On Deja Vu

Is there such a thing as a visual cliché?

Both are poetry collections. One is ‘a study in the nature of reality, selfhood, and the different levels of consciousness we inhabit’; the other is much more concerned with ‘ideas of the waking world, and the world as it is imagined or dreamt’. Ahem.

I don’t suppose this particular coincidence says an awful lot, really: a misty, light-flecked, snowbound scene, particularly evocative of Narnia and Manhattan parks and lonely childhoods, sells poetry. I wish I didn’t find it symptomatic of the slushy state of the poetry marketplace in general. As Peter Hughes puts it, rather majestically: “Hundreds of books and magazines continue to print thousands of poems in which a person wearing sensible shoes modestly observes how some rhubarb reminds them of their dad”. What’s more, in the reviews they’ll be called ‘deeply sensible of the commonplace’. Mmm.

Every gushing review I read of a new collection of ‘crystalline poems remarkable for their precision and focus’ makes me want to torture a fairy. If you do by any chance stumble across a bad review, be sure to ignore it and if possible buy the collection in question. Normally, it’s just a bit different; perhaps it doesn’t include the word ‘heft’, or any reference to dusk, foxes, or childhood. Perhaps some poems in it avoid lapsing into trite epiphany  – what’s known as the ‘Damascus Syndrome’. Perhaps the poet is under 30 and not working in academia and doesn’t like the Goldberg Variations and certainly hasn’t written a ‘ecstatic and utterly crystalline’ poetic sequence about them.

In short, the poetry I read is often dull, and the reviews altogether deadening. It’s all a matter of taste, I suppose, and mine could be off – I do have a thing for McNuggets. I wish, though, more of what I read were more like Roy Fisher’s long poem ‘Furnace’, which I’m reading at the moment. I intend to write more fully about it down the line, but here’s a snippet of this subtly refracted lyric:

“…Whatever
approaches my passive taking-in,
then surrounds me and goes by
will have itself understood only
phase upon phase
by separate involuntary
strokes of the mind, dark
swings of a fan-blade
that keeps a time of its own
made up from the long
discrete moments
of the stages of the street,
each bred off the last as if by
causality.”

Such an irresistible, crystalline intelligence. Oh! Swoon!

NB. I own Public Dream and actually enjoyed it. This is a pretty fantastic poem. August Kleinzahler’s written quite a good review of Fisher’s ‘Collected Poems’ here.

On Reading

He opened the book and thrilled at being alone in it.

Brueghel / Q

Brueghel is that mischievous photographer who mistimes the shot to catch you gawping drunkenly; an unscrupulous chronicler of wonky stares, pimples scratched, that peculiar twitch, those odd bulges – everyday absurdities we look in the mirror to forget.

He painted the totally ordinary and the fantastic in conjunction: piggy-backing, bare arses and haymaking; a man with waffles tied to his hat, a skeleton playing hurdy-gurdy. A flash-flood of. Miscellanies of grotesquery and grot. Seventeen in the bed and the little one laughed. The best bits of ‘Where’s Wally?‘ and  a fleshy, rude wit to boot. Jamboree of the banal, the bawdy and the bestial.

But Brueghel wasn’t just a saucy Flemish cartoonist. He’d a beautiful sense of colour – late ochre and russet, the hushed blue of snow against bark – and crucially, despite their surreal incongruities, his works have a representativeness and a fidelity about them: they fit the sixteenth century perfectly. He painted common people in common professions without resorting to affectation or sentiment, and often his paintings were visual representations of common proverbs or adages, many now defunct. He combined panoramic scope with an inherent flatness to skew perspective in such a way that his best paintings suggest artlessness, immediacy and concealed metaphor at the same time.

*

After finishing Wolf Hall, finding myself hankering after more sixteenth century spilt into words,  I was pleased to come across Q (in a dark corner of the market), a novel which follows the fortunes and misfortunes of an Anabaptist heretic through the upheaval in mainland Europe during the Reformation. Same period, similar themes – the Church, power, political intrigue – but these novels are two peas from very different pods.

