The buses. Where would we be without ‘em, eh? Surely all life is there. I’ve often secretly been grateful that I’ve spent so very flipping much tine on them, because I just kind of seem to know things that my car-driving friends have no clue about. So now that I have no travelcard, I have been trying  (with mixed success – they are simply so much slower, and even without a job one so often finds oneself in a hurry) to limit my travel as far as possible to the unreliable red things. Today, though, coming home from a job interview and an agency interview, I was lucky enough, after a mere 20 minutes or so of waiting in Theobalds Road, to get a good old 243. Massive diversions, and roadworks – London is being chewed up at the moment as if by some mega-hydra – and something like half an hour to get from Dalston to Stamford Hill, and that was once you’d got to Dalston, clearly. Argh.

But hey. I wasn’t in a hurry. And if I hadn’t been sitting on the top deck of a bus this sunny afternoon, I’d never have heard one of the two rude boys at the back say to the other one, “So, what’s the square root of apple pie?”

I know, I know: I owe the world a big post about the Hackney Empire, and it will happen! Soon! It’s been a strange weekend of slobbing around, really. I watched the whole ten hours of Brideshead Revisited, for example. I’ll tell you now for nothing that I wept at the end, and that Laurence Olivier redeems the whole thing with a completely majestic (& slightly hammy) performance in the last episode. I revere him. I also spent ages wandering up and down Church St yesterday, and took some pictures in the old churchyard that I wanted to blog. But before all that, this. It just arrived from Mama Baroque, who clearly needs to go watch Brideshead Revisited. I’ll give you her entire email in its entirety:

Well, I read this and immediately had to send it. You probably know there’s a very old Midrash that says that Torah is written in “black fire on white fire.” I’m using that in the book and was browsing around interpretations this morning when this popped up: (http://www.avakesh.com/2007/10/black-fire-on-w.html) Obviously it’s for you!

Moshe Idel collected some of statements from the early Kabbalists in an excellent discussion of this saying in his Absorbing Reflections, an erudite, overlong and tedious work on interpretation methods in Kabbola (ch.1). Of particular interest is the following quote from R. Yosef Ergas, the noted contemporary of Ramchal.

“On the parchment… there is a likeness of an image…because under the YOD of ink there is one white YOD of the parchment which sustains the Yod of ink….if the letters will fly and disappear from (the parchment). it will remain white without any likeness at all”.

What I think he is saying is that once you put a letter down on paper, you define the space under it, so that even if the letter is erased, that white under-letter remains, visible or not. Thus also, the letters of the Torah brought into being white fire, the space upon which they were imposed, and which was also eternal and pre-existent by the virtue of its suitability for the black fire that will eventually crown it.

Now to my suggestion.

What I might propose is that Torah employs a way of presenting information that relies heavily on omissions, in a way that makes what is not said communicate in tandem with what is said. Eric Auerbach in the first chapter of Mimesis pointed out that gaps, shadows, lack of description and reliance on the reader supplying the background is an integral feature of Biblical writing. It is these features that make Biblical writing so unique and powerful. Perhaps then, this implied background is the white fire that outlines and complements the black fire of what Torah actually writes.

Here is a quote that expresses the concept beautifully, writing about poetry.

“Another way of saying the same thing is to suggest that that the white space between stanzas means something. If nothing is conceived to be taking place within it, if no kind of silent pressure or advance or reconsideration or illumination or perception seems to be going on in that white space, the reader has a legitimate question to ask,” why is that white space there, and what am I supposed to do with it ” (P. Fussell, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, MCGraw-Hill, 1979, p.155)

Actually, I think my mother really should go watch Brideshead. If she can cope with it. It’s about exactly what she says here: the nature of what we say and what truth is, and how it is visibly (or cognitively) represented, and the importance of what went before, and what the nature of our brief tenure here is, and all the rest of it. Also, in its unflinching examination of the gulf between religion (and tradition) and secularism (and modernity) it really does have a rather remarkable relevance (there’s that word for you) in our current troubled blah-di-blah. In other words, it feels important, in a way that goes waaaay beyond Thatcherism and yuppies and teddy bears and fluffy hair. (Or maybe she could just reread the book. There are some cracking performances but all the best bits really do come form Waugh.)

