. one of the great rhetorical tricks of patriarchy, which is to define women’s value in terms of appearance, and simultaneously to define appearance as something so utterly trivial that only completely shallow and useless creatures — like, say, women! — would care about it.

That's why men die younger than women...stupidity blocks arteries.

Former Tottenham midfielder Teemu Tanio insists he was happy to swap London for Sunderland, insisting it's lovely compared to his native Lapland. (Daily Mirror)

As I understand it, the judgment was predicated on case law from 1983 which ruled that a Sikh boy could not be denied a place in school simply because he wore a turban. I don't really see how British civilisation is going to fall because a 14 year old girl wears a tiny bangle on her wrist. Since that judgment in the 1980's a couple of generations of British Sikhs have been educated and excelled academically without any trouble, contributed to British society by becoming doctors, lawyers, academics, engineers, businessmen, whatever. Isn't that what it's all about?

I found the reaction to the judgment amidst the chatter of phone ins and internet messages most interesting. Nice to see Sikhs being cast as bacteria inside the body of Britannica once again, we had been feeling left out for the last decade or whatever. Some of the chauvinist reactions have been paranoid and hysterical and quite amusing. It'll just make Sikhs work harder to excel, create businesses, and get themselves on the Rich List, to by-pass all of that. So I welcome a certain percentage of bigotry in order to remind the younger generation of the need for hard work. For a while there I think people were starting to get lazy.

Yesterday the judge condemned the “seriously erroneous attitude” of the school, which had equated the wearing of the bangle to displaying the Welsh flag - ignoring its religious importance.

However, Martin Ward, deputy general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that he was disappointed.

“The school had offered the student reasonable alternatives to accommodate her religious beliefs, such as wearing the bangle, but not so that it was on display, and it is frustrating that the courts did not find this acceptable.”

1. The legacy of a state that has acted on some socialist principles and has done so reasonably successfully in specific areas, chiefly infrastructure and utilities;

2. The legacy of a state that had brought about a degree of social levelling if not exactly social justice;

3. The legacy of a state that had brought about a certain social cohesion, partly through social levelling, partly through extensive support of cheap culture and education, and partly - inadvertently - through opposition to itself;

1. The legacy of a party-state that had no real resemblance to open democracy, however it might pretend;

2. The legacy of a state that provided very little variety, and no great choice in either necessary items or consumer goods, whose economic foundation was inefficient production, inefficient distribution, inefficient service, resulting in periodic shortages, bureaucratic corruption and debt; a state that asserted it had no unemployment by virtue of employing a dozen to do the work of one, as a result of which all dozen had to moonlight and work themselves into an early grave; a state in which practically nothing could be assumed to be itself;

3. The legacy of a state that at any time could resort to force without having to explain itself to its people and was answerable only to a greater military force both inside and outside its borders.

I do not underestimate the significance of America rising above its original sin of slavery by electing a black President...

It doesn't know it, but the liberal-left in Europe and North America has been lucky to have Bush.

By building him up into a great Satan, the oil man who invades countries to seize their reserves and the Christian who orders bloody crusades, they have hidden the totalitarian threats of our age from themselves and anyone who listens to them. Bush allowed them to explain away radical Islam as an understandable, even legitimate, response to the hypocrisies and iniquities of American policy. Even those in the European elites who do not buy the full 'America has it coming' package believe that Bush is a cowboy who doesn't understand that the postmodern way to end conflict is to compromise rather than fight.

Gary Trudeau had Bush addressing Condoleezza Rice as 'brown sugar' in his Doonesbury strip. Ted Rall decided she was Bush's 'house nigga' and sent her to a 'racial re-education camp' to learn the error of her conservative views. Jeff Danziger drew her as Prissy, Scarlett O'Hara's slave in Gone With the Wind. All three white men had reached for the dirtiest racial insults they could imagine when confronted with a black woman who disagreed with their politics.