Q was written by four Italian authors under the pseudonym ‘Luther Blissett’ – a notoriously inept British footballer who once played for Milan. Its protagonist too remains nameless throughout, though he takes on multiple aliases as he hunts for the mysterious Q, who is an undercover spy for the Inquisition.

The novel suffers from obvious flaws: it’s outrageously overblown and inconsistently paced. The two principle characters’ motivations are never convincingly explored or even fully explained. Stylistically, it jerks and flails a bit (though it is translated from the Italian):

“Almost blindly.

What I have to do.

Screams in my ears already bursting with cannon fire, bodies crashing into me. My throat choked with bloody, sweaty dust, my coughs tearing me apart.”

No matter. Whereas Wolf Hall is meticulously directed, this is a brash, breathless maul of a plot, taking in multiple battles, massacres, mad prophets, instances of enforced polygamy, swindling, espionage and torture, and a singular German nobleman who calls his underlings ‘absolute dickheads’. It’s a Brueghel-esque mash.

Q is in fact resolutely and purposefully a ‘flat’ novel – one reviewer called it a species of ‘anti-novel‘ – and it is playful,  but it is not without ambition. It works in the same way as Brueghel’s paintings manage to frame the madness of the rabble: by compressing and caricaturing and foregrounding. Brueghel painted the crowd, a press of people;  I think Q is an attempt to write a flood of events in a way that represents how history happens in a rush of odd collocations and coincidences, without resolving itself beforehand. It’s not entirely successful, but it’s a lot of fun.

Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

An improvisation:

In a certain town in low-lying Lincolnshire, where the sky is tall enough to accommodate stacked libraries of cloud, a young man reads of Invisible Cities. Dawn breaks, caramel and pearl, as it does in old stories.

The town is built on a hill upon which it is only possible to think downwards.

At the top of the hill there is a church and a watchtower. All roads lead away, down the hill. The faithful direct their prayers down the hill, like rolling coins in a gutter. The old watchtower now offers free entry: visitors like to see the sky reflected darkly in the still pool at the bottom of the hill, but they never look up.

By the pool is a cinema. Filmgoers, who find the town mysteriously altered at the end of the evening, as if it has exhaled, as if something solid in it has been swallowed, are always surprised to find the hill is still there.

Map-makers dislike the hill, its shock of contours, consider it an obvious spillage in an otherwise perfectly clean cream sea. Architects conceive of  the hill hollowed out, dim catacombs wreathing towards high vaulted caverns.

The young man dreams of erosion, rivers breaking their banks, new tributaries carving through old rock, a black weight of water running down a hill.

‘Ballardian’

Mike Thompson has designed a lamp that is powered by human blood.

There’s something deeply strange about a premeditated act of violence being conducted in silence. The sequence unrolls like a snuff movie: she sits at the table like a priest at the altar, smashes a glass, cuts herself on it, drains her blood into the liquid in it, and is suffused in an electric blue light.

Thompson, an English designer based in the Netherlands, designed the lamp having discovered how the chemical luminol is used in forensic science to mark traces of blood left at crime scenes.

“It kind of triggered this thought in my mind, that if energy somehow came at a cost to us, then maybe it would make us think differently about the way we use it,” Thompson told LiveScience. The lamp is intended to “challenge people’s preconceived notions about where our energy comes from,” he said, and it forces the user “to rethink how wasteful they are with energy, and how precious it is.”

Having just finished reading Super-Cannes, it’s hard not to find the invention of a blood lamp deeply Ballardian. There’s an obvious sado-maschistic edge to the sensibilities behind the concept, and an undercurrent of vampiric eroticism to the video, that resonate with the sort of ideas Ballard frames in his writing.

