Keats’s Life Mask, Keats’s Death Mask

 If Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso’ sees you without eyes, then the life and death masks of Keats touch you without ‘living hands.’ The mouth, so wide and fleshy, seems capable of kissing you, or of whispering in your ear. The eyelashes, so shockingly visible, pierce you (all Keats’s glances and depth-charge stares are contained beneath the bulbous lids like poems; these eyes are still, somehow, palpating life). The cupped philtrum, the wispy, fine hairline look tantalisingly warm, like a live body is warm and like Keats once said the stubble fields at Winchester looked warm. (1) How to distinguish between these life and death masks? The life mask is an arrow: the face propels itself, Hyperion-like, into Odes and Epics. The death mask’s sunken features are the ripples a stone makes when dropped into deep water (think of the letters here; ‘negative capability’ enacted, ‘uncertainties, mysteries and doubts’ deepening into an agony of the unsayable ). A voyage out and a journey back, the masks show us a Keats the ground of whose being was death and the apprehension of death.

1) See Keats’s letter to J.H. Reynolds of Autumn 1819

 

42

It’s almost biblical isn’t it? 42 days is now, as of today, the amount of time H.M. Government can detain us British citizens without charge. 42. For 40 days and nights Christ hung around in the desert having hallucinations about Satan, and in general, 40 days is around the time ancient wisdom suggests is enough to test one’s sanity to destruction. This, presumably, is what the entirely arbitrary figure of 42 days is all about. Like all forms of torture (and make no mistake, imprisonment without trial is psychological torture, on a par with electrodes on the genitals or ‘waterboarding’) it’s about theatre, it’s symbolic. And this figure, ‘42,’ tells us of the Godlike powers of our masters. As I remember my RE teacher at school saying, ‘40 days’ stood for a long, unmeasured, indeterminate stretch of time, just short of ‘forever’ in its power to terrify and subdue the devil, the adversary, the alien amongst us.

But what can we do to protest? I have a suggestion. I propose 42 days of mourning, biblical style: sackcloth and ashes, beating the breast, howling and sobbing in public. For all people of good will should mourn the events of today, for they amount to the passing of democracy, the extraordinary rendition of decency. Our British humanity has been whisked away before most of us even noticed and now begins its indefinite term in some nameless, stateless oubliette.

So, on day one of my 42, I will howl with the rest and keep on howling: ‘Down with Bush, down with Brown…’ and how very apt the rhyme is, as if our PM’s very name was destined for execration on the placard. Bring on the teargas, bring on the barricade. That is, if we’re not too Bush-whacked, B-liar-ed and cowed. Please note, George W. makes his valedictory visit to the UK in a few days, in time for Brown to deliver him a final gift: forty-two days, courtesy of a few Unionist desperadoes and two Tory/UKIP nutters. Plus that core of spineless Labour MPs whipped into submission. It isn’t only Brown who has let us all down.

 

Clive James, Keatsian Dude

‘The term [dude] is used mainly in situations in which a speaker takes a stance of solidarity or camaraderie, but crucially in a nonchalant [...] manner. Dude indexes a stance of effortlessness.’ Scott F. Kiesling  (1)

‘Meestah Cliiiiiiive Yaaaaames.’ With those feather boa tones, Margarita Pracatan used to introduce Clive James on his television show some years back. Like a good many of my friends in sixth form, my first introduction to James was watching Clive James on Television. My friends and I tuned in, not so much for the international TV clips, but for what he used to say about them. Later, after his defection to the BBC, I used to make a point of watching Margarita, Vitaly Vitalyev, P. J. O’ Rourke and others being coaxed into giving up the very best of their wit to a T.V. audience by the outrageously twinkly Australian. James wasn’t so much a TV presenter as a cultivator of personalities. He nurtured his guests like an expert gardener might lovingly provide the right conditions in which some rare, delicate orchid could flower. Back in the sixth-form common room, during ’frees’ when when we should have been writing essays on Hamlet, we would discuss the previous week’s guests and TV clips, laugh over the best jokes and feel a little bit more intelligent as we retold them, even though we couldn’t hope to imitate the composure of Mr James’s delivery. Clive James, my friends and I thought, was a dude.

‘Dude’ is, at first sight, a grossly inappropriate word to apply to someone who, as long as I can remember, has been cuddly and decidedly avuncular. ‘Dude’ is a word that seems to belong in Bill and Ted  or The Big Lebowski. It is a word that acts as punctuation in the speech of Bart Simpson. It doesn’t, at first glance, fit the meta-articulate James at all. But I mean the word in two very particular senses. Firstly, it’s a ’street’ way of expressing admiration for a person, and in particular, their masculinity. The kids I teach often use the word in this way, boys sometimes greeting each other with ‘Yo! Dude!’ It’s a way for boys to say ‘I love you’ to their male friends without the other kids questioning their sexuality. The kind of masculinity these kids admire, however, is ‘gangsta.’ James’s masculinity couldn’t be more different. His wit is powerful but never violent, affectionate and yet unsentimental and undeceived. He’s a ‘dude’ not because of his swagger (he couldn’t swagger if he tried) but because of his genius for camaraderie and the seemingly effortless grace with which he writes and speaks. He is also a ‘dude’ because he is able to speak of everything from ‘the street’ up to the Sistine Chapel ceiling and beyond. Recently, his unmissable Radio 4 ‘A Point of View’ show encompassed Amy Winehouse and Snoop Dogg, but he can write just as movingly on Auden or Roland Barthes.

