dat is de twestion! yeah!

I find it’s one that kind of answers itself, though. Speaking as a person used to look uncannily like this toddler – and who was much celebrated at one stage for calling up the stairs, as they carried the baby up to bed, “Dood night, sweet prince!” – I feel well qualified to say how cute I think this is, but I also feel a little sorry for Theo. A whole nation of old people cooing over him…

Happy times, though. And a tip of the hat to the good old Graun for blogging this video!

Here I’ve got a 16-year-old daughter in a tutu heading to Old St for some underage club night in slick snow and ice, in a city with no grit in it, no Christmas lights up  yet, a third of an overdue book review to write, two pumpkin pies to make, and precious little time for Hamlet. I haven’t even called my aunt to tell her when to come for Christmas Eve. Fecking slings and arrows of outrageous fortune indeed. Nice weekend though. Every time I got anywhere near the couch, which was only twice, I fell asleep on it.

[Editing in to say the tall blond Rock God who is my middle kid came over from his dad's with his friend (who has three pregnant dogs in his house) and helped put the lights up. It involved the two of them heaving a thousandweight of sideboard four inches out to get at the outlet, you see... and no pies. Or anything else. The constant grinding of car wheels outside all evening has not improved confidence in Mlle B's journey home later, either. But we're all quite happy Rage Against the Machine has beaten Simon Cowell out of the Christmas charts. Comes to something, eh.]

Christmas cheer for Kirsty

Yesterday was the ninth anniversary of Kirsty MacColl’s death, and it came poignantly less than a week after Kirsty’s mum, the redoubtable (and now 86-year-old)  Jean MacColl, announced that she is dropping her famous campaign for justice for Kirsty. The Mexican judicial system has proved too hard a nut to crack, and there is nothing more that can be done to bring the supermarket magnate whose boat killed her to justice. It’s a huge shame. Her mother is determined to keep doing what she can privately, but she says that “it felt dishonest to go on, to keep asking for money, when we don’t feel we’ve got a chance.”

I know, I know. I know tons of people who leave the room if you so much as say “Shane McGowan” – including one guy who used to live above him or something and if you mention his name starts swearing so badly he makes McGowan himself sound like Mary Poppins’ maiden aunt. But this is a great song, and you have to admit he’s something else. And Kirsty’s lovely. And the video is like a time machine. And it really is like Christmas, this song.

As for Jean, she says: “when I hear those words: ‘You scumbag, you maggot’, I’ll think of that man.”

Christmas cheer, Hanukkah-style

No ho ho! Down, Donder and Blitzen! Off to Norway
with you! Goddamn Unitarians.

So, Garrison Keillor finds himself at the centre of a controversy!

Some of you may be surprised that the cuddly broadcaster – as close to a UK-style ‘National Treasure’ as America can muster – is at the aye of a furore in an eggnog cup. But we poets, of course, know better. The American poetry world – though I have to say not so much the non-American one – is permanently riven by the controversial cuddliness of Keillor. Just try walking into a Lake Wobegon Days convention sometime and saying to someone: “Have you read August Kleinzahler’s new book?” They probably won’t say yes. (Here in the UK it is Kleinzahler who has the poetry fan-base, and they may well have read it; but they won’t be at a Lake Wobegon convention.)

But this time it isn’t a poetry fracas, and the general idea is that Mr K isn’t being quite so cuddly.

But what’s he done? you ask. What can he have done? Well – according to Galleycat – “In a curmudgeonly essay, author Garrison Keillor* unexpectedly bashed Unitarian and Jewish Christmas song writers.”

Yes, it’s true. He did. And nerds. Though we all know Unitarians and Jewish songwriters are NOT nerds. Though I’d hate to appear to be even a little nerdist.** I’ve checked out the primary source, and it seems that Keillor indeed wrote this in the Baltimore Sun:

Christmas is a Christian holiday – if you’re not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don’t mess with the Messiah.

So far, so ecumenical. He’s practically listing all the alternatives, merely omitting to mention things like Hanukkah, Eid, Diwali, Burns Night or indeed any other Festival of Lightsomeness. He compounded it (it seems those nerdy Unitarians have had a bright idea too many) by writing this:

If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.

So basically, I’m sorry because it’s a bit late, I wish I’d started this earlier. But it is still, just about, Hanukkah. Please consider this – whether you be Jewish, Gentile, Muslim, Hindu or Jedi – your invitation to write the Ultimate Ecumenical Religious Seasonal Carol. Better yet, make that your challenge. Because I’m kind of wishing we did. Only I think we coulda done better.

