THE CANTOS OF MVTABILITIE

Two Unalike Things

2012-01-24T15:17:00.000-08:00

I've been laid up for two days with food poisoning, and there's a lot to be said for an enforced period of rest. I had friends visiting on the Friday night, and at about midnight I started to feel very odd: racing mind, hearing voices, excessive salivation, a queasy feeling in the stomach like a eddy whirling scummy plastic around in an oily sea. My two friends had my bed and I slept on the floor of my living room, but at about 5am the sluices opened at both ends. It was epic, like an early 19th century no-expense-spared production of Shakespeare: at one point, puking my guts up, I half-expected to see Ellen Terry ride past on a dolphin in the gaslight, singing 'Full fathom five'. I was, you'll gather, hallucinating by this point. Sparing you further personal details, I will quote the marvellous Terry Castle's account of food poisoning in Sicily, from The Professor and Other Writings:

'So was it the gothic dust of the nineteenth century? Or the (slightly "off") shrimp and calamari? By the time we took the ferry to Lipari, twenty-four hours later, it was impossible to ignore: a certain grinding, flopping feeling in my stomach, like a lonely goony bird struggling to take off. Strange ressentiment at the thought of food...Piled onto the scruffy tour boat filed with voluble Sicilians and assorted squalling offspring, then churned off across the waves. Intestines profoundly restless. A couple of crampy-shivery snorkelling stops in the blue Tyrrhenian sea, then debarked at Panarea for the afternoon. Still in denial, despite rough, gasping, even passionate bout of diarrhea, surrounded by mops and buckets in a little gelateria WC. Trying to persuade myself that I and the stomach bug were only having a brief affair.

A major turn for the worse, however, when we docked at Stromboli. The sun was starting to go down, the fabled volcano smoking in sinister, belching fashion. I stopped to paw over T-shirts at one of the many souvenir stalls in a pathetic stab at normalcy...Inward writhing like Laocoon...Walked gingerly toward the main pumice beach in desultory search of a swim. But then nothing to do but break for it: bowels suddenly on fire. B. watching in horror. Mad, self-flinging plunge into the waves, followed by Byronic exaltation (this is something I've never done before; I am breaking every law of God and Man); then sordid, liquefying release. Catharsis accomplished, I hurried back onto the beach groaning like Mr Pooter after the umpteenth insult from Lupin, his annoying ne'er -do-well son.'

So, dear reader, was it with me, although without the more glamorous setting. After an afternoon of this, my friends cut their visit short.

* * *

On another note entirely, I am captivated by this sumptuously sinister, almost mythological garment: a cape woven from spider-silk, that rich gold-saffron colour being the natural hue. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and I shall be taking a trip to the V&A to gape in person. Apparently it is so light that you cannot physically feel it: cloth as precious as liquid gold, as insubstantial as air.

Feaver-dream

2012-01-09T02:38:00.000-08:00

Just back from a coffee with Maggie, who's given me a lovely wooden winebox to grow basil in. I relish this time of year, tending as it is in the direction of my favourite festival, Candlemas, on 1st February. It's lustration-tide: everywhere the dead leaves of autumn have melted away and the bulbs are budding, tulips snouting through the soil, bluebells elbowing the paving slabs apart on St Bernard's Road today. I love the still, cold quietude and thin lemonwash light, bedding down early into afternoon darkness. The psychic pot has been given a good stirring recently, and indeed I dreamed a few nights ago of skinning and slicing up a huge white pig, before cooking a piece slowly until all the fat melted and crisped deliciously. As I walked home I thought of that dream, and the time of year, and the close of a poem by Vicki Feaver, from her remarkable The Book of Blood:

I join in the cooking: jointing

and slicing, stirring and tasting -

excited as if the King of Death

has arrived to feast, stalking

out of winter woods,

his black mouth

sprouting golden crocuses.

Spirit of Albion

2012-01-09T02:05:00.000-08:00

No word of a lie: I actually vomited with embarrassment when I saw this while researching the new book on the Irish gods. It's going to take some time for me to recover my critical faculties. I am speechless by how low British Paganism appears to have sunk with this film, even by its own hydrocephalitic standards. Exploitative, sentimental, and presumptuous, it's an apt summation of a religion, or set of religions, that klaxons its connection to wild nature and yet is saturated with a specifically suburban kind of self-involvement. The film articulates a conversion narrative of the clunkiest sort in which people just can't get out of the way of themselves, self-deafened by their own internal blether. Theologically, there's no risk of---say---presenting the gods as fathomless, living metaphors mysteriously at work in the soul of the world. Your boss a bitch? Girlfriend left you? Bored with that office job? Well, become a Pagan and you too can have a gormless Terry Pratchett character to be your very own Magic Friend! God, the intolerable, wretched crudity of it, the compulsive obviousness: everything on the self-congratulatory surface, the literal in place of the liminal. This is not profundity: it's LARPing for the inadequate.

The whole religion, the entire shebang, needs an insurance fire.

One final blast of the trumpet before I shut up. I never understand---have never understood---why so few people in UK Paganism ever seem to have any sense at all of how shit it all looks. Go to a public Pagan ritual and it's like the worst teatime kids' serial you ever saw: a Robin Hood for the retarded, a Merlin for the mentally subnormal. Someone has clearly gone to a lot of trouble for this film, but they've done it without any taste or even the consciousness that they lack taste. Man alive, look at the Morrigan's tranny frightwig and metal tits! Clock Ceri(dwen)'s gurning-hippy-in-field face-paint! I'm not arguing for a bon chic, bon genre tyranny but for a basic sense of aesthetics, an ability to move beyond leaden literalism. Do they not realise no one in it can act?! Puddingy Herne ate all the pies but inexplicably appears to have forgotten the two cream horns stuck to his forehead. The Morrigan's on mogadon. And that sublimely awful 'Keeper of the Cauldron' must surely be doubling up as Galadriel for the Sutton Coldfield Amateur Dramatics Society's Crimbo production of The Lord of the Rings. What other explanation could there be for that ludicrous clobber?! I mean, what the fucking fuckitty fuck?!

Oh God, someone just take a tent mallet to my head now and have done with it. I just can't bear the sheer waste of it all. Mundus senescit, gold into dross.

* * *

Mind-cleansers

Sublime

2012-01-08T03:36:00.001-08:00

Reality sleb Chantelle Houghton recently came out with this deathless line about a conversation she had with her boyfriend, crossdressing cage-fighter Alex Reid:

“Alex [Reid] was laughing at me earlier because I thought the sun and the moon was the same thing. Turns out they’re not!”

I'm actually impressed and slightly charmed. She's made a lot of money while having an IQ so low that I suspect one could petition the government to have her human status revoked, and get her reclassified as a donkey, or perhaps a sausage dog.

Jesus Loves Me. With a dead-eyed cat and a hamster.

2012-01-05T04:43:00.001-08:00

(reblogged from World of Wonder).

This is stirring memories of my very religious childhood....is that a real cat? And a real hamster!?

Dear, dear God.

Midwinter Spring

2012-01-02T12:04:00.001-08:00

Today I planted a dozen tulips and twenty white aliums on my balcony--third-floor gardening takes quite some effort---while mulling over a particularly mysterious dream about my ex-fiance, and love, and the future. After lunch, still inwardly ruminant, I wandered in chilly sunlight over to Holywell Cemetary, bosky and lovely resting place of many great and ancient university families. I've long been fond of this particular graveyard: aged eighteen, as a green country boy startled and discomfited by the experience of living in a city, I used to go and hide out in it between lectures, reading Traherne to the bees. Foxes and the odd deer appear and disappear between the bushes in summer, and it is full of red admirals and cinnabar moths settling on the hawkweed and marjoram which spring from so many graves ('beautiful uncut hair...'). It has a tranquil, sleepy spirit, cluttered with crumbling funerary monuments netted in briars---here a sleeping infant dreams on the crook of its arm under a yew-tree; there time is slowly veiling the face of a Victorian angel in moss.

By the gate there is a rosebush, covered today in perfect pinkish-white heavily scented flowers. It's hardly unusual for roses to keep flowering into late winter in a sheltered spot, but these were so beautiful, so untouched by damp or frost, that I caught my breath at the sight of them. And a little later, under an elder that was as bleak and bare as could be, I saw a little oak sapling in full summer leaf. Normally I would be disturbed by such signs of nature not knowing which way to turn in this mild winter, but the conjunction of these midsummer plants---oak leaves and pink roses---at midwinter seemed mysterious, charged with numen, rather than merely unnatural. My own mind's been filled with thoughts of renewal and transformation, of the slow healing of a broken heart, and this uncanny eflorescence of high summer in deep winter seemed to be a sign, to presage a change for the better. For I am every dead thing, in whom Love wrought new alchemy.

I picked one rose-sprig, and one set of oak leaves, and have them on the sill near me as I write. It felt appropriate to light a candle, in recognition, in thanks, and in invocation.

Happy New Year

2011-12-30T02:07:00.000-08:00

Got this trash-injection going round my head now, reblogged from the fabulous World of Wonder. Happy New Year to all readers! Please God let 2012 be less of a car crash of stress and worry than 2011 was. And kudos to RuPaul for the parodic Beyoncé chest-heaving at the end.

Recipe

2011-12-29T07:55:00.001-08:00

Recipe time at Cantos: a good idea for a quick-ish dinner for four, this.

Butternut squash and sage fusilli

Ingredients

1 medium-sized butternut squash, peeled and chunked

20 fresh sage leaves, chopped

half a pack of salted butter

enough dried fusilli for 4 people

packet of pinenuts/walnuts

juice of 1 lemon and its zest

parmesan

olive oil

fresh thyme

Method

Roast the butternut squash chunks with a drizzle of olive oil and the thyme, until soft, c. half an hour.

Towards the end of that period, bring a pan of water to the boil and put the fusilli on.

Melt the butter in a frying pan and fry the chopped sage leaves and half the lemon zest until the butter browns.

Then toast the pinenuts/walnuts in a dry pan, without blackening them.

Drain the pasta when al dente, and combine all the other ingredients, including the other half of the lemon zest and the juice, in a big pre-warmed bowl---all except for the parmesan which you sprinkle on individual servings with lots of black pepper.

Healthy it's not, but it's absolutely bloody delicious on a cold winter's night. Replace the butter with good olive oil to make it vegan, but if you do remember to season it liberally.

Cold Hailey Rainy Night: The Imagined Village

2011-12-26T04:47:00.001-08:00

Deeply British and completely fantastic.

Miller Harris, Feuilles de Tabac

2011-12-25T04:50:00.000-08:00

Very odd take on woody-tobacco, full of unsettling swerves. Starts with the overpowering and indeed alarming citrus/farmyard/rotting hay note of clary sage which lasts about a minute before settling down to an oily hum round the back of the fragrance. It comes on arm in arm with the clove/herbaceous smell of crushed basil. This pungent soggy-leaves accord then swiftly dissipates and the hay is then picked up by a series of meadowy notes which come forward and circle cheerfully like Graces. Despite the advertising blurb about the 'smoky, romantic brasseries of Saint-Germain' this is in no wise an urban fragrance, nor is it in the least French: it is an attempt in fragrance at the English pastoral. It's all very like a Samuel Palmer print in fact: dusk in August, a harvest moon lengthening the chilly shadows (the cold tang of pine needles) in a field with noble rot (patchouli), and sheep shit hovering under the wonderful, sweet fragrance of drying grass (mainly tonka bean here). But there's something here like the sulphurous quality of bad breath too, and a briny, sweaty animalic note: no bad thing, in fact, as it saves the fragrance from excessive prettiness. Despite the name, there's not much tobacco leaf here: instead it's the fuzzy, vanilla-like sweetness of nicotiana flowers which is prominent, the perfume of which is especially strong at dusk. After this bold opening, Feuilles de Tabac suddenly loses the courage of its convictions and dries out to something cool and woody---leafy, a little 'beige', with a lot of cedar---which sadly then doesn't do much.

Form Is Void

2011-12-24T03:31:00.001-08:00

Look at this gorgeous new art blog, Form Is Void (found via the equally amazing Black Nyx).

Cuio anann i Berian! (Long live the Hobbit!)

2011-12-23T06:59:00.000-08:00

I honestly nearly lost control of my urine when Galadriel came on. Remind me not to see this 18 times in the cinema like I did with FOTR. (I was VERY DEPRESSED at the time, and living in Melbourne.)

Lucy

2011-12-23T02:49:00.000-08:00

As is traditional on Cantos---the best midwinter poem in the language (Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight' notwithstanding). Happy Solstice.

A NOCTURNAL UPON ST. LUCY'S DAY, BEING THE SHORTEST DAY, John Donne

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—--things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—--which word wrongs her--—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.

No Cat

2011-12-19T14:52:00.000-08:00

My mental state by the end of term.

Hagia Hesychia

2011-12-14T11:20:00.001-08:00

I've been working on a new icon, this time in a more Russian vein than usual, called Jesus Christ Holy Silence. It's about half done: above is a snapshot of the work in progress. The drapery needs to be shadowed, the hair needs to be textured, and the wings have to be repainted and gilded.

The type is rare: it's an image of Christ prior to the Incarnation, as pre-incarnate Word (Silence). As a heavenly being---for want of a better word---Christ is winged, and is represented as an androgynous youth to symbolise his connection with Sophia, God's personified Wisdom, who is usually depicted as feminine. The folded hands over the breast indicate utter kenotic silence. The halo is both red (divine) and blue (human) in the form of an eightfold star: the hidden eighth point represents the day outside of the seven days of creation, or eternity. This is therefore an image of Christ 'from eternity', begotten, not made.

Bhakti

2011-12-13T09:55:00.000-08:00

Absolutely extraordinary. I can never listen to Sr Marie Keyrouz without feeling that I am in a sound-world of intense devotionalism which would have been familiar to En-hedu-ana. (How unexpected that the world's earliest poet whose name is known and whose work in part survives should be female.)

Ask No Questions

2011-12-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

Over at the restlessly brilliant Lathophobic Aphasia, Vilges Suola does a lovely and revealing self-interview; I've borrowed the format to bring you the following.

What three adjectives would you use to describe yourself?

Slantwise, earthy, ruminative.

What is your greatest achievement?

Being thought of as more or less sane, professional, and kindly, despite periodic nasty brushes in the schizotypal swamplands of the soul. Or: having made and maintained so many richly fulfilling friendships.

What’s your favourite smell?

Church incense, woodsmoke, wet autumn leaves. All together. (I've done some odd things over the years.) Or---heartbrokenly honest answer---: my ex-partner's hair.

What is your favourite taste?

Artichoke hearts in oil, with goat's cheese and very cold Vouvray. Or: seafood.

What’s your favourite piece of music?

I am a musical dunce, unable, thanks to congenital 'music deafness', to perceive most kinds of musical structure or meaning. Probably Tavener's The Last Sleep of the Virgin. Perhaps Byzantine or Znammeny chant.

What book would you like everyone to read? Why?

I'd be happy with a world in which everyone COULD read.

What website would you like everyone to visit? Why?

Absolutely no idea whatsoever. I'm a terrible, unrepentant individualist and dislike the idea of dictating to people.

What is your favourite sound?

The dawn chorus in late April. The Armenian duduk. Richly textured drones.

If you were an animal, what animal do you think you would be?

A marten.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I paint Greek Orthodox icons and garden.

How many languages do you speak and why?

About ten, but I have to problematise the word 'speak'. I learned French at school which I still read happily, and I am fairly fluent in Welsh, which I learned as an adult. I did Latin from the age of eight and Greek from the age of twelve, both to degree level, so I have a thorough working knowledge there. I then learnt medieval Irish and Welsh, added Scottish Gaelic, Cornish and Manx, and have taught Breton and Old English. I read heavyweight academic German and cheapo-airport novel Spanish.

What do you like most/least about your job?

I love academic teaching, and am often identified as a born teacher---not altogether a good thing, as the job brings with it a measure of frustration at the slowness of oneself and others. I do like being able to play with language all day, and the pretence that words are the most important thing in the world for the duration of a tutorial. But I dislike the vamping self-promotion, precariousness, and careerist cant of the profession.

What would heaven be like if you were in charge?

An endless, internally enlarging world of varied, unspoiled, biodiverse, temperate, 'British', landscapes, mainly woodland and meadow. With various young gentlemen famous from stage and screen appearing randomly, all doe-eyed and playful.

When and where are you happiest?

When gardening, between March and June.

Something you are never without.

A manbag with at least two books.

What is your most appealing habit?

Christ, I've no idea. Good manners, probably.

And your least appealing habit?

Gravid somnolence, verbal repetition compulsion.

What is the trait you most dislike in others?

Cruelty to animals, or indifference to nature.

What is your most treasured possession?

My 2,500 volume book collection.

If you could have a supernatural power, what would it be?

Nothing short of full omnipotence, baby.

What words or phrases do you overuse?

'Um...' in a singing note, or, when teaching, 'With me so far!?' Various friends and I share an idiolect, Maux-Hindi, which is literally unintelligible to outsiders, though wholly pellucid to us; in that, 'jhagati namaha agacchanti ma!' is wearing a bit thin as a greeting.

Other than that, 'Your problem, my darling---one of them---' is probably my most overused turn of phrase.

What single thing would improve the quality of your life?

A bangingly toned body. Or about £10 million.

How would you like to be remembered?

'Inexplicably loveable despite the hint of benign malevolence.'

What music do you enjoy listening to/playing most?

Dead Can Dance, a vast array of medieval music, a lot of Indian and Persian music, old Tozzer Amos, This Mortal Coil, the odd bit of Nu-Disco. Chant, and, broadly, religious music in all its manifestations.

What did you dream of being when you were younger?

A botanist, a garden-designer, a herbalist, a Jungian analyst. Oh Christ, a fucking druid.

What were you like as a student at school?

Mildly disturbed and disturbing. I found everything---Maths, Science, Languages---unforgivably easy and yet I worried all the time. I was always depressed, anxious, manic, enraged, or sexually frustrated. At one point I stopped eating and announced I was a witch. I was also obviously gay as a daisy and without much emotional intelligence, which I have had to learn painstakingly as though from a book. It's been like teaching a badger Urdu. In all, from the inside it wasn't an easy time, but people probably just thought I was a polite, slightly strange boy.

How do you cheer yourself up when you are feeling down?

Meditate, have a glass of red, or ring a friend. Read poetry.

If I hadn’t been a teacher, I would probably have been a...

A garden designer/garden writer. Or a psychoanalyst.

Still might, at that.

Who has been the best teacher you have ever had?

There have been several. My D.Phil supervisor at Oxford was and is magnificent; I learned a tremendous amount from my undergraduate tutors as well. One of the best was the late and lamented Michael Comber.

Something that few people know about you.

Nothing I'd care to klaxon on the internet. Oh: I have a pattern of three moles on my chest that match exactly with the stars in Orion's belt (i.e., one is slightly out of true).

If you could travel back in time where would you go and why?

I'd probably be on the shore of Kent some time in the early 5th century, waiting for Hengist and Horsa with a gatling gun. Being a rich Roman in the Principate might have been OK. Or I might be found hunkering down in the long grass of east Africa c. 2 million years ago with some grunting hominids, saying 'Look, you guys, are you really sure you want to do this?!'

What’s your best learning memory from school?

Reading The Bacchae for the first time in Greek.

Are you a tidy desk or a messy desk person?

Very, very tidy, though I have not deployed Sheila Chandra's improbable system for de-cluttering.

What’s your favourite thing to do when it rains?

Sit under a tree, or if indoors, open all the windows.

A poem you know by heart.

'Kubla Khan'.

What would you like to learn to do next?

Drive.

What question would you have liked me to ask you?

When would you like Jonas Armstrong to be delivered?

What would have been your answer?

About 10.30pm tonight, please.

Books in the Lavvy

2011-11-20T14:27:00.001-08:00

As you know, I spent much of the last few weeks redecorating my flat, which is up in the eaves of a late medieval building right in the centre of Oxford. The loo was particular dismal: nasty pink glittery lino, budgie-yellow walls. Now, however, it is done in Farrow & Ball's 'All White', a crisply chalky shade, and the floor is in smart black and white tiles which were a bugger to lay around all them wonky surfaces.

(If you ever want to really rile me, tell me that as a supposed intellectual I'm not practical. I am in fact very practical, good at digging, decorating, and making something that I've imagined into a real object in the outer world.)

Adorning the walls is Tom Phillip's much loved , semi-allegorical portrait of Iris Murdoch, glancing sidelong in front of Rubens' The Flaying of Marsyas and next to a sprig of the ancient and unchanged gingko. Over the cistern is a startled yet compelling Romanesque face from Parma Baptistry.

After several hours painting the snot-coloured room white (it took three coats), I felt disinclined to spend any longer in there. Bodily needs must, however, and so I decided to leave a selection of the most interesting, quirky books I own in there for visitors---why did I nearly say 'customers' there?---to peruse.

Perfumes: The Guide, Tania Sanchez and Luca Turin

Simply splendid, dippable, addictive account of 400 great and not-so-great fragrances, all written up in synaesthetic, critically astute, often hilarious prose. If you like the sound of one, you may well find it in the wicker basket by the sink.

The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton

One of the English Renaissance's strangest books and a brilliant illustration of Saturnian humour, monumentalism, and creativity. 400 pages of relentlessly learned, highly rhetorical prose on what we would now call depression: its causes, its manifestations, and attempts at its cure. Disenchantment and the longing for death emerges forcibly as an arch-metaphor for life, rough-textured and richly-lived.

There's an unsettling story about Burton. Whenever his melancholy affliction got too much for him, he used to go down to the river and watch the boatmen coming and going, all the while laughing hysterically. One speculates as to why.

Towards Emotional Literacy, Susie Orbach

Little two page extracts from Uber-therapist Orbach's Guardian columns, ideal for learning to make soothing, leftist, on-message noises about say, smacking, or adolescence, or failure. I do this in much the same way that other people might learn Balinese.

The English Ghost, Peter Ackroyd

A small, knocked-off book of true ghost stories by a large clapped-out queen, clearly dashed off to pay an unexpected bar bill. Good on the English uncanny; I was particularly unnerved by the unheimlich implications of the story of a three year old child in the late 19th century, who, when asked to describe the old man who had appeared to him, said: 'He’s like Father Christmas. Only he’s wearing burnt paper.'

Ackroyd once tried pulling a Harold Bloom and Naomi Wolf number on me when I was a student (the heavy paw creeping up the thigh, the sherry breath coming in wheezes); I laughed almost as hard as Burton.

How to be a Woman, Caitlin Moran

Britain's best journo stylist takes on the legacy of feminism; hilarious, lovable, verbally pyrotechnic yet unpretentious. Especially marvellous on words for the female genitals ('Minge': hmm, sounds like a slightly put-upon cat'), she handles puberty, love, music, eating disorders, pregnancy, childbirth, beauty and abortion from a barstool. I was aiming to ask her to a feast at Porterhouse---even though I feared she might be, in her own words, 'as out of place as a seagull in a beehive'---partly because I think she's a national trezh, and partly because I would then have trolled someone into college in whose lap Lady Gaga has laid her head.

'What kind of person lives in a house like this...?'

2011-11-02T02:09:00.000-07:00

A few years back, I gave you all a bit of a Through the Keyhole moment with my flat at Porterhouse. I never really felt comfortable in it---the ceilings were low and though it was beautifully appointed it was also a ground-floor fishbowl with an oppressive fifties feel. So here, as promised, is the sequel.

My new flat is at the top of a wooden staircase in the heart of the front quadrangle of a venerable, central Oxford college. The building itself is late medieval with a great deal of later frontage, and despite being the home of 500 madcap young persons it is also, unexpectedly, almost completely silent. So when students or friends enter, having wheezed their way up three flights, this is the view as they are shown in:

The solemn, enigmatic face of the Virgin is placed to draw the visitor through into the flat, framed by the open doors the rectangular shape of which it echoes. The walls are a faintly greenish white which I chose for its cool neutrality and ability to hold light. As the windows are low, fostering light is of the essence: the first thing I did when I arrived was to take down and store the curtains safely (I keep the heating off.) The whitewash also subtly picks up the green accents through the room, visible in throws over the sofa, tabletops, cushions, paintings and the jugs and bowls of flowers I leave around the place. Through the left-hand door is the bedroom, which slightly oddly has a shower leading directly off it---as though one is climbing into a cupboard---and a separate loo:

You can't see this in the picture, but the shower door has been covered with a long rustic curtain made out of rough sacking. The bedroom in truth was a problem: sickly, budgie-yellow walls, tatty carpet, and minimal storage space as the wardrobe is shallow. I have painted it throughout in Farrow & Ball's 'All White'---their brightest, chalkiest shade---and for the recessed parts of the woodwork in their 'Strong White', actually a very pale pigeon-feather grey. Buying F&B paint has been a major expenditure, and you might well think me crazy---but I justify the extravagance by telling myself that this is a period building, and I might well be living here for fully five years. It makes such a difference to the sensual pleasure of the place that the colours have that classical richness and subtlety that you simply don't get with other brands. To soften the stark effect, rough untreated fabrics---like the sacking curtain---have been used on the floor and bed, and a tumble of cushions and pillows with contrasting textures. The bed is covered in an unbleached cotton dustsheet and a cream jacquard table runner; there's a white amaryllis in a jar on the windowsill, and an old cane chair does service as a bedside table.

Retracing our steps through the main room, to the right we find the kitchen:

Problems with the bedroom aside, the kitchen was, I think, the least prepossessing room when I moved in, as it's rendered hopelessly poky and studentesque by the steep angle of the ceiling. I opened it out by painting the woodwork in Farrow & Ball's 'Pointing', a faintly creamy white, and the walls in 'Cord' (also Farrow & Ball), a lovely warm ochre similar in tone to a buff envelope. The floor, which was a gritty pink linoleum the colour of a granulated liver (barf), has been covered with stick-down lino-tiles in crisp black and white, the pattern picked up by the Greek prints in square black frames. The elm chair beneath them in 200 years old. (You can see these in the very first picture, above.)

