About Tyggers

Found this on BlueSky (Twitter for nice people) and it made me laugh but also made me think once again that so much humour depends on getting two separate references, a bit like my favourite joke, which demands a passing knowledge of both Star Wars and French baked goods. But we’ll get back to that some other time.

PS: And just as I post this, I remember my first term at university and my tutor, the lamented Chris Brooks explaining Blake’s concept of innocence and experience by reading the last couple of pages of The House at Pooh Corner.

About Dover Beach

Mad-eyed, foam-flecked rumours on social media that Saturday will see a mass invasion of Dover Beach. Not one led by migrants, though. This time it’ll be stout-limbed, pink-hued defenders of the British way of life on the sands, doubtless screaming bleeding chunks of Matthew Arnold at the baffled boat people until they skedaddle back home.

...and we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

About poems that don’t exist

I remain fascinated by literary and other creative works that acquire added superpowers by virtue of not existing and as such I’m delighted to offer a plug to this triumph of passive-aggressive sarcasm:

Release the Sausages! is an anthology of poems, with absolutely no poems in it. It is a celebration of the first twelve months of Starmer’s government – a monument to the towering contribution to socialist thought of Sir Keir Starmer KCB QC, and his decisive, principled and unifying part in the proud history of the British Labour Movement. And it is a moving tribute to his moral integrity and irresistible charisma, warmth and wit... It contains no poems at all, by over 50 poets who have nothing to say about a man who has nothing to say...

About Bach and Keats

Thinking about the scene early in the movie Tár, where the ghastly Juilliard student Max announces that because he’s a pansexual BIPOC with an overactive leg (I paraphrase), he doesn’t feel able to love Bach because he had 20 children and maybe didn’t do his share of the housework (I paraphrase further) and I wonder how many people who watch the scene think, yeah, fair point, awful Juilliard bloke.

And then I encounter this poem, which reminds us that it’s all about the art, you utter clowns.

Romantic Poet, by Diane Seuss  

 

You would not have loved him,  

My friend the scholar 

decried. He brushed his teeth,

if at all, with salt. He lied,

and rarely washed

his hair. Wiped his ass

with leaves or with his hand.

The top of his head would have barely

reached your tits. His pits

reeked, as did his deathbed.

 

But the nightingale, I said.

About A Martian

This morning I discussed Craig Raine’s A Martian Sends a Postcard Home with a group of bright, polite and (above all) curious Russian teenagers. The gist of the poem is that an alien is describing commonplace objects and phenomena to his friends and that once we decode the things – from books to toilets to dreams – that he’s writing about, we see them anew, as if through fresh eyes, or whatever sensory organs Martians have.

There were extra layers of decoding that the students had to do though. First, the purely linguistic, which I’d expected – what is impatience? But then I realised they were being tasked with identifying things which which they have only a very fuzzy acquaintance. Home phones. Wristwatches. Postcards, of course. And pretty soon we can add books and cars you drive yourself to the list.

I wonder how long before they’re baffled by the very idea of dreams.

About Wordsworth

 

I am grateful to Robert Hutton for live-tweeting his perusal of Nadine Dorries’ new book. To be honest, when I saw the extract above, it rather reinforced my belief that her appointment as Culture Secretary was Boris Johnson’s idea of a Situationist prank – let’s find someone who wouldn’t recognise the most crushingly obvious slice of English verse if it bit off her face and put her in charge of poetry, among other things – but, hey, at least she admits to her ignorance.

What startles me more is that nobody at any point in the editorial process noticed that she’d got the quote wrong.

About poetry on the telly

In one of the remoter corners of the tributes to the late Michael Parkinson, I discover that WH Auden was an early guest on his talk show. (John Gielgud was on the same programme, and Cleo Laine sang a version of Auden’s own ‘O Tell Me The Truth About Love’.)

I can’t find a recording of this particular show, but there is a transcript. And if you wonder why we rarely see poets on primetime TV these days, it turns out that Wystan and Parky were interrogating that same issue, using a mass medium to ponder the fact of poetry’s minority status. The poet, to be honest, doesn’t seem too worried about the situation; he certainly offers no platitudes about accessibility or inclusivity:

MP: But there’s still a kind of elitist feeling about poetry in particular, I mean, isn’t there? 