Make sure you write it about a religion other than your own. And please – no reindeer or other fictional characters allowed. I want Pharisees & cheese, dreidls & fir trees, mangers & doughnuts; casual footwear, religious horned instruments, latkes, Judith & Holofernes; kaftans, angels, angels in kaftans, King Herod, menorahs, fireworks, minarets, and what the hell – some druid holly – the works! In rhyme.

Let’s say the deadline is Christmas Day. If I get any entries, there will be a prize. I have yet to think what it will be but it will be suitably seasonal, if not quite Santa-suit-ably so.

And that’s the news from Baroque Mansions.

* Mom – YOU must click that link! I swear to God.

** though I once summered in a nerdist colony…

PS – As I typed in the tags for this post, after I typed in the word “nerds,” the drop-down menu of suggestions popped up with “graphic designers.” Why, some of my best friends are graphic designers, and many of them are nerdist. There are only six degrees of separation between you and the most liberal-thinking Unitarian alive.

n.b. Hat tip to the Bookseller, whose indispensible daily newsletter was the source of this story.

Christmas cheer continued

Roger and Valerie Holley in Yeovil, Somerset, putting the finishing touches to their pudding hedge. Five years in the making.

Grandfather-of-three Roger, 61, said: ”We’re so proud of our Christmas pudding and robin. It’s taken a lot of work to make it look this good, but the effort was worth it.

”The tree is a real favourite with the neighbours, and the local schoolchildren just love it.

”It’s become something of a local phenomenon among residents, who say it looks good enough to eat.

“We have been displaying the pudding each year since it was created so this year we wanted to make it look a bit different and the robin certainly makes it stand out.

“My wife came up with the idea of having the robin sit on top of it eating a berry so we got to work and made the bird using a 65ml gym ball.”

…Valerie, 65, a retired housewife, said: ”It’s a very unusual thing to have in your front garden, I admit.

the first Christmas post of the year

Shocking, I know. I’m falling down on the job. No, really: that’s the reason there are no Christmas posts yet. Not like these people.

Okay, this is a little out of focus but therein lies its startling authenticity. The Baroque mother has moved to North Carolina and this arrived in my mailbox, lo e’en as I slept, with the heading “How wonderful can Christmas be in North Carolina?” I guess the answer is “pretty damn good.”

What I’d have really liked though, Mom, and you can do this for me next year, is a picture of the poor hapless shmuck blowing it up.

Radio 3 is playing the theme from Gone With the Wind. Or worse, I think it might be a medley of movie themes. WHY?

For a more sustained and concerted Christmas effort than I am able to put in, go to Kate Manson’s wonderful My Pink Half of the Drainpipe for her cartoon A-Z of Christmas. (And can I remind you that Kate Manson is the cartoonist who drew the text pixie for my Text Pixels? She will draw to order, or sell you a cartoon you like, and I bet there’s still time for Christmas… very reasonable rates. And a very expressive line. An original cartoon – how good a present is that??)*

And n.b., no, it really is Gone With the Wind. At this hour. Well, we are speaking of the South, after all.

* Almost as good as this!

Turner gets it Wright

What! No bovine brain matter!?

So, a lovely-looking wall painting has won the Turner Prize. I know the world is now saturated with news stories about this (plus a frankly illiterate piece in the Sun, my five-year-old could do better, call that painting, you can get that down Lewises for £25 a roll), and it was a week ago, but let’s see if we can’t keep this thing moving, eh. There are a couple of aspects of this that impinge directly on the Baroque universe (such as it is – shrinking or expanding, I can’t quite tell which)…

Jonathan Jones, fresh from writing about Leonardo and Michelangelo, says we’re in a (nother) new renaissance. Already! Is the last one already over? It was only two years ago. I reasoned to myself that he may be a bit hyped up… like the children used to get after a birthday party, & I’d be feverishly trying to get the Smarties out of the party bag before they found them.

However, either of his subjects would indeed have recognised the process by which James Wright made his winning piece:

– drawing a cartoon on paper and then transferring it to the wall in what he called “an incredibly medieval way” by pouncing – piercing the cartoon with holes and rubbing chalk through it to create “the ghost of a work” on the wall. The image was then painted with size (adhesive) and covered with gold leaf.

The wall painting took a month to make, and I do want to see it before the exhibition ends. More on that later.