Back in the main room, here's the workstation, with MacBook and plenty of space for piles of papers:

The table, which my friend Ian picked up years ago and which has done sterling service as a dining table in no less than four homes, has been painted and then distressed. The legs are Farrow & Ball's 'Pointing', and the surface is 'Polly Green'; the corners have then been roughly sanded to give the impression of a history of hard knocks. Similarly distressed are the cane chairs (matching the one on the bedroom), which have been coated in Farrow & Ball's 'All White' before being sanded back to reveal bare wood. The white cushions come from India and are hand-printed.

The heart of the main room, which is of course simultaneously my living room and teaching space, is the book-wall, through which one walks in order to enter. The shelving under the window and the raised shelves in the curve were all added by the college's carpenters after I arrived, unpainted: they and the shelves that were already there have been painted the same cool, faintly melancholy white (F&B's 'Cabbage White', in fact) as the walls for an unfussy cleanness:

As you see, crowning the book-wall is my recent ikon of the Virgin of the Sign, hanging from the ceiling in a half-moon mandala:

I find her cosmic yet human face comforting as I sit writing. (Or rather 'writing', to be more truthful.) Of course, it drives noble friends and colleagues mad that I have my books arranged as I do, on their sides, but I am now past caring: I just prefer it, and like the textured shades of neutrals that this engenders. As they are catalogued and arranged strictly by subject I can in fact find everything with ease. Oddly the selves are much deeper on the left, where the books are double-stacked.

The nearest thing I have to a lounge is a long, hard sofa and these two smaller pieces, both arranged by the fireplace. In due course I may accentuate the depth of the mantlepiece by painting both the oblong coving and piece of board that blocks the fireplace off in a deep grey. This area generally is still not quite finished: I really dislike the green of the chairs and am going to have them slipcovered in brilliant white, as really I feel that this area of the room is too dark to have heavy wood and velvet. The long sofa has been covered in a hessian dustsheet from Homebase, washed and ironed. (It has a hectic, jazzy 80s print underneath.) Note the medieval hunting-scene cushions, and the two green silk pillows. You probably can't see in this picture, but the legs of the long sofa have been swatched around loosely with the fabric, which was then secured using safety pins and cheap pieces of silvery Moroccan jewellery. The various bits of floor-matting are all sisal, seagrass, and unbleached cotton, and the light-fittings are el-cheapo crystal-drop chandeliers, which I found for a fiver each in a hardware store. Both were ex-display and broken, so I repaired them with wire and a small pair of pliers.

This bit of the room sees heavy use: I sit in the armchair and students coming for tutorials sit on the sofa, as Oxbridge teaching ideally takes the form of a conversation between two or three people. (How lovely finally to be giving decent Oxford tutorials and not Cambridge 'supervisions', which always made me think of a training analysis.) Above the mantlepiece hangs an ikon I painted some years ago, which turned out with a particularly fuscous, Russian feel and a mysterious expression. Next to it is propped a carved and whitewashed wooden mirror and some miscellaneous objets: a wooden clog, a couple of antiquarian books, and---in homage to Guy Davenport's book of paintings and drawings---a balance of quinces, their green-yellow intended to pick up the shade elsewhere in the room.

The flat is south-facing, and though the windows are small and low, the space is often cut across by stripes of cool autumn light, accentuating the unity fostered by the simple painting-scheme:

That brings the tour to a close. I'm happy here, in this very personal sanctuary. By my wooden Buddha in his stillness sits a green bowl of artichokes, and here, to finish, is a bunch of late autumn dill, catching the slanting light next to a piece of bracket fungus now gone hard as oak.

Thou who didst mightly bring forth God the Word...

2011-10-30T12:59:00.000-07:00

(Not quite finished, but showing the colours and the richness of the gold as they really are)

(Actually finished, complete with lettering, but looking washed out by the artificial light.)

Finished this icon today, which you saw developing from the initial plan a couple of posts down. The size, in case you were wondering, is about 1m along the straight edge.

Expect another episode of 'Through The Keyhole' with my new flat this week! Thanks for bearing with me during the move.

Move

2011-09-25T16:38:00.001-07:00

I move back to Oxford in 24 hours: the flat is a wilderness of boxes and miscellaneous bits of life-chaff which I am trying to sort through.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse, Cambridge, for appointing me to a Research Fellowship in 2008; my time in their company at the College has been intensely and invariably stimulating in many ways, and I take away a rich store of memories.

Greater in Honour than the Cherubim

2011-09-24T18:12:00.000-07:00

The mock-up/design for one of my el-cheapo Byzantine icons:

The painting, as of 2am on Sunday (today):

And a little later:

Moving

2011-09-18T06:30:00.000-07:00

All go here. I leave Cambridge in a week's time, to take up a Fellowship in English at an extremely nice Oxford college. Sorry for the long gap in posting: the interview, the aftermath, the packing---you know how these things are. For now, here's a very beautiful song which I have on repeat:

Having a big creative surge too. This looks like nothing much in mock-up form, but is the template for another of my oversized ikons. The final version is going to be attached to the seam between a ceiling and wall in my new college flat in Oxford.

I've just ordered the board: the straight line along the top is 100cm, which gives you some idea of the scale. The dots and yellow lines will be gilded stars and rays. The concept, of course, is to make a whole wall look as though it's all part of one vast ikon: Byzantine ikons often have the Theotokos or Christ (or, as here, both) presiding from a semi-mandala at the top.

The colours on the Virgin's maphorion will be more like this:

But her face will be like this (pretty exactly, though possibly reversed to look slightly to the left):

Arthur

2011-08-28T05:43:00.000-07:00

I can see only one reason to love 'King' Arthur Uther Pendragon---the nom d'épée of deluded old sponge John Rothwell---and that's the mirror he holds up to religious leaders everywhere. His preposterous mixture of moral certainty and difficulty with the act of thinking reminds one strongly of George Carey's tenure in Augustine's seat; the cooked-up personal anger over the bones of the long dead puts me in mind of thicko Muslim youth declaring parts of East London a 'gay-free zone.' As 'Arthur Rex' (for so he signed the court papers) might have said: 'For verily, the Earth Goddess is mighty in anger and severe in punishment, and She looketh down in thunder upon the Unbeliever.'

Yes, he is a disgrace to thinking, and, like so many UK neo-Pagans, enemy to and fugitive from logic, sense, and taste. I should like to take him---and Carey, and the addle-pated madrassoids---to one side and explain to them that one key aspect of living in a democracy is that the intensity of your feelings is not a barometer of the seriousness with which they should be taken.

Also I'd like to say to him: get a job and STOP WASTING OUR F***ING MONEY.

Gutted

2011-08-18T03:09:00.000-07:00

A miniature of the decline of the British education system. Twelve A-Level papers this year had serious errors on them, ranging from unanswerable questions to missing pages. Here's Mark Dawe, chief executive of the awarding body OCR: "We regret those mistakes and we are very sorry about them. We can reassure candidates that significant work has been undertaken to ensure they get the grades they deserve. You can't help but be gutted when mistakes are made."

'Gutted'? Gutted?! This just confirms my general feeling that what has been lost in British culture recently is a sense of appropriateness, here linguistic. There's nothing wrong with the word, but it's at best a slang term not suitable for a formal statement by the head of a national examination board. The man's obviously got a tin ear for register, which doesn't fill me with confidence. 'Gutted' also has overtones of a particular kind of lugubrious male self-pity which is out of place in a professional press-release. 'Gutted' is what you are when you write off your Vauxhall Corsa. 'Gutted' is what you are when your football team loses, or you find out your girlfriend of two months is pregnant. Possibly I'm just being an appalling snob here---after all, who knows? Perhaps Mr Dawe was too knackered to think straight this morning because he went down the bloody boozer last night with his new bird and they got a bit hammered. Like, ferchrissake.

[Comments welcome on how informal/jarring people find 'gutted'---or not.]

Four fragrances

2011-08-16T03:49:00.000-07:00

As regular readers will know, my favourite contemporary perfumer is the remarkable Bertrand Duchaufour, composer of vaporous chiaroscuro marvels like Timbuktu and Avignon. I recently bought $2 samples of four perfumes of his hitherto unknown to me, and here are some brief reviews.

Eau d'Italie, Sienne l'hiver
*** ghostly ciabatta

Interesting and strange evocation of---as the name suggests---a Tuscan winter. This is, it seems, Duchaufour's favourite among his own compositions: a cool dryness hovering beneath a mealy, bread-like iris and black olive accord. A study in muted greys and browns, there's a green note of something like geranium leaf in there too, coupled with the sweet, smoky nuttiness of chestnut skins. As a fragrance it's beautifully composed, the representation so up-close and precise as to be almost abstract. Sadly, it's simultaneously so fleeting that from the first spray it dissipates in the air like a faded memory of itself. Better on fabric than on skin, where it lingers with an odd, bitter dissonance.

Comme des Garcons, Sherbert Series: Cinnamon
** cinnamon leaf

Begins very like the clean turmeric-and-lemonade fizz of 1994's L'Eau d'Issey pour Homme, but morphs into late December in student bedsit-land: a raspy pong consisting of cheap 'Christmas Spice' joss sticks, limp clutches of ivy dessicated by the central heating, stale fags, and dry rot. Oh, innocence.

Comme des Garcons: Red Series: Sequoia
?** Baffling

Can't comment on this one: from trying it in the CdG shop in London I recall a big cedary-pine smell, and the sample I've been sent is a sweet floral oriental that smells so like the discontinued Fendi by Fendi (1985) that I suspect there's been a mislabelling somewhere.

Comme des Garcons, Incense Series: Kyoto
**** minimalist resin

Starts off smelling like hot hi-fi but rapidly turns into a pared-back incense-resinous accord, the main ingredients being cypress and the piny, terpenaceous tang of colophony, the resin used by violin players on their bow hair to make it grip the strings, also known as Rosin or Greek Pitch. Overall, serene and pleasant if a little stark.

2011-08-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

The incomparable Terry Castle has a delightful piece in The Professor and Other Writings in which she discusses her fetishistic mania for interiors magazines: a fetish I entirely share. She writes, wonderfully:

The late Mario Praz—dandy, scholar, eccentric chronicler of interior-decorating styles through the ages—once observed that human beings could be divided into those who cared about such things and those who didn’t. An avid, even ensorcelled member of the first group, he confessed to finding people who were indifferent to décor both baffling and somewhat sinister. To discover that a friend was content to dwell in “fundamental and systematic ugliness,” he wrote in An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration: From Pompeii to Art Nouveau, was as disturbing as “turning over one of those ivory figurines carved by the German artificers of the Renaissance, which show a lovely woman on one side and a worm-ridden corpse on the other.” All the more macabre when the friend was otherwise refined:

A venerated master of mine at the University of Florence used to say, from his lectern, many learned things about the Provençal poets. I hung on his every word. But it was a grim day when I first crossed the threshold of his house. As soon as the door was opened, I was confronted by a loathsome oleograph of a Neapolitan shepherdess (that same oleograph used to turn up often in the shops where unclaimed objects from the state pawnshop, the Monte di Pietà, are sold). The shepherdess, shading her eyes with her hand, affected a simpering smile, while Vesuvius smoked in the background.

Granted, for the “loathsome oleograph” (which now sounds enchantingly kitsch) one might want to substitute any number of contemporary abominations: fur-covered kitty condos placed nonchalantly in the living room, embroidered sofa pillows that say things like “She Who Must Be Obeyed” or “Bless This Mess,” Southwestern-style bent-willow furniture (barf), neoclassical wall sconces made out of glued and gilded polyurethane, monstrous sleigh beds from Restoration Hardware, Monet water-lily refrigerator magnets, fake “bistro” clocks, and just about any item of domestic ornament with an angel or a dolphin or a picture of Frida Kahlo on it. Yet even without a tchotchke update we can all sympathize with Praz’s baffled revulsion: “It’s curious, the squalor, the unnecessary and even deliberate squalor in which people who profess a sensitivity to the fine arts choose to live, or manage to adapt themselves.”

In this tendency New Agers and academics are very much alike, just as they also share a fondness for backbiting and pointless, fissiparous argument. I too have been as startled by unfathomable decorating choices in the 500k Banbury Road homes of venerable Oxford Professors as I have in the purple velveteen-draped yurts of Moon-daughters and simple quorn-herding folk. Afflicted by the congenital good taste of a certain type of posh mox---and good taste is ultimately as constricting to the breath as the steel corsetry into which every Bayreuth Brünnhilde until Olive Fremstad was strapped---I confess the same bafflement as Praz and Castle.

* * *

Ideal Home time. When I was a child, I fantasised about having a tiny house in the woods where I would live completely alone, with candles, firewood, and a sack of flour for making bread. That dream has modulated over the years into what my friend Justine and I now refer to as 'The Retreat Centre', our common vision-house. I have a very clear image of it in my mind, into which many influences have fed; but most of all, the Normandy home of the Russian artist Yuri Kuper. His home-cum-studio is exactly, exactly, my taste. Here are some pictures of it; see Phyllis Richardson's enticing Contemporary Natural for more.

Vetiver

2011-07-23T03:52:00.000-07:00

L'Artisan Parfumeur, Coeur de Vétiver Sacré

*** Put that in your orange and smoke it

Well, this is a pain. Guy Davenport once remarked that English is a Romance language in the same way that a porpoise is a fish, or a bat a bird. This gives you a nice sense of the degree to which Karine Vinchon's new fragrance works as a vetiver only if you squint at it. Full of ideas and potentially subtle, it doesn't quite come off.

Vetiver oil is extracted from the root of a fragrant tropical grass, which points to some of its fascinating qualities. Simultaneously earthy and airy, it has both a liquorice aspect and something of the autumnal cleanness of well-rotted compost after a crisp frost. Vinchon's fragrance is billed as an attempt to deconstruct the raw material's wonderful cool, grassy smokiness into a citrus~spice~smoke accord, the three core notes set in a frame of black tea which suits all of them. I can see the thinking---hey, vetiver smells kinda like lapsang souchong!---but sense a misparsing of the natural here. Vetiver possesses clean/rubbery and citric angles to go with its dry, earthy vaporousness, but trying to do that with orange and bergamot falls flat here. The concept's not actually a bad one, as aged vetiver oil can smell strikingly like single malt---see Profumum Roma's Fumidus---and whisky in marmalade is of course delicious. But to make the most of the ingredients, Vinchon should have turned the orange down fifty decibels and turned up the peat to compensate, but I suspect L'Artisan's noses fretted that the result would be too austere and make women less likely to buy the fragrance. (Everyone knows women like candied sweet things, don't they? Meh.)

The cod-hermetic blurb ('an offering to the gods', 'a mystical journey from East to West') and a glug of incense sidling around make me strongly suspect that Vinchon is attempting to replicate the structure of Bertrand Duchaufour's Bhutan-inspired Dzongkha (also for L'Artisan), but using vetiver instead of the latter's iris. Again, it's a good, literate idea: vetiver and iris are both cool, introverted materials, and the snowy Himalayan spirituality of Dzongkha shows how well warm spice and tea notes can work in such a composition. The problem is that what vetiver does best is melancholy, not solemnity; it's the more worldly-wise sister of chirpy lemongrass (a botanical relative). The actual vetiver here keeps sliding off the back of the fragrance---an effect like glimpsing, though the tipsy crush of a house-party, a sad-eyed, Modigliani-faced girl all by herself in the kitchen.

Coeur de Vétiver Sacré is an interesting idea and full marks for effort, but the overall effect is of a slightly-off pomander. Buy Andy Tauer's Orange Star if you want the kippered fruit aspect, or get Tom Ford's excellent, soapy Grey Vetiver if the other side appeals.

Take A Break

2011-07-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

I've long loved J. C. Squire's hilarious parody, 'If Pope had written "Break, Break, Break"'. First, here's the original Tennyson poem which provides the object of Squire's parody:

Break, Break, Break

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill:
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

And here's Squire's clever literary lampoon, deftly capturing the zeugmatic style and leisured scribe-by-the-yard manner of the earlier 18th century:

Fly, Muse, thy wonted themes, nor longer seek
The consolations of a powder'd cheek;
Forsake the busy purlieus of the Court
For calmer meads where finny tribes resort.
So may th' Almighty's natural antidote
Abate the worldly tenour of thy note,
The various beauties of the liquid main
Refine thy reed and elevate thy strain.
See how the labour of the urgent oar
Propels the barks and draws them to the shore.
Hark! from the margin of the azure bay
The joyful cries of infants at their play.
(The offspring of a piscatorial swain,
his home the sands, his pasturage the main.)
Yet none of these may soothe the mourning heart,
Nor fond alleviation's sweets impart;
Nor may the pow'rs of infants that rejoice
Restore the accents of a former voice,
Nor the bright smiles of ocean's nymphs command
The pleasing contact of a vanished hand.
So let me still in meditation move,
Muse in the vale and ponder in the grove,
And scan the skies where sinking Phoebus glows
With hues more rubicund than Gibber's nose. . . .

(After which the poet gets into his proper stride).

And here's my own.

'If David Jones had written "Break, Break, Break"'

In Quintile month or Sextilmonað

the rising waters insolent footlappers

white horses of Lear’s kingdom salt daymares

on shorelines and tidemarks

shatter the cerrig.

Where is your curragh Inspiratrix of All Graces?

Are you she solemn as a rushlight on the tide

pale Venus of the northern seas? Be you Branwen, Fflur,

foamflower Essyllt hung with whale-tooth ivory?

Is it MAPONOS or Mabonograin

with his black creel and bone-blue catch

chanting countersong to Dylan’s marwnad?

ECCE

Caesar’s barges cross the strait, aquila-signed

against landfall sergeants of alder-pool, Stour-bend ---

αιαι αιαι cries Private Davies

Pretannic woad worn, glastyn-tinct

put out y'r bloody cigarette, man, there'll be hell to pay if Fritz clocks that, see---

LACRIMÆ RERVM

HOVIS

   pollywoggle

   so.

(and so on for another 78 densely-footnoted pages.)

Pow!

2011-07-19T08:52:00.000-07:00

L'Artisan Parfumeur, Al Oudh

**** dirty hot

Well, this was a bit of a bold one. Who wants to smell like body odour?! Well, me, as it turns out.

Al Oudh is composed by the masterly Bertrand Duchaufour, whose aesthetic tends to be marked by an incredible knack for the pellucid, a see-right-to-the-bottom kind of transparency that is no doubt fearsomely difficult to achieve. It's a bit like Gustav Klimt's one-dimensional decorated surfaces---whether it's hieratic gold spangles for weathly Viennese, splodgy whorls of purple hollyhocks, or shimmering green birchleaves, each image hovers before the eye as a single tessellated plane. Thus, mutatis mutandis, with Duchaufour's translucent effects: whether working with incenses, woods, and papery smoky smells (Timbuktu, Kyoto, Dzongkha), drenched tropical florals (Fleur de Liane, Amaranthine), or sappy, milky leaves (Calamus), he achieves great depth without obscurity or fug.

Al Oudh is in the incense vein, with a core of burning agarwood chips. Oud/agarwood is an extraordinary substance---and whether there is any natural oud in this fragrance I shall leave to those with better noses than I---a kind of woody-sweet medicinal pong, interestingly clean and dirty simultaneously. A bit like spices, a bit like cough syrup, and a whole lot like armpits, the temptation is always to neuter its tomcat, on-the-turn forcefulness. Happily, Duchaufour went the opposite way, and has bolstered the oud note with a number of, uh, funky animalics: civet, castoreum, and the 'yesterday's shirt' honk of cumin. Over this he floats a lovely soft, dry rose, like a full moon over a Cairo slum. The whole thing makes one laugh at the way it breathes life into orientalist cliché. Yes, it's got a whiff of the souk. Yes, it's a what 1940s stage villains termed 'a Dusky Beauty'. Yes, I imagine---and I've put some effort into the exercise---it probably smells much like Jake Gyllenhaal's nethers in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (above). After several months with a 10ml sample, I've come to the conclusion that this is a Good Thing.

Drolly marketed for both sexes, I doubt that Al Oudh would make a good feminine, unless you happen to be either a) naturally intrepid, or b) Lady Hester Stanhope.

Great Nature's Second Course

2011-07-19T03:38:00.000-07:00

One of the temptations of keeping such a long-term blog as this is to put a shape on life, to try and impose a narrative arc on a inherently rather aimless stream of obiter dicta. In general, everything pretty much carries on as it has, in a non-teleological way and without vast upheaval. Nevertheless, there has of late been a minor miracle, in the shape of a lovely complex molecule which puts me out like a light.

Yes, readers, I finally went to the GP about my galloping insomnia and constant nightmares, and was prescribed Zolpidem. I have subsequently had three nights of the most blissful, Lethean sleep I have had for about five years.

Getting wound-up is the killer, you see. There is of course helpful anxiety that spurs one on, but I have been labouring under the unhelpful kind that afflicts many young academics in the humanities, because there are no jobs. Specialized as miniature yellow treefrogs adapted to live in one type of tatty rainforest bromeliad, even as the chainsaws growl in the middle distance, academics at my stage of life often suffer from a characteristic, precarious Angst und Weltschmerz. In my case, it feels like somewhere inside there's a six-year old banging away at all the keys at the far right end of a piano keyboard all the time. I had got used to waking up for twenty minutes every hour and three quarters during the night, every night, with worry twanging and trembling through the air like an evil aeolian harp and loneliness stuck in my throat like a wishbone.

So you'll have noticed the general shift from postmodern drollery to lassitude and gloom that's hung over Cantos (and my life) of late. BUT (but), it turns out I wasn't, in fact, in a downward spiral into the greedy grave, hemmed in by the parched bricolage of academic life; I just hadn't achieved slow-wave sleep for a very, very long time. Readers, after three nights, I have risen again. Not only am I up, I am not falling asleep in my chair at 5pm like a gummy old spinster; I surge with Whitmanian vim and lissom elasticity; and best of all, I can concentrate.

* * *

The above are prolegomena to reflections upon sleep. I'm very prone (because of my disturbed rhythms) to enjoy a number of unusual effects associated with the whole experience, not all of them unpleasant. There are some tiresome tics associated with drifting off---I always need to pee after the light's been off for about fifteen minutes---and I occassionally suffer from a bizarre sleep disturbance called 'exploding head syndrome'. No, this is not a David Cronenburg visual effect, but something a little like the way that your feet sometimes kick sharply without warning as you drop off, usually accompanied by a falling sensation. What I get in addition (though, thank God, not often) is, as I drift into sleep, a sudden, pottery-shattering BOOM or crash that only I can hear, as loud as a bomb blast in the next room. Needless to say, I jerk upright, and often leap out of bed altogether, shaking and with my heart hammering.

As regular readers will know, my dreams are often so vivid and often so exhausting that they are indistinguishable from being awake---in particular they are frequently highly textual, with me speaking foreign languages, reading, or writing. I had an exquisite one about a week ago in which I was leafing through an imaginary, newly-published book called Shakespeare and the Horizon of Consciousness. (See, I can do self-referential meta-dreams.) The first chapter was called GLANCES and had a beautiful discussion of the semiotics of different expressions made with the eyes in the plays and in Early Modern culture more widely, ending with a delicate analysis of the implications of George Herbert's 'quick-ey'd Love'. Alas, that's all I can remember, and it's not actually a bad idea for a book. The devas are obviously sending me messages again.

I also remember being very surprised as an adolescent when I realised that not everyone experiences hypnagogic voices. This happens to me about once or twice a week, usually when I'm exhausted: as I drop off to sleep, one, then two, then up to six different voices---of different genders, nationalities, and ages, and entirely independent of my mind---start talking intelligibly over one another in my head. I've tried writing down what they say, but the state one needs to be in to hear the voices is spoiled if one comes out of it far enough to move a pen. If I maintain a kind of unfocused attention, I can hear them all at once, but if I try to isolate one strand it collapses into gibberish. You can recreate the effect at home simply by opening several interview videos on YouTube simultaneously. It's all a function, I suspect, of being a highly verbal person who spends all day considering language: interestingly, after I spend a few days speaking Welsh, the inner voices switch into that language.

Rather less often I get a visual equivalent which is a source of much frustration: I 'see' with the inner eye fully-formed canvasses passing in front of me for about half a second each, always sumptuously detailed. There are often over a hundred of them: pallid, mask-like faces scudding against a bone-blue background; gryphons, sulphurously yellow talons rearing and wings caparisoned in delicate beadwork; a woman turning with dark nipples and strands of wet hair by sour candlelight. This has made me a firm believer in the foaming fecundity of the deep mind, which is able to produce beautiful, polished art---clearly it is, I have seen them---just beneath the horizon of conscious grasping. I can't slow the slideshow down to 'fix' the images, but they are there.

Anyway, back to zolpidem. It is indescribably wonderful: I really had not realised how utterly ghastly I felt. I pop one tablet 15 minutes before sleep, and, here's the thing, I actually do go to sleep. No bells, no whistles, booms, or crashes; I don't pick up talk-radio through my fillings, or dream I've been transformed into a copy of the Iliad.* Though I still do in fact dream vividly, I am now remembering one a night rather than the six or seven that were normal before. (My Jungian analyst was faced with an embarrassment of riches. I used to bring more dreams in a week than some clients in a year.) And what's more I sleep for seven hours uninterrupted: it's like a blissful homeopathic dose of death.

*My weirdest ever dream, that.

Terence Malick's The Tree of Life

2011-07-11T02:02:00.001-07:00

Any Malick film is a cultural event: readers, I am ashamed to say that I hated it, or at least parts of it. There were too many babies, and not enough dinosaurs.

Having been moved to tears by the first few minutes of Malick's The New World (review here), I was expecting to be rubbled into nothing by all this cosmic-yet-intimate, curling water, wind-through-grasses stuff. Instead, I was simply bored for quite long stretches---the film truly resembles life itself in that regard---and often felt quite guilty in the manner of the sheepish visitor at an ashram.