my Doppelgängers

There’s NO business like SHOW business, there’s NO business I KNOW…

Who are we really? Eh? It feels silly admitting it, but I’m really enjoying Doppelgänger week on Facebook. It asks, and even kind of begins to answer, this question. The self. What you see – or don’t see – when you look in the mirror. I’m not usually into these “memes” and things. I didn’t answer the fifty questions about me last week; I don’t want to announce to the world how I met my partner or when I last cried and why. (I mean, there wouldn’t be much left for job interviews and dinner parties, would there!) I didn’t do the “what colour is your bra” thing (where’s the frisson, anyway? Tops these days are designed so your straps will show, it’s hardly news). Nor do I ever do any of the “93% of people won’t post this as their status” ones (though my sister did one recently about people who have been eaten by dragons; I liked that). Too right, baby.

But Doppelgänger Week – that’s different! It’s like the old (new, urban) parlour games. “Who would play  you in the film of your life?” (I’ve always been told Jennifer Saunders, sometimes Marcia Gay Harden, see above – I tried for Judi Dench but the kids rolled about with laughter: “What! YOU?!”) Or like “Which Friend are you?” (Alas. I’m Janice.)  So Doppelgänger Week, suddenly in a comment thread you have Walt Whitman, Nana Mouskouri, Ethel Merman, and a painting of Jonathan Miller all chatting. You suddenly see how other people maybe see themselves. Or how they’ve been told other people see them. Or just a way in which it’s possible to see them. You see how accurately they see themselves. Some glam it up, some go for humour. One friend of mine posted a (completely inaccurate, btw) picture of Les Dawson in drag. But is it inaccurate?? Or does it say something funny about doubles and selves and what shows on the outside? Who of us is really ourselves, anyway? What is your self, and what does it look like?

There’s something pleasant about having something familiar – someone’s picture – suddenly look different, but kind of the same in some way. The brain, with its penchant for discerning – or creating – pattern (one of the indicators of intelligence, doncha know), immediately goes for the similarities and patterns the new picture onto the mental image of the old one. It’s fun. It’s disjuncture. It’s sideways meaning. It’s like poetry.

Anyway, mine so far. I’ve got two or three more lined up for the rest of the week. And, you know, as they say…

Gray skies are gonna clear up
Put on a happy face
Wipe of the clouds and cheer up
Put on a happy face

Take of the gloomy mask of tragedy
It’s not your style
You’ll look so good that you’ll be glad
That you decided to smile

Today I’m Emma Goldman. But it’s okay. I’ll smile tomorrow.

Born eight months apart

So, Robert McCrum actually did go and read Catcher in the Rye last week; all I managed was three pages of Franny & Zooey. Typical. I was working myself up to Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters – I wanted to read about that tiny little old man again. But fortunately McCrum has written today about his newly re-forged impressions of the Holden Caulfield book, and very interesting they are too. Of course he makes the point that Salinger seems not to have transcended that teen angst he wrote about so well. I said something like this, either here or in conversation, I forget which, remarking that after all, his biggest character (I meant Seymour Glass, in fact) was too innocent and spiritually pure for this world, and ended up killing himself. I also said there must have been more to it than that, given the ferocity over the years and some of the stories we hear…*

Well, McCrum has only gone and noticed the blindingly obvious, which I haven’t seen anyone else do: he’s only gone and Mentioned the War. Essentially, he says this:

What I’m intrigued by is Salinger’s wartime career. Basically, he was drafted as a GI in 1942, served in the infantry, landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, fought his way through France, saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge, and was one of the first to liberate a Nazi concentration camp. In other words, he experienced the reality of the second world war as much, if not more than, many veterans.

