

I should apologise for this, but found it inexplicably hilarious.

the cost of selling

I go to one of the bookshops with a rather late batch of the magazine and a delivery note. It is late, and I am apologetic, so instead of just leaving the package at the information desk, I go in search of D, who is responsible for the poetry section. He's a poet himself, and we have published poems of his occasionally. We gossip about what's about, what people are buying. Cat Haiku, obviously. It's an opportunity for me to riffle through what he has new in stock ... There are magazines I haven't seen for a long time, such as The Journal (formerly ~ of Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry). He starts telling me about new books in; we get to talking about the Costa list, the TS Eliot list, which he regards as "predictable". We agree that John Burnside might have been included. He shows me Moya Cannon, Kenji Miyazawa. I buy half a dozen magazines I don't actually subscribe to (though I should) and when my purchases are totted up, they are over £50. D isn't even on commission.

Poetry and audiece

How often have you heard poets wish for the sort of audiences that the visual arts command? How often have you heard poets complain that Guardianistas will flock to any exhibition, will engage in the quite abstruse language of art appreciation, but will run a mile when confronted with the prospect of listening to a line or two of concatenated words? Even if penned by the Poet Laureate himself?
(Um, well, perhaps that's not the precise superlative I was looking for.)

Well, be careful what you wish for. The incomparable Ms Baroque has a post (no, dammit, it's not that post - which post is it? Anyway -) which castigates quite even-handedly both the lumpen proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

But look again at her castigations. Which one of us can honestly claim that we have never been guilty of any of the following, mutatis mutandis:

• Considering the poet's clothing, his habit of scratching his nose each time he tells a joke
• Wondering if he's making out with that pretty young poet sharing the platform, with whom he's exchanging knowing glances as the middle-aged, heavily maquillaged female poet (with whom they are both sharing the platform) relays dithyrambic sexual confessions
• Wondering if you will get to the pub before it shuts
• Seeing X over the room, a publisher whose attention you've been hoping to attract
• Seeing Y over the room, a poet from the next parish who's always trying to get you to read his manuscript
• Seeing Z over the room, with whom you thought you were good friends until the day you had a blazing row about Bukowski, and who has never spoken to you since
• Wishing the poet's subject matter were more varied
• Wishing the poet told more jokes
• Wishing the poet's poems were shorter
• Wishing it were a different poet altogether?

blond balladeer

So Boris is writing verse? Perhaps he has been studying Stephen Fry's How To book. All of this is so depressing.

God's plaything

Ted Hughes put in a dramatic appearance at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. The "Poet on Poet" lecture was Christopher Reid reading from the Letters, which he's just edited. The event opened with Huge himself, his dark brown voice out of the ether growling the opening verses of Crow. With extraordinary sangfroid CR stood alone at the podium looking self-deprecating, took a draught of water as God was being challenged, then owned that the more alert of us would have realised that he wasn't engaging in some extraordinary act of ventriloquism. He wanted us to keep Ted's voice in our head when he read the letters.

Terrific stuff. He started with the first letter in the book, an extraordinary teenage love letter in which the poetic imagination was stretching its wings. Then there were letters from Cambridge, the letter to Olwyn where he tells about winning the poetry competition (p 93), a letter to Olwyn about America (p 106) where everything is wrapped in cellophane and transported great distances...

It was while he was reading part of a letter to Ben Sonnenberg (pp 586-589) where Hughes is talking about his jaguar, and how he tried to capture that curl of the lip, like a dog bothered by the fly - and in fact the whole passage is about work, revision, and the inspiration that comes with work and alertness - that the surely by now famous visitation occurred. Reid was reading:

The image that came to my head, to give the idea, was - memory of a fly landing on a dog's nose

and something rose across my vision from bottom left to top right, and I tilted my head a few times to try and get it again, thinking it was a trick of the light on the inner surface of my glasses. CR read on for almost half a minute, describing how the dog might react to the fly, and how he was trying to get the description right, and now:

To intensify my idea and make the point of irritation more of an impossible, inaccessible fixture...

and we realised there was a butterfly onstage.

Probably: as if it had a fly up its nostril [laughter from the audience] while I was actually writing these words...

For now the butterfly was in full view, under the spotlight, fluttering over Reid's head. Still laughter

...an average size bluefly came straight acorss that very cold room - where no fly could have moved since November at the latest -

more laughter -

and went straight up my nostril, where it lodged.

The butterfly landed on Reid's head, to general hilarity. He felt something and brushed at it, so it left again and fluttered around, and he saw it, but not before he'd read:

I extracted it, and pressed it in my Shakespeare.

And as he finished the sentence, he was laughing too, and pointing at the butterfly, and said what we were all thinking, if only in jest: "He's here!" After a bit it fluttered onto one of the cardboard boxes bearing the legend "Words", where it stayed until the end of the lecture.

The Act of Making

George Szirtes asks about the Act of Making. I interrogate myself about the need to shout back at the PC monitor, its blue self-sufficiency. Sometimes it's possible to believe you're the only person in the world.