The whole thing is a mess, to my mind. It could have been a piercing meditation on the Book of Job---and at moments it looks very much like it's heading that way, from the opening quotation to the astounding CGI 'early universe' sequences---but it's grafted onto the unremarkable story of Sean Penn's Everyboy/man, Jack O'Brian. It feels like a splice of two different films: all the cosmic stuff might have ended up as a higherbrow, Blakean version of Ron Fricke's 1992 Baraka. The shots of the creation of the universe and the beginning of life rank as some of the most powerful images I have ever seen in the cinema: amid swirls of gas and igniting stars, galaxies form with peals of soft thunder. At one point, as a female vocal cries out 'Lacrimosa! Lacrimosa!' you see a single spiral galaxy glowing with its one hundred billion suns. At that point, my eyes did prickle with tears of wonder. I could have watched hours of it: pulsing veins, dividing cells, drifting jellyfish and beached plesiosaur, the whole lot. Kudos to Malick for the dinosaur sequence: first for making his CGI dinosaurs look entirely convincing as real animals at home in an ecosystem, with the rightful, organic beauty of living creatures, and second for having the boldness to deal with the issue of religion and deep time. This used to worry me as a child: what could we possibly be to God, as infinitesimal beings that had evolved with the slowness of aeons from water and rock!? I kept thinking of Kathleen Raine's lines:

Who but I
Speaks for the mute stone?
For fragile water feels
With finger and bone?

Malickian sentiments indeed.

The rest of the material---Jack's spiritual Bildungsroman---could have been repackaged as the story of a sensitive man's alienation from nature in Malick's usual Heideggerian way, which would have made a film much more like The Thin Red Line. The young Jack was played with exquisite melancholy; Jessica Chastain as Mrs O'Brien had the unearthly, haloed beauty of a Flemish Madonna, the camera lingering on her long, tapering Holbein fingers. But instead the splicing of the material engenders an awkward pushme-pullyou, a half-arsed theodicy.

There is a lot of God in The Tree of Life. Prone as I am to oceanic, contemplative states, I nevertheless found the film tranquillising rather than inducing excessus mentis, as medieval people termed it---the suspension of the chattering intellect in focused absorption and loss of self-consciousness. It's a measure of Malick's solemnity that I went in hoping for mystical self-naughting, which is quite a horizon of expectation to erect around any director's film.

Further, watching as a theologically-literate individual, I felt alienated by the film's constant rehearsal of the problem of suffering ('Why do bad things happen to good people?') without either the incarnational resolution of the Cross or the cooler emptiness~compassion of Buddhism, both of which were gestured towards. Going back to the problem of 'deep time', it's very hard to make an aesthetic case for Christianity in this kind of cosmic context, though not impossible; a cramped, parochial, made-in-Taiwan feeling tends to steal over the theological landscape. Watch Malick's galaxies coalesce and stars foam in the heart of nebulae, and then try worrying about monothelitism or whether the absence of episcopal oversight in Methodism renders its orders invalid. Go on, try.

Buddhism is perhaps a little better at this sort of thing with its vast timespans---Malick's film deals in kalpas, the unimaginable ages of eastern thought---but the Buddha famously eschewed metaphysical speculation about suffering's causes, preferring instead to preach its cessation. Malick doesn't push this far enough: the film seems to evoke emptiness in the technical, tongpanyid sense---that all things are impermanent and intrinsically empty of a separate self---only to climax with a baffling scene on a beach which seems to be intended to be heaven. (Families reunite while milling around on the strand.) Unfortunately, this section looks like a particularly beautifully-shot scene from a straight-to-DVD Christian movie. The metaphysic here seemed to me to be rather vacuous, if I didn't altogether misunderstand, but then I'm not a Christian. Indeed, there's an especially dodgy moment in this scene where you see some bare feet in the sand and the end of a white robe: my heart sank. Oh no, I thought, please don't tell me Malick's going to bring on Nazareth's gift to the Joy of Nations. But he wisely restrained himself.

Altogether a baffling, disappointing, beautiful, and flawed thing, 'worth seeing' (as Dr Johnson said), 'but not worth going to see.'

Fasting

2011-07-03T03:26:00.001-07:00

I'm currently more-or-less-fasting, which is an incredibly useful spiritual experience for me and something I now do fairly regularly. It not only lightens the body but clarifies the mind, making it feel incredibly concentrated and oddly gathered. My thoughts increase in speed; I feel more awake; I become more sensitive but at the same time less sentimental.

There's a fine line to be walked between 'eating so little you feel exhausted' and 'eating just enough to feel spare and light.' The latter for me is about 600 calories a day, for up to two months. I know, before anyone starts, that that is very restricted---but I assure you that after three weeks on even less than that last year I not only looked better but felt fantastic. So a few days of fasting/mindful eating will do no harm---no booze helps too, of course.

The other secret is to start the period with a bentonite and psyllium husk internal cleanse. My God...it may be New Age woowoo, but I assure you I have never experienced such a dramatic improvement in my general sense of wellbeing and vitality as after 5 days on that. You can't go more than five feet from the lav, but everything has its price.

Time for my health-giving bowl of air!

2011-05-25T09:27:00.001-07:00

Deeply moved, as by all Malick's work.

New Blog Banner

2011-04-25T11:39:00.000-07:00

Yes, these do vary with my mood, and I do try to make them striking and dramatic. My favourite is probably the gold-and-white Alexander McQueen one that pops up every few weeks, but when I began blogging I initially went for Remedios Varo in a big way. Since then I've varied between Quirky Goff (Dave McKeans and pictures of creepy old dead things, like hybrid taxidermy and Edith Sitwell) and Thoughtful Hippy (Antony Gormleys in the rain, the less grim sort of Paul Nash painting, images from my own Archetypal Tarot.) I am currently trying to decide whether it would be a) enormously annoying and/or b) colossally vulgar to do that thing whereby a piece of music starts to play when you open the blog. It would probably be Lisa Gerrard playing the Hungarian cymbalon v. quietly, but I am trying to avoid turning this blog into one enormous Gesamptkitschwerk.

Talking of Lisa Gerrard, massive hat-tip to Black Nyx for this clip:

I got as far as the sight of the performer's back walking up to the stage and I thought, 'No. No!!..YES!!! It IS! IT'S A LISA GERRARD DRAG ACT!'

For so, dear reader, it was. I'd have performed this service to mankind's greater joy myself, were it not for the fact that when it comes to impersonating a six foot, blonde, enigmatic Australian chanteuse, looking like a younger version of Brian Blessed probably isn't the best place to start.

Anyway, back to the banner. The figures are taken from the extraordinary terracotta figures by Niccolò dell'Arca (1462-63) in Santa Maria della Vita, in Bologna. On the left, Mary of Cleophas, on the right, Mary Magdalen. I saw this picture---the women's elemental anguish and horror at the deposition of Christ's body---in a copy of Church Times last night, which is right up there in my magazine rack next to the latest Journal of Nonlinear Phenomena in Complex Systems. I think we all agree they have an eerie and haunting power.

Plus, if you flipped Mary Magdalen's hands over at the wrists, she'd look just like a mediæval bacchant. Which I thought was cool.

Praxilla

2011-04-25T03:11:00.001-07:00

κάλλιστον μὲν ἐγὼ λείπω φάος ἠελίοιο,
δεύτερον ἄστρα φαεινὰ σεληναίης τε πρόσωπον
ἠδὲ καὶ ὡραίους σικύους καὶ μῆλα καὶ ὄγχνας

The most beautiful thing I leave behind? Sunlight.
Then the bright stars, the moon's face;
cucumbers in their season, the fruit of appletrees, the pears.

This fragment by the 5th century BC Greek lyric poet Praxilla survives only because the sophist Zenobius quoted it in order to explain the expression 'dafter than Praxilla's Adonis'. In the fragment, the god Adonis is languishing in the underworld, and is asked what he misses most about the world of the living. Sun, moon, and stars, comes the reply---that, and a decent greengrocer.

I have come to the conclusion that this fragment has something sublime about it: an innocence, an immersive joy in quiddity and the quotidian. He doesn't say 'bright gold' or 'an army in array', something patriarchal and aristocratic, but rather fuses cosmic delight with the homely, earthy, and peasantlike. The poignancy of the still life. There's something Adamic here, a great uncorrupted and wondering love.

Poem

2011-04-24T06:36:00.001-07:00

St Anthony and the Centaur

(for Maggie Ross)

There is another world, and it is this one.
PAUL ÉLUARD

He knows this is no devil, which breed
only the nausea of loss. No. Here is horse sweat,
sage, wild scent of trampled spurge,

flanks like oiled wood, and human eyes.
The slow rhythm of four lungs, two hearts,
beating wary vigil by the forest edge.

―Where is the path? To holy Paul of Thebes.
You must know him. He dwells in this wilderness, at a spring
beside a single tree. A raven brings to him his bread.

The centaur gives no answer. The nostrils flare
with shifting breath, stirring flies in chestnut hollows.
How can the hooves among the ferns be shod?

―We aid...one another. My kind. As thine do not.
Our bloods are knit in mercy. We have not forgot
that we are earthborn, and know no exile hence.

A blessing passes. Now the centaur points out the road,
and each to each bows low. Behold: shy annunciation
of the fathomless and hybrid Word.

Blogs I actually read---and envy

2011-04-21T04:01:00.000-07:00

The blog list down the side has needed updating for an age. But here is a little rundown of the writers whose words I hang on every day: the criteria include the excellence of the writing and the 'liveness' of the blog (I know I've been bad about updating regularly this year, but I've paid for it by haemorrhaging readers all over the place); extra points for glossy visual style too.

Black Nyx

Wholly fabulous audiovisual spectacle: moody urban chic meets elusive occulture.

Lathophobic Aphasia

Magnificently dyspeptic wit and rhetoric from Vilges Suola: giving people a piece of one's mind elevated to the status of high art, with an effect oddly like Victoria Wood interviewing Gore Vidal.

Heresy Corner

Always outstanding current affairs blog, with stratospherically good writing. Worth it especially for this affectionate skewering (if such a thing is possible) of Guardianista Laurie Penny's fathomless self-involvement.

Voice in the Wilderness

Compelling, austerely beautiful writing on the contemplative life and the Work of Silence by my friend, the extraordinary Anglican solitary Maggie Ross.

A Don's Life

Prof. Mary Beard of Newnham College, Cambridge on UK academia, politics, and the ancient world. Profound learning put across utterly unpretentiously and with tremendous wit.

Nico Muhly

Frighteningly good, hyperkinetically hip writing from the dismayingly brilliant, handsome and successful composer. Who's, like, younger than me.

Blogtrotter

Knottily precise, learned book reviews with obiter dicta and assorted thoughtful gadelica, of simply astounding, humbling quality, and impossible quantity.

Logodaedalus

Language-creation, confessional Celtica, and spluttering rage from the ever-witty Deiniol.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Part II.

2011-04-20T17:13:00.000-07:00

Click here for Part I.

Day 2

Sunlight warm at 8am, filtering through la vecchia befana's dark wooden shutters. Events of the night before rear up like a lurid phantasmogoria: I vaguely recall a long 3am walk home past the Colosseum and the surreally-rebuilt Theatre of Marcellus (above), the weedy, ruinously lush roadsides sprouting the dozing homeless, all eerily swaddled head-to-toe in blankets like Man Ray's The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse. Feel a little footsore and slightly raddled from the bar's beer and cigarette smoke, but discreetly lounge in bed reading Einhorn's Old French until the thud of the flat door indicates that Dan and the night's gentleman caller have completed whatever aubade was deemed appropriate and have bid each other farewell.

Ablutions done, the two of us cheerfully munch toast spread with the landlady's apple jam (which turns out to be made of oranges), and set off for that day's Cultural Highlight. Trolling up through the central streets of Rome---Dan apparently blithe, me nervous of the traffic and itchily paranoid about the street-vendors---I reflect on our history of travel together. Our first major experiment in this direction was several months in Melbourne a decade ago, a long trip which I have never blogged because at the time I was so brutally depressed and heavily medicated that I simply have next to no memory of it. I had utterly burnt myself out that year striving for a double first, but the Horatian tag caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt had somehow escaped me: in other words, 'wherever you go, there you are', and at the time I was traversing an affectless inner landscape of asteroidal bleakness.

Dan was of course a complete angel at dealing with the whole thing: anticipating the trip of a lifetime with his best friend, he found himself instead forced to play duenna to a somnabulistic, shuffling ghost who had finally gone birthday-suit-bonkers. As we wander the streets of Rome, I catch myself morphing back into this pattern of dependent timidity and have to steel the Inner Man in order to resist subsiding into a bath of elemental shame. Ah, the roles we cast ourselves in: despite clearly playing Sallah to Dan's Indiana Jones, as we push through the heat, bus-exhaust fumes, and squawking hordes towards the Musei Vaticani, I give my latent and preposterous Bovarisme full rein and indulge the self-delusion that I in fact live by the heroic code, fearless and able to cope with anything. I fantasize a world (so close to our own!) in which my true, inner nature is revealed by extraordinary circumstance: no longer a podgy academic erotomane, no siree, but rather a baggy-trousered, bare-toothed zouave, sabre in hand and athirst for adventure.

Arriving at one of the greatest repositories of human cultural achievement manages, astonishingly, to distract me momentarily from the vertiginous mise en abyme of my own narcissism. The Vatican Museums are fearsomely well-organized for Italy: with our tickets bought over the web weeks before we are inside and free to wander within five minutes. If you are not some kind of human supercomputer, they will exhaust your ability to process quite rapidly. 500-foot galleries of suspiciously perfect classical sculpture everywhere: here a mighty eye, finger, or foot juts at you; there looms a massive statue of Mercury with his characteristic flattened World War I helmet, no doubt replaced during the Renaissance. Serried rows of haughty Neronian matrons with ziggurats of ringlets glare down at the viewer, as though auditioning for parts in Fellini films, under painted ceilings like 3D illuminated manuscripts. Past a half-mile long corridor of maps of Italy picked out in hallucinatory blues, greens, and golds, twelve-foot-tall sistrum-shaking Isides and Junoesque Junos bewilder and exhaust the eye. This is long, long before you even reach Raphael's 'The School of Athens' (there's Hypatia, looking nothing like Rachel Weisz), let alone the bafflingly familiar sight of the Sistine Chapel. So much splendour imparts a kind of tristesse: after three hours, both Dan and I look dazed, as though we've been smacked round the face with shovels. Everything somehow so...immoderate, exorbitant, invulnerable. Dumbfounded after such gigantism---of both achievement and sheer accumulation---I feel like I am struggling to free myself from the space-warping gravity well of a cultural black hole, and find myself thinking of Cocteau's aperçu that 'everything in art is monstrous'.

Exhausted, we pause for lunch near the Pantheon, in a square which illustrates the principle that foreign grime somehow contrives to be picturesque: I feel expansive and worldly about eating at an outdoor table under a tumble of plastic vineleaves, yards away from a heap of sweaty binbags filled with elderly fish-heads. The waiter charmless, and the meal itself not brilliant---Dan's tagliatelle alla carbonana fearsomely salty, so we swap. Cold beers and pistachio gelati delight---notwithstanding the vague arrière-goût of merluzzo---but as we eat the shutters are loudly flung back on a first-storey window a few yards to my right. From the window emerges as hideous an old crone as I've ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on. Dan has heard at length my piteous laments about the uncannily iterative, impersonal way in which I seem to attract Mad Old Women, and not for the first time I feel like a character in a medieval romance---perhaps a beleaguered youth labouring under a particularly arbitrary curse. Now, I can cope with the hardbitten, wisecracking old dames in kaftans and Edith Sitwell turbans, but this is, as my friend Luke would say, hissing with pique, summink else. We watch open-mouthed as the sinister hag leans from her balcony ('Romeo's long gone, dear', quips Dan), places one withered hand over her right eye, and fixes us with a beady stare of gibbering malevolence. A cold, self-destructive impulse creeps over me. (Is she about to produce a pointing bone? Must I go out at once into the Bush and expire of despair? Am I in a remake of Suspiria?!!) At this point, still giggling to herself, the grisly old trout lets down a wicker basket on a string. Everyone seems to ignore this surreal, Commedia dell'Arte scene: she cackles and rubs her lips at us, one eye still covered. With the solipsism of latent Catholic guilt, I cannot escape the feeling that this demented, gummy mugging is all somehow aimed at me personally, belonging to the fairy tale-symbolic. (Help! Magical thinking! What am I supposed to do?! Offer to cut out my heart and place it in the basket, releasing her from some kind of spell?!). After a few minutes, the apparently gleeful hag winches up her empty pannier and withdraws behind her peeling shutters. Dan and I turn to each other, blinking and bemused.

* * *

Remainder of the day---and the trip---less demanding on frayed nerves: no other ill-omens or lowering beldams slinking into the sharp Roman shadows. That night we venture out into Garbatella, a faintly run-down neighbourhood south of the flat, looking for this delightful place, Ristoro degli Angeli. After a wrong turning out of the metro station (we walk several times past the same group of half-arsed, teenage Roman goths, death metal blasting out of their open car), we eventually find the restaurant and settle down to an exquisitely delicious meal with friendly service. Antipasti utterly perfect: artichoke hearts, wonderful salty Parma ham, anchovy fillets on delicate crostini. As we glug Frascati, Dan opts for vegetarian meatballs, and I enjoy ravioli stuffed with smoked cod in a velvety potato sauce (nothing like as carb-heavy as it sounds) and an orgasmic pear-tart with an extremely good glass of Muscat. Heavy of belly, we walk home at 1am, trading high-speed banter in the Mapp & Lucia mock-Italian which had been the holiday's humorous demotic ('Giorgino mio! After all these piccoli disturbi, we must have a little divine Mozartino to put us back in touch with beauty once again!')

Home on Alitalia the next morning. That afternoon, contemplating the greyness of the Piccadilly Line on the way back from Heathrow, I wonder why we had ever even considered going anywhere other than Italy. Next stop: Sicily, perhaps, as I want to see Agrigento and stand on the lip of a decent smoking crater, contemplating the death of Empedocles. Possibly Venice would be better, in the wintertime; after all, as Dan said wryly, 'We'll both be ending up there eventually anyway...'

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Part I.

2011-04-11T12:46:00.000-07:00

The Eternal City. How was it, you ask? Hectic, raked with yellow sunlight, car-exhaust-choked, cat-crowded, crumbling; silty green Tiber flowing stickily by under budding Judas trees, me caught by tidal pulls of intense emotion in contradictory directions. Having been hard at work I was desperate for a break: I'd finished two papers in addition to teaching duties and working on my second book, and had just broached the inkwell on a third paper. Loath to be parted from my grinding monomania and feeling (as always) guilty at my appalling academic fraudulence, I was therefore even more surly and evil than usual when I tucked some clothes and the Time Out guide into a bag, doused myself in Caldey Island Lavender, and nipped off to meet Dan.

Dan is adventurous, efficient, and serenely unruffled, which I appreciate as a chronically nervous traveller, given to tedious repetition compulsion (Why don't we go here again? It was nice last night), regressing when abroad to a childish state of mute handholding. We had rented a two-bedroom flat for three nights, quite far out of the centro storico in Ostiense, perhaps an hour's brisk walk from the Colosseum. After a perfectly straightforward flight, we arrived and were let in by a woman whom we realised rapidly was not the manager, Magda, but (o ye unforgiving gods!) an instantly recognisable, common-or-garden Mad Old Woman. My heart sank.

This venerable, seventy-something matron (bring before your minds, gentle readers, a chestnut bob with grey roots, vast dark-rimmed glasses, and a blocky, gold-buttoned housedress) turned out to live in the flat herself, which was enormous and decorated in a typically gloomy Roman bourgeois way. Dark wood cabinets contained silverware and cut crystal glass; a melancholy, tubercular woman in a taffeta gown peered out from a dim, chiaroscuro portrait above the sofa. Slatted wooden shutters could be wound down over the windows to reduce the apartment to sepulchral gloom.

Dan---who is an extraordinary linguist---communicated with her in a macaronic pidgin of English and Italian (how to say 'Ho there, good mother!'?), and initial friendly overtures rapidly went downhill when we grasped that la vecchia befana, as we instantly christened her, intended to stick around, sleeping in the main bedroom, while we forlornly occupied the two single beds in the other room. At this point Dan was required to perpetrate a sequence of acts of quite heroic cruelty, forcefully evicting the gabbling crone and packing her off to her country house outside the city. It took an entire hour to manoeuvre her, yakking on all the time, out of the apartment, as she showed us the kettle, the contents of the fridge, the shutter mechanisms, the taps, the keys, the condiments, her eldest son's parking fines, her wedding photos---a whole battery of self-evident gewgaws. We had to stop her laying the table for us, explaining that what we really needed was to be left alone. ('Stand not upon the order of thy going...' murmured Dan.) Eventually, she tottered off, still wittering about a tree that had 'fallen upon all her little chickens' (?), leaving us bemused with a stepladder and three lightbulbs to replace for her.

That night we explored Trastevere, the lively area where sensible people stay, which really did look much like this:

Winding streets, peeling ochre stucco, lemon and bay trees in pots, a vague, thrilling smell of cooking, dead fish, and urban drains. Boys zipped past on vespas, as the glamorous and underemployed youth of Rome (who presumably all still live at home with their mothers) hung out outside bars and cafes in the pleasantly warm twilight. Pale and English, I tried to feel more Helena Bonham-Carter than Kathy Burke. At a little pizzeria that night (sourced from the generally reliable Guide) we sat ecstatically picking at hard-boiled eggs and salty artichoke hearts while drinking Frascati. Just behind where I was sitting we could hear a well-educated American voice ordering pasta, and after a while we turned to see a woman of about thirty eating farfalle and drinking a whole bottle of red wine to herself. Now, this would be wholly unremarkable in the drink-swilled alleys of the UK, but I was vaguely under the impression that conspicuous, unstinting solo drinking should, in an American, be read as a sign of a liberated, unpuritanical spirit.

We fell to chatting: she was a New York banker on a break between one job ending and another starting, the rent on her Greenwich Village apartment was more than my salary, she had majored in English at Yale. After a few minutes I had her down as a brittle drunkorexic: alarm bells began to ring and I began to have a vague ressentiment to the idea of spending further time with her; unfortunately in an uncharacteristic fit of kindness I'd just that minute asked her to join us for a drink after. Lauren (let's call her) soon revealed, under the influence of a further two glasses of red, an abrasive stripe to her personality, a windswept hinterland of harsh neurosis. Gems included 'If you have a BMI above 24 you should be denied healthcare!', and the immortal question, shrieked over a twilit square in a voice like an electric drill, 'Are Gypsies, like, Roman Mexicans?!' We sent her home the 500 yards to her hotel slumped and slurring in a taxi.

* * *

Next day's goal: the Villa Borghese, with its astonishing Bernini sculptures. Walking a long way---perhaps ten miles---from the flat to the Borghese park, we wound up past the Roman Forum, Trajan's Column and various other monuments, dodging all the while the heaving, frenetic urban traffic, seemingly controlled by no law of God or man.

For half an hour or so, we lay in the park, waiting for our entrance time-slot: bright green grass, the splash of water distant under umbrella pines and holm oak, white daisies scattered starrily through the fresh, uncut grass. Pigeons moved bobbing their heads through the flowers, their neck feathers shining purple, blue, green in the sunlight. Utterly ensorcelled in this paradisial, wholly artificial place---a Cardinal's pleasure palace at the heart of an enormous city---I thought of the laus Italiae in Virgil's Georgics, and idly conceived a plan for a garden that would replicate as far as possible the idealised locus amoenus at the beginning of the Roman de la Rose. (How do you put two crystals at the bottom of a fountain which each reflect half the garden anyway? Something like a mirrorball sliced in half?!)

The highlight of the Galleria was Apollo and Daphne, a statue I had loved since I first saw a picture of it as a child. In situ, it is simply breathtaking: as though caught in freezeframe, Daphne becomes the figurehead of a ship's prow which is also herself, breasting a wave of metamorphosis. A visual paradox: she is never going to move again, but she looks at this final moment as though she is about to take off like a bird, caught in an upward helical swirl of leaves like wingbuds. Delicate, almost translucent foliage bursts from her fingers, roots emerge from her toes. Bernini manages to depict her enclosing within a slippery, organic sheath of bark, and a sculptor who could believably depict the texture of bark covering over human skin could have done anything. She shrieks in fear and ecstasy as she becomes something else, something non-human, from the inside out and from the ground up. My sense that this intersection of stuprum and metamorphosis is also in some sense an orgasm was confirmed by something one never sees in photos of the statue. Wandering round to admire Apollo's peachy rear, I saw (could not help but see!) that for all her flight, Daphne's newly-opened leaves creep backwards to caress the sun-god's divine balls.

* * *

Bowled over by the Borghese Gallery, we wandered back to the flat via the Spanish Steps (street-hawkers shipped in from the Punjab), the Pantheon (a great shaft of sun from the oculus piercing its vaulted gloom) and Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the only Gothic basilica in Rome. I was so stunned in the dim light by the hallucinatory gold-bestarred lapis lazuli of its ceiling vaults (19th century) that I burst into tears and quite failed to notice the tomb of Catherine of Siena.

That night, it was time to Go Out. Dan and I have trailed through gay bars in half a dozen cities; as I loathe clubbing I have to get into the zone with this kind of thing, accomplishing the necessary mental gear-shift between open-hearted aesthetic rapture and the grim-faced brazenness necessary in a corybantic meat-market. We started off gently with a trendy, glass-fronted bar called 'Natali', on Via Bissolati. It turned out to be women's night, and Dan and I were startled by Roma lesbica: a trendy, white room full of edgily gorgeous, perfectly coiffed girls, all of them (like lesbians everywhere) as swaggering as pirates, as idle as sultans. Suddenly, 'In the Mood' started up and we realised that, faaaaabulously, we'd come on the monthly night for Lesbian Burlesque. Feathers, nipple-tassels, women looking like Dita Von Teese with enormous fans, you name it. It was quite a sight.