Above: ‘Dude’ Lebowski being…a dude.

James’s Protean intellect makes him a dude in a much more archaic sense too. A dude was originally a New York aesthete, possessed of certain fastidious and refined sensibilities, a lover of beauty and truth. James’s whole career has been a defense of this old-fashioned worldview, but with one critical difference from the aesthetes of old: they were fond of championing art for art’s sake. James loves art for life’s sake. For him, to borrow from Blake, ‘everything that lives is holy.’

But Keatsian? Like ‘dude’ this is an honorary title, but perhaps even more of an apparently unlikely appellation. Or so it seems, unless you’ve had the chance to make more than a superficial acquaintance with the life and works of the early-nineteenth century poet. Keats had a reputation until relatively recently for being a rather fey, dreamy, wistful type. In the popular imagination he was rather feminine. (3) But as recent scholarship (most notably Nicholas Roe’s) has shown, Keats is tougher and far more politically engaged than was previously thought. Keats’s problem was his image. His was what he termed a ‘poetical character,’ delighting in whatever persona he created. He himself felt he was a thing of nothing. His friends (among them, Shelley) and enemies alike couldn’t bear this slipperiness and nothingness of spirit and tried to cast him as ‘piss-a-bed’ poet (Byron) or the wan and wounded Adonais (Shelley). Anything but that ‘poetical character’ Keats felt himself to be.

Clive James hasn’t had the extremes of critical response endured by Keats; he’s not consumptive; and has proven himself magnificently capable of avoiding early death.  However, I’d like to suggest a couple of gentle affinities. James is a little marginalised these days, the default Keatsian position (why isn’t he on BBC4 and ITV simultaneously,  being at once erudite and populist as is his gift?). In addition, his writing has a ‘poetical character’ to it: his TV criticism, his essays, his poems, his comic ‘to camera’ pieces, reveal a delight in Iagos and Imogens alike– all of that work fed by the Keatsian wellspring of permanent, discreet melancholy, beating in every measured word. ’Where but to think is to be full of sorrow’: surely James’s whole poetical identity (if he has an identity) feeds on the marrow of this axiom.(4)

 Benjamin Haydon’s sketch of Keats for Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.

 

 

1) American Speech, Vol. 79, No. 3, Fall 2004, pp. 281-305.
http://www.pitt.edu/~kiesling/dude/dude.html

2) Watch James in Clive James on Television and listen with nostalgia for the intelligence and humour with which he dissects ‘Captain Power’ and the singing kiddy evangelists:  http://youtube.com/watch?v=eXf4ZtYsSWg

(3) Given my earlier comments on Rufus Sewell and ‘feminine’ masculinity, I also have a secret soft spot for this Keats, the Keats whom Byron accused of perpetually ‘frigging his imagination’ in verse. Nicholas Roe’s book is John Keats and the Culture of Dissent.

(4) James’s own website has a splendid selection of prose, poetry, audio, video work by James and people whose work he admires. www.clivejames.com

 

Changed, Changed Utterly: Nick Cave, Alex Turner, R.E.M.

And The Boys Next Door begat The Birthday Party; The Birthday Party begat Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds; The Bad Seeds begat Grinderman…(1)

With some embarrassment, I realise I am about to write yet another public love letter to Cave–my ‘erotographomania’ appears to know no bounds. Like Mr Sandman in ‘Today’s Lesson,’ Cave appears to be stalking my thoughts, even my dreams. Here’s the latest dream I’ve had which he steals and conducts.

***

I can’t help but think of Nick Cave’s musical history in terms of some kind of biblical genealogy, a geneaology of the kind found in Genesis (1) and some of the Gospels. In these long lists of who begat whom, the writer weaves together generations, each generation being part of one giant organism; protean and yet always retaining its distinctive identity. What’s impressive about Cave’s genealogy is his ability to turn himself inside out, riding time like a river. He hasn’t, like Orpheus or Lot’s wife, turned back to try and recapture what has been lost. Instead his music remains strong because he wrestles with what is.