Madhouse

The point about the madhouse is that it’s virile.
The point about the madhouse is that it sticks by its beliefs.
The point about the madhouse is that sanity is bourgeois.
The point about the madhouse is that no one is acting.
The point about the madhouse is that no one gets in by simply being nice.
The point about the madhouse is that it liberates the spirit.
The point about the madhouse is that you can think just what you like there.
The point about the madhouse is that anyone can enter.
There’s nothing special about the madhouse, people come and go all the time.
There’s nothing threatening about the madhouse, we are all of us dying.
There’s nothing terminal about the madhouse: you go along for the ride.
There’s nothing sad about the madhouse: weeping and gnashing of teeth, that’s nothing.
There’s nothing mad about the madhouse, it is sanity by default.
We are sane by default, we are mad by design, but the mad are more admirable.
Admirable is the ape, the bulbul, the mitochondria, the swelling of the larynx,
Admirable the orchid, the garlic, the fire inside the shut book,
Admirable the cry of the tortured, the lost voice of the nightingale, the laughter
in everything ostensibly sane but tending towards madness
such as sunlight, the slow rain, each pendulous drop, the wide road,
the brimming eye, shadows, picnics, public conveyances, thunder.
Nature is a madness with a method and all the madder for that.
Culture is a madness everyone inherits.
Science is a madness in love with numbers, the perfect amour fou.
Health is a madness that shifts from minute to minute, gesundheit!
Money is madness that fills your pockets and leaves a silver slugtrail in the garden.
The point about the madhouse is not to describe it.
The point about the madhouse is not to change it.
The point about the madhouse is to live there
to accustom yourself to its immaculate manners
to dwell in the house of the Lord for ever
with the prophet, the poet, the dwarf, the scholar, the fire.

1. Denial (It never happened, we don't do wicked things.)

2. Historicising (It happened a long time ago, it wasn't us. Not personally.)

3. Fiction (So and so has written a novel, but who's to know what's true, what's fiction?)4. Myth (It is the sort of thing that happens in the scheme of things, an archetypal pattern. It's not real life.)

5. Justification (Those who claim to be victims are clinging somewhat unnaturally to the myth. It must serve their purposes. They are devious. No wonder people hate them.)

6. Someone like Karadzic was bound to come along and do what was necessary.

Heavy matters! heavy matters! but look thee here,
boy. Now bless thyself: thou mettest with things
dying, I with things newborn.

Ah-oh, smokestack lightnin,
Shinin, just like gold,
Why don't ya hear me cryin?
A-whoo-hooo, oooo,
Whooo.

Whoa-oh, tell me, baby,
What's the, matter with you?
Why don't ya hear me cryin?
Whoo-hooo, whoo-hooo,
Whooo.

Whoa-oh, tell me, baby,
Where did ya, stay last night?
A-why don't ya hear me cryin?
Whoo-hooo, whoo-hooo,
Whooo.

Whoa-oh, stop your train,
Let her, go for a ride.
Why don't ya hear me cryin?
Whoo-hooo, whoo-hooo,
Whooo.

Whoa-oh, fare ya well.
Never see, a you no more.
A-why don't ya hear me cryin?
Oooo, whoo-hooo,
Whooo.

Whoa-oh, who been here baby since,
I-I been gone, a little, bity boy?
Girl, be on.
A-whoo-hooo, whoo-hooo,
Whooo.

The dog is fascinated by the sound of the banjo. When he strums the strings, the dog sits up, cocks its head, listens. When he hums Teresa's line ... the dog smacks its lips and seems on the point of singing too, or howling.... Would he dare to do that: bring a dog into the piece, allow it to loose its own lament to the heavens between the strophes of lovelorn Teresa's? Why not? Surely, in a work that will never be performed, all things are permitted?

'My case rests on the rights of desire,' he says. 'On the god who makes even the small birds quiver.'

[Here he sees himself back in the flat of the girl who has been the occasion of his downfall.]

I was a servant of Eros: that is what he wants to say, but does he have the effrontery? It was a god who acted through me. What vanity! Yet not a lie, not entirely.

[Then he remembers the incident of the dog they once had, that Lucy faintly remembers, recalling that it was a male and saying:]

'...Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it. This went on until the poor dog didn't know what to do. At the smell of a bitch it would chase around a garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide...'

[Lucy doesn't see the point. Nor does he see it quite, and tries to explain by saying that dogs can be punished for misdeeds...]

'But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.'

'So males must be allowed to follow their instincts unchecked? Is that the moral?'

'No, that is not the moral. What was ignoble about [the spectacle] was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It was ready to punish itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it.'

'Or have it fixed.'

[Vision here of the 'fixed' dog, 'padding about the living room, sighing and sniffing the cat and getting portly'. Lucy asks if he has always felt this way, and he says no, only sometimes, ending '...desire is a burden we could well do without.' to which Lucy replies: I must say... that is the view I incline towards myself.']

By Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933)
translated by Edmund Keeley


What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Salt's now a business, and the model is partly borrowed from Bloodaxe, and partly from Faber. The idea that poetry is "for everyone" is good in principle, but trite pap when put into practice. Read Bernstein, among others, on this. There is a little thing called "taste" - and sadly, in Britain, most people without much experience of poetry express an interest in precisely the sort of neo-Georgian slice-of-life empirical rubbish that Salt poets and poetics used to question, and present a viable alternative to. The Salt "brand" is in danger of becoming meaningless - all things to all people.

"Taste" is really a big subject, of course. I say things about it all time time at Eyewear.

My feeling is a certain rather traditional taste has been in the ascendancy in the UK for some time. One that seeks for craft in poetry, and perhaps too much slice-of-life - I sometimes write poems in this vein myself; as exampled by Armitage's response to Alex Turner's lyrics...

...I felt that the idea that poetry should be opened to all, while wonderful as an idea, could founder on the fact that most non-poetry readers have little active or engaged taste, but received and often simple expectations from a poem.

I don't think that matters very much, Todd, not unless one is trying deliberately to write down to people (always a mistake, people are not to be written down to.) Most poets are not trying to do that.

Pace Bernstein most poets are not major innovators either, but 'major'-ness is not in itself the whole story. Poets do not have to make decisions about 'writing for all'. They have to write what genuinely fascinates and compels them. That sounds simple but is devilish hard in practice.

Poetry is not an abstruse science. It is to do with the business of being human which is something we share with all other human beings, whose feelings and experiences are not trite.

It is however an art, which means it is difficult to do well, whether we are Schoenberg or an Arctic Monkey. There is no obligation on us to be either. Nor can we really have it every way at once, which is why I asked about taste, about what you meant by that, since it is a word with a specific history, and implies the aesthetic judgment of that part of society that considers itself the best. It certifies itself in most cases.

So which is that part of society? Whose taste are we supposed to be following. Bernstein's? Armitage's? Marilyn Hacker's? Alice Oswald's? John Ashbery's?

I don't believe one need follow any dominant group's "taste". I think there is too much taste /fashion in the poetry world(s).

Blockade

Where ideology fails, mere livelihood
takes over, seeking its bottom line,
wherever that is, in vision or in blood

or further regions impossible to define.
The cross of St George flutters on the pole
behind men picketing in a benign

huddle, comfy, but barely in control
of the world that they are bringing into being.
They form a solid yeomanry in droll

revolt against powers that even now are fleeing
the cities they rule from. From what far regions
have the yeoman risen? Where are their all-seeing

leaders and prophets? Their everyday religions
are bottom-line affairs with few demands,
offering basic warmth for mild allegiance,

composed of mostly affordable deodands:
crumbs for the ducks, a tip for the paper-boy,
a Christmas kiss, holding a mother's hands,

comfort for the dying. I'm thinking of Joy,
Ruby, Ted and Jerry, their children trapped
in kitchens and sheds a real storm would destroy

in minutes, and Stan, hollow-eyed, flat-capped,
whose tools we inherited, and Percy Bunn
the handyman and glazier who dropped

dead at the church fete, and gangling Ron
the caretaker, whose wife left and he drank
for weeks, and every picket the son

(or daughter) of people of such social rank
as drop away now, lost in the dawn retreat,
the tankers rolling past them, faces blank.

1) A good/matured Live Literature act avoids disingenuously and lazily positing or counterpointing some shadowy poetry 'elite' or 'aristocracy' it seeks to antagonize and agitate. This is a big (insecure) and narrow-minded cliché that is rarely relevant, interesting, or even accurate -- the good stuff lies elsewhere, further along, after assuming artistic importance in one's own right.

2) Similarly, a good/matured Live Literature act should not describe a non-existent stuffy and failing poetry world it is here to save –- this, again, is disingenuous nonsense normally used to hold up an empty, self-aggrandising rhetorical position predicated on a flawed understanding of poetry, poetics and poetic history. It should be proud of its roots, and it should deal with its ancestral genealogy of forms with an open mind, rather than adolescently attempting to distance.