Tottering out stunned after one beer---bedraggled weeds drifting on the Lesbian shore---we headed towards our other option, 'Hangar', described in Time Out as 'Rome's oldest gay bar.' This place was the brainchild of an American expat who had decided in 1990 to transpose a '70s San Francisco-style joint to Rome. It was hilariously ghastly: the barman appeared to be Benedict XVI on his night off, and while the clientele were certainly cruising, it seemed in many cases to be only in the direction of their pensions. Dan and my jaunts to this variety of seedy dive always follow the same format. My role is that of place-holder: like the square root of -1 in algebra, I allow a certain calculation to take place but get neatly cancelled out before the equals sign is reached. I'm perfectly happy with this: as Dan is on a writing retreat in the country with his mother and father, opportunities for performing the Act of Frightfulness are limited, whereas for my part, let us just say, living alone means that the threshold of Bo Towers is not exactly uncrossed. As we sat by the bar we played the game of cheerfully wondering, in order, how many men there were over 60; how many were in Holy Orders, et relicta. I grimly contemplated the fact that I shall no doubt die the lonely death of the sexual pervert.

After a while, bang on cue, some greasy, diminutive chap wandered up. I felt like holding the palm of my hand right up in his face, before saying brightly, 'I'll just stop you there, shall I?! You are now going to utter a sentence which we may analyse as follows---

[INDIRECT OBJECT (First Person sg. Pronoun in Dative)] + [IMPERSONAL VERB (3sg. present indicative, 'please')] + [SUBJECT]

---said subject in fact being, viz., Dan here. Aren't you!? Don't even try denying it.' But I refrained, and so out came, as per: ...mi piace tuo compagno...

Given that I pick up in bars with roughly the same frequency as an asteroid strike, I'm perfectly content to play the aide-de-camp (as it were) in these situations: I obtrude when attention is unwelcome, and recede behind fan and powdered wig when it is welcome. Dan took no liking to this bopping elf (as they used, preposterously, to call Marc Bolan), but when he got chatting to an attractive Austrian boy of about 30, it was time for me to withdraw backwards, like a smug French courtier witnessing the teenage Marie-Antoinette being put to bed with Louis-Auguste. I emerged from the din peacefully into the warm 2am streets of Rome with a map and the keys to the flat. On the sly, long late night walks around foreign cities are something I quite enjoy---the hint of danger and disorientation, the need to make a leap of faith while navigating from point to point in the dark.

To Come: Day 2...

Translation

2011-03-08T07:38:00.001-08:00

From a choral ode in Euripides' Bacchae (my trans.)

When, when
will I drum the earth

with one white foot,
whirl nightlong

drunk on delight,
throat thrown back,

bare to the dew-wet
dark, like a fawn

gleeful as meadowgrass is green
slips from the nets

when the beaters close in
huntsmen and hounds

straining and snarling
but who springs of a sudden

like a swift rush of wind
and this way and that

to the river goes frisking---
one with the green life of water,

and one with the dim woods'
shadowy hair.

News

2011-03-08T03:48:00.001-08:00

'Oooh now', to use the all-purpose greeting my group of friends presses into service at any opportunity. As I'm all stressed with work, I shall give you some snapshots of recent activities, murie myrthe for to prouoke.

Weird dream last night. I have a head full of language at the moment, which mingled improbably with Brian Aldiss's novel The Malacia Tapestry (a crock o'shyte, btw) to place me in an alternative Alexandria, being instructed in the arts of Christian gematria by some white-mitred, black-bearded old Copt. Words could be divided, as Abbot Theomenes explained, into demon words, deacon words, priest words, and episcopal words, the latter also called hyperontes. The principle seems to be that consonants are good and vowels bad, but if you must have vowels you should have the greatest possible variety of them, with a low ratio of vowels to consonants.

So, a demon word is 'ata, 'crown', because it has only one consonant fettered by two selfishly identical vowels. An episcopal word, on the other hand, might be kalsphizdonthamu, 'we [inclusive] consecrate', because it has all five vowels but they are kept under firm control by the flanking consonant clusters. The other types are somewhere in between, but the system was a complicated one.

I must remember not to eat cheese before bed, and I think I might have read more of Auraicept na n-Éces, the early medieval Irish 'Scholars' Primer', than is good for me.

----

I've been ill for a worryingly long time: since January 15th, when I got 'flu. I then had sinusitis and bronchitis, both viral apparently. I am just, just starting to feel back to normal: the only thing that helped was rinsing my nose out with warm saline. Madonna, eat your heart out.

----

She probably is, in fact, if she's seen Lady Gaga's dire new vid. The song's an el-cheapo rehash of Madonna's 'Express Yourself' with a pounding beat, served up lukewarm as a noblesse oblige sop to t'gheys. It was always going to be hard to top the maniacal, colour-saturated, hyperkinetic 'Telephone', memorably featuring as it did the luscious Beyonce dressed as Wonder Woman and rocking a Betty Page fringe, but come now, Gaga. The clotted, wordy opening purports to give what I can only describe as a manichean Magna Matrimyth, a fable of the origin of evil, simplistically recast here as intolerance and lack of freedom. Taking the form of a 70s sci-fi B-movie, it's both hard to follow and dull dull dull ('As the womb slumbered, and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life was not temporal...'). The imagery uses reflections cleverly, but it's all a bit like gooey, biomechanical H. R. Giger dusted in pink glitter. The visual language isn't as coherent as in other videos of Gaga's: at one point she dances around with hideous model Rick Genest, her make-up matching his facial tattoos, both dressed in tuxes---is this alluding to the ghede-family of Haitian vodou (and if so, why?), or did it just seem like a good idea at the time?!

When Gaga brightens into the glory of the everlasting, I can't imagine this mess will be thought of as one of her better efforts, frankly.

---

More anon!

Like a Horse and Carriage

2011-02-14T23:00:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day to all! For yesterday. I'm late posting because it took me hours to struggle out from under the avalanche of cards and gifts that came through my postbox yesterday. Hahaha. Ha.

Ha.

AVEDA

2011-01-23T07:06:00.001-08:00

Poor old Aveda. With their seven 'Chakra balancing body mists' they've tried doing a range of all-natural fragrances linked to the energy centres of the subtle body (blah...), and every time they get 80% of the way to something interesting and attractive only inexplicably to spoil it. Often a clear, bracing accord of three elements is knocked off kilter by the carrier---a sour-sweaty odour in 'Chakra 4: Fulfilment' and a disgusting deep-fat-fryer oily pong in 'Chakra 6: Intuition', for example.

This of course is a problem with all-natural fragrances: without the fixative layer provided by musks and other synthetics, you tend to get a busy, cloudy murk like finest bong-water. There are exceptions: upmarket Aussie perfume company Aesop's two all-natural scents, 'Marrakech' and 'Mystra', are splendid. 'Mystra'---an archaic, green-gold accord of labdanum, frankincense and mastic---is one of my very favourite perfumes, and is the olfactory equivalent of a Byzantine fresco painted in ingredients drawn entirely from nature, the colours vivid but austerely harmonious. To my nose, Aveda's chakra mists are fuzzy and slightly dirty-smelling in contrast.

In the heart chakra one (as far as I can recall) the composer has tried to play with an old, old, combination: rose and incense. Now with an accord this familiar (Calvin Klein's 'Obsession', for example), you have to tune the notes in a particular direction to avoid wearisome cliché. One thing you can do is send the ingredient quality stratospherically upmarket---deploying Omani silver frankincense and Bulgarian rose, for example, which is the strategy that firms like Amouage use. I might call this the 'River Café' technique: simple things done with very expensive, perfect materials.

Rose and incense go together because, like all great accords in perfumery, they share an angle, in this case a clear citrus accent. Good frankincense is basically lemon-resinous-smoky, and good rose is lemon-boozy-pepper. (Next time you wash up a wineglass with the lees of last night's red wine in the bottom, scratch the surface of a lemon to get some oil on your finger then dip it in the dregs. It will smell weirdly rosy.) So what you are doing is trying to make an accord around that shared lemon component, and you can extend that 'keystone' accord in various ways. One thing to do is to warm and round the lemon out in the direction of orange or mandarin (lemon is an icy smell), and this can work beautifully. I find myself unsure whether doing the opposite---sharpening the citrus aspect with lime or grapefruit---would be pleasant.

[Bo spends five minutes experimenting with frankincense oil and Jo Malone's 'Grapefuit Cologne']

Well, whaddya know? In fact, the effect is cold and antiseptically odd, but not at all unpleasant in an astringent, herbal way. The grapefruit unexpectedly accentuates the camphoraceous note in frankincense (the camphor note in grapefruit is one of the things that makes it difficult to use, because some people perceive it as garlicky.) If we were to add rosemary, which is also heavy on the camphor, as it happens, and some lemon thyme, then this might become a decent structure reminiscent of an el-cheapo 'Eau Sauvage'; it could then be rounded and earthed with the clean, bass warmth of cedarwood.

The rose could be extended in other directions: towards shocking pink with summer fruits like strawberry and raspberry (Andy Tauer does this in his fizzy-neon 'Incense Rosé'), or in an exotic direction with different peppers or allspice, picking up the smoky note in the incense. One could also do things to the frankincense end of the accord as well: embitter it with myrrh, raunch it up with some animalic musks bringing out the louche, grubby side of the rose, or sweeten and warm its cold clarity with vanillic benzoin. None of this would quite make a perfume---but it would be a sketch towards one.

What you shouldn't do, pace dear, misguided Aveda, is 'complete' your rose-frankincense accord with a greasy smell like off almond oil and embalming fluid. It's so inexplicable I wonder if it might actually be deliberate---perhaps if natural fragrances smell 'too good', Aveda worries that the customer will doubt their organic credentials. Still, the body mists seems to be selling, so I suppose the bourgeois bohos must be buying this stuff. A shame, in my view: with a careful series of reformulations, this could be a cute, delightfully faux-naif range.

Archilochos

2011-01-06T02:41:00.000-08:00

On Melanie's shelf I found yesterday a copy of Guy Davenport's translations of Archilochos, with a foreword by Hugh Kenner. This is a beautiful little book, with Davenport's imagist, Poundian translations set against his wonderful black-figure designs of crested hoplites, prancing satyrs and gossiping women.

The preface begins with a perfect, perfect little bit of writing:

Archilochos is the second poet of the West. Before him the archpoet Homer had written the two poems of Europe; never again would one imagination find the power to move two epics to completion and perfection. The clear minds of these archaic, island-dwelling Greeks held a culture that we can know by a few details only, fragment by fragment, a temple, a statue of Apollo with a poem engraved down the thighs, generous vases with designs severely abstract and geometric. They decorated their houses and ships like Florentines and Japanese; they wrote poems like Englishmen of the court of Henry and Elizabeth and James. They dressed like Samurai; all was bronze, terra cotta, painted marble, dyed wool, and banquets. Of the Arcadian Greece of Winckelmann and Walter Pater they were as ignorant as we of the ebony cities of Yoruba and Benin. The scholar poets of the Renaissance, Ambrogio Poliziano and Christopher Marlowe, whose vision of antiquity we have inherited, would have rejected as indecorous this seventh-century world half oriental, half Viking.

Perfume Update

2010-12-28T04:03:00.000-08:00

Here's a little update on recent fragrance purchases. Early in December I took a trip down to Harrods, which is undoubtedly the best place in the UK for rarer and higher-end perfumery. As I walked through the crush into the perfume hall, I kept making little yelps of delight: they simply had EVERYTHING. Here was Guerlain's exclusive 'Bois d'Armenie', a styrax/benzoin number that isn't a million miles from L'Artisan Parfumeur's great 'Timbuktu', but for the fact that the benzoin has been nastily extended with vanilla; the whole is as a result too sweet. I sampled some of the vastly expensive frankincense knockouts from the Omani firm Amouage, and tried on Jo Malone's 'Oud and Bergamot Colonge', which is excellent apart from the fact that (like a long brocade dress in the rain) it seems to continue to grow heavier after you put it on. Oud is an odd smell---a kind of noble rot that eats up the heartwood of certain trees, it has a sweet rosy woodiness with a touch of melancholy to it. I'd wear this, but at c.£80 it's too expensive.

On to Dior. I smelled the miraculous lily-of-the-valley 'Diorissimo', one of the most purely beautiful women's perfumes ever made and a staggering achievement, as lily-of-the-valley produces no natural oil; all such fragrances are therefore reconstructions of great artfulness. 'Diorissimo' smells rather like Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago looked: radiantly lovely in snowy furs. Next came 'Diorella', which is interesting to compare with the Dior men's fragrance (a great classic) 'Eau Sauvage'. They are essentially different takes on the same idea---a citrus, hedione, pine, fines herbes accord, similar to a classic eau de cologne but somehow more silvery and resinous. 'Eau Sauvage' is a little loud but still remarkably tasteful (I was unsurprised to notice that a very handsome half-Italian colleague in his early forties wears it), whereas Diorella 'reads' as a more delicate and polished version: they are like two pictures of a bowl of bright yellow lemons and aromatic herbes de Provence sitting on a table, one executed in the saturated colours of gouache, one in washes of watercolour. 'Diorella', incidentally, makes a lovely masculine.

On the fifth floor at Harrods is the bonkers niche perfumery cave of Roja Dove, who was for some time professeur des parfums at Guerlain. Dove composes his own perfumes, some of which are absolutely classically beautiful---the wonderful, limited edition chypre 'Diaghilev' for the V&A, for example, which is superlative homage to Guerlain's 'Mitsouko' and Rochas's 'Femme'. I find his style a little heavy, personally---there's something busy and over-saturate about them, edging towards camp in the filled-to-the-edges manner of a Moreau painting:

The niche perfumery room is in rather this vein. Curlicued, gilded and beswagged, it is a monstrously kitsch space containing some very, very beautiful things. I couldn't help myself wandering around it snapping open an invisible fan and imagining what life would be like as a grande horizontale---it's that kind of atmosphere:

The first stop, guided by the cute, flirtatious fragrance gopher, was Profumum Roma's 'Fumidus', or if we're going to follow their cod-classical branding style, Profvmvm Roma's 'FVMIDVS'. I'd had a 5ml sample of this which I had adored, but I wanted to smell it on me in a decent dose. When I asked for it, gopher-boy said nervously, 'Er, well, not many people like that one.' I, however, do: a brutally phenolic pong of ancient vetiver, it smells of the top-notes of a really good single malt without the alcohol. You get an extraordinary, inky swirl of peat, woodsmoke, turned soil, frost, and rotting leaves, like Tauer's creosotey 'Lonestar Memories' without the engine oil. I love it, as it reminds me of many evenings spent out in autumn woods by firelight and candlelight with my friend Justine---but it is seriously butch. It's also seriously expensive: I won't tell you how much it cost, but suffice it to say it was somewhere between the full price of an academic monograph and your average monthly mortgage payment. I came away from the till reeling with the heady vapours of conspicuous consumption.

That was then. Yesterday I took a second perfume trip to London, this time to the Comme des Garcons store on Dover St. It's a hilarious space, with a look that's one third-shop, one third-gallery, one third-Lagos slum thanks to GdG's characteristic distressed, half-finished objets trouvés aesthetic. I like the shop especially for the laughably misnamed 'assistants'. These always seem to come in two types: a) Japanese pensioner, approximately the size of a largish soda siphon, wearing a black housedress and green Doc Martens; or b), lanky effeminate who clearly possesses a degree in poststructuralist theory and an attitude problem. It's these little quirks one must treasure about having an upmarket shopping experience.

The perfumes are right in front of you as you come in, in elegantly minimal colour-coded bottles. I wanted to try the rest of their superb 'Incense' series, having got the wonderful cathedral-in-a-bottle 'Avignon', a kind of wet-stone/church incense number to which I am devoted. In the end I settled on 'Jaisalmer', though the arid, hot-pepper 'Ouazarzate' and gloomy pine-resin and tobacco 'Zagorsk' are also excellent, albeit that the latter made me feel like I was being packed off to a Lithuanian sanatorium in 1973. (I didn't think much of 'Kyoto', which smelled of hot hi-fi.)

'Jaisalmer' is a thing of beauty: the sweetened camphor smell of clove is the central note, rounded out with a powdery pepper quality which moves the clove in the direction of dried bayleaves being burned. There's also a cardamom note hovering in the background, with a sufficiently dry, dusty resinous angle (frankincense? colophony?) to stop the whole thing smelling like Indian rice pudding. It's an excellent winter fragrance, and given that it will last years, fairly sensibly priced at £43.

GdG also have a clever series called 'Leaves', which are interesting attempts at 'green' fragrances---in other words, perfumes using notes which evoke cut grass, sap and crushed leaves. Green notes are terribly difficult, and all too often can take on a mean, narrow-eyed quality (see Chanel No 19). If paired with citrus they can seem spiteful, and can also come across as cold and a little funereal if given a white floral topnote. I didn't like either 'Lily' or 'Tea' in the series, but the third was the Whitmanian 'Calamus', composed by the marvellous Bertrand Duchaufour. Like all his work it privileges radiance and transparency (an aesthetic exactly opposite to Roja Dove's voluptuary fugs), and indeed it seemed so quiet when I tried it on that I wondered if I might be anosmic to something in the formula. The basic impression is of green sap and chilly cut grass, the smell of the first lawnmowing of spring. Utterly non-herbal, it has a wet, milky odour rather like you get on your hands after pulling up chickweed and goosegrass, but without any of the earthy, soily tang you get after weeding. It's cunningly done, and I will be wearing it a lot comes the thaw.

So that's me for you. In a related note, I must also pop down to the Aesop store in Mayfair next time I'm down, because I need to replace my bottle of their wonderful green-resinous Byzantine fragrance 'Mystra'. Just before Christmas, I stillied over on the ice in Ealing, fell on my manbag, and smashed the bottle. Bugger. My first thought was for my iPhone, but the bag was of course full of broken glass---which I wish I'd thought about BEFORE I stuck my drunken paw in there and had a good old rummage about. 'I see it bloody, I see it red!', as the prophetess Fedelm says in the Táin...

Happy New Year to you all.

The Bitter Withy

2010-12-23T04:34:00.001-08:00

('The Blessed Virgin chastises the Infant Jesus', Max Ernst)

A favourite folksong this, based on some peculiar and subversive apocryphal legends of Christ's childhood. The lyrics are below; go here for a jollier carol-like version from composer Nico Muhly's marvellous blog. You won't hear this on Carols from King's.

The Bitter Withy

As it fell out one high holy day,
Small hail from the heaven did fall,
Our Saviour asked His mother Mary mild,
If He might go play at ball.

“At ball, at ball, my own dear Son,
It’s time that you were gone,
But don't let me hear of any misdoings,
At night when you come home.”

So up the hill and down the hill,
Our sweet young Saviour ran.
There He spied three rich lords' sons
Playing in the sun.

"Good morn, good morn, good morn" said they,
"Good morning all", said He.
"Now which of you three rich lords' sons
Is going to play at the ball with me?"

“Oh, we are lords’ and ladies’ sons,
Born in bower and hall,
And you are nothing but a poor maiden's child
born in an ox's stall."

"Well if you're royal lords' and ladies' sons
born in your bower and hall,
I will make you believe at the very end
I am an angel above you all.”

So He built Him a bridge with the beams of the sun,
And over the river ran He;
And these rich lords' sons they followed after Him,
And drowned were they all three.

It was up the hill and down the hill!
These rich lords' mothers run,
Crying: “Mary mild, call home your child,
For ours he has drowned each one!”

Mary mild called home her Child,
And she put Him across of her knee,
And it's with a handful of green withy twigs
She gave Him lashes three.

“Oh, the bitter withy! The bitter withy!
Thou causes me to smart,
The withy shall be the very first tree
To perish at the heart!”

A very Merry Christmas to all readers.

Oh Felicia...

2010-12-17T07:35:00.000-08:00

NB this post was written in early September.

(Picturesque Belgium)

(Historic Germany)

I got back last week from trolling through what felt like most of northern Europe with my friend Dan, in a kind of harried road trip. Dan had been taken on to transport all the worldly goods of his friends Hattie and Sam from Felixstowe to Helsinki (Sam is a Swedish-speaking Finn, and they were moving to Finland with their two small children), via Holland, Copenhagen and Stockholm, in a very large white transit. Dan's mother went along to share the 2000+ miles of driving, and then flew back from Helsinki; Dan crossed by ferry to Estonia and drove down through Latvia to Kaunas, the second city of Lithuania, where he collected me off a cattle-class Ryanair flight. We then wended our way to Vilnius for the night, on to Gdańsk, then Berlin, then Luxembourg, then home to my parents in Kent. By the end, poor Dan had driven well over 3,500 miles.

I was unprepared, in these jolly EU times, for the sheer grimness of post-Communist eastern Europe. Lithuania seems to consist largely of nothing much---huge forests of pine and sodden bog, with occasional silver-weathered clapboard houses. When we were inevitably stopped by the police on the motorway, communication was a problem. They spoke no English and we speak no Lithuanian. (I can give you a lovely discussion of the language's Indo-European archaisms, but being able to decline výras is of little help when a uniformed officer is pointing at his clipboard portentously.) In the end, Dan found that he and the police officer could both speak Russian, and then that we had not paid a motorway toll, fine €300. Under the circumstances, the guy let us off and said we could buy one at the nearest petrol station, which we did. The full moon rose over central Vilnius as we limped in, lost and exhausted: parking a vehicle that is 3.2 metres high and 6 metres long was not always easy, in the dark, in a foreign city. But we managed it eventually, and collapsed in our hotel. The next morning, Day 2, we set off for Poland, glad to be getting the hell out of a country whose chief contribution to European culture seemed to have been the pogrom and a corpus of 1500 folksongs largely about geese.

Poland also was largely forest: great echoing acres of pine and broadleaf woodland. This was the deep tanglewood of the central European imagination, of fairytale and nightmare. The archetypal overtones of the deep dark wood as a place where, in stories, terrible things can happen, were overlayered for both of us by the uneasy knowledge that it was in woods like these that terrible things had happened, not 70 years before. We both sat thinking about it in the van (now christened 'Margot'), as we travelled through endless miles of shadowy resinous gloom over crazily potholed roads. Little old ladies sat by the roadside selling mushrooms and jars of amber-coloured honey; every few miles heavily-made-up, leather-miniskirted Ukrainian prostitutes plied their wretched trade in the woodland tracks for passing truckers. 'You can really see', quipped Dan after a thoughtful few miles, 'how a few death-camps must really have cheered this place up.'

But Gdańsk, beyond its smokestacked industrial hinterland, was a city of great charm and beauty. Gracious 17th century merchants' houses lined the streets of the old town, usually with bars in what had once been their cellars: the whole place had that characteristically self-confident grandeur-in-practicality that one sees in the architecture of Hanseatic ports.

By the time we arrived were starving hungry, and Dan decided that we had to eat Kashubian that night. Kashubian, I learned, is a small West Slavonic language that is spoken around Gdańsk---basically a kind of titivated Polish dialect posing as a language in its own right. Following the guidebook, we arrived at this ethnic eatery, which was a kind of shuttered wooden hall with animals made of straw hanging from the ceiling. A crazy-looking straw pig circled slowly above my head for the entire meal; a louche koala grinned from over Dan's left shoulder. The menu was in Polish and Kashubian; I read neither, so Dan ordered for me with a glint in his eye, as we were serenaded by an elderly man with terrible body odour and an equally terrible accordion. After my pickled herring in a cold mayonnaise and raisin sauce---thanks, Dan---and some rather better meat and potato patties, we headed back to the hotel, away from the eerie stares of the grass menagerie.

Day 3 took us 600km to Berlin, and there was a real sense of returning to the familiar as we crossed into Germany. (Even Dan, who speaks Polish and lived in Kraków for six months, had found Poland a bit gloomy.) That night we went round for dinner at the stylish flat of my friend Stripey Mark---so-called because he had a great fondness for Breton tops as a student---and Julien, his unbelievably hot French boyfriend.

Still vibrating with stress from the long drive, Dan and I were unprepared for the leisurely pace of a Berlin night---dinner was dished up at 11pm, which I ravened down, having had nothing to eat since the pickled herring, and we finally went out at 2am, much fortified with goodly wines. Now, normally 2am is the kind of time when I think about getting up to write a 9am lecture, rather than going out, but off we trolled to some club called 'SchwuZ'. By this time, I was feeling the poverty of my skills as a modern linguist: whilst I do read and just about speak French (and understand it fine) I can read German only on a very circumscribed number of topics: basically, if conversation isn't about linguistics or die irische Helden- und Königsage I'm mute. Chatting someone up in German, you understand, is therefore beyond me at present.

Only Julien came out with us: Mark had to finish some work for a deadline the next day, and so the three of us tottered off in a taxi. SchwuZ is a cafe at the front---all rattan chairs under and awning and nightlights in red glass bowls on spindly little tables---and then inside, it opens out into a series of interlocking bars and subterranean dance areas. It was all very Otto Dix that night, as one would hope for in Berlin: the sequinned doorbitch taking our cash looked like a cross (or perhaps a collision) between Matt Lucas and a demented budgerigar. The boys of the town were rather good, I thought, tending to the dressy and lissom with a bit of well-kempt facial hair going on in a way that I find very attractive (see Jonas Armstrong for the idea). Knowing Berlin's reputation I'd come wearing my butchest scent, Andy Tauer's campfire/leather 'Lonestar Memories', and had been wryly turning Lewis Carroll's amnesiac Baker over in my head:

He would joke with hyaenas, returning their stare
With an impudent wag of the head:
And he once went a walk, paw-in-paw, with a Bear,
"Just to keep up its spirits," he said.

No such luck, alas, so at 5am or so, we left, having to begin the drive again at 11am.