Firstly, the novel: set into the hills above Cannes, in the bleaching light, Eden-Olympia is an executive-class, ‘intelligent’ business park, which has been touched by madness. An apparently sane doctor has killed ten people in a storm of violence that cannot be explained. Paul Sinclair, husband of the doctor’s eventual replacement, feels compelled to investigate and gradually uncovers a subculture of crime and engineered psychopathy that threatens to spill outside the mirrored walls of the park.

In Eden-Olympia, we discover, the executives are restless. They have slipped moorings, are adrift in an environment in which work is the only familiar landmark. In an enclosed, disconnected world, they have become inured to whatever normal society expects of us; the market sets its own morality. Dr Wilder Penrose is employed to manage volatile minds: “our amiable Prospero, the psychopomp who steered our darkest dreams towards the daylight”. Without wishing to give the game away, we soon learn that he has prescribed a particularly depraved brand of catharsis.

Essentially, Super-Cannes is a stylised thriller, a tightly twisted coil of  narrative  which flashes the disquieting, prescient ideas for which Ballard (who died this year) became renowned. In fact, the Collins English Dictionary now carries a definition for ‘ballardian’:

“adj. resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels and stories, esp dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”

The novel’s chief weakness is that at times it feels too much a set piece, the writing merely facilitating the enaction of the author’s ideas. Ballard sometimes over-tells in a clunky, hammy way: the narrator, Paul, introduces his wife as “spunky but insecure”, and she never really provides anything other than a rather wooden cameo.

But in a sense these blips are no more than perculiarities of the genre, Chandleresque affectations, and even serve to heighten the strangeness of the narrative. I found Super-Cannes an overwhelmingly intruiging, unsettling novel to read. It is filled with an oppressive brightness; the glare of white buildings, the fusing heat of a exposed rooftop, the vulgar shimmer of neon in alleys. Ballard shoots off images like rogue fireworks:

“Cannes lay beneath us, a furnace of light where the Croisette touched the sea, as if an immense lava flow was moving down the hills and igniting at the water’s edge.”

His writing is charged throughout with a forensic energy and all the blank hostility of an operating theatre – turning the page sometimes feels like making the first cut at an autopsy. Super Cannes reveals itself in the white light that a dentist uses to direct the drill; the light of the blood lamp.

The Man Who Lost the Sea

“Say you’re a kid, and one dark night you’re running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy. You pass the sick man and he wants you to shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks you’re too old to play with toys. So you squat next to him in the sand and tell him it isn’t a toy, it’s a model. You tell him look here, here’s something most people don’t know about helicopters…”

‘The Man Who Lost the Sea‘, by Theodore Sturgeon; via

‘Wolf Hall’ – some thoughts

Portrait of Cromwell, by Hans Holbein 1532-33

I watched ‘Raging Bull’ the other night, though it was more like a test of endurance than a simple pleasure: it is such a claustrophobic, clenched-fist of a film, there is such an air of masochism about it, and it is so dominated by De Niro. The fights are astonishingly filmed, camera tight to his gloves, wheeling about, never leaving the ring, orbiting him, a helplessly drawn satelite.

Thomas Cromwell exerts the same planetary pull over Hilary Mantel’s 650 page Wolf Hall, set in the crucial decades which saw Henry VIII marry Anne Boleyn and declare himself head of the Church of England. The son of a blacksmith, he forces his way into the Tudor Court by a combination of machination, opportunism and sheer determination, eventually finding the favour of the king and becoming one of the most powerful men in England. He is a smooth-tongued political genius with a quick and capacious mind – ruthless and affectionate, calculating and loyal: a man who looks like a murderer.

It is fair to say that Cromwell encompasses the novel: it moves where he moves – indeed its length is in many ways a testament to his stubborn vitality.  Stylistically, the writing is restrained, sometimes curt, though Mantel is an expert wielder of a dry aphoristic wit and there are occasional flashes of lyricism. Aptly for a novel about politics, dialogue dominates, though Mantel hardly ever mentions the protagonist by name. Instead, the third person ‘he’ becomes a sort of epithet for Cromwell in the same way it signifies divinity in the Bible – one feels after a while that it ought to be capitalised. It’s a clever - if precarious – device, because consequently the reader is made to feel at one step removed from the character over which the novel obsesses. It could easily become a frustrating or confusing authorial tick – but it doesn’t, because it embodies both Cromwell’s impenetrability (sic?) and omnipresence in the novel so succintly.