WHA: No, I think obviously it appeals to a minority. I know certainly when I have to read there are a lot of students there, that’s all I can say. And they seem to enjoy it. 

MP: But the key word there was ‘minority’. Why should it be a minority? 

WHA: Well, because it’s a rather difficult art. You’ve got to have, both to write it and to read it, you’ve got to have this passionate love of language. 

MP: Yes. 

WHA: And that is probably... a minority who have this. 

Also from the dead poets’ society: participants in next month’s Dublin marathon will receive a medal that attributes the following to WB Yeats: “There are no strangers here: only friends you haven’t met yet.” Not only is there no evidence that Yeats wrote or said it, it seems rather unlikely that the grumpy old fascist sympathiser would even think along those lines. I wonder what he’d have had to say to Parky.

About assumptions

Following on from the theatre reviewer who wondered why someone might write a play about TS Eliot and/or the Marx Brothers, because only old people have heard of them and might understand the jokes; first, from an article about Evelyn Waugh, which assumes in the reader’s favour. 

It’s the “of course”, of course, that confirms this could only appear in the TLS, or something of that calibre. But then there’s another kind of assumption, from Albion’s Secret History by Guy Mankowski

which (apart from the fact that I know where Bromley is, thanks) I’m calling performative ignorance because even if he doesn’t know where Bromley is, Mankowski could look it up in a matter of seconds.

(And, on vaguely related lines, the people who tore chunks out of a quotation from The Masque of Anarchy because they thought it was by Jeremy Corbyn, rather than Shelley; or “Shelley, whoever that is”, as one Twitter sage put it.)

About age

Wailing and gnashing over a public broadcaster making the classic mistake of trying to lure younger listeners now, rather than just waiting until they get old:

I hear that in a BBC radio staff meeting yesterday, management told staff to reduce the age of people listening to @BBC6Music by 5-10 years, with an optimum of listeners in their early 30s. If true, this is madness: an utterly skewiff corporate notion of who might listen or why.

— Chris Thorpe-Tracey (@christt) April 6, 2023

But then, searching for something else, I come across a theatre review from last year (of a show that sounds disturbingly as if I might have written it, but also pretty bad, which tells its own tale), where the writer appears to accept this logic, even if he’s old enough to know better, and to get the joke: 

I detest clever-dick plays that make the audience struggle hard to find meaning but allows them the warm glow of self-congratulation for getting an obscure reference. I studied Eliot in A-level English and devoured the Marx Brothers films at what was then the National Film Theatre in the 1980s. Is The Waste Land on the curriculum now, in its centenary year? And who under 50 knows about Groucho and his siblings and will therefore get McGuinness’s oblique references to old routines and one-liners? Writers can write what they want, of course, but it’s odd to pitch a play exclusively to an ageing demographic.

Any odder than pitching it exclusively to the young, who apparently don’t want to watch a play, or listen to a radio station, that would have them as an audience?

About World Poetry Day

It is, apparently, so I did one. 

‘On Watching A Noah Baumbach Movie’ 

The dialectical sparring created 

an intellectual conflagration so intense 

it burned their minds beyond recognition 

and they could only be identified 

by reference to their high school transcripts.

About Nadine Dorries

For no particular reason, I asked ChatGPT to write a sonnet about Nadine Dorries and, intriguingly, it’s just about bad enough to be a sonnet written by Nadine Dorries (if the former Culture Secretary knew what a sonnet was). 

Fair Nadine, who in politics finds her place,

Her voice is heard with vigor and with grace,

She stands for values, for freedom and for right, 

And battles those who seek to dim the light. 

With passion, she defends the common folk, 

And fights for justice, always without cloak, 

Her heart is true, her mind is clear and bright, 

And with her words, she challenges the might. 

Her spirit soars, unbound by fear or doubt, 

And with her strength, she leads the righteous rout, 

For she believes in truth and in what's just, 

And in her cause, she puts her sacred trust. 

So let us hail fair Nadine's noble heart, 

For in her work, she plays a vital part.

