Boxes, texts

I wonder how many writers would rather have been visual artists. We know that Frank O’Hara would (see “Why I would rather be a painter than a poet”), but I’m sure he’s not alone. The idea of working a field (pace Olson) rather than a line, space rather than time, is something that must draw most writers, particularly of fiction, every now and again. The idea of being able to see it whole, simply by standing back. Some writers succumb to the temptation, with greater or lesser success: Sylvia Plath, David Jones, DH Lawrence. Me. I sometimes think Joseph Cornell is the mirror image of us all. The artist who would rather have written. The sense of narration in his boxed works is so strong that surely he must have been aware of it, and sometimes wondered why he didn’t simply write the stuff down. Each box looks like the ideal cover for a novel that waits to be written.

Malpertuis

Glancing through the New York Times Books Update a few moments ago, I found a review of a novel. I quote: Marie Phillips’s first novel, “Gods Behaving Badly,” in which the 12 major deities of ancient Greece uneasily cohabit in a dilapidated town house in 21st-century London, dwelling just above the city’s “greasy tide” of human flesh.

This sounded as though it might be fun, but it also reminded me of something. It took me a moment (and Google) to remember exactly what. I had an image of Orson Welles, and a sailor in a back street of a European port, frantically knocking a closed door. It didn’t take long to track the memory down. A Dutch film, made in 1972, called Malpertuis, based on a curious Belgian book of the same name by Jean Ray (aka John Flanders). I saw it in the Electric in Portobello Road, with another film by the same director, Harry Kumel, in a double bill with Daughters of Darkness, of which I recall nothing. Malpertuis, on the other hand, I remember in the way one remembers certain dreams: an atmosphere, a bedroom, the details of the house, an argument about money, an overall disquiet. Colours and moods, and Orson Welles a brooding and presiding spirit.

What brought the film (and book) to mind, though, was an odd coincidence. Like Marie Phillips’ novel, Malpertuis describes the travails of the Greek gods imprisoned, far from their time and world, in a dilapidated northern European house. I wonder if Phillips has seen the film, or read the book. Clearly, none of her reviewers has. Maybe it’s the kind of good idea that more than one person can come up with. But it would be nice if people were led back by the novel to Jean Ray’s weird and forgotten work, and to Harry Kumel’s film.

Pontification

Ratzinger’s campaign against Italy’s newly-formed Partito Democratico (PD) continues apace. Not content with planting his emotionally warped moles (read, self-mortifying Paola Binetti and the other so-called Teodems – though what they understand of theology or democracy is anybody’s guess) into the heart of a party that continues to represent, numerically at least, the last gasp of the long and often great tradition of Italian communism, he used an address to the Roman administration yesterday to deliver a direct attack on its leader, Walter Veltroni.

God knows, I’m no fan of Veltroni, nor of the PD, but it’s pretty rich when Ratzinger accuses the city’s administration of allowing Rome to fall into a state of gravissimo degrado. He was probably too busy fiddling with Georg studying theology to notice what Rome was like twenty-odd years ago, under the rule of the inept and effortlessly corrupt Christian Democrats backed by the Vatican, but I remember it well: dirty, degraded, inefficient, unkempt, stationary. It’s true that a lot of Veltroni’s reforms have been cosmetic, but hey! a little lip gloss and mascara is no bad thing. More to the point, Rome actually feels like the capital of Italy in a way it never did, especially as its only rival, Milan, slides into squalor and neglect, personified by the sadly abandoned state of its central station.

Ratzinger says the city doesn’t guarantee the safety of its citizens. According to a recent survey, Rome is the safest major city in Europe. But what are facts to the merchants of revealed truth? He says that Rome has problems of homelessness, low wages, social inequality. He says this from his usual pulpit, dressed in his usual finery, exempt from VAT, the recipient of a slice of Italian tax money that would make a whore blush. He doesn’t say it because he cares (he cares? come on!), but because it’s what his real supporters – Italy’s centre-right – want to hear. He’s set his sights so low he’s now an unofficial part of the opposition. He’s there with Sandro Bondi (ex-communist) and Michela Vittoria Brambilla, Berlusconi totty, rooting around in the political muck for the odd truffle.