Most rock stars struggle with the present tense once they’ve hit forty. Rock, as any damn fool can tell you, is about youth. Once that ‘fair flower’ is gone, the rock musician’s raison d’etre easily withers and dies unless that musician’s talent is exceptional. Take R.E.M., for example. I was once the most passionate of R.E.M. fans: I was in the fan club; I read ‘Remarks,’ a band biography, about 15 times; I bought every album, every dodgy bootleg I could find. I can still tell you the name of the street (Oconee Street) in Athens GA where they played their first gig in a derelict church–such was my pathological adoration. Then, finally, after an epiphany over ‘Crush with Eyeliner’ some years ago, I realised with huge sadness that everything after Green (1989) was merely a competent travesty. Now, each time they release a record, I hear reporters reiterate that terrible kiss-of-death phrase, ’return to form.’ In fact, it is ‘returning’ that is really R.E.M.’s problem. 

Stipe and co always seem to be trying to return to what they once were, as if they don’t want to evolve but retreat. They haven’t realised that they can’t ‘get back’ because they’ve blanded themselves into stadium-rock nonentities. The wellspring that fed great albums like Murmur and Reckoning has run dry. They are chained to the lovesong (a genre in which Stipe becomes horribly saccharine; he can’t write decent lovesongs to save his life). They make political statements (off and sometimes on record) but they have stopped being political storytellers, connected to everyday America (can you imagine Stipe being able to write anything as good or as lucidly particular as ‘Old Man Kensey’ or ‘Driver 8′ now?)(2). Their money and fame grease everything they do. In interviews Stipe reeks of self-importance and the once fine flick-knife wit of Peter Buck seems addled and hopelessly jaded.

Perhaps someone is now going to write and tell me that I’m wrong and I haven’t done my research, as Geoff Barradale did over my Hawley piece some months back. If this is the case, I’d be glad to be convinced that I’m mistaken, such was my love for the band. But I doubt anyone can provide the evidence I need: for a start, I can hardly bear to listen to recent R.E.M. interviews or new tracks these days because to me everything they do rings hollow. They’ve long since ceased to create their own system, but instead are ‘enslav’d’ by Time Warner’s. Their moral independence is zero.

The fate of R.E.M. should act as a warning to all artists (musicians, poets, painters etc). Their descent into the anodyne demonstrates what happens to those who don’t know how to be true to their gift. Think of The Arctic Monkeys as a test case. They have such a distinctive sound: breakneck yet sometimes tender, it’s a tremendous thing: so few artists escape pastiche. But this very blessing becomes a curse if they remain trapped in that sound, if they don’t at once know themselves and know to burn, break and bend themselves into something new. Alex Turner has already attempted this with his latest project The Last Shadow Puppets,(3) where the sound is genetically related to The Arctic Monkeys’ but yet changed–utterly.  I hope Turner ignores any flak he gets for this or any other act of creative daring, because if he can eventually navigate his way out of the young dude rapids in which he currently finds himself, very interesting and even greater things will emerge.

But if the fate of R.E.M. helps us to think about gifted people like the Arctic Monkeys, it also holds up a mirror to something else that’s important about Cave’s gift. R.E.M.’s failings emphasise how rare is the genius for change. Cave is extraordinary because he won’t solidify; he refuses to cool to room temperature. How beautiful to burn as he so defiantly does. Perhaps at some point he will fizzle out,  relishing, as few have the courage to do, his infirmity and disintegration. Or perhaps he will continue to burn until the end: as the cold stars burn, as burns the ineffable rose.

(1) See Genesis 4:18: ‘And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and
           Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech.’

(2) Compare these two clips, ‘Old Man Kensey’(1985) vs ‘Supernatural Superserious’ (2008).  I rest my case.

(3) a small but delicious sample:

 

 

Northern (Lexicon 2)

‘And if you’re northern, that makes it even worse.’ (Morrissey)

for George Deane

In ‘Let’s Ballad: Richard Hawley, Voicemanguitar’ I talked about Hawley being ‘northern.’ On the Hawley forum later, there was some dispute about whether Sheffield (Hawley’s home town) is really ‘north’ at all. But to me, Sheffield is north. Sheffield has a good deal of affinity with the northern town in which I was born, Bolton. In both cases, being northern is about neglected beauty, postindustrial decay, political radicalism, battered dignity. I’ve lived in the Cotswolds for five years now, and love its landscape (it’s not the chocolate box it at first appears to be). But I crave, will always crave, the Victorian red brick, the blackened sandstone of the north. It hurts me to go there: Bolton looks more impoverished with each visit, eviscerated as it is by the blight of supermarkets and what my Dad calls the ’sheds,’ the vast hangars full of consumer tat to be found on the Bolton Wanderers carpark that is the ‘Middlebrook’ out-of-town shopping centre. My north fights against this north. My stone and brick north is also a dream place, a place of whinberry-filled moorland. Whinberries could stand as emblems of the north: tiny berries that cling to the earth, that bruise your teeth and tongue with their purple; sour-sweet bubbles containing larksong, reedy streams, peatbeds. Whinberry–a taste I haven’t had for so long but which stays on my palate. Those berries: so many unhealed, stubborn bruises the hill wears like a blazon.  