About the Queen

And so the Queen finally enters Valhalla, not lasting quite long enough to tell us what she thought of Cobra Kai season five. Now is not the time or place to cast aspersions on the late monarch. Whatever you think of the institution itself, she clearly discharged her role with commitment and aplomb; and, in any case, she's someone’s mother, someone’s grandmother and so on. That said, we seem to have entered a moment – with uncomfortable similarities to the period following the death of her daughter-in-law – when those who aren’t swept up in the mood of collective melancholy feel uncomfortable about conducting business as usual. We don’t mock the Queen herself, but surely some of the bloody awful poetry and awkward corporate tweets are fair game? And as for faded celebrities trying to get in the act...

As far as big public events go, it seems that the effective shutdown of normal service at the BBC and other broadcasters when Prince Philip died last year is now rightly seen as overkill; but the laissez-faire attitude from the Palace has led to some anomalies and inconsistencies. So there was cricket, but no football. And we were allowed a few daft game shows on Saturday night, even if they were shunted to BBC2, but not the Last Night of Proms. This last cancellation seems particularly odd; wouldn’t a bit of sentimental flag-waving be just the ticket? And there are precedents. In 2001, the Last Night took place four days after the 9/11 attacks, surely a more brutal shock to the collective system than the passing of a 96-year-old? The mood was a bit more sombre than usual, exemplified by Leonard Slatkin conducting Barber’s Adagio for Strings. And it was beautiful and respectful and wholly right.   

About Larkin (again)

There is much buzz, as the centenary of Philip Larkin’s birth approaches, about the notion that his privately expressed opinions should render him a candidate for cancellation. He’s clearly one of the dead white males most at risk of being squeezed out of the curriculum and the canon, as a more diverse slate of poets move in.

That said, I’m white and male, and I didn’t properly get the point of Larkin until I was well into my 30s; the voice of resignation and disappointment that underpins his work never really rang true until I’d experienced it myself. The barrier to understanding him may be as much chronological as ideological.

Which isn’t a reason not to teach Larkin to teenagers of all races, genders and political persuasions, of course. In a complex, multicultural society, empathy is at a premium. It’s important to instruct white boys in the finer points of Maya Angelou; and, equally, to explain to black girls why Larkin thought and wrote as he did.

PS: An enjoyable selection of Larkin-related musings at the New Statesman.

PPS: From the above, Emily Berry quotes some lines from Larkin’s ‘Vers de Société’ that say more than one might have expected about modern, digital modes of interaction: 

...the big wish

Is to have people nice to you, which means 

Doing it back somehow. 

Virtue is social. Are, then, these routines 

Playing at goodness, like going to church?

PPPS: James O'Brien covers the subject: I pop up at about 18.30. 

About Radio 4

Two more nuggets that would have fitted neatly into my dissertation but will have to hover here for the time being. Both popped up as I did my usual Sunday morning potter to the strains of Radio 4. First, on Broadcasting House (from about 37.40) both interviewer and interviewee explicitly assume that listeners to the station will be familiar with a particular poem by Philip Larkin, not to mention an Oscar-winning movie from more than four decades ago. Are such assumptions justified? Should they be? Or is such cosy familiarity with the canon off-putting to too many people, specifically the people who aren’t listening to Radio 4, however much the BBC wants them to?

And then on Kate Moss’s Desert Island Discs (1.15) Lauren Laverne mentions cultural capital but I’m not entirely sure it means what she thinks it does. Which is another cultural reference that you, the imaginary average reader, may or may not get, and so it goes on...

PS: And on the Today programme on Monday morning, Hadley Freeman compares Ms Moss to Thomas Pynchon...

PPS: Discussing the broadening of the canon, with particular reference to Brain of Britain.

About Penny Mordaunt

Of course I haven’t read Greater, the book by the woman who might be Prime Minister in a matter of weeks, so I’ve had to rely on artful filleting by lefty journalists (in this case John Harris of the Guardian) to acquire this gem: “The British prefer a future that looks very much like the past, only a lot better.” Which seems to hint at both a Baudrillardian simulacrum and a Radiohead lyric, while meaning precisely nothing. Which is a pretty good fit for this blog, and for 2022 as a whole.