* * *

A few hours of sleep later, we were motoring along various excellent German autobahns----'fine, big roads', as my Ayrshire great-grandmother once said when she saw a motorway for the first time. Berlin to Luxembourg is about 800km, and we careened into the transistorized Grand Duchy at around 10pm, in lashing rain and a particularly Mittel-Europäische kind of mungey blackness. Margot (the van) was very low on petrol. I myself was very low on gin. Luxembourg city seemed to have no petrol stations: as we crept closer and closer to having nothing in the tank, we had to stop in increasing desperation at a series of random hotels and ask for directions. We eventually filled up when poor Margot could have gone barely another mile. Having parked the van on a main street, with ticket paid and displayed, we fell headfirst at around midnight into the peculiar, poky hotel, then into the minibar, and then finally into our beds.

Much refreshed, we had breakfast the next morning---me having my usual nourishing cup of black coffee and health-giving bowl of air---and went to retrieve the van.

Which had gone.

We discovered from the hotel that yes, that street did indeed normally have parking, but that this one day of all the year there was a jolly street-fair, and so parking had been suspended. Signs announcing this fact had been helpfully placed around the street at ankle-height, in Luxembourgish.

Down the copshop, we explained the situation to the actually very nice and helpful receptionist, paid the eye-watering €258 fine (along with the legions of other tourists who had made the same mistake) and waited two hours to be driven to the vehicle-pound near the motorway. The dismal situation was improved by the fact that every one of Luxembourg's policiers could have moonlighted as a male model; and further because one of our fellow-sufferers was an extremely glamorous tranny, who had, as Dan observed, 'come Done', in an expensive black pencil skirt and expert maquillage. Her vertiginous shoes looked as though, by some mysterious contrivance of the cobbler's art, they were on backwards---the stiletto spike lay horizontally flat along the ground, extending backwards from the toe rather than downwards from the heel. We were as impressed by the shoes as by her gravelly, non-nonsense manner.

Later that day, nine hours and 400km later, we finally arrived at my parents' house, having been through the Channel Tunnel. More relieved than I could say, we parked Margot outside the house and reflected, with Guy Davenport, that travel is very narrowing.

Update

2010-12-17T02:50:00.001-08:00

NB: this post was originally written in September 2010!

* * *

Things I have done over the last two weeks, deep in the Kent countryside:

a) eaten delicious wild mushrooms, picked myself (yes, I do know what I'm doing---never fear, I shall not be following the dismal example of Nicholas Evans). Parasol mushrooms are especially good in risotto, please note, because they release a lot of liquid when cooked.

b) I have also read a large proportion of Burton's massive omnium-gatherum The Anatomy of Melancholy, which is up there with The Faerie Qveene and Browne's Religio Medici as an all-time favourite book.

c) I've walked in the local wet, vetiver-scented chestnut coppices every day.

d) Finally, I've made a stab at learning Mandarin. If you could have seen me, gentle readers, contorting my face into the strange syllables of the perfumed East, you would have laughed. It's not actually that hard, if you are doing everything in pīnyīn transliteration, but it is hilariously like the dialogue from every kung-fu movie you've ever seen. You'd think it was all an orientalist, egg-flied-lice stereotype---but no, they do apparently really say things like 'I come you house make sitsit?' (that is, 'Might I call round?') and 'Two weeks, I go China.' I can, however, quite see why the language's fearsome reputation has come about: I can imagine it being very very difficult to attain real fluency. The weighting of difficulty differs from an Indo-European language: unlike, say, Russian or Old Irish, Pǔtōnghuà (i.e., Mandarin) has next to no morphological stage-business: every word is more or less indeclinable, unmarked for tense, case, or number. This makes it all very straightforward, as long as you learn the correct tone when you learn a word, which is easily done. But then a whole series of flanking expressions and aspect particles come in, many of which do not map onto I-E grammatical categories at all well, and if you couple that with different cultural norms, you can see why it's a challenge to wrap your tongue around. Then of course, comes the massive task of learning the characters, of which 2000+ are needed for literacy to be achieved.

My favourite word so far is the hilarious érzi, 'son', which is pronounced as follows. First, make the quizzical noise of a elderly dog waking up, 'arr?', with a rising tone; alternatively imagine you are a west country farmer (or a pirate) saying 'arrrr?' with a distinct burr, and again with a rising inflection. Then add the brief, unstressed syllable 'dzuh', to rhyme with the last syllable of 'sofa'. Fun!

Vision: Hildegard von Bingen

2010-10-17T05:01:00.000-07:00

Oooh! Oooh!

Polari Bible

2010-09-16T12:10:00.000-07:00

From the Polari Bible---if you don't know what Polari is, you've clearly never listened to Round the Horne. A kind of underground gay slang of the last century, its main characteristic is huge lexical replacement of English words with borrowings from Yiddish, Romani, and Italian, with a number of instances of backslang (for example, 'face' backwards is ecaf, hence 'eke', 'face') and Cockney rhyming slang. Another salient feature is the swapping over of male and female pronouns and names, and a high number of expressive neologisms---I especially like the marvellously smoggy, tenebrous 'munge' for 'darkness', and the lovely throwaway 'fakement' for 'thing'. It all has a kind of seedy gaudiness that I find irresistably funny, recalling Sontag's 'Notes on Camp' by trivialising serious things to the point of complete absurdity; anything said in the language takes on what the ghastly Alan Hollingshurst once called 'the uniquely homosexual tone of bored outrage.'

(And why oh why haven't I got a trio of famble-palones?!)

1 In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was nanti form, and void; and munge was upon the eke of the deep. And the fairy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas.
3 And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle.
4 And Gloria vardad the sparkle, that it was bona: and Gloria medzered the sparkle from the munge.
5 And Gloria screeched the sparkle journo, and the munge she screeched nochy. And the bijou nochy and the morning were the first journo.
6 And Gloria cackled, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the aquas, and let it divide the aquas from the aquas.
7 And Gloria made the firmament, and medzered the aquas which were under the firmament from the aquas which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And Gloria screeched the firmament Heaven. And the bijou nochy and the morning were the second journo.
9 And Gloria cackled, Let the aquas under the heaven be gathered together unto una place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10 And Gloria screeched the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the aquas screeched she Seas: and Gloria vardad that it was bona.
11 And Gloria cackled, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding maria, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose maria is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding maria after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose maria was in itself, after his kind: and Gloria vardad that it was bona.
13 And the bijou nochy and the morning were the third journo.
14 And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkles in the firmament of the heaven to divide the journo from the nochy; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for sparkles in the firmament of the heaven to parker sparkle upon the earth: and it was so.
16 And Gloria made dewey dowry sparkles; the dowrier sparkle to rule the journo, and the nanti dowrier sparkle to rule the nochy: she made the twinkling fakements also.
17 And Gloria set them in the firmament of the heaven to parker sparkle upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the journo and over the nochy, and to divide the sparkle from the munge: and Gloria vardad that it was bona.
19 And the bijou nochy and the morning were the quarter journo.
20 And Gloria cackled, Let the aquas bring forth dowrily the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21 And Gloria created dowry whales, and every living creature that trolleth, which the aquas brought forth dowrily, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and Gloria vardad that it was bona.
22 And Gloria fabed them, cackling, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the aquas in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23 And the bijou nochy and the morning were the fifth journo.
24 And Gloria cackled, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping fakement, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
25 And Gloria made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every fakement that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and Gloria vardad that it was bona.
26 And Gloria cackled, Let us make homie in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping fakement that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So Gloria created homie in her own image, in the image of Gloria created she her; omee and palone created she them.
28 And Gloria fabed them, and Gloria cackled unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living fakement that trolleth upon the earth.
29 And Gloria cackled, varda, I have parkered you every herb bearing maria, which is upon the eke of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding maria; to you it shall be for carnish.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every fakement that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have parkered every green herb for carnish: and it was so.
31 And Gloria vardad every fakement that she had made, and, varda, it was dowry bona. And the bijou nochy and the morning were the seyth journo.

Tarot 3

2010-08-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

Just on the off chance you were wondering, this is what has happened to my 'Archetypal Tarot' over recent months. Click on the image to enlarge.

Two Penhaligon's fragrances

2010-07-26T09:04:00.001-07:00

(This picture is about as camp as Penhaligon's 'Bluebell'---see below!)

Poor old Penhaligon's. They try so hard as a fragrance outfit: elegant, retro shops, knowledgeable staff, a brand which consciously goes for a kind of old-fashioned British rattan-and-aspidistra country-house vibe, and yet despite it all every single one of their perfumes which I have ever smelled is foul.

I am sitting here with a sample of their famous 1978 'Bluebell', which is, as Turin and Sanchez comment in the only word of their review in Perfumes: the Guide, 'repellent.' The blurb tells you that it is meant to evoke the deliciously poignant scent of English bluebell woods at the beginning of May, the delicate earthiness of unfolding ferns, the shimmer of dappled light through translucent green...what it actually smells like, however, is a hyacinth-scented air-freshener in a cancer-ward. A sour-sweaty, chemical undertone mingles hideously with a cloyingly sickly floral topnote, which resembles the odour given off by those hyacinth-in-a-jar Mother's Day gifts, just after they've gone floppy and started to rot. I can imagine the poor Penhaligon's perfumer tearing out his or her hair at this and asserting that a lot of great perfumes contain a note of decay---there's a distinct, beefy whiff of mushroom skins in the citrusy Diorella, for example---but he or she would be missing the point. The smell they are trying to evoke is incredibly delicate and elusive, whereas they've bottled an absolute bruiser. It needs to be a wet smell, with a mix of humus-like and green notes. I would have started with a threefold accord based on the incense note of balsam poplar (start with benzoin), iris, and a leafy tone of your choice, aiming towards but stopping just short of the spicy-musty smell of crushed bracken or cow-parsley leaves in spring. Then hawthorn, violet, and the odd, 'wet' smell of hedione, for a cool, sappy freshness like the heart of Guerlain's 'Après L'ondée'; and finally, fleetingly, about one twentieth of the hyacinth note that Penhaligon's has actually used in 'Bluebell'.

Hmph. Things may, however, be on the up: I was assured by the very nice lad in the Covent Garden Penhaligon's the other day that the great, the trismegistos Bertrand Duchaufour has been brought in to compose some new fragrances for the company. Duchaufour is the creator of the superb 'Timbuktu' for L'Artisan Parfumeur, a smoky 'transparent wood' and one of the very few fragrances I could wear nearly every day. The assistant passed me a sample of Duchaufour's new work for Penhaligon's called 'Amaranthine', and, reader, I have it here. I'm glad to say it's better than 'Bluebell', but alas it is a world away from 'Timbuktu', probably for budgetary reasons. It's a sweet vanillic wood reminiscent of Olivia Giacobetti's brilliant 'Dzing!', but creamier, and without the latter's wonderfully odd saddlesoap and fresh putty/linseed notes; instead there is a loud floral topnote that I think is the milky-banana smell of ylang-ylang, perhaps with orange blossom in there somewhere as well. Far, far better constructed than most other Penhaligon's fragrances---Duchaufour is a genius, after all---nevertheless about the best I can say for it is that it would be good for middle-aged art teachers of both sexes, and neither.

Critical Mass

2010-07-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

Last night, for the second time in a week, I dreamt that I was trapped in a coven of Satan-worshippers---in Margate, which is obviously the natural home for sinister occult cabals, having once given the world Tracey Emin. (Can YOU think of any other explanation?!) Anyway, Satanists seem to go in for red velour in a big way, as well as dangly chest jewellery and leatherbound books, but I was startled to find that in extremis I managed to come out with an exorcism which started with the Trinity, and went on via the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, St Michael the Archangel ('...and all the angels and archangels'), SS Peter and Paul, Barnabas, Matthias, Stephen Protomartyr, Thecla, Perpetua, Felicity, and Catherine of Alexandria, followed by Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux ('Doctors of the Universal Church...'), Lucy, and finally Agatha, famous only for a nasty martyrdom and a nice pudding.

You can take the boy out of Catholicism, but you can't take the Catholic out of the boy...

Aion, Dead Can Dance

2010-07-24T08:25:00.000-07:00

Aion, Dead Can Dance's extraordinary fifth studio album, is twenty years old this year. It continues to represent an apogee in their development, the creation of a flawless work in which local beauty and overall structure cohere into a shimmering perfection which is more than the sum of its parts. Part of DCD's power as a band had always lain in the raw visibility of their creative differences, as multi-octave vocalist Lisa Gerrard's seraphic harmonies played off fascinatingly against Brendan Perry's brooding folk-balladeering. Her voice benefited from the rhythmic structure and backbone his musicianship provided, and he needed her ecstatic glossolalia to temper his native bluesy austerity. If you know DCD's back-catalogue well, it remains a strange experience to listen to Gerrard and Perry's respective first solo albums, The Mirror Pool and Eye of the Hunter: their musical styles seem to have separated out as completely as oil and water.

And yet in Aion, it all somehow came together, for the first and arguably the last time. The album was the second in a series which continued until the band broke up, in which the music seemed to be partially localised in space and time. 1988's The Serpent's Egg had possessed a solemn, Levantine quality, redolent of Crusader castles and gilded, incense-shrouded mosaics, of bell-caparisoned horses and leper-kings. This technique anticipated Gerrard's later soundtrack work: The Serpent's Egg evoked a more-or-less coherent soundworld in a variety of moods, from mystical keenings and solemn processions to a thunderous cavalry charge, as though for an early forerunner of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. In this soundscape of chimes, horse-brasses and chant, Gerrard's voice at times sounded strained, as though she was aiming at mid-nineties John Tavener but not quite hitting the mark. (The latter's 1995 'Song of the Angel' would be quite at home on The Serpent's Egg.) Perry's three songs on that album, 'In the Kingdom of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King', 'Severance', and 'Ullyses' [sic], on the other hand, injected a much-needed rhythmic vigour and a smokily-autumnal vocal depth. Don't mistake me: Gerrard's voice is ever a marvel, but The Serpent's Egg showcased rather less of its inherent flexibility and range than other DCD albums. It is in my view Perry's rich baritone and poignant lyrics which lifted the album above atmospheric historical pastiche.

In Aion, all these issues were luminously transcended. Ironically, for an album which saw Gerrard and Perry's musical voices fuse more intimately than ever before, it emerged out of the wreckage of their romantic partnership. (The gulf between them has grown worse over the years---apparently after 2005's reunion and world tour they no longer speak, and twelve-year-old footage of Perry was used somewhat awkwardly in Clive Collier's 2006 documentary about Gerrard, Sanctuary.) Aion is one of DCD's briefer albums, lasting less than a forty minutes, and it has a sealed, hermetic perfection which echoes the Hieronymus Bosch image on the album cover, chosen by Perry: a man and woman float inside the transparent globe of some vast paradisial fruit, threaded through with placental veins. The woman's pale skin and long blonde hair evokes Gerrard's own; the man reaches up to kiss her, placing his hand on her womb, their arms crisscrossing in anticipation of union. This deeply alchemical image is perfectly apt: it hints at at the complex fusion of competing skills and visions behind Aion, itself a recaptured Eden---A Garden of Earthly Delights---brought about by the self-isolated devotion to the Work of the alchemist and his soror mystica. The mysterious title too is evocative: a word of many meanings, I think it is most likely to point to Jung here, whose AION: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self was published in 1959. Indeed, as I have suggested above, the album embodies some very Jungian concepts: anamnesis or 'far-memory', alchemy, spiritual refinement and the coincidentia oppositorum in the pursuit of wholeness. Saturated with Renaissance and baroque influences, it reveals a band who had utterly transmuted the thrashing industrial textures of their eponymous 1984 debut.

I propose now to go through each of this sublime album's tracks in turn, with a few words of discussion. I recommend you listen to them reasonably loud; if you buy the album, note that a beautifully remastered version is now available.

* * *

The Arrival and the Reunion

In this extraordinary opener, it is instantly clear how greatly Gerrard and Perry's technique had been honed even since The Serpent's Egg: a single glossolaliac line suddenly shatters into a sumptuously swift-moving polyphonic blaze. Punctuated with great whacks on a drum, Gerrard's lustrous vocal glitters like cloth of gold against the silk of her own multitracked voice and the dark velvet of Perry's: after barely a minute, all voices resolve again into a stately, ritualistic monody. The soundtrack quality of The Serpent's Egg persists: as the title suggests, this is music for a formal meeting between two gorgeously-arrayed potentates, perhaps the Queen of Sheba appearing in the court of Solomon in a cloud of nard and styrax, or Isabella being led before Ferdinand in the Palacio de los Vivero in Valladolid, hung about with pearls. Sumptuous and imperial, 'The Arrival and the Reunion' is an opening apparently more suitable for a Hespèrion XXI release than a band whose roots were in the early 80s Melbourne post-punk scene, a fact which underlines the extraordinary fearlessness of DCD's musicianship: from Joy Division to Jordi Savall in six years.

Saltarello

And then from imitation Early Music, we come to the real thing: a brilliantly energetic performance of a medieval Italian street-dance (originally performed by those higher up the social ladder, but filtering down and becoming widely popular at the close of the Middle Ages), played on the period instruments---including bagpipes and a hurdy-gurdy---which had become Perry's passion. Like most of the songs on Aion and indeed the album itself as a whole, the track is circular, wheeling round merrily to a beautifully crisp conclusion. There is another, equally lovely version by Arany Zoltan here.

Mephisto

A tiny, luminous track which lasts under a minute. A perfumed melody with a ravishing, nostalgic timbre simply repeats twelve or thirteen times, growing gradually louder and then fading away again. I can never listen to it without thinking of the opening of Cavafy's wonderful poem 'The God Abandons Antony':

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.

...αόρατος θίασος να περνά / με μουσικές εξαίσιες, με φωνές...'Ah! Poetry!', as Woolf's Orlando says.

The Song of the Sibyl

Having mentioned Catalan Early Music maestro Jordi Savall in passing earlier, we now come to him directly: the third track on Aion is a fragment of the chanted medieval (mainly Iberian) liturgical drama known in Catalan as El Cant de la Sibil·la, in which the Cumaean Sibyl foretells Judgement Day. Savall and his wife Montserrat Figueras had begun recording the surviving versions---Catalan, Latin, Galician, and Mallorcan---in 1988, in a series of stark, uncanny performances: the constant repetition, incremental increase in power, and bloodcurdlingly apocalyptic refrain of the 'Song' impress it deeply upon the listener. A number of versions can be found on YouTube: Figueras' own is here; and here is another, clearly authentically performed, as in the Middle Ages, at Christmas.

Gerrard's own sibylline persona lent itself well to this piece---below you can see a mesmerising video of her performing it live, robed all in white, austere and sacerdotal. Her naturally rich contralto is given full rein for the first time on the album, as we shift from the complex pieces----complex in terms of voices or number of instruments---which have gone before to something far simpler and slower. Cool and dim as the interior of a cathedral, Gerrard's voice moves with great suppleness over an ecclesiastical organ-drone and the chimes of handbells. This is the first time on the album that we have heard intelligible lyrics, albeit ones (in a typically oblique DCD move) in medieval Catalan: Al jorn del judici, parrà qui avrà fet servici---The Day of Judgement, for those who will not have been saved.

Fortune Presents Gifts not According to the Book

The Baroque Iberian theme continues with Perry's first solo song on the album, a setting of a poem by Góngora (1561--1627) translated from the Spanish. With this song, we move into a different mode and into more open terrain. So far, Aion has evoked winding medieval streets and the shadowed, sumptuous interiors of churches and court buildings: but 'Fortune Presents Gifts' leads us out into the parched countryside of Don Quixote, its theme the brutal caprice of earthly life and the omnipresence of injustice for the poor.

Sometimes she robs the chief goatherd of his cottage and and goatpen
And to whomever she fancies the lamest goat has born two kids
When you expect whistles it's flutes
When you expect flutes it's whistles
Because in a village a poor lad has stolen one egg
He swings in the sun and another gets away with a thousand crimes
When you expect whistles it's flutes
When you expect flutes it's whistles

(Luis de Góngora)

The music has a hazy sunniness which is ostensibly at odds with the fatalistic lyrics, as a bright, fluttering harp-like melody is plucked out upon the guitar against a warm drone. And yet one remembers that Góngora (despite being a priest) was a notorious gambler, and his poem is kind of card-player's shrug at the wiles of Fortuna and her ever-turning wheel. This is a very simple poem by Góngora's convoluted standards, but there is a faint allusion to Virgil's first Eclogue in the first two lines quoted. In a further example of the care with which Aion is constructed, 'Fortune' continues the Iberian theme of the album while introducing English lyrics sung by Perry, whose own reflective, elliptical style somewhat resembles Góngora's poem.

As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins

We begin with an unaccompanied descending vocal line from Gerrard in sombre voice, which quickly resolves in a second dance that recalls 'Saltarello', but in a more stately and less demotic fashion, with drones and chiming bells. Gerrard's lyricless lyrics alternate between low and high, accompanied by the starry sparkle of bagpipes. After a few minutes, her voice changes timbre and becomes much warmer: doubletracked to the sound of pounding finger cymbals, the song circles rounds to a gentle and irenic conclusion.

The End of Words

The 'End of Words' on the album it certainly is not, with one of Perry's most compelling songs still to come; but it certainly marks the beginning of a darker interval. Punctuated with a solemn bell, this is a funeral procession, the coffin being borne from the dark church by mourners with a slow and heavy tread, followed by black-eyed women in lace mantillas. As in 'Song of the Sibyl', Perry and Gerrard begin by singing the same repeating, ritualistic line, before her voice separates from his and floats over the top. Again, multitracking allows two people, both in possession of chameleonic voices, to imitate a small choir. If 'The Arrival and the Reunion' was a wedding, 'The End of Words' is a wake.

Black Sun

In many ways the centre of the album, 'Black Sun' is the second showcase number exclusively for Perry's powerful voice, and the first with his lyrics. It is a perfect example of his penchant for building a song out of overlaid rhythmic structures of continually increasing complexity. (See the superlative 'Crescent', which is notable for Perry indulging in Gerrard-like speaking-in-tongues.) A complex drum polyrhythm is paired with nervy cymbals and an unsettling, circling four-note synth motif, with flashes of brass breaking like lightning over a dark landscape.

Murder! Man on fire.
Murder! I've seen the eyes of the living dead.

It's the same old game. Survival.
The great mass play a waiting game.
Embalmed, crippled, dying in fear of pain, all
sense of freedom gone.

Black sun in a white world.
Like having a black sun
in a white world.

Sinister and lurid as a Caravaggio, 'Black Sun' is probably the key song on the album, and yet the most unrepresentative: it could easily be on a Perry solo album, alongside the extraordinary 'Utopia', for example. But only in this song are the alchemical themes which the album as a whole embodies to the fore: the 'Black Sun' was an hermetic term for Saturn, symbolic of the stage of the alchemical process known as the nigredo, the 'blackening', the reduction of all matter in the sealed vessel to an undifferentiated and putrid mass. Hence the pounding, dramatic despair of the song, its images of death and maiming: it stands for the breakdown into cynicism and self-disgust which presages the reflorescence of life. One wonders how much of the breakdown of Perry and Gerrard's relationship is contained within it. Less mannered perhaps than many of the other tracks, 'Black Sun' is the emotional heart of Aion.

Wilderness

This one, readers, I cannot find as an embeddable video, so here it is. The penultimate in a series of four sombre tracks, 'Wilderness' has an a cappella Gerrard multitracked over herself in shades of sombre grey. It's a brief piece of polyphony that would be luminous in the Anonymous 4 manner if it a) wasn't so gloomy, and b) didn't suffer from the spongy lack of aural texture that overlaying a single artist's voice can cause. Atmospheric but lacking something in radiance and impact, it prefigures some of Gerrard's Oscar-winning work on the Gladiator soundtrack.

The Promised Womb

Sorry about the dog. Another wholly mysterious title, for another solemn faux-Baroque track. Against a background of string glissandi which sound like The Academy of Ancient Music busking in the rain, Gerrard plies a bit of vibratoless sub-Monteverdi. It's a bit like catching a bit of Orfeo wafting from the next door palazzo. On that note, here is a piece of the very same, conducted once again by Savall, with the exquisite Figueras playing personified Music: one can immediately see the closeness of Aion to Monteverdi's soundworld, poised on the edge between the Renaissance and the Baroque:

The Garden of Zephirus

Ah, and now Cavafy's procession which we heard in 'Mephisto' confounds our philosophical leave-taking of Alexandria by doing a three-point-turn and passing us again going the other way, this time accompanied by tinkling sistrums, flutes and birdsong. It's like a vision of a seraglio seen through a grille wound about with jasmine, or an Empress passing by in a scented palanquin.

Radharc

The album ends with, as Terry Wogan would say, a whiff of the souk. We've definitely been moving down through Andalucía during the course of the album---if 'The Garden of Zephirus' evoked a Moorish courtyard with its fountain and channels representing the four rivers of Paradise, then 'Radharc' takes us over the Straits of Gibraltar and into North Africa. (The title---oddly---is Irish, meaning 'faculty of sight' or 'spectacle': given the track's mystical overtones, one wonders if Gerrard and Perry, both of whom are of Irish extraction, looked up 'vision' in an English-Irish dictionary and arrived at radharc instead of aisling.) The third dance on the album, 'Radharc' combines all the instruments which have appeared so far into a sinuous, snake-charmer's melody. Over insistent, skittering drums, Gerrard lets her chiaroscuro voice swell to the primeval and un-Western extremes which suit it so well. Pulsating and hypnotic, in under two and a half minutes the track, and the album with it, end in a triumphant flourish.

* * *

Aion displays something like what Classicists call 'ring-composition', whereby motifs appear and reappear in a mathematical order. The album is trisected by three dances, the outer two faster and the inner one slower, and further it falls into an initial 'sunlit' half and a subsequent 'shadowed' half, each one containing, like the yin-yang symbol, a track of the opposite kind: the solemn 'Song of the Sibyl' in the first half and the exotic 'Radharc' in the second. Perry's two solo songs appear after four tracks have gone past and when another four are left to go. Those two fragrant little interludes, 'Mephisto' and 'The Garden of Zephirus', mirror each other from opposite ends of the album, serving as transition pieces between sunlight and gloom, gloom and sunlight.