 

I Just Wanna Move the World: Nick Cave Live

‘I am gone though I am here.’ (Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing).

Yesterday, as normal, I woke ‘with the sparrows’ and ‘[hurried] off to work.’  I taught some kids. I fretted about GCSE coursework folders. I felt sick when I jotted down my ’to do’ list for the next few days. I ate a banana . I talked about the weekend just gone. But when I taught, fretted, jotted, ate, talked, although I was polite and professional, I was not there at all. Yesterday, much more than is the case on most days, my heart was lost and my soul was elsewhere. I wanted validation, I wanted Love (not love), I just wanted.

All day the experience of the previous evening raced and ached through me like a second pulse. One face, one voice ghosted through the childrens’ and teachers’ faces and voices (picture those Victorian photos of ’spectres’ where the effect is achieved by two photographic plates being superimposed on each other). The ‘presence’ causing my absent presence yesterday was, of course, Nick Cave, whose Birmingham Academy gig I attended on Monday.

Perhaps, you’re thinking, the intro to this piece is a little overblown. Perhaps it seems that here the violins are just a little too loud in the mix. It’s only a bloody gig, in a sweaty dive at that, with a band of hirsute Australians playing eccentric-sounding musical instruments. Only a gig. But, you see, a gig is never just a gig. It’s a doorway, a fire-starter for the soul. These rock gods, what they do is light the touchpaper and stand back, and most of the time, the flames fizzle out in a day, two days. Or maybe, if the audience-member (or rather communicant) is up to it, is all ears, a different, consuming blaze takes hold.

The opening of the set was certainly explosive. Cave, Ellis et al walked on stage and began with ’Night of the Lotus Eaters,’ and as they did so it felt like I was under the spell of a crazed preacher as Cave sang ‘get ready to shield yourself’ over and over; an apocalyptic beginning if ever there was one. Unlike the previous gig I had been to (Alexandra Palace, 25 Aug 05), where the venue was lofty and cathedral-like, here the size of the place allowed me to get to within 10 feet of Cave. This meant that, as the band went on to do a suitably ferocious version of ‘Tupelo,’ I found myself able to gaze at Cave’s face and body rather in the way you are supposed to look at Pietas by Michelangelo; with a curiously still and open eye. It’s odd but accurate to speak of stillness here, given Cave’s frenetic movement; during the entire evening, he was only anchored when he briefly sat at the keyboard during the encore, and even then his energy seemed barely contained. But as he raged through his repertoire I drank him in, despite the fact I was dancing at the same time. At all points on Monday night I jumped and wiggled, waved and reached up my hands towards the stage. But at all points I was still. The Bad Seeds’ storm exorcised the storminess in me.

Songs rained down on us in a hurricane. Most of Lazarus got an airing (or rather a thundering) and the tracks I heard are even better (and weirder) live than they are on record. ‘Dig Lazarus Dig,’ for example, is rump-shakingly sexy, and the desire expressed in ‘Lie Down Here’ is alluring but terrifying (oh, the snarl when he sang ‘I’ll build a million of y/ baby/ & every one of them will be mine’). What I’ve heard Cave call Bad Seeds ‘Standards’ were drenching us too: ‘Deanna’, ‘Red Right Hand,’ ‘Get Ready for Love,’ and at every turn that ‘enormous yes’ of the crowd got fatter, sweeter, more abandoned. I was reminded with each tune of the astonishing variety of very very beautiful work this man has produced. Although various punters kept crying out for this song or that, increasingly, I did not care what the band played. Each song had the same manna in it, the same grace.

And as the set stepped up and up in intensity, I also became aware of the face behind Nick Cave’s face: his physiognomy’s weariness and sadness. Yes, as he says, he just wants to move the world, but there’s a paradox in this. The more songs he creates of this quality, and the more people love him, the more they feel they own him. Then, when he doesn’t make a record that sounds like these fans feel he should sound, they’re incredibly let down; ‘moving the world’ also involves such ‘low down bummers.’  They want him to play songs from another band of his – The Birthday Party–(someone asked for ‘Release the Bats’ on Monday and at one point, when there was a glitch with the keyboard, there were so many requests bombarding him that he commented ‘will somebody start the fucking song.’) They want him to be smacked up, rootless, dead. They want him to wreck his life because they haven’t the imagination to wreck their own.  They want him to be immortal, immutable, and, of course, he’s not. He must know that as much as he delights, he must inevitably disappoint. Like every other rock god he’s bound for glory and disintegration. Hence the solitariness that glows in his face, as if his gaze is arriving from light years away. It’s the loneliness of the long-distance singer, one who now has over a quarter-century’s worth of music under his belt, and whose songs are forever slipping out of his fingers and into the souls of his fans. Cave, as he must well know, is inexorably ‘becoming his admirers.’