It’s a cliché of military memoirs that the real war never gets into the books. Happily, there is one witness to the re-conquest of Europe in 1944: the distinguished literary critic Paul Fussell, whose account, in the closing pages of his classic study Wartime, is powerfully suggestive about the inspiration for Holden’s unforgettable narrative.

“What was it about the war,” Fussell writes, “that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt? It was not just the danger and fear, the boredom and uncertainty and loneliness and deprivation. It was rather the conviction that the optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable.” To the troops, the war had been “sanitised and Disneyfied” by the phonies back at HQ.

This is similar enough to any analysis of the origin of the “anarchic” – and specifically verbal – humour of the Goons, etc, to warrant a little heads-up, at least in my little world. As has been said to me many’s the time – and I thought I had written it somewhere here on the walls of Baroque Mansions but now cannot find it – that humour – gentle as it may seem compared to our current “edgy” style, but still a humour of disjuncture and even disrespect, came from the fact that after what they had been through they simply couldn’t believe they were even alive. There were probably, quite literally, no words for it.

I feel I can bring poetry into this now. After all, we started with an ethereal novelist – and this anarchic-humour-wordplay-joy-true-poetry-Art-Essence-of-Life trope of mine, which so often ends with a clip from The Bed-Sitting Room or Fred Astaire, is becoming well rehearsed, isn’t it? I might write a book. Anyway, the debate came up a couple of years ago, regarding the über-serious American poet Anthony Hecht – who, like Salinger, was part of the liberation of the concentration camps – and whether he had “earned” his lugubriousness by having “paid for” the “overstuffed damask sofa” that was his world outlook. The idea was that he had, and I think that’s right.

There is probably a massive dissertation to be written (and it may already have been) on why the Americans turned to despair after this experience and the British went all Ministry of Silly Walks. Of course, both Milligan and Cleese famously suffered from crippling depression, so the answer is not that they were simply happy. Duh. It’s about expression – and whether you write angry books and then retire from the world or poke fun at everybody and become a national treasure. National temperament? Dramatic tradition? The difference between coming to help out and thinking you were going to be invaded? Between being supposed to be some kind of saviour, and the surprise of surviving? Going home and having everything be still the same, and going home and having absolutely everything be different?

One thing is for certain, and anyone who wants to get all sniffy about things that were big fifty years ago might do to remember this: these guys had seen what could happen. They had to come back from that and get on with things. I wouldn’t be very impressed with a Brooks Brothers suit and the earning power of a good Ivy League degree either.**

Whatever it is, you have to wonder if, in some small way, Spike and JD might be a bit related.

* New York Times, via my old mucker James Marcus: “Mr. Salinger pursued Scientology, homeopathy and Christian Science, according to the daughter. He also drank urine, and sat in a Reichian orgone box, Ms. Salinger wrote. He spoke in tongues, fasted until he turned greenish and as an older man had pen pal relationships with teenage girls.” I’m not suggesting anything here about Spike, by the way!

** (Oh, wait. I’m not.)

How utterly annoying. I have somehow accidentally published my notes for a future post, which have now been live all morning while I struggled with a recalcitrant and very ancient copy of OXS and an equally balky computer. Damnation. Pardon me while I quickly make this into a real update post!

Okay, now aside from the Oscar Wilde night which will take place at Lemon Monkey café in Stoke Newington, north London, on Saturday Feb 13th, we have the following:

I will be reading on the Saturday after that, Feb 20th, at the poetry Café in Betterton St, London WC2. The other readers will be some very esteemed Salt Publishing colleagues, and the unsalted Roddy Lumsden. Chris H-E has kindly blogged the details so I don’t have to; just click here.

Me and the Dead is in paperback! Yes: you can  now have a soft, bendy copy of your own, for less money than the hardback! Why not complete your Me and the Dead collection today.

Oscar & Henry is bouncing around in the real world, and has been reviewed along with the other Rack Press titles, in the estimable online organ The Bow Wow Shop.

Michelle McGrane, over at Peony Moon, has kindly as Salt, blogged the details of the Oscar night – so, rather than do it all myself again, I’ll send you to her. I also gave her a poem from the pamphlet, with which to whet your appetites. Really, it is a service and a half she does me, for she is in South Africa.

