Unsynthesised manifold

And while we’re reading Greer, just a reminder of the time she was knuckle-rapped by some Plain English people about her use of the term unsynthesised manifold and responded splendidly. I admit that I didn’t know the term myself, which rather belies her optimism about reasonably educated Guardian readers. She says:

Most reasonably educated Guardian readers would, I faintly hope, have recognised the phrase “unsynthesised manifold” as an English version of a basic concept in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, first published in English in 1790 and familiarised in Britain by the work of Coleridge and just about anybody else who writes about aesthetic theory.

And if you’re as disappointingly – and, I faintly hope,untypically – ignorant as I am, here’s her definition of the phrase:

The “unsynthesised manifold” is, in the original sense, everything that is out there, regardless of whether we perceive it or not. As we can’t sensibly talk about matters of which we are unaware, we can use the expression more usefully to describe the endless flood of undifferentiated sensory data we accumulate throughout our waking hours. Our conscious and subconscious attempts at organising this stuff and getting it to make a kind of sense are attempts at synthesis. Because of the way the brain routinely edits and translates the raw data, what we perceive is not reality itself but a model of reality as encoded by our individual software, even before we start trying consciously to make sense of it. Most of what we perceive evades conceptualisation, and is neither dreamed nor recollected, though sometimes we can fish it out under hypnosis.

So now we know.

Shit. Piss. Sperm. Gilbert. George.

Germaine Greer has a fascinating take on Gilbert and George in today’s Guardian. The article is, I think rightly, less than warm about the work, which she seems to find as pompous, vacuous and posturing as I do. She has some sharp and entertaining things to say about the devotion with which women visitors gaze on a world in which they simply don’t exist.

But what she’s really interested in is the way the work reveals the mechanism that’s enabled the couple’s survival: the annihilation of Gilbert. After having said that ‘this couple, like every other devoted couple, amounts to less than the sum of its parts’ (hmm), in the final paragraph, she comments:

Gilbert and George do not answer when asked if they are lovers; they might as sensibly be asked if they are haters, for they are everything to each other. What their art says about coupledom is terrifying, for the suggestion that Gilbert has been annihilated is derived from the work itself. Gilbert is the tentative one whose eyes are most often cast down or up, evading the viewer’s gaze. George wears glittering glasses; Gilbert seems blind as a mole.

New Red Brigades arrests shake Italy

Seriously, does anyone know where this comes from (other than Perez Hilton’s blog – spot the tell-tale trail…)?

Publishing

I’ve just read a very interesting post in the Tart of Fiction blog, about the difficulties of being published. I left this comment:

I sent my first novel cold to publishers around 15 years ago. (It never even occurred to me to find an agent in those days.) The first sent it back in a matter of days (four!), the second kept it for 18 months before admitting that the paperback division wasn’t interested. The editor who wanted it, Neil Belton, suggested I get in touch with an agent. I did.

I was taken on, presumably on Belton’s recommendation. By this time, I’d written another novel and she tried to sell that one, without success. We parted company. Novels three and four were circulated to agents, once more without success (nibbles but no bites), and it wasn’t until two friends of mine who knew agents effectively introduced me that things changed. Both of them offered to represent me!

I made a choice, the wrong one as things turned out (for reasons I won’t go into here), and another novel did the rounds without being bought. Humbly, I went to the agent I’d previously turned down, and she agreed to take me on. Eighteen months and what must have been thirty or forty rejections (for its quietness) later, she sold novel No. 5 to Picador. It’s coming out in spring 2008.

The lessons? I’m not sure. The first is that I was picked out of a slush pile all those years ago and came damned close to being bought. So it can, or could, happen. The second is that the wrong agent is less than useless and the right one worth her weight in gold. The third is that no book will get published until it falls into the hands of the right editor. In my case, she’d turned the book down a year earlier and then, because she found herself thinking about it at odd moments, asked to see it again before making an offer. If the book had reached her without mediation, maybe she would still have bought it. But do books reach senior editors without mediation? I doubt it.