And what’s the solution? (Apart from blocking in its tracks a party that might – just might – manage to reform Italy.) That’s right. The family. And what kind of family? Right again. The kind based on marriage between a man and a woman. So let’s run through this again. Homelessness, poverty, inequality? All it takes to solve them is to stop gay couples having any kind of rights at all. It’s all so simple, you wonder why Jesus didn’t think of it.

Memory

This is the second poem I’m planning to commit to memory as a whole, instead of in half-recalled scraps. It also, maybe incidentally, acts as a corrective to the over-devout tones of the final verse of my first choice, by John Clare. In fact, reading it again, it acts as a corrective to the entire poem. As Joni Mitchell once, memorably, said: A little yin yang there for you, folks.’ It’s by Frank O’Hara.

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don’t you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?

Edward St Aubyn: On the Edge

Much as I admire the Some Hope trilogy and its sequel Mother’s Milk, this novel, written between the two, is an odd – and to my mind unsuccessful – book. It’s concerned with the adventures of a group of people who would probably term themselves spiritual seekers as they drift from one feelgood farm to another, from Findhorn to Esalen, from tantric sex to psychedelic release. The book is full of detail; praised by one reviewer for the depth and breadth of its research, it seems to me though to be over-researched. Page after page is devoted to the kind of irony-free information about basically cranky new age theory that wouldn’t be out of place in a self-help bestseller, but sits oddly in a book that also appears to have a satirical purpose. In fact, one of the problems I have with the book is to understand exactly where it stands. At times, it reads more like Waugh’s The Loved One, than anything else, and many scenes draw on the same kind of viperish superiority that’s implicit in that novel. St Aubyn’s justifiably lauded style is undoubtedly at its best when it’s taking the piss out of the over-rich airheads and yearning geriatrics who fall prey to the sort of nonsense offered by these alternative modern-day spas. Debarbed, it works less well and there’s a soft, slightly sticky core of sentimentality that St Aubyn would never have contemplated in the trilogy or Mother’s Milk. My reading may be influenced by my own attitude towards what I see as the irretrievably phony world of the privileged soul-searchers described. St Aubyn, though, seems to want to have his soulcake and to eat it too.

Icons

I was reading a review in a recent London Review of Books (Vol 29, No 23) of a book called No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy, by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lacaites. The book, as you’ve probably guessed from the title, talks of the process by which photographs come to represent not only the specific moment at which they are taken but something much larger; become icons, in other words. The review, by David Simpson, cites the famous photograph of the Vietnamese chief of police shooting a Vietcong suspect in the head, and the way it subsequently came to stand for everything that was wrong with that war. Later in the article, it mentions the photograph of the napalmed girl, which no one who has seen is likely to forget.

But it also makes an interesting comment about the way the image that is selected to act as this kind of resonant shorthand reflects not only the actual event – a dying man, a burning girl – but also the way we choose to see it. The example the book (and review) providesis that of the single student facing down the tanks in Tienenman Square. As an event, Tienenman Square was a triumph (and remains so, despite its suppression) not of individualism but of collectivism. It was a triumph of numbers. Yet we’ve allowed, or preferred, the single image that represents the event to celebrate an act of single heroism. This is perfectly in line with western ‘liberal’ notions of resistance, but it’s an incongruous and even offensive way of commemorating what went on. It’s foisting our sense of what matters onto people for whom that sense might be inimical.

Most potent images are of individuals. Dorothea Lange’s migrant mother, the Iwo Jima flag, most recently the falling man. Perhaps the only event which seems to have resisted our need to focus on, and celebrate, the particular is the Holocaust. The photographs of the Holocaust that haunt us don’t show individuals, but heaps of bodies that are barely recognisable as human, let alone people with quirks and desires and claims being made and histories. They starved to death, but that isn’t what reduced them to this. It isn’t that starvation can’t be done at an individual level; I’ll never forget the face, or body, of a man photographed in Srebenica.