The same day as this was all happening (and I should mention the wonderful accolade for poetry itself, which was that the new Poet Laureate, Carol Ann, announced the winner of the Turner Prize), Damien Hirst was spotted skulking through the streets at 1.30am taking pictures of some sculptures in a gallery window. I’m not sure why this wold be seen to be a bad thing, as artists do have to get their ideas somehow, and after all where better than in art – but thank you The Standard for this description:

The onlooker said: “He pulled up outside the gallery and was looking around.

“Suddenly he put on a silly hat and ran up to the gallery window and took a quick photo of the sculptures on display using his BlackBerry. It was all over in 30 seconds.”

Well, as Hirst, says, art is “about looking.”

I don’t think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius. It’s about freedom and guts. It’s about looking. It can be learned. That’s the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice, you can make great paintings.

But if it is a question of time – if he simply hasn’t been “practising for long enough” – maybe we will have to wait for that New Renaissance after all…
There is more, so much more, but I must liek the will o’ the wisp be away…

’tis the season to be Baroque: an unadulterated flavour

Well! It’s Sunday night already. Waking up today with a) a headache and b) that Saturday feeling was not auspicious, and nor has your doughty correspondent managed even to get hold of some pine boughs. Apparently you have to get back to the stall at the exact stroke of 6, otherwise they have given them all away to other people, and if you are sitting in the hairdressers with a glass of wine which your hairdresser has brought out, unexpectedly, in hopes of buttering you up to babysit her kid on the 23rd, you are just out of luck. Well, it was a laugh. I might do it, too. He’s 3: the best kind. It was a nice sort of blush Pinot Grigrio.

Got my roots done though. And some free wine. And the holly. And mistletoe. And panettone. And some presents. Shockinly expensive presents. And my cherub necklace back from being repaired, and got the cleaner in, and washed all the bedding on a hot wash, and took out the recycling, and answered emails. Tried to clear space in the living room to put up the thing I am calling a tree this year, but got half-way through and hit some barrier or other, and the thing is now all discombobulated… I need the boughs. And help moving the sideboard.

And just got in from the all-day XMas Poetry Extravaganza at the Betsey Trotwood pub in Farringdon Road – you know, the one I said I wasn’t going to, well I got roped in to the quiz, out of which I duly got knocked on a question I should completely have KNOWN: to wit, who was the king in 1905. Damn it. But on the plus side, I heard readings from the likes of Roddy Lumsden, Tom Chivers, Luke Kennard, Kate Kilalea, and Tim (of course) (aka Santa) Wells, and set up a couple of fab readers for my Lemon Monkey reading series. Luke Kennard himself, and also Annie Brechin, who is about to move to Prague but will come back on purpose at the time. Details to be got out to you all in due course… not that most of you live in London, but one likes to do one’s bit.

In other news, there’s a post on the Turner Prize that has been half-written since Thursday or earlier. Plus I would dearly love to write something about the two consecutive evenings I spent at the Stoke Newington School Christmas concerts, my last ever. At least the last I will ever see my own kid in. All a bit much, frankly, folks. Plus there are various other ideas floating free in the shattered remains of the Baroque brain. There is little food in the house but what there is I must eat some of before I can go to bed, having had nothing but brunch, red wine and some cheese in the pub all day. Paperwork to be readied for the morrow. Clothes. Lists. All that stuff. It’s all very well but errrrghhhhh…

And in other news there is so MUCH! Kirkus reviews has stopped – folded. Eek. HMV rejoices over collapse of Borders, Waterstones trading down, end-of year lists dull, end-of-decade lists even duller aside from revelation that almost everyone thinks Ian McEwen’s latest books were crap, and Blair has said publicly that even without the so-called likelihood of WMDs he would still have invacded Iraq. Apparently he and Bush used to PRAY together – THAT was it.

And did YOU know that Sam Taylor-Wood’s boyfriend is only 19? She’s 42! He, the child, plays the infant John Lennon in the execrably-named upcoming bio-pic, profiled at length in the December Vogue, Nowhere Boy. What kind of a title is THAT. Sorry. (They tried to be discreet on set.) And let us see, well maybe that’s enough. For now. You know I’m alive and Baroque Mansions has not yet burnt to the ground, that’s something. Touch wood.

And it is freezing out. As if you didn’t know that.

