The Guilt of a Literary Critic

I’m ill, which means I read thrillers, and today’s thriller is le Carre’s Smiley’s People. I wasn’t expecting to come across this half a sentence:

… for at the time he was composing a monograph on the bard Opitz, and trying loyally to distinguish true passion from the tiresome literary convention of the period.

So much is communicated in this line; it tells us so much about Smiley, who is labouring away on a mediocre writer (you wouldn’t say this about a truly great one), and about literary criticism, particularly of poetry. He so badly wants to see past the convention, but he also has a duty to acknowledge the convention, which in this case appears to be a little too dominant (I’m sure there’s something to say about him being a spy here…). He’s compelled by his own readers, and by the conventions of lit crit, to negotiate a path through these things and I think that’s what struck a nerve with me. That second part ‘trying loyally to distinguish true passion from the tiresome literary convention of the period’ could be the tagline for my book on H.P., but to admit such a thing would never do. The quest to ‘distinguish true passion’ is passe, but no one wants to read, or to read about, a poem without it.

Sonnet #2

So I told JB about my attempt at a sonnet and she suggested a drinks-based sonnet cycle, taking minty tea as my next subject:

My love is like a cup of minty tea;
A delicately fragrant drink of green.
New-plucked from morning garden presently,
More limpid, fresh and subtle than a dream.
For those averse to caffeine and its charms,
A drink to sooth the stomach after food.
This peace is found within my lover’s arms,
When richer kinds of life have proved no good.
But have you ever watched a mint plant grow?
It can’t be contained within a single pot.
A blanketing of strangely darkened snows;
Regard the force of the regarded not.
Seeming so simple, smooth and sweet and clear;
A strident force is latent in my dear.

All the Books I Didn’t Read this Month

A little while ago I mentioned that KB had sent me a couple of books, one of which is Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which I started reading as soon as I’d finished The Marriage Plot. I got about halfway through before giving up, put off by a group of characters I really didn’t like. Then I started Mark Helprin’s The Winter’s Tale, which, I discovered when I opened it, RS sent to me while I was living in Liverpool (when the weather couldn’t have been much more bleak and cold). It started out well with a chapter narrated from the point of view of a horse, but I couldn’t get into that either. So then I tried to read a David Hosp novel on my Kindle, which wasn’t an auspicious start. It had been recommended to me by MS, but I didn’t like that either, basically, to be blunt, because it wasn’t very well written.

But then I abandoned the recommendations of my friends and struck out on my own, in a bookshop, and came across this:

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

It’s the opening paragraph of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and I bought it and read it in less than 24 hours. I think it caught my mood perfectly; I’m so excited to be going away and to start exploring new places. He has his dog with him; and his truck, Rocinante, fits perfectly with my dream of a tiny house.

One of the things I liked most about the book is Steinbeck’s attitude towards loneliness. I like the way he accepts it will be part of his trip, that he can’t avoid it, while also acknowledging it will pass. After experiencing a night of ‘desolate loneliness’ he wakes up the next morning and notes that:

the world was remade and shining. There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I. The night fears and loneliness were so far gone that I could hardly remember them.

There’s something mindful about this, but also, I think, novelistic. It’s the novelist’s trick of compassionate observation that allows everything to appear rich and interesting but not overwhelming. Loneliness becomes just one of the many things he experiences on his trip and it is embraced as part of the nature of that trip. There’s something refreshing about this complacency when there seems to be so much hysteria about loneliness around these days. Rather than a horrible affliction to be feared and avoided, it’s just another human state that comes, and teaches us things, and then passes.

I done gone written a sonnet

It’s official; my ability to procrastinate has reached new levels of artistry. Confronted with a to do list that includes, you know, getting some work done, I decided (as you do) to write a sonnet instead:

Shall I compare you to a cup of tea?
You are more milky and less temperate.
Like caffeine you bring out the stress in me,
And cause acid reflux in my gullet.
Like a soggy teabag dunked in liquid
Quite spectacularly uninspiring;
Bitter, tasteless, charmless, weak, insipid,
Liquor for the boring, old, retiring.
But in the mornings you’re the kick I get
To send me up and running at my day;
The charmless background to the best bit yet
Motivational fuel for come what may.
Too often you’re a right pain in the head;
One day I’ll thank you for the life I’ve led.

Do you think it might be a breakup poem?? Not exactly Shakespeare but not bad for a first attempt.

Can you help me identify this band?