And if Mordaunt does bellyflop into Number 10, she’ll have to decide whether to carry on her party’s deranged feud with the BBC. If she does, she should ask herself how a commercially-driven broadcaster might have made this rather wonderful production of The Waste Land. Except that that might expose a fatal cognitive dissonance in modern Conservatism, which seeks to exalt the best culture of the past, while simultaneously deriding intelligent examination or experience of that culture as elitist.

About Pinter and Yeats

They should take all the pauses out of Pinter plays to make them faster and more appealing to a contemporary audience.

— Richard Blandford (@rblandford) August 17, 2021

PS:

The least liked takes lack all conviction, while the most RT’ed are full of passionate intensity.

— Tom Peck (@tompeck) August 17, 2021

About Larkin

When an ad for this poster (the work of the Bristol company Standard Designs) popped up, I laughed at first, because it’s funny; then my inner pedant grumbled because Larkin was wary of any jazz that happened after about 1940 so the Blue Note designs being pastiched here wouldn’t have figured that much in his collection. (I once complained to the BBC because a Radio 4 play about the poet suggested that he was a fan of Cannonball Adderley.) But then I wondered whether that was the whole point – anything to annoy the King of Curmudgeons. If only he were around to write a mordant poem about it.

Or maybe he did anyway...

She kept her songs, they kept so little space,

The covers pleased her...

About bad art

I assumed at first that the One Britain One Nation project was meant to form part of this weird culture war we’re currently embroiled in; a bear trap for bien-pensant liberals who instinctively giggle at any ostentatious expression of patriotism and are then immediately tarred as sneering quinoa-munching metropolitans, out of touch with the stout yeomen of Albion, yada yada yada...

If that’s the case, though, the whole thing seems to have backfired. Not (just) because of a general revulsion against drilling young minds into ostentatious demonstrations of sentimental patriotism – a practice with which even arch-Imperialists such as Kipling were uneasy – but because ultimately, it was a bad song, a banal dirge with vapid lyrics. Those who might stand by the sentiments will flinch at singing along with something so cruddy. “Tear him for his bad verses,” as the luckless Cinna’s assassins yelled.

And similarly, we can side-step another cultural skirmish, about whether or not a hereditary monarchy is more trouble than it’s worth in the 21st century, when we consider the merits of otherwise of the new statue of Diana, Princess of Wales. As Jonathan Jones puts it, “Perhaps not even for Diana’s sincerest believers, for the statue group’s emotive symbolism is undermined by its aesthetic awfulness.” It’s dreadful. That is all.

That said, of course, since we have a governing class that seems intent on sidelining what we’re supposed to call the creative industries (less a war between cultures, more like a war on culture in general), maybe simply expressing any kind of critical/aesthetic evaluation is just as subversive and dangerous as mocking patriotism or the monarchy...

About the Downing Street whiteboard

    

Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive 
Officiously to keep alive...

Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘The Latest Decalogue’, 1862

(Background here.)

PS: Marina Hyde neatly skewers Dominic Cummings and all the other purveyors of blokeish populism: “If we must have machismo, must it be so very poorly essayed?”

About Shelley

As a proud geek and devotee of quizzing, who was inevitably the last to be picked for any sporting team, one might have thought that I’d have approved of the Hackney New School, which claims to have all but eliminated bullying by replacing playground football games with poetry, chess and quizzes.

Pupils have memorised poems Ozymandias and Charge of Light Brigade [sic] off by heart and recite them as they line up for lessons or when they are eating lunch, [headteacher] Ms Whelan said... “Just yesterday a group of year 9 students beat me in a name the capital cities quiz, this would have been unthinkable two years ago.”

Well, um, yes, but. Knowing about poetry is, as Sellar and Yeatman had it, A Good Thing. But there’s something about learning it by rote and chanting it over lunch that feels almost cult-like. I do wonder what the radical Shelley, who was booted out of Oxford for his heterodox views on religion and much else, might have made of this; and ultimately what it means for education. 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away... 

(I’ve got an uncomfortable feeling that Tennyson might have approved, though.)