From Aion's mysterious first words---est ol ghirgond'olbe cahli sond'olbe, in d'alte grand'olbi, cahli vrend'olbe!---which sound like they could be in Occitan, we realise Perry and Gerrard are engaged in a kind of vocal archaeology analogous to Pasolini's 'anthropological cinema'. With a minimum of resources---two extraordinary voices and a crew continually swapping a dozen instruments between them---they summon spirits and evoke an age. Perry's two fierce, cynical songs add savour, salting Gerrard's operatic longeurs with urgency, and preventing her atmospheric vocals from becoming ennervating. We think back to the cover image: the man and woman afloat in their sealed alembic, joined to each other but not in sexual union, isolated from the world yet able to see it through the frail membrane which protects them and their great and precious work. As Hilary Mantel has written of alchemy, but might have written of Aion: 'After separation, drying out, moistening, dissolving, coagulating, fermenting, comes purification, recombination: the creation of substances the world until now has never beheld. This is the opus contra naturam, this is the spagyric art, this is the Alchymical Wedding!'

Tauer

2010-07-12T06:07:00.001-07:00

I'm trying on three fragrances at the moment, all by talented Swiss perfumer Andy Tauer. Tauer is the creator of my very favourite perfume, L'Air du Desert Marocain, an oriental so warmly, smokily beautiful that complete acquaintances (to use Victoria Wood's phrase) sometimes start smelling me like excited cats.*

1) Un Rose Chypre: crepuscular, mossy green with a swooning, old-fashioned rose and bay topnote. Very pre-Raphaelite or William Morrisy. Ultra-feminine, in a red hair and green silk bustle kind of way, but actually quite suits me. Would have suited Maud Gonne better.

2) Orange Star: citrus hob-cleaner, with a whiff of pomander. If anyone smoked oranges like they do kippers, this is what they would smell like. Not to my taste.

3) Vetiver Dance: I've never much liked the rooty, haylike smell of vetiver, although there is a saline, peaty, sea-myrtle dimension to it which appeals somewhat. This wan little thing leaves me cold.

Humph. You win some, you lose some. I'm also immensely annoyed by the fact that I've twigged that Lolita Lempicka, which I love, is basically a gloss on Thierry Mugler's artfully vulgar Angel, which I loathe for its honking, WAG crassness. The similarity underlines for me the paradox that Angel, which is basically a fruit 'n' flowers pong for brassy tarts, is actually very cleverly structured. On top, cassis and tropical flowers; underneath, a dark, almost butch patchouli note. The two sides play off against each other fascinatingly, and I sample it constantly in shops, even though I still don't like the effing smell. Annick Menardo, the creator of Lolita Lempicka, has retained this basic anatomy but has somehow upped the knowingness and irony, mainly with the addition of an array of anisic notes. There's a brilliant moment in the third movement of Thomas Adès's 'Asyla' for orchestra where the evocation of a wild night out suddenly morphs for a moment into a quotation of mid-90s pounding house in some sweaty club at 3am: the unexpected effect is oddly like smelling Lempicka---something unpretentious and with mass appeal being evoked knowingly and played with in a very highbrow way.

*This happened twice today (15/7/10)...

TRANSform me!

2010-07-12T06:06:00.001-07:00

Best. Makeover. Idea. EVAH!

Pope Joan

2010-06-28T10:46:00.001-07:00

Fabulous! Those clever Germans have made a film of my favourite medieval legend. (Can we have Pope Joan vs Prester John for the sequel?!)

Ill

2010-06-26T11:28:00.001-07:00

Well, what happened there?! The end of the academic year, that's what, with its round of examining, conferring, form-filling, and meetings, problematized by a wheezing, weeping chest-infection which began the Sunday before last and is finally easing off a week later. Sometimes things just get the better of you: I have, I am glad to say, the constitution of an ox, but this felled me at the knees. Tucked up under the counterpane like a mobcapped Victorian spinster, I've been left with a sense of lassitude and exhaustion. Do people still make slippery elm food? How do you brew a nice beef-tea, suitable for invalids? Ought I to be soaking my trotters in a hot mustard bath?! I simply feel too feeble to find out.

Scent

2010-06-08T10:08:00.001-07:00

I've learned a lot from this fragrance and perfume lark, following my usual habit of becoming fascinated by a topic and (in this case literally) inhaling a large amount of information about it. I thought I might summarise what I've grasped in the process of coming to appreciate a whole new artform.

First, smell is not uniquely subjective, nor does a fragrance smell different on different people because of their supposed 'chemistry'. The volatility of the topnotes can change a little if your skin happens to be particularly oily, but basically a given perfume smells the same on me as it does on you. Bacon, garlic, the seashore---they don't smell different for different people, and neither does fragrance. What varies is people's ability to recognise and articulate what they are smelling, which with a fine fragrance may be a very complicated, changing, layered composition. (There are around four hundred different types of molecule in your average perfume.) In the same way, you and I may notice divergent things when we both look at the Mona Lisa, but we are both seeing the same thing.

Secondly, perfume isn't much to do with essential oils, or with steeping flowers in copper stills stirred by laughing Provencal enfleurageuses in straw hats---all the usual impedimenta of tie-dyed old hippy shit. Most fragrances are incredibly complex mixtures of lots of synthetics and a few naturals, and yearning for 'all-natural' fragrance is a bit like saying you can't get much out of a Van Gogh because he used phthalocyanine blue instead of powdered lapiz lazuli, or titanium white instead of ground-up chalk. That is, it's an essentially ideological rather than aesthetic decision. If you are interested in perfume as an art form (rather than as a organic lifestyle accessory), then quite simply synthetics are your friend. This is because to recreate a powerfully evocative scent---a rose-garden in June, say---you do not simply slosh some rose essential oil about. Essential oils of the aromatherapy sort rarely smell exactly like the plant from which they are extracted; rose oil, for example, has a jammy, cooked smell in comparison with the scent you breathe in when you stick your nose in the living flower, which actually smells faintly boozy and lemony, factors which the perfumer needs to take into account when composing his portrait of a Platonic summer bower. (Guerlain's Nahéma, a very great rose perfume, famously has no extract of rose in it at all, and yet wonderfully, swooningly smells of the living blossom.) Further, you cannot manipulate the timing of most natural fragrances; you can use grapefruit oil, by all means, but it will be gone after five minutes, and there's nothing you can do about it. And, unless you are prepared to inquire closely into the rear-end of the musk-deer, you will want to use synthetic musks, which 'fix' lightweight, fly-away molecules and give persistence to a fragrance, rather in the same way that a coat of varnish adds depth and lustre to a painting. Perfumes made with all-natural ingredients may be pleasant (Aveda isn't bad), but they have little lasting power and tend to have a bong-water, greeny-brown smell because all the notes come at you at once. If you want Debussy (L'Heure Bleue) instead of windchimes, or Elgar's cello concerto (Mitsouko) instead of someone playing with their singing bowl, you need the full palette of calones, lactones, esters, indoles, and aromatic aldehydes.

Thirdly, I've learnt that appreciating perfume, like coming to love poetry or music, requires a bit of effort and application, the development of critical language that allows you to articulate to yourself what you are smelling. When I smell a fragrance now, I go through a kind of checklist, which goes as follows.

1) Spray on test card. Wait a few seconds for the alcohol to evaporate. Sniff. You may get an instant impression ('Yes!' or 'Ugh!'), or a generalized kind of white-noise 'perfume' smell. Wait a bit---it's possible for powerful smells to knock out your receptors for a few moments, so you may unexpectedly find that a perfume seems to smell of nothing at all.

2) You are now smelling the topnotes. Is this perfume representational, or abstract? In other words, does it smell like, say, milky tea in a rose-garden, or crushed lemons and kitchen herbs, or melon and the sea, or does it smell like something that doesn't exist in the real world? If the latter, ask yourself questions such as, 'What time of day does this abstract smell seem associated with? Is it light or dark? Does it remind you of a piece of music, or a sculpture? Is it friendly or unfriendly? Happy, or sad?'

3) In either event, then you should go on with some further questions, prime among them being---'Is it edible or inedible-smelling?' You may get 'food' notes of vanilla, pastry, spices, fruit, nuts, chocolate, and milk, for example, or wholly inedible smells like lavender, lily, amber, wet stone, incense, tomato-leaf, soap. You are trying to tie down your perceptions of a potentially very complicated creation.

4) Still more: 'Is it loud or soft? Cold or warm? Masculine, feminine, or genderless? Soft, or angular?'

5) Then ask yourself if the topnotes hang together. Do they, as it were, appear separately, so that you can focus on one while the other recede for a moment, or do they form a chord, as in music, with a unique, moving quality as a group which they do not have individually?

6) If you like the smell enough, spray it on yourself now and wait a few minutes. Go off and do something else, then peer beneath the surface. The topnotes will be pre-eminent for some ten to twenty minutes, before the 'heartnote' emerges. This may be quite different ---'Angel' famously has a rather masculine patchouli heartnote under its ditzy, fruit 'n' flowers topnotes; 'Mitsouko''s luscious peach-and-apricot flan topnote conceals inky, angular, almost austere depths. In a sense, this is the perfume's true character, the impression that it will make on other people unless you constantly reapply it to play the topnotes again. Is there an accord here, and with how many parts? Two? Three? Repeat questions 2) to 5) for the heartnote.

7) Wait two hours. The smell on your wrist is now the 'drydown', the trace left by the heaviest molecules in the fragrance with the lowest volatilities, which may persist for days. What kind of smell is it? Is it woody (salubrious, resinous, and dry, like pencil shavings)? Spicy (cinnamon, cloves, pepper)? Ambery (like a hippy-shop---a blend of sweet, fragrant incense resins)? Leathery (a tanning smell, bitter, tarry, and smoky)? Clean (a white, soapy smell, like fresh linen)? Floral? Herbaceous (cut-grass, 'green'-smelling)? Animalic (sweaty, urinous, even faecal)?

Once you've been through this process---and many perfumes, even ones you don't think you like, will repay this kind of 'close reading'---you can have a considered opinion about what you've smelled. Some fragrances, of course, strike one as so immediately crappy and horrible that you're quite justified in not bothering, but most of the products of the great houses like Guerlain, Givenchy, Chanel, Caron, Yves Saint Laurent etc, as well as those of niche perfumers like Parfums de Nicolai, the wonderful Andy Tauer or L'Artisan Parfumeur, will be interesting at the very least. Happy smelling!

Gaelic

2010-06-01T03:20:00.000-07:00

One of the nice things about learning a language is that the more of them you learn, the easier it gets to acquire another one---as my polylingual EU translator friend Charles proves. He speaks Maltese, English, French, German, Estonian, Greek, and Icelandic fluently, which makes me want to spit. ('We hate it when our friends become successful', as Morrissey caterwauled.)

What is fluency? I'm sure there are learned sociolinguistic definitions, but a working one for me consists of three parts. First, you need to understand 80-100% of what is said to you (or to which you listen) at normal speed, immediately. Second, you need to be able to use all the grammatical and syntactical constructions which the language offers, and as a result to be able to say anything you want to say, even if you have to use a slightly roundabout way to get there. Third, you need to have a working, tip-of-the-tongue vocabulary of about five thousand words, even though in English you might easily know six times that number. On top of this, you need a working grasp of idiom and register.

Language learning goes in fits and starts. Ten years ago, I didn't know any Welsh at all, and I didn't begin a serious attempt with the modern language until I was about 25, having been exclusively concerned with medieval Welsh and exam-passing up until that point. During this transitional period, I made a huge number of often comic mistakes, in which I deployed a medieval word instead of the modern one. I used teg for 'beautiful', for example; this meant 'fair' in Middle Welsh (in both senses) but now means only 'impartial' in the modern language. The landscape of the Gower is, I can assure you, extremely impartial. I lost my 'gauntlets' instead of my 'gloves', and once memorably asked a senior Welsh academic if I could 'build him a coffin' instead of 'make a request', due to a misunderstanding about the verb archaf.

After a warm-up period, I'm normally nattering away happily at the Eisteddfod, but it's hard to maintain fluency in a language that I speak for fifteen minutes a week plus one week a year. Nevertheless, I read a lot in Welsh (always the news, for example) and listen to the radio a lot in the background. The best part of a bottle of wine helps to free the tongue, I find.

I mention all this because I'm currently teaching myself Scottish Gaelic. I have studied it in the past, and published a small article on poetry by learners of the language a couple of years ago, but am basically mute in it. It's interesting, therefore, to go through the same process as I went through with Welsh but hugely speeded up, because I'm making more effort. As with Welsh, there is a background level of passive vocabulary knowledge, because if nothing else I have been learning/reading/teaching medieval Irish since I was 22. So an awful lot of the words are basically familiar, often with a slightly changed sense and considerably changed spelling. But active speaking ability is quite another thing, problematized by Gaelic's complicated pronunciation rules, which are dismayingly askance to those of Irish. Yes, I know that basically yer actual sound-system is much the same, with palatal consonants, glide vowels etc, but the fine-grained detail is often really quite different.

Colloquial Gaelic, by Katherine M. Spadaro, glosses over this problem completely, so much so that I don't understand how a real beginner lacking a linguistics background could come out of the course with any real ability to speak the language. Major pronunciation rules are not explained, such as the instrusive 'sh' that appears in lots of words in the cluster -rt. Tha sin ceàrt, 'That's right', is pronounced 'ha shin kyarsht', for example. Now, there's no problem understanding this from the linguistic, phonological perspective, but really it might have been mentioned. The result of this silence on Spadaro's part is that the learner without access to a native speaker is never going to be able to pronounce any word that doesn't appear on the CD at some point or other. I suppose this is inevitable with a language like Gaelic, with its complex vowels and long, consonant-filled words. The beginner would have to listen to the CD extremely carefully to grasp that cuideachd, 'also, as well', is pronounced 'KOOjukh-k', a situation quite different to Welsh, where the spelling system of the language reflects the phonology extremely well.

But, dear reader, I am getting there. I've finished Spadaro and Teach Yourself Gaelic, and am working through Roddy Maclean’'s brilliant '“Letters to Gaelic Learners”', six hundred or so archived mini-essays from the BBC on all manner of subjects. I listen to the letter first before going back to read the text, inserting into it any pronunciations which seem surprising, and writing new vocabulary down in a ledger. By doing five of these a day, I'm beginning to absorb the rhythms of the language and develop the ability to decipher it aurally, as well as putting sentences together. I'm feeling rather smug at the moment because I've just this minute managed to understand almost all of a piece about Gregor Mendel and the genetics of pea-plants without looking at the written text. But pride goeth before a fall...

Garden

2010-05-23T03:39:00.001-07:00

In April-May 2006, my much-loved, much-mourned garden in Oxford achieved a brief period of perfection. We'd had a very late spring, much like this year, and so all the early flowers came together---the bone-white of the pear-tree blossom mingling with bluebells and tulips, primroses and sugar-pink dicentra. If I were, by some miracle, to live there again and have that garden for my own once more, I would certainly do it completely differently, adopting a much more radical and formal design. But as it was, a long gravelled rectangle with a table, which I made myself, surrounded by foliage suited us quite well.

When I think about gardening, I'm always torn by my instinct for classicism and an equal love for cottagey informality. The two traditions can be cleverly made to play off against each other---as, for example, at the extraordinary Lower House, near Hay-on-Wye--but with the Lake St garden I dithered around too much for it to be a really coherent design. This is partly a consequence of the nature of the place: we were renting the house, and didn't know how long we would be there, so I intially started the garden just to 'grow some stuff' in a spirit of experiment. Gradually my ambitions---and financial expenditure---increased, until it was one of my prime joys in life.

Now, it is perfectly possible to do quite astounding things with a small garden, as Roy Strong has shown in a charming book, and if I ever own a house similar to Lake St---that is, a late Victorian mid-terrace---then I will prove the point. (Alas, what with academic pay being as it is, I shall probably end up living in a crisp packet on the side of the M4.)

As a result, the Lake St garden became rather a palimpsest of whatever horticultural idea had seized me at the time. I never got over the problem that in spring (February to May, perhaps) I want to enjoy a space inspired by the cool colours of woodland: deciduous green, blue, white, pale pink, delicate yellows. But then, come high summer and into autumn, I wanted hot, burnt colours---golden and ochre sunflowers, scarlet poppies and crocosmia, tawny grasses, orange cannas and heleniums. As as result there was usually a weird-looking period of overlap around the beginning of June, as the pale, delicate spring palette gave way to the brazen summer one. An orange nasturtium against a bluebell is not a successful combination.

So, this is the garden. About fifty by twenty, it has a gravelled eating area, beds filled with bluebells and herbs, and walls on either side. Wigwams of hazel twigs add a slightly potager-like, witchy feel. It was absolutely a plantsman's garden: I could never say no to the interesting one-off, the rare herb with oddly scented foliage, the big set-piece. Many plants we culled as seeds (or self-sown seedlets) from the various formal gardens around Oxford: in particular, the thoughtfully-planted borders of my old undergraduate college, Lady Margaret Hall, were rich hunting grounds, both for seedlings and ideas. In the end, it wasn't as aesthetically successful as it might have been because I tried out too many ideas in it: it was both a pastel spring garden inspired by Gertrude Jekyll, and a blazing summer 'jewel' garden of the Christopher Lloyd via Monty Don sort, in which Piet Oudolf-esque meadow planting rubbed shoulders uneasily with my penchant for whimsy and druidical wortcunning. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal. Here it is, that magical last spring.

From my Lake St garden diary for this day four years ago:

Garden at its peak of loveliness. The cow parsley is fantastic---but I should have put more in on the left hand side. The heucheras are also great, and the chocolate brown lysimachia is excellent and much taller than last year. The gunnera is going well, the golden hop is well above the garage and the russian vine is sending off stems in streamers. The bluebells are excellent and the ox-eye daisies have developed their little white-hearted buds. Unfortunately, slugs have gobbled the heleniums and the echinacea. Not so good. But I have planted a huge number of dahlia 'Bishop of Landaff', with their amazing scarlet flowers and dark brown, nearly black, foliage. I've also potted out the sweetpeas, which were a bit pot-bound, and the leonotis, which should be eight feet tall in two months. The lemon verbenas are leafing up but the blackcurrant sage has expired in the frost. Roses in bud everywhere through the garden. I'm glad I added so many ox-eye daisies, as they're going to add a sense of lushness and abandon to the whole.

The garden in summer:

Glee

2010-05-05T07:39:00.001-07:00

Now, I have two theories about Fox's brilliant, bitter/feel-good comedy Glee.

The first is that the whole thing is a massive political allegory, with an oddly left-wing bias for such a frothingly rightwing network. According to this view, the put-upon, idealistic, but often ineffectual Will Schuester is the Democratic Party, and the borderline lunatic, self-laudatory, and ruthlessly scheming Sue Sylvester is the GOP. Schuester's screechy, selfish, delusional wife, with whom he is trapped in a loveless marriage, is the big-spending pearl-earring Left of the Nancy Pelosi school. Well-meaning, profoundly loveable but lost and damaged Emma Pillsbury is a kind of personification of the American floating voter. Principal Figgins, downtrodden and shamefacedly manipulated by Sue Sylvester, is the Supreme Court. The students represent voting blocks: WASP, African-American, gay, Hispanic.

That's one theory. The other, and I'm absolutely sure of this one, is that Sue Sylvester is a evil parody of Camille Paglia: an aging, self-laudatory, catty, Madonna-worshipping amazon, rambling on relentlessly in an insane outpouring of barely-coherent solipsism. They even look similar, ferrchrissakes:

Sue Sylvester's voiceovers in particular absolutely nail the qualities that eventually made Paglia's monthly column at Salon unreadable: the ill-thought-out swerves of ideas and subject matter, the constant, braggadocio-swollen self-reference, the absurd claims about her own influence. See Paglia on how she 'invented blogging', here; as she says, Sylvesterishly, 'My columns had punch and on-rushing velocity'. Compare Sylvester at her barmiest---the 'quiver' is in the thigh of a pregnant cheerleader, by the way:

Dear Journal, Feeling listless again today. It began at dawn, when I tried to make a smoothie out of beef bones, breaking my juicer. And then at Cheerios practice, disaster. It was unmistakable. It was like spotting the first spark on the Hindenburg. A quiver. That quiver will lose us Nationals. Without a championship, I'll lose my endorsements, and without those endorsements, I won't be able to buy my hovercraft.

This gives precisely the sense of 'whaa'?!' that reading Paglia's column induces. Why does Sylvester need a hovercraft?! Why does Paglia need to tell us that she watches The Young and the Restless and has three televisions?! Sylvester's bitchy one-liners, on the other hand, are as good as Paglia at her best---the woman who lacerated Andrea Dworkin (aptly, in my view) for her overeating and 'garish history of mental instability' would relish Sylvester's characterisation of Pillsbury as 'a mentally ill ginger pygmy with eyes like a bushbaby.' When Sylvester strides down the school corridors, shouting to herself: 'I am Ajax, the mighty warrior!' she is surely embodying Paglia's bracing brand of Amazonian feminism.

Anyway, to adapt Sylvester---that's how Bo sees it!

2010-04-09T07:14:00.001-07:00

Further adventures in scent today. On my way back from lunch I passed via the shopping arcade and tried some new things on.

1) Givenchy, 'Gentleman'. Turin and Sanchez give this 2/5 and dub it 'a sad little woody leather.' They're right. It starts with a forceful patchouli topnote, before mellowing to a woodsy, leather drydown. It doesn't suit me at all: too old, too frayed, too brown.

2) Davidoff, 'Cool Water'. Very famous, this one. Five stars from the Guide, which calls it a 'cheerful, abstract, cheap, and lethally effective formula of crab apple, woody citrus, amber, and musk', adding: 'Now let women wear it for a decade or two.' On my skin, it's a kind of marine musk, and as I'm not the kind of man who wears polo shirts, it generally makes me feel slightly vulgar---not necessarily a criticism.

3) 'Paco Rabanne pour Homme'. Four stars from Turin and Sanchez. Weird citrus/woody thing with a green, honeyed animalic drydown. Smells exactly like the fur of a cat that's been cuddled by a woman wearing very expensive perfume, before going out mousing in the rain. Interesting and sophisticated in a slightly dank way.

4) Chanel, 'Allure Homme'. One star. A kind of woody amber, very like 'Cool Water' but with the volume turned right down. It has a kind of anisic, Pernod/liquorice topnote that lasts about fifteen seconds. Totally undetectable on my skin after half an hour.

Well, I wouldn't buy any of those, and interestingly I didn't make up my mind about any of them until I sat down to write this, manically sniffing my forearms all the while. Having mentioned 'cK One' yesterday, I had a sniff at the tester again in passing. Still lovely, still the fragrance equivalent of an Agnes Martin painting:

I also tried one of the companion pieces to Hermès's gorgeous 'Eau d'Orange Verte', namely, 'Eau de Gentiane Blanche.' It's honestly one of the most horrible things I've ever smelled, so bad that I didn't dare even spray it on a card: it has a horrific topnote that smells like the lurid green sap of a very poisonous plant, like hemlock or (especially) giant hogweed. Turin and Sanchez descibe this as 'a thrillingly weird topnote of raw peanut and green peppers', which gets it exactly, though 'thrilling' wouldn't exactly be the adjective I'd choose. According to them, it then calms down to 'a meek orange blossom', but I'm buggered if I'm hanging around this triffid-venom long enough to find out.

So no luck from the lunch-break's activities, really; but still, I have Jo Malone's 'Lime, Basil, and Mandarin' to look forward to.

Lovely Things

2010-04-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

I had a merry little shopping spree yesterday, in honour of the force that through the green fuse is presently driving the flower, an' all that.

First: new hair. It's exactly the same as the old hair, but just tidied up. It took me until the age of 28 or so to finally acknowledge that I need to get my hair cut every five to six weeks, or else it looks less like hair and more like something in dire need of a vet, inexplicably perched on top of my head.

Then I went shopping for stuff to spray on myself. Friends and regular readers may know that I have become a bit of a fragrance fanatic of late, after reading Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez's ravishing, life-changing Perfumes: The A-Z Guide. Never before have I come across a book which opened my eyes to the existence of a (to me) entirely new art form of dazzling sophistication, handing one the grammar and vocabulary, the understanding of topos and genre, which grants one the ability to make an informed critical decision. This is a kind of family thing for me really, as my mother---and yet again I prove dear Oscar wrong---is a perfume junkie, who owns about 130 different fragrances. Until I read Turin and Sanchez's hilarious, poetic book, almost all of them smelled exactly the same to me: a jet-engine haze of alcohol, honking flowers, and general bleugh. I have now had my nose educated, and know why this is---I just happen to hate big florals and most orientals, because I find them overpowering and aggressive. The worst of these is of course Dior's famous 'Poison', a vast, blowsy number that encapsulates the 1980s alpha female in a bottle. Wearing it, Turin and Sanchez aptly comment, is like driving a Sherman tank down the High Street. People just get out of the way, 'and if they don't, you just swivel the turret to remind them you're not kidding.'

In fact, I nipped into John Lewis today and out of curiosity decided to have a sniff of 'Poison' for the first time while I bought something else. The expertly maquillaged, slightly brassy girl on the desk duly sprayed some on a card for me and I nearly passed out on the spot. This stuff reeks. It creeps over your clothes in the same way that a petrochemical bloom spreads up an unspoilt river estuary. Slightly shellshocked, I put the tester-card in a book, put the book in my bag, and walked home, self-consciously aware all the way that my personal space was klaxoning 'TUBEROSE!!!', as though through an olfactory megaphone. And, look you, all this despite the fact that not a drop of this stuff had ever touched my skin, hair or clothes. 'Poison' is, as the phrase went, A Perfume You Know You've Been In A Lift With.