But in the meantime, here are some blogs I think you might enjoy:

Ad Marginem

100 Words

Unkempt Women

American Suburb X

Hipsters Have to Pee

Unhappy Hipsters

Beleaguered Squirrel

Sheenagh Pugh’s writing blog

Salt Publishing blog

Blood and Property

The View From Planet Jamie

Okay, that’s enough Salinger. I’ve had a weird few days, headaches and dizziness and malaise, fallout from being “let go” in a scheduled meeting while sat there (with prepared work, notebooks, folders, a little pen) (“but we’ll pay you to the end of the day”), all mixed together with a nice big dollop of hormones. Tasty. I didn’t get to look through my Salinger books as planned because my ability to concentrate deserted me. But it’s also been a busy few days in its own way: I’ve been to the theatre three times!

1. Innocence, by Dea Loher: a 3-hour-long German play, like a series of philosophical essays all given some form of roughly human embodiment (the crazy middle-aged lady; the bitter middle-aged lady; the crazy, bitter middle-aged lady; the undertaker ["I couldn't be a doctor because I never managed to have the compassion to hurt people, to heal them, but with the dead I can give them what they need, I can make them beautiful"] , the undertaker’s sad young wife who longs for a baby, the two illegal immigrants; the blind pole-dancer who talks like Katharine Hepburn and clicks her fingers every five seconds ["my parents were both blind; they wanted a child who would also be blind, because you see, their world was complete and I must be part of their complete world"]) all tacked together with some weird surreal touches which were, I later gathered, meant to be amusing. It steadfastly refused to pander to our bourgeois hankering for retrgrade narrative or the kind of reliance on individual character that gets in the way of the Issues Under Discussion. It had a friend in it; he was great; it ended yesterday. Friend is on way back to Manchester as we speak. (We mentioned the Hepburn mannerism to him; he said, “well, the actress is Canadian…”)

The space in the Arcola is diabolical. It’s a long time since I had to sit on a metal folding chair – for a three-hour play! Even the ceiling was black. And the bare-bulb house lights were so harsh that I was awake in the night with a pain in my old glaucoma-ridden eye… And that’s before you get to the audience, oh dear doctor as Gran Gran would have said. You never saw so many difficult haircuts, so many deep facial expressions, so many roughly stitched shoulder bags made from bits of old curtain. And the director was sat next to us in the second half laughing like a drain.

2. The Whiskey Taster, by James Graham, at the Bush Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush. Wonder ad-boy has synaesthesia. Works with a girl of the type one so very often encounters in real workplaces. The Big Contract to win, rebranding a vodka. He relies – or, rather, she relies – on his gift for translating one sensation into words that evoke a different one to establish the all-important pitch. She is hyper-ambitious (“I’m from Croydon”) and up for a promotion. All this works fine until someone has the bright idea of bringing in an old traditional whiskey taster from the Highlands to do his voodoo on the vodka…

The cast is fabulous: there are only five of them. The boss is a bit of a caricature, the client is marvellous, and the whiskey taster is John Stahl, who does Shakespeare, and it shows. In fact, most of them have some Shakes in their credits. The lead, Samuel Barnett, is utterly convincing and wonderful, and I only realised afterwards that I saw him in Desperate Romantics (which I know, I hesitate to admit having seen any of but I was sick, okay, and I gave up after a few episodes. The performances were lots of fun though & Sam was good).  The play is funny and touching, and full of extremely clever ideas which are played out very satisfyingly, through dramatic situation and character (up against the wall!), with a bit of exposition thrown in. (The only bits that didn’t work were a couple of places where the characters started to try to explain themselves; budding new playwrights, please take note.) The set is spare and clever and effective. The lighting was part of the set and used to evoke the synaesthesia. The space is tiny, the seats a bit high, but really the thing was so engrossing it didn’t matter. The whole audience was sat forward with attention. We were happy afterwards and went for a pizza.