So much for the state of Cave’s soul. But what might he want in return from those admirers? I’ll hazard a guess that what Cave might need from his audience is the response to art that Rilke said ‘The Archaic Torso of Apollo’ demanded:

 

We cannot know the legendary head

With eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark centre where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of his shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

 

Rilke describes the aliveness of a statue. Its beauty is so powerful that it sees into you, it knows you. It doesn’t judge you, but the work of art makes you judge yourself and know yourself. And in knowing yourself you also feel the work of art’s power to ‘change your life,’ –to change it by loving (’where procreation flared’) and by creating –something. Rilke’s poem seems to say Cave’s desire too. It’s not so much that Cave seems to want you to ruin your life –but that he wants you to move, to Love (not love), to want, to actually live.

 

Taking the Hemingway with Dig, Lazarus, Dig

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 ’Built from nothing but high hopes and thin air’: the line from the song ‘Dig Lazarus Dig’ sums ups the way that at least one fan seems to have felt about Nick Cave’s new album of the same name. Tim Russell argued on Facebook that Cave had made a flimsy album, the worst of his career, and that Cave should ‘dump the wife, give Blixa a call, move back to Berlin & buy a big bag of smack’ (Feb 28, 2008 at 4:59 PM). The album stinks, Russell has it, because the Bad Seeds have produced some unsingable melodies and have been ‘emasculated’ (he accuses them of weedy instrumentation without the benefit of Blixa Bargeld). Russell also contends that Cave’s lyrics have gone all unfunny and banal (he quotes the line ‘We’re gonna have a real good time’ as an example). Russell’s piece is passionate enough but wrong on a number of counts.

Wrong, first of all, is the idea that this is somehow an upbeat album. It’s not sorrowful like No More Shall We Part or The Boatman’s Call but it is grimy, deliciously sordid, full of terrible jokes (my personal favourite is ‘I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker’), crazed, desperate. ‘Shiny Happy People’ it ain’t. Russell claims it’s not fucked up enough. Not fucked up?

This is an album that has as its beating heart the ghost of John Berryman (1914-71), the US poet who committed suicide by jumping off a bridge and missing the water (1). Berryman’s subject-matter is all the kinds of things Cave revels in on Lazarus. This is from the first of Berryman’s Dream Songs:

What he has to now to say is a long

wonder the world can bear & be.

Once in a sycamore I was glad

all at the top, and I sang.

Hard on the land wears the strong sea

and empty grows every bed.

Berryman’s alter ego, Henry, is lascivious, drunk, violent…in other words, a bit like Lazarus in Cave’s song (’Larry grew increasingly neurotic and obscene’).  In the lyric booklet which Cave publishes with the album, Cave’s words have the same manic intensity as Berryman’s, and reveal a similar penchant for the ampersand. Berryman uses the ‘&’ to abbreviate, to suggest speed of thought, jokiness, nervous exhaustion (incomplete ideas, jumpy intensities). If anything Cave’s ampersands are even more manic. Take this sample from ‘Moonland’ where

in moonl&

under the stars

 

under the snow

I followed this car

 

& I followed that car

through the s&

Berryman ’s poetry and his biography are attractive to Cave for a number of reasons. There is the suicide (2):

                            Berryman was best!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

he wrote like wet papier mache/went the Hemming-way/weirdly

on wings & with MAXIMUM PAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!

But what’s also attractive to Cave is Berryman’s descent into madness and alcoholic indignities, and the lens which this creates, a lens through which Berryman sees America: ‘Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world/& shaved & swung his barbells, duded Henry up,’ writes Berryman in Dream Song 77. Macho, hopelessly pathetic, with a ‘ruin-prone proud national mind,’ Berryman’s antihero journeys restlessly through dirty America, ‘making ready to move on.’

But there are more layers yet to Cave’s album. If Berryman is its beating heart, the roadmap of Dig, Lazarus, Dig is Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. The last track on the record,  ‘More News from Nowhere’, tells the story of Homer’s epic in miniature. In it appear Cave’s versions of  Circe, the Cyclops and the Sirens. In fact, it seems that Cave’s former lover PJ Harvey is the Siren he has in mind when he sings ‘I saw Miss Polly!!!singing with some girls/I cried,–strap me to the mast!!!!’. Other songs take on aspects of The Odyssey. The song ‘Night of the Lotus Eaters’ fishhooks an episode in book nine of Homer’s poem into a howl of junked up political frustration at our ‘catastrophic leaders.’(3) ‘Midnight Man’ retells the story of what happens to Odysseus’s wife when Odysseus is on his travels -Penelope’s suitors are forever ‘comin’ round’ to Odysseus and Penelope’s ‘place’, vying for the chance to be her ‘midnight man’.