But such unstoppable floral godzillas, thank goodness, are not the end of perfumery; no indeed, not by a long way. A bad habit of mine used to be the wearing of a single fragrance until I ran out. There are two reasons why this is not a good thing. Firstly, no one smell---unless very genteel indeed, like 1974's 'Eau de Guerlain'---can possibly suit all occasions and weathers. The second is that said smell becomes indelibly associated with a period of six months to a year in one's life, and in that limbic-brain way can afterwards instantly reawaken memories of temps perdu. This tends to overwhelm me with maudlin nostalgia and a sense of the evanescent pointlessness of life in the face of relentless, devouring Time. Quite apart from such lugubrious reflections, I also made some questionable fragrance choices. At school and in my first year at university I wore 'Dolce & Gabbana Pour Homme', a sensible herbal cologne which was ten years too old for me then, and which, now that I am ten years older, I disdain as too dull by half. It's the fragrance equivalent of a well-cut suit, an expensive haircut, and a job in a merchant bank. I also wore Yves Saint Laurent's 'Opium pour Homme' for a long while, an overpowering woodsmoky oriental which now makes me feel sick, as it reminds me of an especially unhappy period in my life, around 2002. But there were some good ones too: Dior's 'Dune pour Homme', a light, citrusy cologne with a lovely green note of bitter herbs, which I still wear despite the vague feeling of melancholy at gaucheries long past which it induces. I also like 'Acqua di Gio pour Homme', which is pleasant enough---it has that split-melon-in-the-rain smell of things like 'L'Eau d'Issey', mixed with a herby-lemon tang---but it's ultimately too boring for me to contemplate buying again.

So these days I hover between seven different fragrances depending on mood. Standard day-at-work issue is either 'Dune', as described above, or Hermès's lovely 'Eau d'Orange Verte', a woody, bitter-green cologne with lots of basil and lime notes in it. Both are fresh and light, but the latter is more suitable for wearing in winter as well as summer, because the orange in it allows it to take on something of the aura of a very, very tasteful Christmas decoration. Also in winter I like Tauer's gorgeous 'L'Air du Desert Marocain', which is actually a woman's perfume but which smells great on me. Full of ancient, purifying resins---benzoin, styrax, frankincense---it has a chilly, grey cedarwood basenote which somehow makes it smell warm and cold and sweet and austere at the same time, like the day and night of the North African desert which it so skillfully evokes. Related is Armani's 'Bois d'Encens', which smells exactly like High Mass: a diffuse, lemony pall of frankincense falling on the congregation like smoky stars. Unfortunately, it's both very expensive and lasts less than half an hour on my skin. But while it lasts, it's like having a personal choir following you round singing the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom. Another more daring favourite is Givenchy's 'Insensé', which is that rarest of things, a floral for men. I know I said earlier that I hate florals, but this is an exception: a slightly overcast, herbaceous smell with woody undertones which lingers elusively on the edge of the senses. I'm not at all sure it suits me, but I like it very much because it is a beautiful, complex, slightly cerebral thing. And finally, I love L'Artisan Parfumeur's radiant, almost transparent 'Timbuktu', which is supposed to be inspired by Malian women's personal grooming rituals. (Bear with me here.) Apparently, the thing to do down the Mali is to make up a very personal dry paste of scented resins, woods and spices, which you then burn over a the embers of a fire while you stand above it drenching your skin and hair in the billowing clouds of smoke. The fragrance has topnotes of green mango peel and the spicy warmth of cardamon, with a background of completely clean, unoily smoke, a bit like well seasoned applewood being burnt on a bonfire. It's absolutely beautiful; I feel like a shaman when I'm wearing it.

So that's me for you. Now I simply must do some actual work.

Trash of the Titans

2010-04-04T11:58:00.000-07:00

I nipped off to see the remake of Clash of the Titans down the old kino the other day, having loved the 1981 film as a kid---Laurence Olivier as Zeus, Arsula Undress as Aphrodite---what wasn't to like? I resisted taking along a half-bottle of whiskey and a box of chocs, as recommended by Gwyneth Lewis in her Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression, but it was a close-run thing. It was that kind of evening, and I wanted trash.

And trash I duly got. What a meretricious crock o'shyte this remake was! I sat there in the fetid, popcorn-scented dark rolling my eyes at the screen. The first thing that's wrong with it is the absurd manufactured plot-device of having human beings rebelling against the Olympians for their arbitrary rule (what-ev-ah), a feature wholly, unimaginably alien to the religion and culture of the ancient world. Ditto the importation of concepts like redemption, salvation, and sin, all put into the mouth of a kind of loony proto-Christian sadhu, which map very awkwardly indeed onto pre-Christian culture---even this hyperkinetic imaginary version thereof. Hades, of course, was the principle victim of this polytheological reformation, inevitably being cast as a kind of devil-figure. Being played by Ralph Fiennes as a cross between Richard III and his own Lord Voldemort didn't help. Whilst gloomy and unloved in classical mythology, Hades nevertheless doesn't merit rewriting as a kind of evil, hunchbacked creep.

The casting was deeply idle---see Fiennes, above---with Sam Worthington playing the same identikit dim beefcake as he had in Avatar complete with unGreek crewcut; poor Polly Walker, magnificent bust straining under its sheath of gold crepe, simply reprised her role as Rome's Atia under a different name, one eye no doubt fixed on the paycheck. Throughout there were cinematographic 'borrowings', shall we say, from better and more imaginative pieces of epic film-making, which made the film feel cheap and whorish. The Stygian witches, for example, were embarrassing rip-offs of Guillermo del Toro's signature style of monster, with their noseless, eyeless faces and elongated, black-tipped fingers:

Much too was shamelessly ripped from Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy---the shots of Perseus on his flying horse ducking and diving after some leathery-winged nasties were plain copies of the battle of Minas Tirith, as were the mobile souks erected on the back of the giant eliphaunts, sorry, scorpions. Gemma Arteton's Io (shorn here of any bovine associations) was simply a kind of Arwen redux, complete with the kind of deep, breathy/sexy posh English voice that the lovely Liv Tyler affected so well for the role, quite different from her normal East Coast squeak.* Well-draped if a bit heavy on the Touche Eclat, Arterton had a kind of Junoesque quality which struck me as authentically Greek (just about the only thing in the film that was.) Here she is, wearing, well, let's just call it an 'item':

The casting highlights, on the other hand, were my favourite actor, the gorgeous Hans Matheson, and poor old Nicholas Hoult, fresh from sporting a soft-focus angora jumper in Tom Ford's A Single Man. As I watched the pair of them clambering about in deep tans and leather miniskirts, I reflected wistfully upon the Greek words erastes and eromenos, which certainly whiled away some of the film's longeurs.

The saddest thing about the remake, I decided, was the intermittently stunning art direction. Everywhere you looked, there was the luminous spectacle and inspired design which shows that a version of the Iliad, the Odyssey, or the Aeneid could be done which would enrapture the senses. If a heightened, mythic version of the ancient world can be done this convincingly on screen, then why not film something worth filming?! You could do all three epics in sets of six 45-minute episodes, if you employed clever, literate screenwriters who would be prepared to really familiarize themselves with the poems. A pipe dream, I suppose. But why couldn't Dido's palace in Aeneid 1 and 4 be like the Great Hall of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, which even had dancing girls sporting passable imitations of Minoan costume? There was a dreadful scene in which Gemma Arterton and Sam Worthington have a bit of a flirt in the hold of Charon's barge on the Styx (a genuinely new thought, that), but as they stood on the rickety jetty looking out over the misty river---her impassive in a white woollen cloak, him in armour---I thought: in a film-version of the Aeneid, Aeneas and the Sibyl could look just like this. But then the silly bastards went and spoiled it by having a Charon who looked like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean. OK, he was a kind of medieval Death-figure even in the original, but that's no excuse. Charon has a beard, people; his eyes are like fixed flames, according to Virgil, in a very strange phrase.**

For all that, there were some gorgeous touches. Pegasus (with or without the definite article) was impressive: we got to see some pegasikoi too, as it were---little colts with lovely downy wings like goslings. Medusa looked oddly Art Nouveau, more glassy Franz von Stuck than archaic apotropaion, but she wasn't half bad. And when she turned someone to stone, all the snakes on her head reared and hissed at the same time, which was a nice detail. There was also a rare moment of genuine intertextual humour when Perseus and his men were searching through the armoury of Argos for equipment. Perseus turns up a ridiculous mechanical owl, clearly the unbelievably naff 'Bubo' of the 1981 original. As it clicks and whirrs he asks what the hell it is, totally bemused. 'Just leave it', snaps the Argive captain, wearily.

The original Bubo, however annoying, did give the opportunity for a skillful cameo from Susan Fleetwood's glacially cerebral Athena (below), the eighties film giving a much better sense of Olympus as a divine society than the remake, which gave the gods' individual personalities very short shrift.

Up on the sacred mountain---the architecture of which looked a bit like the Skylon from the 1951 Festival of Britain---we saw a kind of golden-armoured Apollo (HE'S A BLOND, YOU IDIOTS), and old Julian Bashir from Deep Space 9 made a very improbable appearance as Hermes. No one else had a speaking part: no Hera, no Athena, no Ares, no nuffin'. Liam Neeson blustered about, Irish accent coming and going, looking very much the same as he had thirty years before as Gawain in John Boorman's Excalibur, turning up every so often as an Odinic wanderer, having blundered in (like the Kraken) from the wrong mythology.

A mystifying experience. All in all, my advice would be: if you're going to see it, don't see it sober, and secondly, watch the well-acted if campy original first.

* * *

*Never understood this. Most American women under thirty-five sound a bit like cartoon mice to my British ear. ('Sweeweewheedle, like, wheedlewheet?!!') My old housemate had an American friend with exactly this kind of abrasive, rape-alarm voice; I remember being down the far end of my old garden weeding when the words 'AND MY BREASTS WERE, LIKE, REALLY REALLY SOOOOORE?!!!!!!!!!!!!!' came shattering jaggedly through the air outside as the window was opened.

**stant lumina flamma, Aeneid 6.231. This is an odd, compressed, construction, though the meaning is clear: 'his eyes stand with flame', literally, but apparently something like 'his eyes are fixed and fiery'. I often wonder if this isn't a use of the 'standing' verb as a kind of verb 'to be', analogous to the use of the (directly cognate) atá in Irish.

Auerbach

2010-03-01T05:05:00.001-08:00

I'm reading the great Erich Auerbach's superlative Dante: Poet of the Secular World. On every page, I keep coming across passages of enormous insight and beauty, written with a luminous depth of knowledge and heritage of rumination which would be unusual in a youngish scholar these days. Auerbach was 37 when it was published, some 17 years before his extraordinary Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature, one of the most important critical books of all time, emerged.

In the world of letters one comes across a very few people who seem simply to have read everything: Bloom, Bowra, Sontag, Tony Nuttall, and a small number of others. I often reflect that there must have been a historical point (or points) when the literal achievement of that task---universal reading---became humanly impossible, at the moment when the volume of written matter in the West became such that even if you read all day from adolescence until death over a normal lifetime you would not be able to get through it all. (The last person reputed to have 'read everything' in this sense is sometimes argued to be Coleridge.) It must have been impossible in late Antiquity too, but we have lost so much of the writing of the classical world that it is now certainly possible to have read pretty much all the literature (note the rider) that survives.

Here are some particularly good bits from Auerbach's beautiful study.

On Virgil:

This peasant's son from northern Italy, whom the most reserved of his contemporaries and even the political leaders of the day regarded as a favourite of nature and looked upon with a kind of loving awe, combined a deep attachment to the Italian soil with the highest culture of his time. Those two elements were so fused in him that his rural traditionalism seems to be the quintessence of a perfect culture, while his cultivation gives the impression of a profound natural wisdom, at once earthy and divine.

On the Gospels:

And the story of Christ revealed not only the intensity of personal life but also its diversity and the wealth of its forms, for it transcended the limits of ancient mimetic aesthetics. Here man has lost his earthly dignity: everything can happen to him, and the classical division of genres has vanished; the distiction between the sublime and the vulgar style exists no longer. In the Gospels, as in ancient comedy, real persons of all classes make their appearance: fishermen and kings, high priests, publicans and harlots participate in the action; and neither do those of exalted rank act in the style of classical tragedy, no do the lowly behave as in a farce; quite on the contrary, all social and aesthetic limits have been effaced.

Hypnoticks

2010-02-15T15:03:00.000-08:00

I've been listening to this obsessively since James posted it on Facebook on New Year's Day. It's riveting: a bit Joy Division, a bit gloomy Sigur Rós, a bit Test Dept. I can't resist singing my own arcing, looped vocals over it, weaving in and out of the thrashing, industrial textures.

* * *

In contrast, here's Chanticleer's sumptuous deconstruction of Perotin's Beata Viscera, refracting the music into rippling, echoing lines. Ignore the naff birdsong at the start, and the nauseatingly saccharine imagery on the video. Like 'The Sound', this is another track which starts off simply and then after about five minutes develops into a fierce, shimmering complexity.

* * *

And, as it were halfway between the two, we have this gorgeous duet from Philip Glass's opera Akhnaten, in which the heretic pharaoh Akhnaten and his wife Nefertiti declare their love for one another. He is a countertenor and she and alto, so the sweetness and similarity of the voices is eerie: his more silvery, hers richer in tone. I listened to this constantly as a teenager, and to the following mesmerizing extract from Glass's Einstein on the Beach, which still moves me enormously:

A Lesson to Us All

2010-02-15T15:00:00.001-08:00

Too many milieux injure an adaptible sensibility. There was once a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue.

--Jean Cocteau, Le Potomak

Work in progress

2010-02-12T07:51:00.000-08:00

I spent last evening starting an icon, which now has to dry a bit before I can finish it (the glue under the gold has to harden so that it can be varnished.) I'm off out to get new brushes and some more paint, and to hit Heffers. I have worked my arse off this week, including all last weekend, and I'm bloody taking the day off.

* * *

UPDATE as of this afternoon---well, it's not a Photios Kontoglou, but it'll have to do. I can always pretend it's a Fayum mummy portrait rather than an ikon.

Mad

2010-02-09T12:35:00.000-08:00

I went down to London the other night to see the ENO's production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor with Melanie. I think I can say without fear of contradiction from her that it was the very worst opera I've ever seen; it gave a new meaning to the phrase sourly uttered by whichever Victoria Wood character it was, 'We left at the overture.'

Now, I'd never seen any Donizetti, but I have seen a decent amount of opera and my tastes are catholic, from Monteverdi to Adams. But this was terrible. Apalling. It's a bad sign when you think after three minutes, 'God, this is dull', and an even worse one when the tragic drama of love and brooding madness has you in absolute stitches. The (to my ear) awful, trundling badness of the music was a shock as well: every aria, each of which seemed to go on for ever, was like a foursquare old-fashioned hymn tune, minimally decorated with trills. It also had that staple of bad opera directing everywhere, where people fling themselves against walls and wardrobes to indicate they are feeling really deep, like, emotions. An even worse stagecraft staple was the pointless, slow-motion milling about of the chorus in a kind of glassy, unseeing Brownian motion, grinding around the stage in search of something to do.

The first scene involves a tedious and long-winded description of the background to the plot, which is in fact very straightforward: girl loves mortal enemy of her wicked brother, and secretly swears to marry him; mortal enemy has to leave for a while, during which absence girl is deceived by wicked brother into thinking mortal enemy is unfaithful; brokenhearted, she is persuaded to marry wicked brother's nasty choice of husband. Mortal enemy comes back during wedding, curses poor gulled girl unfairly for faithlessness (instead of stupidity, which would be quite justified), girl goes mad and kills nasty husband. To my mind, this simple enough, sub-Lloyd-Webber scenario did not necessitate the immensely clunky dialogue of the first scene, which Melanie and I parodied in a text-message exchange later that night:

(Me, imitating Enrico, the wicked brother, who is tearing his hair out)
'O! Fie upon it! How shall I recover my faded patrimony and the wrack of all my ambitions, if my sister Lucia will not agree to marry Ruggiero, the brother of Seraphina, lady-in-waiting to the late Queen? But, alas! Has he not spent the last decade disguised as Dondolo, the simple-minded illegitimate son of Pedro, the wicked clergyman whose lands abutt our own?! O, me miserable! Shame, Death, Ruin!'

(Melanie, continuing)
'O woe, for sorrow! For having been dispossessed by the wicked wrong-doing of the fraudulent Belshazzaro, upon the vagaries of an ingrate sister depend all my weighty dignity and pride, bequeathed me at my father's tragic fall from the hunting mare the prophecy warned him never to mount! Praise God we have convinced her by lies of the death of her lover at the hands of pirates, secretly in our pay! Give me the lying letter!'

It would have been better in Italian, because in English it was absurd. Also, no one in the entire vaguely 19th century production seemed to like using the door: if they could possibly climb in through the window, they did. This reached its proposterous height when Edgardo, cursing poor Lucia for her faithlessness, wrapped the white tablecloth around his shoulders like a cape, in the manner of a small boy pretending to be a superhero. Draping it around himself, he then climbed out of the window. At this point, Mel and I were both convulsed with helpless laughter, and could face no more; the lure of the famously beautiful glass-harmonica-accompanied mad-scene was nothing to the prospect of a drink and a Giardiniera at Pizza Express over the road.

Mere Sontagisme

2010-02-01T02:08:00.001-08:00

Here's an enormously amusing article about that old sacred monster Susan Sontag, similar in tenor and wry wit to Camille Paglia's uproarious dissection in Vamps & Tramps of the way that the great critic of Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will succumbed to narcissistic ego-bloat. (The title of Paglia's essay-cum-bitchslap, 'Sontag, Bloody Sontag', was worth the price of the book.)

I like Terry Castle from reading this. She has a fine sense of comic timing and self-mockery---on the way in which Sontag pressed her into service and driver and willing slave, she notes, 'I was rapt, like a hysterical spinster on her first visit to Bayreuth'. I'm going to get her big critical anthology The Literature of Lesbianism if it's anything like as fresh and witty as her journalism.

NB The above photo of Sontag is referred to in Castle's article.

Only Women Bleed

2010-01-11T06:57:00.000-08:00

I see radical lesbian feminist philosopher/theologian Mary Daly has died. The blog-obits have varied from the naffly saccharine to the excoriating, taking Daly to task for her failings, perceived or actual. (There's a hilarious piece over at Melissa McEwan's on Daly, in which McEwan, having come to praise her, contorts herself into a flailing ecstasy of right-on self-abasement in the Comments once she's told that Daly was once nasty to transsexuals.)

It's rather difficult to write about Daly, as a man, without being accused of bigotry. A keynote of her playful style was the making of very extreme statements forte con brio which might or might not have been merely throwaway. In this she was like a kind of philosophical performance artist of woman-rage, but the line she trod between radical art-speech and radical hate-speech was, sadly, a narrow one. I'm not sure becoming a kind of mirror-image Tertullian really did her, feminism, or the world much good in the end, nor how deliberate a pose it was. But more on this anon.

Credit where credit is due: Daly wrote some wonderful, profound, clever things that totally put the bomb under the 'kyriarchy' (great word). Beginning with work on the great Jesuit intellectual Jacques Maritain, she moved into skeweringly accurate analyses of patriarchal religious structures, especially in her early works like The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the Father. These did much to enable women and men alike to see the hierarchies of institutional Christianity as contingent and Kafkaesque, and in them she laid bare---with lacerating, scornful wit---how deeply that religion's pompous absurdities of practice are in fact rooted in the murky bowels of its theology. (A metaphor Daly would have liked, that.) I find this a tenable if intellectually-unsubtle view, but then Daly was never really interested in nuance: her favourite word was 'BIG!'. I respect Daly a great deal for her refusal to bill herself as any kind of dutiful patriarchal daughter, utterly rejecting any concession, and, sometimes, using language with a kind of bubbling, fierce humour. And may her name be forever blessed for the wonderful coinage academentia: don't we all just know what she meant.

Unfortunately, she then began a period which lasted until her death in which she gradually lost touch with the world around her whilst claiming to see it ever more clearly. As Lord Shaftesbury remarked, '[T]he most ingenious way to become foolish' is 'by a system.' For a deeply learned woman, Daly's scholarship became erratic: she clung, for example, to the notorious 'nine million women' figure for the number of deaths in the early modern Witchcraze, and completely ignored the emergent and specifically radical feminist scholarship of the 1980s which demonstrated that her view of the witch trials was simply mistaken---a note of intellectual high-handedness with other women scholars which sadly came to blight her work. She was not in any way a competent historian (except perhaps, once, of the Church) but ultimately a kind of philosophical propagandist; when history becomes martyrology and persuasion is replaced by propaganda---in however prankish a spirit and in however good a cause---then the scholar ensures the eventual academic evanescence of their own work, because it will have to be redone properly.

This propaganda settled into the form of a radical feminist Manichaeism, in which the world is divided down the middle into men (bad, intrinsically disordered, violent, oppressive and 'necrophile') and women (good, intriniscally oriented correctly towards life and each other, peaceful, oppressed and 'biophile'.) One of the saddest things to watch, as one reads Daly's later works, is the way that the first category grew ever more capacious and the second shrunk ever further as the ideological strictures tightened. By the late 90s, 'women' had come to mean radical feminist lesbians, or, as Daly might have put it, only Positively Revolting Hags who had Crone-ologically seen through the patriarchal pompenile parades, rejected intercourse in favour of Outercourse, and had joyously up-risen into Quintessential Be-ing. As her remaking of the dictionary, Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, makes plain, Daly was, alas, no Joyce when it came to wordplay. The experience of being trapped in the book's thuddingly-repetitive, elephantine punning makes me feel like Victoria Wood's wonderful character Kitty, a formidable Manchester matron of decided views, who tells us:

--She said, 'Kitty, do you like fun?' I said, 'No, I don't!--I had enough of that in 1958 when I was stuck in a lift with a hula-hoop salesman.'

(As Daly might have said, 'We may be overthrowing the patriarchy, but I want it to be fun fun fun.') As her throught developed, she appointed herself the arbiter of who of who was not 'a real woman' according to her own exalted criteria, eventually defining which women were and were not worthy of a feminist revolution. Sex-workers, transgendered women, Christians, straight women who enjoy straight sex, mothers of boys, women who love their male relatives, women who have undergone male-derived kinds of psychotherapy---all were eventually excluded in Pure Lust as 'imitation males.' Men, of course, had to go too, via a shady and unspecified process of 'decontamination'. I find it astounding that a woman of Daly's obvious intelligence felt able to use that term in a post-Holocaust world, in which it is a clear and sinister synonym for 'extermination.' As she said:

If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.

Change 'males' to 'Jews', 'blacks', or 'gays' and see how it reads. Whether or not she meant this statement seriously, and whether or not anything can be said on the grounds that it's merely playful, philosophical free-association, Daly struck here a genuine note of wistful Stalinism once too often for my liking.

There are a variety of questions that can be raised about Daly's career, beyond the infamous banning of male students from her advanced classes; on the latter, I can see her point, but on the other hand it's little better in my opinion than the ghastly Islington registrar Lilian Ladele refusing to perform Civil Partnerships: in other words, whatever wacko views you feel it incumbent upon you to hold, you have to perform the job you were employed to do fairly. I find it striking that Daly told women to leave the Church en masse, but continued to work for a Jesuit university for over three decades. Intellectually, the main problem is her apparent inability to conceive that there might be other axes of oppression beyond men vs women, and that perhaps class, education, race, and economic status might just possibly complicate such a simplistic binary. It mystifies me that such a sophisticated thinker could be so tin-eared at times. Hers was ultimately not a flexible mind; her intellectual style closely resembles that of that Eagleton-coined atheist pushmi-pullyu, 'Ditchkins', i.e. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchkins. Whereas Ditchkins sees religion itself as an irredeemably corrupting influence on the human mind and writes from a position of withering intellectual certainty, Daly saw the kyriarchical forms of religion as the monstrous leviathan to be slain by herself as a labrys-wielding female Marduk. Both often hit the target and hit it hard; both are often guilty an obtuse lack of imaginative sympathy and intellectual manoeuvrability.

There were other problems: the issues about Daly's unedifying fear and loathing of transsexual women (to whom she implied actual violence should be done) have been well picked over on the blogosphere, as has womanist poet Audre Lorde's famous open letter accusing Daly (in polite terms) of a privilged, colonialist and unconsciously racist mindset and methodology---to which Daly apparently never publicly responded. I'll let you hunt those out for yourselves should you wish to do so.

All in all, I'm glad feminism has moved beyond Beyond God the Father, as it were, jettisoning Daly's utopian flights of fantasy and lurid lesbian neo-hierarchies, despite her importance. Daly once wrote: 'I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism – or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism – which are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!' I find in this---Maoism and Marxism aside---a recipe for the reductive suicide of human culture, and an extraordinary sense of intellectual contempt deriving from unconscious feeling of vulnerability to pollution. (She could have done with thinking about Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger a bit harder.) For Daly, there is no point even thinking about, say, the three-thousand year old legacy of Hindu culture, spirituality, literature, art, ritual, architecture, medicine, or philosophy: it is merely an instantiation of the patriarchy. (Someone had better pop Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty a note through.) I find myself questioning whether Daly was really learned enough in, for example, Buddhism or Jungian thought to pronounce them valueless and 'itty-bitty' in this way. Judging by her basic lack of attention to them and the historical errors of her scholarship, I rather doubt it. As she gradually lost interest in any account of literature, psychology, biology, history, or religion which conflicted with her stark worldview, she became increasingly ideologically self-marooned; a great loss to the world, as she had an exceptional mind.

There's one term in particular that I do wish that she had picked up from Jung: enantiodromia, that is, 'the tendency of polarised extremes to come to resemble one another via a process of compulsive unconscious compensation.' Ultimately, Daly was an extraordinarily powerful and yet limited thinker, who took the tools used to construct patriarchal religion and analysed them in great and mordant detail. Alas that she went on to use those tools to erect a house of mirrors, which came strangely to reproduce the original patriarchal edifice. By being hierarchically exclusivist, by claiming privileged access to truth, by erecting purity laws about sex and by anathematizing dissent, Daly created a house in which every surface reflected only her own face. In the end, perhaps the best---and the worst---that I can say about Mary Daly is that after a lifetime's striving in the service of feminist thought and nine or so books, historically she won't even be as important as Camille Paglia, another lesbian feminist and her thorough-going ideological opposite.