When I write, which I do rarely these days, it is more of a listening than a writing. I don't know what sort of listening. Nothing as explicit as Name That Tune, but hoping to hear something. That sounds precious. It isn't really - the first poetry I heard was nursery rhymes and the shipping forecast, and prayers. Always troubled by what I didn't understand, I still find an edge of anxiety* in that listening.

There can be a cadence to it, rather as you can tell through a closed door without hearing the words, whether it's a sports report or Thought for the Day. (I don't want to write poems like either of those, by the way.)

First off, particularly if I'm asked to write something (rather than responding to a simple(!) urge to write), there may be a stage when I'm brainstorming, just jotting down odd lines and whatnot on scraps of paper, rewriting bits that interest me, shuffling them around, trying to see if they speak to each other. At this stage I have only the vaguest idea of what I might be listening out for. In fact the point is usually that I don't know - I'm hoping to be surprised, like the impatient child mixing up the components of the chemistry set behind the sofa, hoping for an explosion - but not anticipating that it will ruin the wallpaper. With luck, what I'm feeling at this point is a sense of recklessness, and ignorance: I can try anything, no-one's going to see it, no-one's going to judge my competence by this playing around. It's just words and shapes of words, lists of words, alternative words, arrows, squiggles, underlinings, verbal patterns, notes of echoes, influences.

But sometimes it feels forensic. There must be something here: it's a question of finding it, whatever it is. Often I give up at this stage, because it just seems like a heap of dry leaves. Or a load of responsibilities.

But if it starts to look promising, I may go to the computer and print off ten pages of draft stuff, because it's easier to cut up and shift around and keep track of. At this stage, whether it started as work or play, I'll feel more like a child on a wet Sunday with scissors, cardboard, glue and a nice empty kitchen table, but no clear plan. (Oh, and a mother, who has a very clear aesthetic... Who isn't going to like what I do. Too bad!)

But mostly, it's listening. Saying words over and over. If I'm lucky, I can get into a stride, into some sort of fluency - I agree with Helyer here - though I distrust what's easily won. If I can have clear space and time, and can work it through, there will be that self-forgefutlness.... Ice-skating, if I could do that, but for me - more like playing a fish. Yes, there's a fish there, but you can't see yet if it's a perch or a trout. You can eat a trout, if it's big enough. If you can land it.

No, that's a rubbish analogy. Fish aren't ours; we don't conjure them up. They are themselves. Here, they are only a metaphor. Words might allude to something believable, like a perch or a trout. It's more that the elements of preparation and luck can combine in a way that's similar to fishing. Chance favours the prepared mind. And standing out there in the drizzle, in oilskins, somewhere in Scotland, mind in neutral, can be pleasurable in itself, whether or not anything is landed.

Analogies with chemistry sets don't work. The poem is, ideally, something other. Often (in my case, anyway) it's not what I was hoping for. I might be looking and listening out for something deep and significant about that "eye-on-the-object-look" but end up with some drollerie about ironing. The language will have deflected me. And that's not something arbitrary, really, is it? In the end, it's my language, my own lack of seriousness, that sends me off into the undergrowth instead of up into the spare foothills.

Now please tell us, George, about your ploys for unblocking. In particular, do you have any simples against Fear?

*I really mean that. (I am so up for a cheap pun.)
Update
Perhaps I should stress that I'm talking here about the very start of writing, the point before I know what manner of thing I might be dealing with. The clearer it becomes, the more technical the approach. But at the very outset, it's difficult to know what is happening, or about to happen, and even less how to describe it.

a thing of shreds and patches

Rob MacKenzie has a post today about Poets in Velvet. A chick lit novelist describes the launch of a poetry anthology, quite unlike one I've ever been to.

Several of the contributors [are] mingling nervously with the guests. You can tell that they’re poets as they’re wearing mainly velvet clothing with lots of scarves and some of them have on jaunty hats. [p 183]

So what do poets really wear? In Martin Figura's splendid poem 'Poets' Retreat', the malevolent landlord boasts that his dog Cerberus 'can smell poet. It's the wet corduroy.' Martin himself can be found wearing a leather jacket from time to time, but never a scarf, never a hat. Never velvet.

moving on

The secondhand bookshop on Bridge Street is closing down. I'd popped in there in between chores, to find most shelves completely bare, and the floor covered with cardboard boxes. There were a few expensive old travel books left to pack. For a moment, I lingered over some Victorian travels in China, with engravings - something I didn't need, just covet...

All the poetry had vanished. Just wooden racks where it had been: startlingly clean and bright, simple pitch pine, never expecting to see the light of day.

I've bought so many books there over the years, and been tempted by many times that number. 30 years, they've been there, the proprietor told me, and now they were returning to their origins, going back on the road while they were still fit enough to enjoy it.

Oh, on the road, and enjoying it!

For a moment there, it sounded romantic. But think of it - the draughty church halls, the muddy tents, the packing and unpacking, the awful b&bs.

And meanwhile, the naked shelves, the cardboard boxes. The dither over how to pack the last few, the precious ones. What's it going to be? Another café, another outlet for chichi clothes.

Another piece of mental furniture shifted out with the trash by economic forces.