also applicable to a poem

Robert Rauschenberg again:

“People ask me, “Don’t you ever run out of ideas?” In the first place I don’t use ideas. Every time I have an idea it’s too limiting, and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven’t run out of curiosity.”

So many things you might read are painfully clotted because the poet is tying the whole thing in knots, trying to express an idea. This is a different thing from a conceit; a conceit can be a graceful, airy thing - like a tissue-paper funnel lit by a match. An idea is a thing that will weigh any work of art down with its constant need to be stuck to.

This (idea) reminds me of when I used to sit in a writing workshop where someone would read a story, based on their great-aunt or whatever, and if anyone said, for example, “the ending isn’t really working,” they’d say: “But that’s what happened!” People could get quite heated.

Or is that not about ideas? Well, it’s about thinking you know the end before you know the beginning, and that’s the same thing, isn’t it.

another father, also elegant

Well, not quite - but almost, in some ways. I just spent the whole evening on the phone talking to a friend whose brother is terminally ill; we told all the funny hospital stories, the gallows-jokes, talked about my dad and his so-called “dementia” last year when he was ill, and her brother’s cancer and how it’s making him forget things, and the strange quiet happiness that you can have just sitting with a sick relative in the garden of a care institution… and how “I hope he realises I’m a tough cookie, I said to him I’ve been through a lot, I’ll be sad and then I’ll get over it”… freeing him up to put his worry into his kids -

Well, that’s got to be more real to me than this. But still, the news has made me feel strange. I always loved  Jasper Johns; Rauschenberg is one of those for whom one felt simply a kind of awe. His seriousness hung over the whole enterprise. I could do a big long fat post on Rauschenberg and my childhood and late Abstract Expressionism (which I still think was in many ways the most intelligent artistic response to the fifties - at least, when you were still in them - just as Lichtenstein is my hero of the sixties), which did so much to inform my aesthetic even before I knew what it was - and the whole air of everything opening out, social experimentation, which was both encapsulated by the Abstract Expressionists and also contradicted by them, in the darkness of their work… and Rauschenberg’s one of the darkest. And about the generation before us, which is dying on a daily basis now, the first generation I can remember as vigorous people… but it is late and I am tired and there is no chance to do it. Tomorrow, no: work busy, no lunch break even, then PTA. Finite, life, even while we’re in it.

Elegantly Dressed Canvas. And here is Jonathan Jones in today’s Guardian, echoing my sentiments almost exactly: “Robert Rauschenberg is dead,” he writes. “That’s a much sadder thought than I would have expected.”

He writes:

“The real story goes more like this. In America in the 1940s, for reasons ranging from the influence of European modernists living in New York during the Second World War, to ambitious gallerists and collectors, to the far more significant underlying forces of growing imperial power, the shock of the Nazi Holocaust, the spectre of the Hiroshima bomb and the awareness that Europe might be culturally exhausted, there was an artistic revolution. Jackson Pollock led a breakthrough by abstract painters into the public eye: and it was while these Abstract Expressionists were establishing themselves that Rauschenberg started making his radical art that poised itself between the poesie of Abstract Expressionist painting and the blunt materials of everyday American life.”

And as Rauschenberg said, “I work in the gap between art and life.”

So now I give you the artist himself as a memento mori. Sorry.

On that note, however, observe how sunny he is! He hasn’t a care in the world. Not like that tortured drunk Jackson Pollock. Look at this crisp white shirt! I do love a white shirt. And his wonderful shoes. And those utterly foppish socks. Oh to be sitting in a barn doorway upstate somewhere, with lots of money and a photographer hanging on your every laughter line, and a capacious studio just behind waiting to be filled with all the ideas that are just percolating up… You’d look crisp too.

just a quick question

How do lifts work? I mean, old lifts, maybe even the ones will the grilles for doors, not computerised - like what my grandparents’ apertment had when I was a kid? What’s the mechanism - how does the lever or button on one floor communicate with the gears and pulleys and make the lift heave into action, go to that floor, and stop and open its doors?

And why did I never think to ask this before?

One of you guys must understand this.

a sheep on LSD and a mad American witch

Ohmigoddddduh, the pictures I got in my email yesterday! I wonder if I really need a haircut that bad. I mean, I think I’d only just had one.

A photographer friend took a load more shots of me last week, ostensibly for my author pic etc for Salt, who ask for six pictures (i.e., more than my normal number from any given ten-year period) - which I haven’t seen yet, but they looked pretty damned alarming when they were still on his camera. All weird hair.