If I’ve made Lazarus sound like a poem rather than a record, so much the better. Cave surely intends this to be a poem, a poem not set to music, but married to it. But to neglect the melodies here would be to do Lazarus a grave injustice. Heavenly murk characterises the sound of this badass Bad Seed musical journey through the land of the dead. Tim Russell asserts this isn’t singable record. Yet I find myself utterly possessed by snatches of melody–oh strap me to the mast Mr Cave, if you would. ‘Lotus Eaters,’ for example, has a very trippy sound, in keeping with the narcotic undertow of the lyrics; Warren Ellis on ‘mandocaster’ and ‘loops’ appears to be responsible for part of the effect here, but the vocal, too, is a siren-song on Cave’s part. Yes, we might miss Blixa on this or on any Bad Seeds production. But hell’s bells, Ellis is extraordinary. He and his merry chums conjure up a whole legion of exotic instruments, even the names of which sound like they’re capable of summoning up a few spectres: ‘mandocaster,’ ‘cuica’, ‘loops,’ ‘vibra slap.’ The viola on ‘We Call Upon the Author’ sounds like it’s been ectoplasmically rearranged; the flute on ‘Jesus of the Moon’ levitates, man.

I could go on. But I won’t, at least until I’ve seen the live show in May. Suffice it to say that this is a record with ‘eat me’ written on it. Be sure, however, to take repeated doses. Overdose if at all possible. If you do, I guarantee you’ll find much more Homeric (and other) dark matter in Lazarus’s beguiling murk. Get out your Homer and your headphones and dig.

 

(1) go to this page for a biog/bibliography: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/berryman/life.htm

(2) The reference to ‘went the Hemming-way’ refers to the fact that the novelist Ernest Hemingway killed himself at the point where he felt he could no longer write. See http://www.ernest.hemingway.com/marywelsh.htm for more details.

(3)For the poetry anoraks amongst us, go to this blog which supports Barack Obama, and look at the use the blogger makes of Lowell’s poem ‘For the Union Dead’ which takes the idea of  the US state as an aquarium and compare with Cave’s lyric ‘they fishbowled me and toured me round the old aquariums’. Has Cave been reading Lowell too? –Lowell and Berryman were contemporaries and friends.  http://progressiveerupts.blogspot.com/2008/03/for-union-dead-robert-lowell.html

 

Dust and Deity: Time Alone with the Dirty Three

The Dirty Three are an unholy and a holy trinity: Warren Ellis, Mick Turner, Jim White have played together under this name since the mid nineties. Ellis is also a member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and all three have played with an impressive number of highly respected artists such as PJ Harvey, Cat Power and Bonny Prince Billy. What’s in The Dirty Three’s rather splendid name? Are they a band of outlaws ? Musically, yes. Are they dirty like the Dubliners and the Pogues were dirty? Well, in a way: the Three’s dirt and that of their folk cousins is the dirt of raw emotion, whatever that may be–eighty percent proof, musical poteen. Their dirt is also the dirt of sex. Most music is designed to seduce, to lead up to sex. The Dirty Three, however, create music which is sex itself–sex and the post-coital come-down; abandon and melancholy, orgasm and after.

But what of this ‘after’ state, this melancholy? In actual fact, the Three also give us not just dirt but dust. There is a sense when you listen to an extraordinary album like Cinder that you are hearing a dissolve into death. The melodies (for the most part the band do not use words) hardly seem to be there at all. Their music doesn’t beat you into submission but soaks into you, patterned like ocean currents. As someone who loves singing to herself but who doesn’t perform and who has little or no technical knowledge of music, I can at least get a sense of how daring and experimental, how difficult and extraordinary these melodies are, by trying to sing them. As soon as I think I have understood a tune, I realise it slips away from me. The Dity Three’s music controls you, you do not control it.

And this is where the deity bit comes in–Orpheus to be exact. When you hear Ellis on violin or mandolin you realise the truth of those Greek myths in which Orpheus charms and spellbinds the humans, the plants, the animals into a kind of ecstatic sadness. Sadness (Saudade) here is medicinal. The frenzy of human activity, what Wordsworth called ‘getting and spending,’ is suspended as you listen.

Byron thought of Robert Burns as a rare combination of ‘half dirt, half deity.’ Rare indeed is the ability of musicians to be both of these things at once: outlaw and angel, fugitive and present.

 

Civil as an Orange: Do Women Need a Fiction Prize?

Tim Lott is an unhappy man. According to a recent Telegraph article, he feels that the women-only Orange Prize for Fiction is ’sexist and should be scrapped.’ The Telegraph goes on to detail the reasons for his ire at the ‘discriminatory, sexist and perverse’ award.

His main claim is that women are no longer a ‘mistreated minority’ in the literary world. On the contrary, he argues, women dominate the literary industry as writers, publishers, agents and readers. In fact, he goes on to argue, it is men who are now discriminated against. But it is not merely the case that women oppress men in the literary marketplace: according to Lott, ‘Girls in schools are more literate than boys, and pupils are taught reading mainly by female teachers promoting mainly female writers.’(1)

What Lott appears to be suggesting is that there is some kind of female conspiracy going on, a conspiracy against male writers. It begins, he seems to suggest, with those seditious individuals, female English teachers (of which I am one) who foist–shock horror–books by women on poor downtrodden boys, thus alienating them from the pleasures of reading, and by extension, discouraging them from becoming authors. Then an army of female writers, publishers and readers finish the job, stifling male creativity, drowning out male voices.