Interestingly, the whole commercial issue has only come to the forefront now, as we decide on the title and cover. My title – a quote from Shakespeare – was considered too quiet, apparently the biggest sin in mainstream publishing, and we’ve finally found an alternative with more zing that pleases us all sufficiently and has won the approval of the sales people. Now we have to decide on a cover! These, of course, are peripheral issues to the book itself.

Perhaps the most important lesson, to me at least, is that I kept writing.

John Cale: the definitive Hallelujah

http://www.youtube.com/v/ckbdLVX736U

No success like failure

I was surprised recently when the name of a friend of mine came up in a conversation I was having with someone who works in the media, younger than me, finger on the zeitgeist: let’s call him J. I met the friend who was mentioned at university and last year, after more than 25 years, we made contact and found that our friendship was, against all odds, intact. In those 25 years, I’ve done what I’ve done, working abroad, writing and so on, and my friend has become a household name in Britain, much loved and suitably rewarded (You know who you are!) for his work in television and theatre.

And what did J. say? That it was odd to see how two people could start off equal and yet one of them should become so successful and the other should end up a… At this point his voice trailed away but it was fairly clear that the word he wasn’t prepared to utter in my presence was ‘failure’.

And I started to look at my life and my friend’s, and weigh them against each other. We’ve both done pretty much what we’ve wanted to do in our lives. We both have relationships that are strong and have lasted for over 20 years. He has children and I don’t, but J. didn’t know that. We’ve both achieved recognition for our work (though mine has come much more recently, and to a far more modest degree). We’re both surrounded by friends. We both have houses we love and are proud of. We both have dogs… I could go on.

In fact, the only significant differences are two. Money and fame.

So why was I so surprised?

BEATING TIME

Another poem from the collection entitled VALUE. Once again, it seems like the work of a slightly deranged person I’m not sure I’d want to know, though some of the cultural references still mean something to me. Translate ‘the new thingliness’ into German and you should be able to track down the identity of Rasha, the black dove. Oh yes. The River Manifold, for much of its length, flows underwater.

BEATING TIME
‘The conscience is to you as what is known,
The unknowable gets to be known.
Familiar things seem a long way off.’
John Ashbery

1
Fool music from a country station
and the murdering king is accomplished out of clay
as the granite slopes wear woven caps.

He borrows a voice from the clack of iguanas,
he swallows a compass, he paces the carpet,
recoils from his maker into the head

of a Chinese dragon. It is there he can breathe.
Don’t scald his porcelain lungs with blue.

Crossfire. Blockades. The skeleton of his aunt.
Let’s play that tune again.
His lampshade chest is the new thingliness.

Requests from an imagined hospital
palaver with the painted feathers of song-birds,
the ochre-stained river. He whispers
his blood group into the mouth
of Rasha, the black dove.

Now there’s an address that could be yours.

2
I wanted to be what
you said I was
all the time I
was listening to the radio.

A specific number of dead
on the shelf
a portrait in wood
of a detumescent nude.

As the people walked towards the clinic
I harboured my boat and waited too.

Everywhere it was raining
alarm clocks
and opening hands
and disconcerted

musical gems were tumbling
from a silk-lined bag.
That was the season for speaking in tongues.

All the time I was listening to the radio.
Now it is the motion from one thing to another

or it is the place where bad stories are made
to convince us of the world’s bad use of us

or a kind of art denied the human figure,
vague cushion stifling our fictions of
life, love, death, avocados. To imitate
so many people becomes a kind of coin,
the impecunities of an even pettier trade
Poor naked city.
Was that where I was?

I seem to walking into an even more curious
war than the one I left so many years ago.

3
Capable of its most intimate reach,
a thong on the backs of giggling children,

that nervous flush in the veins of exchange
in a country whose crops are nylon and beads,
mirrors that reflect in the many images of the king
his fatuous dance around fire

like the magnetised needle in his stomach.
He shall become despised, he hopes,

as bitter water is despised,
a certain kind of popular air whistled between the teeth
while window blinds beat around a wooden bar.

His language is not held in common, his sex

is a question asked three times.
His arms are open at the wrist

as he reaches toward the pear tree.
He sucks out the fruit
from under the dappled skin.