I try, I try, you know.

(My best friend, Ms Rational Self-Behaviouralism - and let me tell you what a crock that is sometime, we’re talking about a woman who thinks she’s on a diet when she switches from wine to tequila, as she was trying to tell me over a bottle of Sancerre and a chocolate pot at lunchtime two days ago - where was I, oh yes, she went to a job interview once and when she came back and told me about it - I was babysitting - her entire account was about how she could feel her hairpins working loose throughout the interview, and was afraid to move her head while she spoke lest her enormous hair should fall down in one whoosh over her face, making her look completely useless, which also had the effect of making it almost impossible to think of the answers to their questions…)

Anyway, there we are. The picture above is a cropped version as I’m not sure the other person in the photo would wish to be featured internationally in a feature on mad hair. My own excuse is that it was a cold, windy day and I had removed my hairpins so I could more easily wear my pink felt beret, which I then - not wishing to appear like a pink-beret-wearing idiot in perpetuity - in turn removed for the picture. In other words, it’s a slippery slope.

But of course Ms Baroque is not the only one who hates the camera. Philip Larkin, famously lugubrious in decades of photographs, was far more vain than one might have thought, as it now turns out following the unearthing of his correspondence with the photographer Fay Godwin. As he reviewed her prints for approval he complained of having “as much expression as a lump of sugar,” or looking “like CS Lewis on a drugs charge” - or indeed the above sheep.

“He marked the ones he did not like, adding: ‘Destroy them if you like. I hadn’t realised my affinities with the late Stan Laurel’.”

(Now, that’s something I’ll never have to worry about.)

In one letter: “‘I think on the whole they are highly successful. It is not your fault I look like a cross between an egg and a bloodhound on some of them’. Later that year he admitted to Godwin that there was a good thesis to be written on the reaction of sitters to their photographs. Looking at a new batch he disliked ones ‘where I am peering out from among dark shelves with a somewhat furtive, whimsical appearance’.”

Mind you, I think furtive and whimsical is exactly how I come across, above. And deranged. And slightly witchy, which is my bane (though not my wolfbane, no never) and no amount of nice nail polish ever seems to dispel the image. And I get that hysterical crackpot look every time I laugh; but whaddamigonna do, huh? (1. Learn to keep my mouth closed. 2. Just grow up. 3. Leave the hairpins in.)

an utter dislike for eggs

As you can see, writing very little. You can’t see me not writing poetry, but I have not even managed to have one idea all week. Thinking very little: it’s been hot, and all I feel like is sleep. Reading not much, but this evening some very amusing interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, from a sort of assortment of short pieces from throughout his career, like a sweet shop between covers. I’m too vague, languid - and other words with “gu” in them (though nothing to do with GU puddings) - to quote anything, or talk about why it is all so interesting.

By same token, I never quoted any Proust last week, from Alain de Botton’s bagatelle How Proust Can Change Your Life… never actually read anything by de Botton before. All the best bits seem to be from Proust himself but I’m sure that’s how Alain would want it, indeed. And he can at least take all credit for the bagatelle itself, and having gathered the bits and got his arguments together: a feat of engineering resulting in a soufflé. The problem with it is, once you started quoting either Proust or Hitchcock you’d never want to stop. (There was a great bit, though, where Prout’s philistine brother was a doctor, specialising in prostatectomies. His skill was so great, apparently, that they became known in medical circles as ‘Proustatectomies’.)

Hitchcock himself too delicious for words, and no less delicate and neurotic than Proust in his own way.

Interviewer (Oriana Fallaci, 1963): “Practiced as you are in frightening other people, fear must be completely unknown to you.”

Hitchcock: “On the contrary. I’m the most fearful and cowardly man you’ll ever meet. Every night I lock myself into my room as if there were a madman on the other side of the door, waiting to slit my throat. I’m frightened of everything: burglars, policemen, crowds, darkness, Sundays… …And then I’m frightened of people having rows, of violence. I’ve never had a row with anyone, and I’ve no idea of how to come to blows. And then I’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened; they revolt me. That round white thing without any holes, and when you break it, inside there’s that yellow thing, round, without any holes… Brr! Have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I’ve never tasted it. And then I’m frightened of my own movies. I never go to see them.  I don’t know how people can bear to watch my movies.”

Interviewer (Charles Thomas Samuels, 1972): “In Rebecca, Joan Fontaine’s employer puts out her cigarette in a jar of cold cream; in To Catch a Thief, Jessie Royce Landis puts hers out in an egg.”