Hang on a minute.  Lott’s myopic, poisonous outburst deserves a little more scrutiny. Let’s deal with those seditious teachers first. It is true that the majority of English teachers are women (this is certainly the case in my department). It is also true that the majority of graduates studying English are women. There is evidence, too, that boys’ literacy lags behind that of girls. English teachers up and down the land can hardly fail to be aware of this: OFSTED inspect the way schools try to raise literacy levels in boys; in interviews, headteachers ask prospective English teachers how they intend to address the issue in the classroom; and any English department worth its salt plans into its lessons ways to raise boys’ levels of achievement in reading and writing.

In fact, what this often means in practice is that we English teachers habitually teach topics that are designed to appeal to boys and read stories/plays/poems that are predominantly about boys and are written by men. Take Tulip Touch as an example. Here’s a novel for teenagers that is by a women (Anne Fine) and has female protagonists. Our department bought a class set of this novel, but had to abandon teaching it in year 8 in favour of Holes, which is by a man (Louis Sachar) and is predominantly about a bunch of criminal, alienated boys. Tulip Touch was deadly in the classroom. Not because there is anything wrong with the book, but because boys often switch off or feel insulted if they have to sit through anything that is about or seen through the eyes of women. Girls, however, do not revolt or cause riots if they have to read about the lives of men or look at the world from their perspective. They accept all this submissively, without a murmur. They are still trained to do this sort of thing– even now, even in 2008.

Other authors I teach to years 7-11 are David Almond, William Nicholson, William Shakespeare, Willy Russell, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Tatumkhulu Afrika, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Grace Nichols, Nissim Ezekiel, Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, Ben Jonson, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway. I may have left out 2 0r 3, but the ones I have omitted are men. Men outnumber women on this list by quite a long way. And this is not my choice of authors, by and large: many on this list are in the prescribed AQA A GCSE syllabus anthology. For the most part, I teach what I am told. I try to teach equality, non-sexism, those sorts of things. I would be ashamed of myself if I did not. But I do not predominantly teach female authors and I spend my working life trying to help the young men I teach gain a good education despite the sense of alienation many of them feel. But more than that, I try to treat them as human beings who matter to me. I am by no means the only female English teacher in the UK who takes this attitude to the teenage boys she teaches.

If Lott’s rather sloppy spenetic assertions about the teaching of English are without foundation, his other arguments about the power of women in the literary marketplace appear to stand up to a little more scrutiny.  It is true that many writers are women, but, interestingly, Lott doesn’t cite any statistics on the incomes of female versus male writers, so it isn’t clear whether male writers are paid more than female writers or vice versa. But let’s assume that women writers are the dominant force in writing and publishing. Let’s assume too that women writers are even, on occasion, given generous advances, receive (mixed gender) prizes, command the bestseller lists. If all this is genuinely the case, there is still no reason to ditch the women-only Orange Prize.

Why? You only need to take a look at the soon-to-be launched ‘Sexism in the City’ report, compiled by the Fawcett Society for some overwhelming reasons. Despite forty years of equal pay legislation, women are still chronically underpaid, discriminated against and harrassed in most spheres of work, whether they work as cleaners, call-centre workers or city brokers (I urge everyone to follow my link to the Fawcett Society’s report to assess the details). So if women are fairly represented in the literary industry, this fairness is an anomaly–an extremely important one.

Writing allows women a voice, an identity. It’s a tool that makes the invisible visible, the silent vocal. And this is why the Prize should remain. It should remain as a symbol that celebrates women’s identities and talents.  But the Prize should also act as a thorny reminder that women’s ‘lott’ is often, at best, to be ghettoized, patronised, and controlled and at worst to be impoverished, beaten, even raped and murdered.  It’s important, too, that the Prize should be something that women writers sometimes spurn, because when women novelists refuse to have their work considered for The Orange they remind us that to win it is to be branded a woman writer (always a perjorative label). A.S. Byatt doesn’t want her books to be considered for the award because she doesn’t want to be considered A Woman Writer. That fact in itself bespeaks an injustice, one that we should all be angry about: woman is still subsidiary, expendable, secondary. To be a woman is still felt by many women to be a handicap, a limitation. ‘Civil Orange’ or ‘Rotten Orange’? The jury’s split, for good reason.

1) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/18/norange118.xml

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/55063-more-criticism-of-orange-prize-.html

2) The Fawcett Society sets out its case at: http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/documents/Make%20Some%20Noise%20-%20short.pdf

However, here are a couple of ‘bites’ from the report:

• Only 11% of FTSE 100 company directors are women
• 30,000 women lose their jobs every year in the UK simply for being pregnant
• Two thirds of low paid workers are women
• Women working full-time are paid on average 17% less than men
• 18% of sex discrimination compensation awards are for sexual harassment

(the above statistics are from: http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/index.asp?PageID=621)

 

Delia Smith: Eco Warrior?