And by the way, I really am very sorry to be giving you all these me me me posts, not poetry poetry or some sort of brilliant take on current events. The past few weeks really have felt like being a puppy pulled along on the end of a leash, you simply try to stay upright. I haven’t even read anything. I printed out a poem off the internet and put it in my bag to read later when I had a chance, but that was on the tube and I was too tired, and just looked at the Metro instead, and I forget what the poem was now. Maybe by Harold Munro. It really is like that. I have a yellow exercise book which I’m writing lists in, of presents and tasks and days and things to do and so on, and it even contains items like “make list of emails I have to answer.” Friends say I am very organised for Christmas but it is at a cost. And I’m certainly not organised for writing. Or reading. Oscar who?

Christmas! at work!

Sorry guys. Story of my life. At the mo. In a way. Even this has made me a little bit late. You wait, though, by the end of the weekend I’ll have written a book review, finished the epic tome that is the list and schedule for the next two weeks, answered some emails and decked the halls of Baroque. Enjoy!

Also on Text Pixels.

some poetry links and other stuff from the busy world of Baroque

Sorry: a housekeeping post. Not much to report here on the Baroque front, nor any energy to report it with. Had to leave the house at 7am today, which anyone who actually knows me can imagine what that was like. (I know people do this every day. I will say they are used to it.) I blagged a takeaway cup in Tinderbox yesterday and took some coffee with me on the tube – I knew I’d never make it otherwise. Having had a cup of it here. And had two more as the morning progressed, at the event. It was an event. There were canapés. All I’ve eaten all day is coffee and canapés. Then back to the office, rewrote a speech and an article, then left at what seemed like an unfeasibly early 4.45, but was really nearly 9 hours in without a lunch break; then Tesco in Seven Sisters, and four bags of shopping in the rain. One of them split. Mlle B had to be rung and asked to come to the bus stop with an unsplit one.

There is now beef stew in a pot, laundry in the machine, and some half-price red wine in a glass.

My iCal has not survived the reinstallation of my OSX yesterday. Any geeks out there, can you help? Weirdly it was like the only thing that was working before the reinstallation… Now it just jumps once in the dock and goes back to sleep. I’m on Tiger plus every known update. I was updating for hours. And I’m a busy woman, across several platforms; I need my iCal…

Went to Borders in Islington yesterday. Very depressing; Robert McCrum may well be right to say Britain is not big enough to support more than one big American-style chain (I wish someone had thought of that before); he’s certainly right to say he’s sorry it was Borders and not Waterstones that buckled. The poetry section in particular, very funereal, not least because it had several books in it by friends… the place was packed. And depressing. Gangs of urchins running loose in the CD section. And, oddly, a young woman with bare feet. Perfectly normal otherwise to all appearances.

Seriously, guys, what are we going to do? Remember the days when you had a favourite bookshop? Or indeed clothes shop? Now you just have a favourite chain. And then the chains can’t hack it, and then you’re left with just a favourite Amazon. CRAP. Ah well.

Let’s see. Two links. First there is this, a press release so well-written that I am just giving it to you whole. I’ve worked in very high-powered press offices that couldn’t have delivered a press release like this. It’s a new poetry site I really think you should check out and bookmark, and it is run by the totally indefatigable Tom Chivers:

With newspaper coverage of contemporary poetry and non-mainstream literature dwindling, a bold newcomer has entered the field of literary journalism. Inspired by the speed and energy of blogging, Hand + Star is an online compendium of new writing and reviews, launched today.

The offbeat e-magazine is published by independent poetry producer Penned in the Margins and takes its name from the Fleet Street workshop of Tudor printer Richard Tottell, whose 1557 Songes and Sonettess popularised the work of Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey.

Hand + Star offers intelligent, fresh perspectives, open to the interplay between text, technology and popular culture. The editor, poet Tom Chivers, is committed to seeking out “new, independent and lesser-known voices in poetry and fiction” and hopes to encourage “debate, discussion and disagreement about writing”. The editorial team also features former Londonist.com contributor Julie Palmer-Hoffman, whose lively blog has already covered topics as diverse as Twitter, bad sex, lexicography and Walt Whitman.

Content currently available includes reviews of books by Richard Brautigan, Philip Gross, Thomas A. Clark, Billy Collins and the Faber New Poets, essays on poet Alice Notley and the art of translation, as well as new poetry and fiction that captures the energy and intelligence of a new generation of writers.

After that is the slower-paced but extremely interesting Verse Palace, run by Frances Leviston. I owe her a piece on line breaks and the function of the line. (Bet you can’t wait!) But seriously, there is some great stuff up there already, so go have a look! And bookmark it so you don’t miss my piece.