Hitchcock: “I was aware of that repetition; the second example was used to show my utter dislike for eggs.”

And then there’s the bit about suspense: he hated it. He couldn’t bear to go in the kitchen when his wife was making a soufflé - would it rise? Would it not rise? He bought an oven with a glass door, but you still couldn’t really see. He couldn’t go into the kitchen at all for the whole eighteen minutes, wondering if the soufflé would rise.

I should think he also disliked the part where his wife had to separate the eggs… or did she protect him from that detail, the poor thing?

I’m so sorry. The book I wanted to buy in the charity shop the other week and couldn’t is the book I need to quote here, but I can’t. I don’t have it. It is the wonderfully execrable Bridges of Madison County, which I had never before realised was so killingly funny. The scene is where the two protagonists are eating this vegetarian meal. (It’s so amazing. She has always instinctively preferred not to cook meat, as if in readiness for the beautiful stranger’s miraculous arrival! However, her husband and children don’t get it.) And as they eat they reflect on how quiet the kitchen is, without the awful sizzling of the sausages or the roast. “There had been no violence along the food chain.”

Tell that to Tippi Hedren.

conversations of the week

Of course neither of the conversations of the week is anything your correspondent herself has been involved in. No, no: there has been no conversation of the week in Baroque Mansions. Sometimes we like it that way; and last night, I’m pleased as punch to say, I slept for a dizzying* eleven hours. Even with the toddler downstairs being left to cry, scream, wail and grizzle for an hour or more when he woke up, which is how his parents (mis)manage him. It’s worse in the summer, he wakes up earlier and of course windows are open - if you’re lucky. Mine was firmly shut last night, after yesterday morning.

Anyway, I’ve been neglecting things a bit in the quotidian whirl, and one of the things I hate to admit to neglecting is a blog I like a lot: the ever-interesting New York-based Maud Newton. So I had a look this morning and what do I find but a conversation you couldn’t even make up: it’s made my day, already. (Something had to: I tried on all my summer skirts this morning and none of them do up. I have gained back all the weight I lost being sick last year - and that just isn’t right! And I have a party to go to this evening. At least my feet aren’t fat.)

Maud writes:

“Critic: [Upon introduction.] Maud Newton… Wasn’t there a novel called that this year?

Me: I don’t think so.

Critic: Yes, I think there was a novel or something.

Friend: Are you thinking of Elizabeth Costello? Or some other book with a name for a title?

Critic: No, Maud. It’s such a common name now, all of a sudden. Recently I met a Rachel Maud. And Maud Newton, yes, it’s definitely a book.

Friend: Maybe you’re thinking of a blog?

Critic: [Pulls out phone.] Let me just check Amazon.

Me: I think I’d know if there was a novel called ‘Maud Newton’.

Journalist: Yes, I think she’d know.

Critic: No, I’m not finding anything. Let me put it in Google…

There’s more! Go check it out.

In related “Never-trust-a-critic” news, a conversation elesewhere brings up this article from the Dublin Review on poet-critics by David Wheatley, the, er, poet-critic. (Takes one to know one, I say.) I enjoyed it very much, especially the how-to at the end.

Before that, though, there is this delicious paragraph which casts, perhaps, a tiny ray of light on the critic in Maud’s story above (and don’t get me wrong: a tiny ray is all he deserves):

“Dennis [O'Driscoll] is the Ulysses** of the quotation business, pursuing his quarry like a sinking star over horizons most of us never even sight. Who else would have thought to look in the Farmer’s Gazette for a reaction to Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Prize win? And sure enough there it was: ‘Bellaghy Celebrates as Farmer’s Son Wins Top Literary Award’. He has quoted Alan Bennett’s suggestion that, just as abandoned cars sometimes have notices slapped on them reading ‘Police Aware’, beauty spots or ‘some particularly touching vagrant’ could have an equivalent reading ‘Poet Aware’. Maybe the unread poetry books and magazines piled high in shops could have a ‘Dennis Aware’ sticker. As for trying to find something he hasn’t already seen or read before you, forget about it: a friend-who-shall-remain-nameless has tried casually dropping the name of a non-existent poet in conversation with him, only for Dennis to fall on the unknown name like a chameleon’s tongue on a passing horsefly: Who?”

Ah! Such happy days. And now, having already been out once this morning, to the pound shop to get a feather duster and some Windolene, I am now off out again to get that coffee…

* Literally: I now feel a bit dizzy.