4
The river goes under the earth
a second and final time. Timeliness as the dragon
swings on the calendar, as the music
arranges itself on the black caked
scimitar chest of the king.

He looks at the chart.
He folds his raw gums up.
He is waiting to be unsexed.
He confuses ‘war’ with ‘ward’ or the fanciful tangling
of a river’s art, frivolous and intense
along the boundaries of a fine
state to be in. He offers the doctor
his medicine. The River Manifold.

Articulate the soft bones of his anger,
supple as a glove or translucent fish, bury him
up to the neck in rats, words, death.
Bite on the bullet, death.
As to the leavings
something will come of all this.
Lick treacle off a pierced spoon in the nursery.
In that mirror all mirrors are touching.

5
Listen to all that water,
so near it hurts.

He pushes the leveller down to his knees,
his language the delicate pink

of entirely separate notes
in a bloodied stream, a good

number to follow. He wakes

in the cabinet of feathers, his earlobes
bleed like the entrails of a glass

and wounded gazelle.
His mouth is the deranged wardrobe

in which a seamstress, weeping,
points out magnetic north.

6
In the riveting lack of its
dark mineral growth the compasses
are what happen. He pushes a spade
through that crystalline powder
that is water’s revenge
on the garden. He asks his
penis for a little light relief,
he opens to the gurgling
passage of water, of red and
white cells, still wondering if the dragon
is out to get him. Too much earth
beneath his feet and drinking
deep is what the earth,
requiring him, will ask of its
own blood. He takes no more chances,
wrestling down the window. Myopic
children tango from the spar right
into the sea. Each new direction
splints the disarmed politics
of their wordy, glistening lasso
as it flashes back over the meadow
grass, the nightingale loop,
the vicious exactness
greasing their palms with a
tacky silver, residual light
that might as well nestle under the ribs
as become a sick bird fluttering
for its exit, tendentious
signature signing off the main
man. Listen as he takes off
his sewn white plimsolls, his
hairy blue sweater and rolls them up
and stuffs them into the mouth
of his household god. Hard butter
would melt into the shards of
prophecy there and then be dumb.

Toffee

After all this wearisome political stuff, I thought it was time to post a picture of Toffee. I found her in a cardboard box marked Omaggio (Free) outside a pet food shop. She was just over three weeks old and should still have been with her mother. She fitted neatly into my hand. Now, five years later, she moves sofas to hide her bone.

She’s called Toffee for obvious, chromatic reasons. My father, who was deaf, called her Coffee, for similar reasons, and she seemed perfectly happy with that.

She’s bilingual. She disobeys commands in both languages.

DICO? DICEVO…

Prodi’s cobbled together a twelve-point list designed to hold the centre-left coalition together until the end of the legislation. It’s sufficiently vague to work for a while at least and, faced with the alternatives of a technical government or, even worse, the return of Berlusconi et al., we have to hope it does.

Oddly enough, the list doesn’t mention the word DICO, despite having a point devoted to family matters. Francesco Storace, former minister of health and currently under investigation for political espionage, commented, with his usual ready wit: Dico (I say)? Dicevo (I said).

The Vatican, in other words, has managed to block civil union legislation by playing the Andreotti hand, as I predicted.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. Nice one, Giulio!

Crisis? Just ask Giulio

It was inevitable that sooner or later Romano Prodi’s government, with a majority of one in the Senate, would stumble and fall. And it isn’t surprising that two of the people responsible for yesterday’s defeat should represent fringe elements of the radical left, although not the parties they belong to (nor the electorate, given that both of them have their seats as a result of the quota system introduced by Berlusconi). Smugly irresponsible, they’ll no doubt be enjoying their self-righteous fifteen minutes of attention right now.

But I’d like to know why Giulio Andreotti (mafioso, seven times PM and devout Catholic) changed his mind after having assured the government of his vote, and abstained, knowing full well that abstention is considered a vote against. Vatican pressure? After all, this way the government has fallen before the DICO debate on civil unions, avoiding what might have been an irritating defeat for Old Mother Benedict. And if it does struggle back to its feet, it’s unlikely to risk a second debacle in the upper house so soon after yesterday’s.

Nice one, Giulio.