Yet Wolf Hall is a strangely fleeting, illusionary experience for such a doorstop of a book. This, I think, is because it is a historical novel concerned with such familiar events, which nevertheless only tells a fraction of the whole story – Mantel is apparently already writing a sequel. It ends almost arbitrarily, four of Henry’s wives yet to have their misfortunes visited upon them, Cromwell having not changed substantially throughout. To the author’s credit, it never becomes stodgy or ponderous. Despite its bravura and boldness of imagination, the novel has an inherent flimsiness, an allusiveness: it is an odd thing, after all, to be reading such an immersive fiction of the real life of someone whose name is first learnt in primary school. Wolf Hall is a monument to that man, casting a long shadow, for in a very real sense this story only ends with our reading of it.

*still reading Heart Songs…

On the Futility of Blogging

I remember filling a time capsule in primary school. Our teachers were getting superstitious about the approaching new millenium so of course we set about collecting artifacts to preserve – tatty football stickers, broken tamagotchis, old conkers – and wrote explanatory notes addressed in hope to any rogue aliens: “Manchester United won the league but nobody likes them. I hope the future is better”.

We buried them in the far corner of the playing field under the tree with the old condom hanging on it.

In pursuit of glamour

‘…  alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives…‘

This photograph shows the Gare Montparnasse rail accident of October 23, 1895, in which a train overan 30 metres of concourse after its brakes failed, ending up – rather spectacularly – on the street outside the station. It’s an almost allegorical scene; evocative of machismo and ego and of a certain romantic folly.

In 1909 F. T. Marinetti wrote the Futurist Manifesto, quoted above: by all accounts a manic, self-mythologising, melodramatic rant, and for these reasons an intensely satisfying one. When I first read it, I tried to memorise these lines:

“Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.”

There’s something extraordinarily vital about this pronouncement that I like – an emboldening physicality. Too often I find myself reading stodgy, complacent books and thinking stodgy, complacent thoughts. I’d much rather be punched in the face.

Of course, the Futurists were often nutters (& sometimes fascists) and despite extolling new technologies, urban protrusions and violent injustices, not even particularly original. Marinetti and friends were committed – fuck the brakes! fuck the end of the line! – to the headlong pursuit of glamour in art: fame, mystique, permanence – all the old motivations, in other words. Every artist wants these things.

The Futurists, though, believed that Art is necessarily an imposition upon the natural order of things and in that sense any creative act is an act of ‘violence, cruelty, injustice’ requiring no justification. They therefore invoked the ‘black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives’ without moral scruple.

One person was killed in the rail accident of 1895.

—

The Futurists on Road Safety:

Marinetti describes driving his car into a ditch upon encountering some unaccommodating cyclists, which is laughable when you consider that he was a fascist nutter and James Martin – a TV chef – wouldn’t dream of dirtying his Prius for the sake of ‘a bunch of City-boy ponces’.

Heart Songs

Yesterday I bought Heart Songs by E. Annie Proulx from my local Oxfam. It’s a collection of short stories set in rural New England; “magnificent wrenching pieces”, says Vogue, apparently.

I loved the Pulitzer Prize winning The Shipping News – in fact it’s one of my favourite novels, written with a lyrical precision, like black bark on snow, and unsparingly humane. Proulx’s* prose carries the scent of both Hughes and McCarthy in its regard for the natural world; she shares with the former a sense of the implacable hostilty of the wild, and with the latter a weight and watchfulness.

I’ve read 70 pages of Heart Songs and don’t yet feel disappointed. Once I’ve finished I’ll be back.

*this can’t be right, can it? Ugly, ugly.