** You know, I read this several times before I realised he probably means Ulysses the ancient character, not the book! Bloody hell. You just sort of assume everything’s about Joyce, don’t you.

what is it with these people?!?

In today’s Guardian:

“Police should be harassing badly behaved youths by openly filming them and hounding them at home to make their lives as uncomfortable as possible, the home secretary will say today.”

Yes, that’s the same Home Secretary - this blog’s fondly-familiar stay-at-home secretary - who said that “surely no one” goes out in Hackney after dark. No one exceot thugs and scoundrels, clearly, and possibly the cops who are harassing them. And we were worried about having a Conservative mayor? But wait:

“The crime initiative is part of a government strategy to win back voters by proposing more radical approaches to tackling deep seated problems.”

According to the Times: “I want police and local agencies to focus on them by giving them a taste of their own medicine.”

You have to wonder what radical forms this “taste of their own medicine” will take: prank calls? Doorstep selling? Abusive graffiti on the front door? Parked cars in the street, cops with binoculars, ringing the bell during dinner? Telephoto pics of Mum in the shower? I can imagine streets where every house has its own running documentary: who knows what this could unearth. Maybe no32’s Dad in the shower with no86’s Mum! Peyton Place, here we come!

But srsly. The government is showing an almost Solomanian wisdom here. Why not get cops to harass the entire families of badly-behaved youths! After all, it’s all their fault, isn’t it. First, the parents. And if that doesn’t work, annoy their grandparents. Maybe follow their little sisters home. Spike the babyfood. That’ll get ‘em.

In fact, why not turn the whole thing into a reality TV show? Put the footage to use. People would love it.

“He’s a very serious guy. And he wants your money.”

(Or, Coldplay Lite)

Hey, you all know how much I hate, loathe and despise having a million “free” newspapers thrust in my face every day, running from work to the tube - slipping on the ones that litter the stairwells down into the station, especially when it rains, worrying about the time when someone will slip badly and break their neck…

And the papers! Anything you can’t persuade people to take without shoving it in their gob and shouting “It’s free!” as they try to rush past you just has to be great, right.

So there I was on the bus. There was a London Lite. I looked inside it like some kind of tourist freegan. And what, whatever do you think I saw inside?

I saw the explanation for Coldplay.

It is a quote from Chris Martin. He says, of their new album (Viva la Vida, or, Death and All His Friends): “Each song is our attempt to do a different colour. It doesn’t matter whether the record is good or bad, It matters that it’s colourful.”

(Remember their hit song, Yellow?)

But I think he also means: “It matters that the stupid mugs buy our album even if it is crap.”

Brought to you by a grown man who named his child Apple.

Yes.

elegantly dressed smoke

We’d almost forgotten what it looked like! And so well accessorised.

I really think you hardly need an Elegantly Dressed Wednesday piece this week. You’ve had Joyce’n'Beckett play pitch’n'putt; you’ve had Stalin and Gorky, with Gorky in that lovely overcoat, with what look like tennis shoes and a hippy skullcap; and you’ve had that outrageous picture of Gorky with Feodor Chaliapin, - which was a bit thrown away, to be honest. It goes through me like a jolt every time. But Gainsbourg I promised you and Gainsbourg you must have.

He’s great, isn’t he! And you can just tell that that shirt, of which we can only see the top inch, is a very good shirt. But best of all, he looks (& you know I mean this in a GOOD way) exactly as if he comes out of the cartoons.

(Edited in: Actually, looking back over that last post, I see that Gorky is ALL about the overcoat. It is his emblematic garment - it reeks of success, it exudes power, and in the picture with Chaliapin he wears it over his shoulders like a magnanimous gesture.)

some kind of parody?

Well, it’s only just gone up and already I’ve fallen foul of a well-known academic, who has emailed my editor the above question. To be sung slowly, to the tune of “What Kind of Fool Am I?”

But it’s all right, in the end: apparently it was just the bit where we have a laugh at the expense of James Joyce. And I’ll stand by that. Gawd! You know, I love Joyce. I had the whole mystical tower moment in Dun Laoghaire, which I’ll not try to spell any better than that this time, and even went so far as listening to Ulysses on talking books when I had my eye operation, as some of you might recall. But you know, scrotumtightening - it’s not my favourite bit. And that snotgreen sea. Maybe it’s a boy thing.

Check out me and the poet Ruth Fainlight in conversation here. It is true that it quickly deteriorates from a proper interview into a long sort of girly poet chat, but all the more amusing for it I hope.

However, here, sent to me by a very kind person last summer, is a parody. And all the more amusing for it.