Dear people of the interwebs,

I’m trying to remember the name of a band I really liked during the mid 90s but all I have to go on is a fuzzy memory of their album sleeve. It was all black with two pumpkin lanterns in the bottom left corner. I can’t remember what they were called but I do remember searching for other stuff by them and never finding any. They may have been an all girl band; they definitely had a female singer. They might have been riot grrrl but I’m not too sure. Their name may have begun with ‘M’ but I might be wrong about that. I just remember really liking them and now it’s bugging me that I can’t remember who they were. Unfortunately I threw out their album when I got rid of my tape collection…

Couchsurfing

Have just joined the couch-surfing site with big hopes. Let’s see how that one turns out…

Keeps running through my head…

You pass through places
And places pass through you
But you carry ’em with you
On the souls of your travellin’ shoes

Be Good Tanyas, ‘Littlest Birds’

Got this running through my head a lot at the moment, which is not really surprising… This is how the words look on the interwebs and I *think* the spelling of ‘souls’ is a mistake, but I like it so I kept it.

Brizzle!

I came. The view from OB’s car.

We saw. Chic CE.

We partied. Ready? FOG!!!

 

 

Julie Burchill Seems to Have Forgotten that Bisexuality Exists

Waiting for the parents to come over and move me and (nearly) all my worldly goods to LF and ME’s house, I came across this piece in the Guardian/Observer by Julie Burchill. I’ve spent years planning to write a book on bisexuality and couldn’t let this pass by without commenting.

After noting that she will remember this summer for ‘an epidemic of stage-managed sapphism like no other in living memory’, Burchill provides a run-down of female singers, including Rihanna, Cheryl Cole, and Avril Lavigne who have, over the last few months, made some kind of gesture in the direction of lesbianism, either by making sexual comments about other women or by ‘posing saucily with female friends’.

The question for Burchill is ‘how much of this yearning is physical – and how much is fiscal?’. She points out that, on the ‘fiscal’ side of the equation, performing lesbianism is a way of titillating men and therefore of attracting attention and, as public formers, generating more income. But she concludes the piece by asking ‘who’s to say that hidden homosexuality on the part of the female population couldn’t be at least part of the reason?’ After all, ‘there can be no doubt that men get a great deal more out of hetero sex than women do; to put it bluntly, that’s why they resort to porn and prostitution in a way that women don’t need to’.

The big problem here, as I see it, is that Burchill can’t keep the old boring binaries out of her head. According to her, women like Rihanna, Cheryl Cole, and Avril Lavigne are either straight and therefore flirting with women to titillate men and/or make money OR they’re secretly gay and secretly hating having sex with men.

Burchill is making some huge generalisations here and she appears to have forgotten two important things: that it is actually possible to be attracted to men AND women (and to enjoy having sex with both), and that attraction and the social performance of that attraction are full of subtle nuances. Thinking your best friend is beautiful and wanting to cuddle up to her on a beach doesn’t necessarily mean you want to have sex with her. And it certainly doesn’t have to mean that you want to give up men altogether.

Denigrating heterosexuality and ignoring bisexuality doesn’t help anyone, least of all gay people. Sexuality isn’t a competition over who has the most genuine emotional bond or the best sex; it’s about complex interactions between individuals. Individuals have complex sexualities that don’t necessarily (or usually) conform to the binary of being attracted to one gender and not to the other. Sexualities evolve and can change. And to add further complexity, relationships between individuals don’t always stick to the binary of sexual attraction or unattraction.

Instead of seeing woman-woman flirtation as a sign of suppressed lesbian desire we should be able to view it as part of the messy, wonderful world of human attraction and interaction.

Green Thought

A couple of days ago JB asked me if, while packing up my stuff, I’d managed to avoid getting distracted by books I haven’t looked at for ages. I HAD managed to avoid that problem until I came across Sam Willetts’ poetry collection, New Light for the Old Dark. I bought it when I was working in Liverpool after a recommendation from a student who had been, like Willets, a heroin addict. Reading through it, this poem grabbed me:

GREEN THOUGHT

French windows at the grievous onset
of rain from a sky turned nearly to foxglove,
doves’ breasts ruffling along the gazebo parapet,
Bacchus smirking, hoof-dainty, in an alcove;

the whole come-hither, fuck-off patrician vista
undisfigurable by mood or weather,
or by me, tapping ash on marble in the loggia,
muttering lawn-porn in a green mental whisper.

I was drawn to it by the allusion to this stanza from Marvell’s ‘The Garden’:

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Willetts’ poem makes Marvell’s seem a bit smug; Marvell immerses himself in his garden and is completely assured of his place in it. Willetts has a more ambiguous relationship with his, not least because there seems to be a hint of seediness (Marvell banishes Eve from his garden so all is well). A sense of isolation runs through both; for Marvell this is absolutely something to celebrate but Willetts doesn’t seem so sure. Marvell is so confident of self-sufficiency of the mind and of its power to transform things, but Willetts seems to find more comfort in the self-sufficiency of the outside world.

I think one of the reasons I like this so much is that it reminds me of my own moments of sitting outdoors, smoking a cigarette.