It must be that we don’t want – or are unequipped – to see the event in those terms, in terms of the single emblematic life. We see them en masse. And I don’t know if this is a good thing – because the Holocaust can never finally be understood and to see it in terms of individuals would be, in some terrible sense, a sort of trivialisation – or a bad thing – because we think in numbers and the weight of numbers, and numbers are an avoidance strategy.

Size

I see that Sharp is about to market an LCD television with a 108 inch screen. This reminds me of a conversation I overheard last Christmas during an idle half hour in a Costa queue (see post below).

Middle-aged man 1: I’m thinking of getting one of these new big tellies.

Middle-aged man 2: I wouldn’t bother.

Middle-aged man 1: No? Why not?

Middle-aged man 2: I got one last month. You don’t notice they’re any bigger after a couple of days. They’re a waste of money.

Middle-aged man 1: Oh.

One frappuccino, to go

Those of us who’ve read Naomi Klein’s compelling account in No Logo of how Starbucks mark out, invade and conquer new territory will not be sad to hear that the caffeine empire may have outstretched its effective reach. Read more about this here, from today’s Guardian.

What always strikes me when the need for coffee hits me in England (apart from the price: an espresso in Rome costs, typically, around 50p; in the UK, three times as much) is just how totally incapable the workers in these places tend to be. It’s not just Starbucks, it’s everywhere. Caffe Nero, Costa, they’re all the same. The longer the queue, the worse the service, as though some perverse mechanism were in place to punish the customers for being legion. Half a dozen teenagers in branded tee-shirts faff around from till to coffee-machine to counter with as much sequential logic as decapitated fowl. They squabble over (dirty) trays, put coffee into the filter thingumybob then stand and think about the nature of cups, or life, or something. They wait for the coffee to fill the cup before heating the milk for cappuccino. They put plates of doughnuts on top of other plates of doughnuts. They do everything, all of them, and all of it badly, as though Adam Smith had never lived nor wrote. And the managers are no better than the trainees.

I’m now going to be an Italy bore for a sentence or two, but as I spend so much time criticising the country, it’s only fair that you bear with me for a moment. In any ordinary bar in Italy, you’ll find a person at the till who takes your money and gives you your receipt (in a bar that doesn’t know you, obviously; otherwise, you pay as you leave). You take your receipt to the bar where a barman (rarely a woman) glances at the receipt and puts the appropriate saucer and spoon on the counter. This tells him at a glance how many espressos and cappuccinos he needs to make. He puts the coffee into the filter, slams it home, takes advantage of the time it takes for the coffee to descend to straighten the spoons in the sugar bowl or load the dishwasher or chat about football. When the cup’s full (as in half-full; no espresso fills the cup), he puts it instantly on its saucer. You drink it, smile, say Grazie, buon giorno, and off you go. It’s taken five minutes at the most. Of course, if you want to, you can dawdle, read the newspaper that’s lying around on one of the tables. But what you came in for is a coffee, piping hot, fragrant, and fast. From a clean cup. It isn’t difficult. If a country that’s famous for not being able to organise can do it, it can’t be that hard.

As though I didn’t have better things to do with my time…

Your Brain is 47% Female, 53% Male

Your brain is a healthy mix of male and female You are both sensitive and savvy Rational and reasonable, you tend to keep level headed But you also tend to wear your heart on your sleeve

What Gender Is Your Brain?

Travelling

Coming back to London after Christmas, Jane and I were forced by engineering works on the lines to change at Birmingham. Not just trains, but stations. We had to cross the centre of Birmingham on foot, from New Street to Moor Street. And what an odd place the centre of Birmingham has become, part Blade Runner, part amusement park, part architectural folly, not at all unpleasant, but utterly deracinated, as seems to be the fashion in post-Gehry city centres. Moor Street station, on the other hand, was a rooted joy, and it didn’t even feel that refurbished. It felt as though people had simply kept it clean and in working order for all these years. Even the train to London, which took only fifteen minutes longer than the usual Virgin connection, came from an epoch when trains were designed to provide their passengers with decent window space and relatively roomy seats. Unlike the various Pendolinos employed by Virgin, which look more like bloodied suppositories than anything else and provide half the space of their Italian counterparts.