I write this piece with a little trepidation: I am about to utter remarks that might be deemed highly critical of a national institution. Delia Smith is part of the dictionary, part of the annual TV schedules and, if a brief trawl of internet book chatrooms is anything to go by, someone whose fanbase is pathologically loyal. And yet, no-one who really cares about food rates her, although chefs and food writers who should know better seem prepared to endorse her (Nigel Slater, of all people, made a guest appearance on a recent ‘How to Cheat’ show and even Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, prepared as he is to take on the might of the supermarkets and the poultry industry, looked rather scared when Richard Madeley recently attempted to goad him into criticising Smith on live TV).

In one sense, I can understand Whittingstall’s reluctance. Delia is terrifying. Not only are her fans rather militant, but her recipes are often, especially these days, highly alarming (Aunt Bessie’s potatoes in your chocolate muffin anyone?). Her style of delivery is famously leaden, her TV manner so very Shaun of the Dead. But why, given the hostile reviews she generates (see The Guardian & The Telegraph for recent examples) does she end up dominating the bestseller lists?

Is it precisely because she has nothing passionate, creative or inspiring to say about food? With Delia we can forget all about air freight, food miles, the exploitation of farm labourers in this country and elsewhere. We can forget about misery meat and battery farming. We can forget about the skill and perseverence, enjoyment and experimentation involved in learning to cook. On Planet Delia, we do not let our consciences (or indeed our intellectual faculties, or even our tastebuds) bother us at all. Instead, as she outlines in the introduction to her book, we simply follow her commandments (she calls her prescriptions ’a way forward’ (p.7)).

‘To begin with you have to rid yourself of prejudices which sometimes are… myths… or a form of snobbery’ (’Life from the Freezer’). ‘Have to?’ Apparently what those who don’t cook for lack of time or due to lack of confidence simply need to get over is their desire to eat fresh food, in favour of a diet of ‘measured portions’ of frozen basmati rice, ‘frozen, ready-cooked chickpeas,’ and ‘ready-diced [frozen] onions’. This will mean, apparently, that we need only do ’some smart shopping–probably once a month.’ Am I alone in finding this Delian Brave New World terrifying? Don’t bother with the remaining small-scale local greengrocers and butchers who struggle on in the face of Tescodification–let them rot and close down whilst the supermarkets take care of your every whim. And remember to shop around folks; don’t just stick to Sainsbury’s–try Tesco AND Asda AND M&S as well (the recipes in How to Cheat generally involve buying a brand from a named supermarket).

Of course, you could argue that it’s better to visit the supermarkets less, and that this will help cut greenhouse gas emissions as shoppers stop using their cars as often. However, any gains of this kind must surely be offset by the fact that Delia proposes we spend our cash on expensive ‘value-added’ products that are produced using God knows how much energy (what does the ‘blast-freezing’ process she mentions entail, exactly?) and made from products flown from Thailand, Kenya or elsewhere: ‘Now ingredients grown in Thailand are available deep-frozen in the UK’ (see? not the slightest tremor of conscience in that last sentence, was there?). These are also products which swell the coffers of the supermarkets. As Joanna Blythman points out in her excellent Shopped: The Shocking Power of the Supermarkets, supermarkets don’t want to sell us fresh fruit and veg (low profit margins). Instead they are ever more greedy for us to buy ‘value added’ goods: ready meals, as we know, and, as Delia is currently to promoting with some zeal, as many other types of processed food as they possibly can. Tins (tinned lamb, Delia?), bottles (expensive passatas, pestos etc) and frozen chopped veg. Of course, not only are these value-added items better for supermarket profit-margins, these products also perpetuate their own popularity. The more people use them, the fewer people will learn to use a knife to chop onions, or will think about animal welfare (it’s easier not to worry about the beef in your spag bol if it comes in a tin), or will learn any kind of culinary independence. Therefore, the more people will need to buy these things. The upshot being that, instead of Delia fostering the desire in her audience to eat fresh food, grow their own and not use Tescos and their ilk, she simply reassures us that it’s OK to sleepwalk into a future of absolute dependence on supermarkets.

But of course, this should not surprise us. How to Cheat crowns the career of someone whose first book, in 1971, was called…How to Cheat at Cooking. If Delia is in so many ways a happy food colonialist*, and, as such, the enemy of the eco-warrior, she is at least adept at a certain amount of judicious recycling.

 *Part of the introduction to her latest book is entitled ‘Hidden Servants’, in which she tells us ‘there are a million and one servants around the world beavering away, preparing quality foods designed to help us around the home.’ I can’t be alone in finding this statement staggeringly offensive.

N.B. All references are to How to Cheat, 2008.