Anyway, despite my misgivings above, rest in peace, Mary.

2010-01-06T08:07:00.001-08:00

The Turn of the Screw.

I've read the novella, seen the Britten opera, and watched the TV adaptation.

I just don't get the point: some young woman who might or might not be a hysteric has a spot of bother with some posh kids who might or might not have been touched up by a corrupt valet and his floozy, who (spot the theme) might or might not be visiting them from beyond the grave. It's all so utterly inconsequential, and fails to give me the chills or even hold my interest. Give me Sheridan Le Fanu or M. R. James any day.

Snow on snow...

2009-12-19T05:47:00.001-08:00

Here are some more pictures I took as I went out to dice with the chance of a broken hip this morning, Cambridge's pavements being a mass of transparent, inch-thick, mirror-smooth ice.

(A bit of King's.)

(The classic Cambridge Christmas view: King's College Chapel.)

(Part of the main court of my college, as I went to collect my mail.)

(Senate House.)

(Old Court, 'Porterhouse'.)

(The gardens, 'Porterhouse'.)

Cruise control

2009-12-15T03:11:00.001-08:00

It took me several seconds to realise that this is a small child, and not a woman with primordial dwarfism. Suri Cruise is three and a half years old.

Omens

2009-12-07T06:27:00.001-08:00

(Harold Bloom)

Thoroughly enjoying Harold Bloom's Omens of Millennium: the great literary critic is so much more enjoyable when not doing his tired 'Ain't it awful?' number, that is, when not writing about literature.

The book has his usual faults: it reads as though Bloom actually wrote a 50,000 word long essay and then left his put-upon research assistants to pad it out to book length. It is full of repetetion, often telling us the same thing twice in the course of five pages: that Elijah became the angel Sandalphon, for example, or that when the next 'authentic' American prophet comes to follow Joseph Smith, 'we will not recognise her (at least at first).' It has Bloom's bad habit of adding '-ism' to words to create unclear abstract nouns---'angelicism', for example----or using technical terms in non-technical ways; Nietzsche's 'perspectivism' is pressed into service to mean something like 'a vertiginous evocation of soaring height and plunging depth', and 'vitalism' is used to mean 'irrepressable vitality'. It has irritating tics like his dislike of Jung's thought ('a reductive cult'), which he clearly doesn't understand at all, and his ironic fondness for Mormonism. There is a strange sequence of pages in Chapter II ('DREAMS') in which the prose suddenly ceases to make sense, Bloom going incomprehensibly off on one for about 3,000 words. As I read it, I assumed I was failing to understand a word because I was drunk, before realising that I was, in fact, perfectly sober.

For all that, it's an enjoyable book, if you like delving into Kabbala, Sufism, Swedenborg and the like; full of incidental hermetic joys, its main interest for me was in listening to Bloom telling us a little about himself and his own ironic, neo-Gnostic religious sense, rather than talking his usual old bollocks about 'self-overhearing' in Shakespeare.

Garden

2009-11-10T09:40:00.001-08:00

The view over the Scholars' Garden from my office window at 8.45am.

RIP

2009-10-12T00:43:00.001-07:00

This is my grandad's obituary from The Guardian.

* * *

The psychiatrist Arthur Hyatt Williams, who has died aged 94 after a long illness, was a pioneer in treating criminals psychoanalytically. Widely known as Hyatt, he was a warm, energetic and optimistic person, both boyish and paternal. He believed strongly that even the most hardened criminals, including murderers for whom there was no chance of direct reparation, could be helped to work on their sense of guilt and modify their destructive tendencies, and he would put himself out to a great degree in order to treat them.

This belief was one source of his enthusiastic campaigning, along with Leo Abse and others, for the abolition of the death penalty, which came in 1965. Hyatt also did long-term work with people who might otherwise have become violent. It is hard to demonstrate the full value of such preventive work.

He was one of a relatively small group of prominent psychoanalysts who combined their high level of commitment to psychoanalysis with a passionate dedication to the public sector. Moreover, where tough work was to be done – with very disturbed adolescents, or psychotically depressed postnatal mothers, or couples involved in domestic violence, say – there Hyatt would be.

As a child brought up in a family of modest means on the Wirral, Cheshire, Hyatt developed a lifelong passion for all things living. At the age of 13 he was so fascinated by the butterflies on a visit to Liverpool Museum that the curator asked his mother if the young enthusiast could come each week and help. He first wanted to become a zoologist. Instead, partly as a result of winning a scholarship, he studied medicine at Liverpool University, later specialising as a psychiatrist, and going on to train as a psychoanalyst, qualifying in 1952.

His first analyst was Elizabeth Rosenberg (later Zetzel), till she returned to America after a year. Then he saw Eva Rosenfeld; she had helped Sigmund Freud and his family leave Vienna in 1938 before herself settling in London.

During the second world war, Hyatt did three years' service in military hospitals, followed by three years in military psychiatry, with Indian troops, in India and Burma, where he was mentioned in dispatches for his work in a forward area. He was also involved as a psychiatrist in the innovative War Office selection boards.

One of his stories from this vivid period concerned his calling a fellow officer a "moronic psychopath". The officer complained to the commander, who listened carefully and said: "This is a serious situation. I have known Dr Williams for a long time and have followed his work closely. I have never known him to be wrong in the diagnoses he makes."

After the war, Hyatt worked first in Maidstone, Kent, and then, during the 1950s, began a part-time involvement with criminals at Wormwood Scrubs prison, west London. This became the field of his most significant work. No doubt for personal reasons, but also to help him in dealing with the destructiveness of some of his patients, he went back into analysis, first with Melanie Klein – as one of her last two patients – then, after her death in 1960, with Hanna Segal.

In 1962, his work in prisons was complemented by his joining the staff of the Tavistock Clinic, in Hampstead, north London, as consultant psychiatrist and subsequently chair of the adolescent department (1969-78). He played a big role in the recognition of adolescence as a specific entity, rather than as merely an intermediate waiting period between childhood and adulthood. His psychoanalytic work included treatment of adolescents and adults presenting a full range of difficulties.

Hyatt's book 'Cruelty, Violence and Murder' (1998) outlines his concept of the "death constellation": the tilting of the balance between destructive and constructive elements in the personality, so that in some cases, for a combination of constitutional and environmental reasons, an imbalance arises. When this imbalance coalesces into a character trait the person has to kill off whatever is too painful. Through a relationship in which mourning and remorse become possible, people in this situation can be helped to find their more human potential. Hyatt stressed that mourning is indispensable for mental health in general, as well as in the processing of murderousness arising from the death constellation.

He was no stranger himself to loss and mourning. When his first two wives, both psychoanalysts, died relatively young, Hyatt was devastated, and characteristically not ashamed to show it and share it. In 1939, he married Lorna Bunting; in 1972, Shiona Tabor, nee White; and, in 1987, Gianna Henry, nee Polacco, a child psychotherapist and later a psychoanalyst.

Hyatt's love of nature led him to spend time in cottages in the country in Britain and Italy, and to do voluntary work on the protection of butterflies. He is remembered at the Cassell hospital, west London, where he also worked, for changing from his suit (and his challenging work with troubled families) into his gardening clothes, and producing lots of vegetables. He is said to have grown aubergines in pots on the sunny window-ledge of his office at the Tavistock – he was equally prolific with ideas. He loved literature, knowing by memory large chunks of Shakespeare, Keats, Coleridge and writing beautiful papers on their work. He taught and lectured widely, not only in Britain but in Australia, the US, Italy and Spain.

From 1982 to 1985 he was director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, where he was helpfully straightforward to colleagues and students alike. He was an excellent supervisor; I remember him speaking about a patient who had dreams of working for the charity War On Want. Hyatt's comments about her making war on her own wanting helped me to understand in a new way something about the death instinct. This was a typical intervention: bold, insightful, graphic and non-judgmental. It was characteristic, too, of his love of and respect for word play.

Hyatt recalled becoming the target of a lorry driver's rage while he was driving from treating a murderer in Pentonville. After Hyatt had managed to defuse the situation, the lorry driver said: "If you don't want to get into a fight you'd better not look like that" – which Hyatt took as a helpful warning to him to create more space in order to separate himself better from the impact of the murderer's personality.

After his official retirement from his NHS post in 1979, Hyatt continued to teach at the Tavistock and to co-chair a workshop in the adolescent department for at least another 20 years, well into his 80s. He also worked as a psychoanalyst up to the age of 88.

He is survived by Gianna, by four sons from his first marriage and by four stepdaughters.• Arthur Hyatt Williams, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, born 23 September 1914; died 27 August 2009

Nine Lives, the Barbican

2009-09-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

As a promo for his new Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, William Dalrymple had arranged an evening of readings and music last night at the Barbican Centre. There were the wandering, God-intoxicated minstrels from Bengal, the bauls; then Pakistani sufis singing the rapturous poetry of the 18th century saint, Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit Shah; then dalit Theyyam dancers from Kerala; and then finally Anglo-Tamil singer Susheela Raman singing traditional and then reworked hymns from Chola-era Tamil Nadu. The fabulously talented Raman was, I suspect, the main draw for most of the westerners in the audience.

Dalrymple's book, which I currently have on the go, is an attempt to examine the current situation of the great spritual traditions of the subcontinent at this time of huge change and economic growth. (India's economy is set to overtake that of the US by 2050, completely reversing the last century's world order.) Dalrymple accordingly tells the stories of nine people---the 'Nine Lives' of the title---including a Buddhist monk, a Jain nun, a possession dancer from Kerala, a devadasa or sacred prostitute, and a tantric skull-feeder. The story of the latter is a striking instance of the cultural and economic changes which Dalrymple examines: from an American academic journal, he had heard of a Tantric adept in Bengal whose role was to take the skulls of restless suicides and wandering virgins and to calm them by feeding them rice and dhal, thus setting their unhappy spirits to rest. After much searching, Dalrymple found the skull-feeder, and interviewed him. Initially happily forthcoming about his mysterious and grisly calling, the skull-feeder eventually clammed up. When Dalrymple asked why, given that the tantric had spoken at length about his work to an American anthropologist twenty years previously, the adept replied sheepishly that both his two sons were both ophthalmologists in New Jersey, and had warned their father that talking about feeding skulls might be bad for business. Thus speaks the New India!

The audience were strikingly divided. In the main, the westerners were shabbily-dressed old hippies, the women in beads and faded, shapeless garments Fiona McKeown-style, the men in jeans and T-shirts. Those of Asian origin or extraction, on the other hand, were without exception beautifully dressed---I was sitting next to a man of about my age in a three-piece suit of herringbone tweed---with the women in particular showing that luminously graceful, well-draped elegance and ability to wear bright colour that only Indian and French women seem to possess. In the jeans and T-shirt brigade myself, I felt awkward, realising that this was potentially a rather formal and indeed classical evening for many of the Indians in the audience.

The bauls---which means 'madmen' in Bengali, and rhymes with 'cowls'---were wonderful. An eclectic group of wandering spiritual minstrels combining elements of many faiths, they were dressed in multicoloured, harlequin-like patchwork, their devotional songs haunting and energetic at the same time, with very long, microtonally ornamented vocal lines. There was some gender thing going on too---these middle-aged and elderly men stepping and prancing with subtly, sweetly feminine gestures of yearning. Two great bauls were present: Debdas Baul, and the blind minstrel Kanai Das Baul, who is described in this article in the Guardian. Both performed near the end of the bauls' set, sitting for the first part on a low raised platform, crosslegged, absolutely still. Here are some bauls:

The audience loved them, but like Colonel Gadaffi, they overran their session, meaning that the fakirs of Bhit Shah in souther Pakistan who followed them had to do a a shortened set of only two songs. (Dalrymple, visibly sweating with relief, announced that the fakirs had only received their visas the day before, and had arrived at the Barbican at 7.25 for a 7.30 concert.) As the bauls represented a kind of Hinduism blent with mystical Islam, so the Shah Jo Raag fakirs represented Muslim mysticism syncretised harmoniously with Hinduism. Sitting in a row, the five musicians each played a damboor, slapping the resonator and plucking the strings whilst singing the verses of the their revered saint, who died in 1752 and at whose tomb their order has sung every day and night ever since. Their sound was frankly difficult for western ears, with moments of enormous beauty but also an unexpected roughness; it was like a three-way cross between Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's ecstatic qawwali (without the French bistro-esque accordion), the massive, sinuously cumulative power of dhrupad chant, and the noise of tomcats fighting in an alleyway. Here's the late, great Nusrat sahib by the way:

After the interval, we had the theyyam dancers of north Malabar, and this is one of the few occasions where I really can say I've witnessed something absolutely incredible. Theyyam (from Skt. daivam, 'god') refers to a Keralan custom of spectacular trance-possession, in which dancers drawn from the lowest caste, the dalits, are dressed in astonishing costumes and masks; possessed by the divinities and drummed up into ecstasy by a trio of percussionists, they dance, and are worshipped as gods, even by the most bigoted of brahmins. For the period of the theyyam, the rules of caste are reversed, and position and power are miraculously tranferred to the powerless. The custom---which is extraordinarily similar to Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian possession practices---seems to be a rare local survival of pre-Indo-European, non-brahminical Dravidian religion, later absorbed into Hinduism. Here's a theyyam dancer:

Under the red stage lights, the vast masks and costumes were seriously weird and very powerful, the dancing really quite amazingly primordial and violent, with nothing of the fluid, precise courtly grace one associates with kathak, for example. At the end, the dancer incarnating the Mother Goddess (?) blessed us all (I think) by flicking his/her fingers at the audience. Wiser readers than I will have to tell me if this is right: my ability to analyse the symbolism of the masks was hampered both by my ignorance of the art-form and by having lost a contact lens on the tube.

Finally, as the theyyam dancers were helped off to a roar of applause, we had the magnificent Susheela Raman, slinky in a red dress, presenting her version of ancient thevaram hymns from Tamil Nadu. These are devotional songs written by Tamil saints during the great Hindu revival of the Chola period, famed also for its exquistely delicate and sensuous bronzes. After winning a Mercury Music prize nomination in 2001, Raman moved to Tamil Nadu and studied the Thevaram tradition with one of the last great masters. She has an extraordinary voice, gauzy and delicate in the higher registers, very deep and resonant in the lower; she is also highly trained in south Indian classical singing. Dalrymple was lucky to get her, as her high profile undoubtedly was a draw for many in the audience. However, I felt as I watched her that her inclusion might have been a mistake. I personally loved her set, ancient Thevaram hymns gradually being accompanied by electric guitar and inflected with a full-blooded rock sensibility: but this non-traditional---and loud!---reworking was too much for many of the middle-aged and older people in the audience, and I saw numerous people get up and leave in something like disgust, including the couples on either side and in front of me. (You can hear the song Raman began with, a hymn to the deity Murugan, here.) As I left, one of the aging hippes was remonstrating aggressively with the unfortunate Irish girl on the door. 'I wouldn't have gone to a pop concert in England, why would I go to one in India?' I heard her asking, obviously so addled on nagchampa and rough dope that she hadn't realised she was in fact in central London. I felt like telling the silly cow to get her head out of her asana.

To round off, there's a fabulous hymn to the tamil divinity Murugan here, in which the mystifying imagery---six babies appearing in a puff of smoke in six lotus blossoms?---can be explained by the wikipedia article on the deity here. (Who'd have guessed that the six women who collect the six lotus-babies are the Pleiades?!)

Face/Off

2009-09-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

Further to yesterday's post on Tori Amos, I must ask: what has she done to her dolly old eek?! She looks like a novelty candle of herself. I hope it's just duct-tape and butterfly-clips under that wig.

On that note, let me draw your attention to the work of the fabulously talented, but sadly late, Kevyn Aucoin, whose book Making Faces is one of the most gorgeous books about make-up ever written. Aucoin created a whole series of looks for Amos before his tragically early death at 40 from an undiagnosed pituitary tumour. Here's an Aucoined-Amos as Pocahontas---

---and as Simonetta Vespucci (is there any more beautiful name in the world?):

Aucoin was an expert at creating unnerving impersonations. Here's Callista Flockheart as Audrey Hepburn and Gwyneth Paltrow as James Dean (!)---

---followed by Winona Rider as Liz Taylor, with Gina Gershon as Sophia Loren:

Swooningly gorgeous. Reader, if I didn't spend my life sighing and saying, 'No, you've not translated the infixed pronoun', I'd have been a make up artist.* It's one of those things I just know instinctively I could do really well, unlike the much larger list of things I know I'd do really badly. For that matter, I want Lisa Eldridge's job: like, really, really want it. Look through her ravishing gallery of work here: old Naomi Wolf, whom (sorry Justine, I know you like her) I've always found a rather second-rate mind, can troll right off with her beauty myth. (Wolf is currently having a jolly old time defending the veiling of women in a fantastically dim piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.)

*Actually I'd probably have been a shrink or a garden designer, but never mind.

Tori Amos

2009-09-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

From amongst Camille Paglia's peculiar mishmash of incisive, learned commentary and braggadocio-swollen drivel, I find one insight in particular to be profoundly useful: that continuity is more real than fracture, and that a sensually-alert holism makes for a more sophisticated hermeneutic than po-faced, atomising hand-wringing, to say nothing of the striking of fashionably careerist poses in shrinking and ever more specialised academic fiefdoms: I passionately believe that learning, like Love in 'Aristophanes'' speech in Plato's Symposium, is the pursuit of the whole. To put it more crudely, I believe art is primarily about pleasure, in the broadest sense, which includes intellectual pleasure. We can certainly interrogate our pleasures, expand them, and rank them in a hierarchy of values, but literary- and art-criticism which has lost sight of rapture and rich emotion---criticism, in other words, which thinks itself smugly superior to that which is criticised---isn't worth the name.

A corollary of this is Paglia's useful Frazer-meets-Freud belief that paganism never ended, but gorgeously continued in the high cultural tradition of the West, and that it now surges on, unabated, in our popular culture. (Note to pagans--this belief in continuity is not literal in a kind of ghastly Murray-ite way: it's a metaphor for competing aesthetic modes.) There are serious problems with this view, like, uh, the existence of the entire Middle Ages. But nevertheless I have thoroughly absorbed Paglia's habit of reading popular culture through the lens of the art and religion of the ancient world, a style of looking which, of course, also links with astrology--- another ancient discipline old Paggers and myself both love.

Which brings me by a roundabout route to Tori Amos, whom I saw live last on Thursday night at the Hammersmith Apollo.

Amos is a genius--an absolute 24 carat genius, like her older contemporary Kate Bush, whose rate of output she surpassed long ago. She has volcanic stage-presence, a molten rapport with the audience and their emotions that belies her hermetic, Mallarmé-like lyrics, which often sound as though they have been translated from another language by a computer program ('Deck the halls / I'm young again / I'm you again / Racing turtles / The grapefruit is winning...'), and would make more sense in the original Estonian. Writhing flame-haired between two facing pianos, often playing one with each hand in opposite directions, she creates vast, surging waves of feeling using rhythm and orchestration and that swooping, sweet-spectral voice. It's almost cinematic in the way it bypasses the brain and grabs hold of your heart. She reminded me forcibly of Homer's Circe, and even more of Virgil's, who has a gorgeous cameo at the start of Aeneid 7. This is the brilliantly Amos-esque passage:

Adspirant aurae in noctem nec candida cursus
Luna negat, splendet tremulo sub lumine pontus.
Proxima Circaeae raduntur litora terrae,
dives inaccessos ubi Solis filia lucos
adsiduo resonat cantu tectisque superbis
urit odoratam nocturna in lumina cedrum,
arguto tenuis percurrens pectine telas.
Hinc exaudiri gemitus iraeque leonum
vincla recusantum et sera sub nocte rudentum,
saetigerique sues atque in praesaepibus ursi
saevire ac formae magnorum ululare luporum,
quos hominum ex facie dea saeva potentibus herbis
induerat Circe in voltus ac terga ferarum.

Soft winds blew all that night and the white moon
lit their way, the sea phosphorescent beneath its glimmer.
Keeping close inshore, they skirted the land of Circe,
the rich daughter of the Sun. She makes the virgin woods
re-echo her unceasing song, and there she lightens the night-shadows
of her lofty palace with brands of fragrant cedarwood,
her shuttle flickering to-and-fro over the delicate weft.
From her island they could hear the angry roaring of lions,
fretting at their chains and growling long into the night,
with bristling boars and caged bears and the eerie howling
of beings trapped in the shape of huge wolves---
men whom the savage goddess had transformed with potent herbs
into creatures with the fur and faces of wild beasts.

(Aeneid 7.10ff, my trans)

I love this passage of the Aeneid: it's utterly typical of Virgil's brilliance. The images are visually imprecise, eluding the eye in a kind of shadowy half-light---moonlight, firelight---and along with Aeneas and his men we hear rather than see the island of the goddess, and wonderfully even smell it in the case of the cedarwood torches. The combination of Circe's siren-like endless singing against the roar of the howling enchanted animals strikes an uneasy, decadent note: it makes her sound almost like a self-pleasuring, amoral mechanism, singing over a backing chorus of agonised creatures. I'm reminded of a horrible story about Salvador Dalí, according to which the great artist used to drift restfully off to sleep to the howls of live cats he'd nailed to the ceiling.

God, Amos was working the Circe archetype hard on Thursday night. She struck exactly this note of savage delicacy and sublime, self-absorbed apartness. She rocked up and down the pianos like the Virgilian goddess at her loom, opalescent and witchlike, looping her vocals over the animal roar of the guitars and drums. For Amos in full Circean mode, watch this sadly unembeddable video of 'Rasperry Swirl', especially at 3.43--4.05: she burns, she blazes. Give Sandys' Morgan la Fee two opposing pianos and a drumkit and you have the idea:

Her persona as an artist isn't chill and lunar, despite the frosty associations of early songs like 'Icicle' and 'Winter': she's hot. In terms of ancient archetypes, she isn't the witch---usually a loathsome tomb-crawler and necromancer in the ancient world, splendidly apotheosised by Erichtho in Lucan's Pharsalia. No, Amos is channelling those amoral solar sorceresses, Circe and her niece, Medea; and like both of them, she is a descendent of the sun, not of the moon. The overwhelming impression she gives is of furnace-like power.

So as I watched her last night, kundalini racing up my spine, eyebuds on both palms burning, gays spraying tears and Smirnoff Ice everywhere, I reflected that the reason t'gheys love 'all them old women singers' is to do with this quality of potency, as concentrated in the voice. A good female voice can be like a weapon, a hugely forceful and muscular projection from a incongruously slight physical frame. The strong-voiced woman singer thus partakes of a kind of androgyny, because in vocal power the sexes are equal, and she can ply her vocal line like the amazon plies her sword. (In opera there's often a piquant contrast between this gender equality on the vocal level and the awful way the women characters are treated in the plot, a contrast which I think is key to the stunning emotional reach of the artform.)

As Amos rauchily gyrated sidesaddle on the piano-stool, I thought about the way that men often dismiss a certain type of artistic genius in women as mere kookiness, veiling any visceral sexuality safely out of sight under a gauze of elfin waftiness. It's a subtle disembodying tactic, perhaps---replace the woman who sings about being caught masturbating in her 'pumpkin p.j.'s' with a constructed nymph or queen of the fairies. (Compare the removal of the woman poet from the human order to the supernatural one implied by Sappho's ancient epithet, 'The Tenth Muse', brilliantly dissected by Greer in Slipshod Sibyls.)

(A very botoxed Tori singing 'Bouncing off Clouds')

Oh God, how I love her! Amos has---like many another woman artist---placed the manipulation of multiple personae at the heart of her work, breaking out a shifting and kaleidoscopic parade of masks. She's made this quite explicit at times, creating perplexingly different personalities for different songs---a fluid, feminine artistic mode alien to the male tendency to crystalise and make literal (Pessoa notwithstanding). Here's the cover for 2001's collection of covers, Strange Little Girls---

---and in 2007's American Doll Posse, Amos sang in five personae explicitly derived from Greek goddesses:

A facet of this characteristic elusiveness and indeterminacy is also seen in Amos's habitual word-slurrings and lyrics which teeter on the edge of total incomprehensibility:

Never was a cornflake girl
thought that was a good solution
hangin with the raisin girls
she's gone to the other side
givin us a yo heave ho

---as 'Cornflake Girl' starts, for example. 'My encyclopedia' comes out, in the same song, as 'Ma hencyclopuheedeeah!', and in the slinky, langourously despairing 'Iieee' the word 'chapel' is idiosyncratically pronounced 'chaypull'. Words loose final syllables or develop strange prosthetic consonants.

On Thursday she did a range of old and new material that played out these (ahem) sexual personae in gorgeous fullness. We heard the exquisite 'Icicle' from 1994 (many of Amos' early songs are relentlessly snowbound), which is very nearly an Emily Dickinson poem:

Icicle -- icicle --
Where are you going --
Where are you going --
I have a hiding place --

When spring marches in --
Will you keep watch for me --
I hear them calling --

Evoking an uncomfortable place on the edge of loss of innocence, both sexual and theological, this song has the haunting line 'greeting the monster in our Easter dresses', which has an peripubertal, Angela Carter feel of wolfishness, snow and willingly-threatened virginity. As with Dickinson, the influence of protestant hymnody is fundamental to the structuring of Amos' work, and many of her songs have strongly hymnlike patterns of rhyme and refrain. You can hear something of the same influence on 'Bells for her', the lyrics' solemn fatalism augmented by the use of the lovely gamelan-like tones of a prepared piano, matching Amos' own exquisite, Butoh-esque movements:

Phew. I could go on all afternoon, but I'll spare you. If you don't know Amos' work, hie thee hence to iTunes, or failing that YouTube. All I can say is that she's absolutely bloody blinding. I bow down!