And finally, editing in here, and thanks to Heather Phillipson for the link -  a really interesting Radio 3 programme (yes, yes, I know) called Exploring Our Amazement: Poetry and its Audience. Really well worth listening to. Which you can do until this coming Sunday, the 13th.

PS – Editing in to say I have now eaten delicious stew, with many vegetables plus chilis in it. Hurrah…. zzz…

PPS – And Tom Chivers is reading at the Lemon Monkey café on January 9, along with Matt Haydon and Heather Phillipson! More details to follow.

a tale of three writers you can really trust

There are not, in the scheme of things, as it may have become apparent in my essay on Zadie Smith on essays the other week, that many writers one feels one can really trust. I mean, who just somehow more integrity than everybody else – who have a kind of purity or clarity about them and their endeavour.Who you know will never lead you astray, or down the garden path. Not very many at all. It seems my whole life has been a search for these people.

Clearly, regular readers will know by now that one of the writers I feel I can trust is my late teacher and friend Michael Donaghy, who among other things addressed this very issue of trust by saying that is why technical skill is so important – we were saying in poetry, gut it applies across the board. It’s one of the ways of establishing with the reader that you aren’t going to let them down. I never would have been his student in the first place if it hadn’t been for this relationship of trust built on the page; the rest was serendipity.

Another of course, who predates him in my reading life, is the Master himself, Henry James. The summer of 2004 was the summer of  novels about Henry James: remember? The one by David Lodge that just looked so spurious; The Line on Beauty, which featured James tangentially, and which I was halfway through reading when Donaghy died in the September, so I never finished it; and the one I did real all through, later, transfixed, as if my life was changing. (In fact, it was.) The Master, by Colm Toibin. A novelistic rendering of the life of James, incorporating words from the man and his associates, and a remarkable, kaleidoscopic, prismatic, and deeply moving work.

(My poem The Master and the Future, written in the voice of James and based on a line from his notebooks, had been written a year earlier, in July 2003, a little white elephant; but that summer I got it published, on the crest of a wave, and it won third prize in an Oxfam poetry competition.)

Well, there’s the background. So imagine the shock and happiness of clicking on a link recently and reading this, by Colm Toibin:

It was the Hay-on-Wye book festival in the early 1990s. I was wandering around the tents after my own event, wondering what else was on. The program that afternoon included a reading by two poets: one name I vaguely recognized, the other was new to me. As I passed that tent, I found that the poets were starting. I went and sat on my own at the back.

I know that I had not slept very well the night before and was slightly hungover; this may have meant that I was oddly more receptive to things, more open and vulnerable. But I am not sure. Whatever it was, the work of the poet whose name I had not known hit me with considerable emotional force. There was a mixture of playfulness and rhythmic intensity in the work, of an imagination held down by the discipline of stanza form and metre and fired up at the same time by the beauty of language and by life itself. The poet, I should add, was also very good-looking and had a soft American accent. He was fresh-faced and young, and seemed almost innocent. His name was Michael Donaghy.

One of his poems in particular had filled me with delight, especially a line in which “a nice distinction” had been changed by a saint “into an accordion.” After the reading, when I was getting a book signed by him, I mentioned this poem and must have seemed disappointed that it was not in a published volume yet. He said if I waited he would write it out in longhand for me. I waited behind and he did so. Later, back home, when I read it over and over, I loved it as much as I had when I heard it for the first time. It was called “Irena of Alexandria”:

Creator, thank You for humbling me.

Creator, who twice empowered me to change

a jackal to a saucer of milk,

a cloud of gnats into a chandelier,

and once, before the emperor’s astrologers,

a nice distinction into an accordion,

and back again, thank You

for choosing Irena to eclipse me.

…

This just seems to breathe life into Michael again. I feel as if I can hear him speak, reading this. Then Toibin talks about the Chicago Police Chief O’Neill, who collected Irish music and about whom Donaghy wrote; and “Phantom”, the long memorial poem in Don Paterson’s new collection, Rain. It’s all in a gorgeous-looking Canadian cultural magazine called  Brick. But of course, I’m useless. Because I was going to link it in September, and you could have read the extract from the article they had posted online. But I delayed and faffed, and wrote other things, and now the new issue is up and Toibin’s memoir is taken down.

But I wanted to share it with you – and you can buy the magazine. It’s gorgeous-looking and chock-full of goodness (see, using technical skill to win our trust). And failing even that, you can read the works of Colm Toibin, Michael Donaghy and Henry James. Or you could just leave a comment telling me how useless I am.