3. The New Act of the Year Award at the Hackney Empire, of which more later on today, once I’ve been out for a coffee and got to grips with the sunshine out there.

And now, as it happens, my friend is waiting for me in the coffee shop.

Of course, that headline has appeared in about three places already. I’m on my way out and have no tie to look out the books for a phrase right now.

At last the thing has happened. The thing that might, in about a hundred years, lead to the opening of those famous vaults in which are stored all the decades’-worth of unpublished subsequent writings by the author of all those iconic – yes, iconic – books. When I first discovered JD Salinger at the age of 19 he hit me like a wave breaking. I was drenched in it. Catcher in the Rye was good, but what really blew me away – sad as it may seem to say so now – was the Glass family. Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters was a really profound experience for me. Franny & Zooey was one of my favourite books nearly to the end of my 20s. I do think these books represent something really good about the fifties, something we can never recapture – why, even the idea that “the last man in the city with a completely unguarded face,” or however he put it, would be a good thing.

The Burlington Free Press says this:

Enraged by all the “phonies” who make “me so depressed I go crazy,” Holden soon became American literature’s most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel’s sales are astonishing – more than 60 million copies worldwide – and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams – to never grow up.

But I think we are all, while strangely infantilised in some ways, still so busy being “grown up|” in all the others – so cynical and worldly and materialistic – that his books seem strangely out of step now. I know everyone will want to see them and read what he’s been writing all these years – but if it hadn’t been for them being hidden, wouldn’t we be thinking they were somehow too naif  for our jaded era?

More – and more cogent, I’m sure – later. Anyway, RIP Salinger. I’m going to the theatre now, a very serious contemporary German drama, links etc afterwards. I almost have a feeling they should announce Salinger’s death from the stage.

EDITING IN: Well I meant to go away and do something clever, like reread a book and find apt quotations from it, or devise some clever theory about the Zeitgeist and how old JDS is going to fit into it as we claw our way back out of this recession… but no. I managed precisely nothing. But never fear, because the wonderful James Marcus has gone and come up with the goods! Read his take on it here. You’ll be both glad and also kind of sorry you did.)

… the Jimmy Durante way to email etiquette (and having more fun)

Enough with the accessibility already. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks (in between losing my job, etc, of course – really it’s a whole new pastime) flitting around a pile of poetry books, mainly the books of the TS Eliot Prize shortlist, plus The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, which I’m due to be taking part in an email round-table discussion of in a few weeks. More on which later, probably after the discussion…

I’ve enjoyed a lot of them. It’s been great. But the one book I’ve been unable to tear myself away from, in the big way that is what poetry is in fact for, is not on any of those lists. DA Powell’s Chronic. I had put off buying it while I wasn’t working in the summer, and these past few weeks – oh, ignorance! – have been a festival of book-buying. (I also replaced my copy of Cocktails, which I’d given away.) So I’m all kitted up, with (ahem) time to read.

On yesterday’s theme, the inside flap of the dustjacket has a bit of blurb in it from the US poet Stephen Burt, who says of Powell:  “No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible.”

(Seeking to clarify my perception of this, I googled DA Powell, Accessible poetry, and got this, off the Harriet blog, announcing a poetry reading: “Accessible poetry” – “By which I mean ‘easy enough to get there’. Especially from anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.” SO refreshing.)

But enough of that. This is very beautiful poetry. It’s urgent – in that it feels important – recognisable, in that it speaks to human nature and experience – human, in that you know who the author is because he is speaking to you – linguistically pleasing and technically dazzling. It is, in fact, easier to “access” than some of the poet’s earlier work, but I loved the earlier work too. There has been some muttering that it isn’t up to his best, but I’m not taking a view on that; I’ve just been enjoying it too much. So I’m not going to write a full review here (& I’m frankly not feeling articulate enough today) but you can read Joan Houlihan’s in the Contemporary Poetry Review.

The book itself is capaciously designed with lovely big square pages, on which Powell’s lines are stately. And as you can see above he is also a great reader.

You can read poems here and here. Hope you like them.