3) With good Live Literature, the words should be doing most of the work. Or, the words should be the driving force of the act/performance/event. If another aspect holds sway -– the action, for example -– it becomes other –- e.g. theatre or dance. Or, if a beard holds sway, it is Scroobius Pip [cheap gag, best ignored as irrelevant]. As a further example, a comedy song can be considered as within the bounds of Live Literature if the driving force of the artistic enjoyment/understanding is from the words –- foregrounded use of rhyme or rhythm for humour, surprise etc (and cf. earlier posts about poetry and music).

4) With Live Literature, the words must be good (in whatever way) words; surprising words, as with any form of literary endeavour. Too many Live Literature acts are little more than incoherent shouty doggerel polemic –- not literature, or even really Live in most senses of the word.

So, in summary, anything where the words are foregrounded or are the focus in an interesting performance conceit or frame; anything where the energy comes largely from the words and their manipulation and impact in a live setting, is potentially good/matured Live Literature. But in order to be considered a good/matured Live Literature event, the words should be the biggest thing on stage. The mantra should be: The Words Must Do The Work.

After supper she lays out the small cards in neat piles. She draws each one using the thumb and forefinger of her right hand with a slight snap as she pulls them from the pack in her left and turns her head a little as she searches the table to see where the rules allow her to place them. Another tiny snap as she lays the card down. She knows four or five varieties of patience, this being something she inherited from her mother, and each has a name though I can only remember Roxanne and the Greater or Lesser Olga – grandmother’s name. The long, red-nailed fingers move gracefully, elegantly, economically, fingers from my childhood, exactly the same, moving to a choreography much like that of eating. The fingers are quite different from my godmother’s, that other great player of patience. She would lay out the cards on a special half-size drawing board covered in blue canvas, usually while in a half seated position on the divan, her movements unlike my mother’s, with an elegance she had not inherited but cultivated, a little amused by her own self-consciousness, as if she were playing the whole game in inverted commas, not believing in it as my mother does, but carelessly, as mere amusement, playing in whatever fashion she chose to play, while talking, making telephone calls, someone giving her cue-lines as she learns a role and rehearses it, often simply messing around. It is as if she were playing some light-hearted fugue of many parts whose melody was a continuous sequence of divisions, expansions, and variations, the end playfully turning back on itself. She draws the cards with delicate hands, a look of curiosity on her face, the cluster of golden bangles quietly clinking on her wrist. She looks around, her eyebrows sail upwards, she ponders a little, then with a grimace of pleasure or resignation comments on her decision and gently, easily, lets the card fall, not worrying too much about where it lands. My mother, on the other hand, concentrates furiously when she plays. It matters to her: when I address her during a game she does not reply immediately but her hand hovers in the air, she looks up and takes a break. She feels it necessary to arrange the cards neatly in proper rows. I know a great deal depends on whether the game is concluded successfully or not. It sometimes happens, albeit very rarely, that she cheats a little, as she confesses with an embarrassed little smile when I wickedly question her. She is happy when the cards come out and, sometimes, seriously upset when they don’t. If ever I ask her what she is thinking of she usually just shakes her head and doesn’t answer. She won’t allow me a glimpse into her private world. I know that the game, in which strategy plays a small enough part, helps or does not help fulfil some secret longing. Now that secret longing is almost certainly something to do with me, or so I think. She wants not be retired when she reaches sixty. It’s not impossible that she keeps quiet because she regards it as somehow childish, this activity; childish that she should risk all her secret, most important hopes on a game, though of course she does believe in luck. She is a touch superstitious and believes in the kind of providence that may be influenced by the commission of good deeds to offer rewards in this world out of a sense of fairness or patience, much as I myself once did until my seminary education, complete with a mass of spiritual devotions and doubts, resulted in turning me into a Roman Catholic atheist.

It is terrifyingly smug to assume that Spain would be beaten purely because Italy had won every previous competitive match between the countries since losing the very first, at the 1920 Olympics.

Tom and Dick fish muddy waters,
Wish each other quickly dead.
Yet in the end around the table
They both share the poor man's bread.

Therefore some live in the darkness
And others live in light.
We see those who live in brightness
But those in darkness are lost to sight.

With all this intellectual exertion, it's good to get some physical exercise. I play ping-pong with George Szirtes, the poet. I win. I'm not boasting. I'm telling the simple truth. He lost and I won. Convincingly, mercilessly. To be frank, I don't just beat him, I crush him like a bug.

Blackbird

An old song this, how the blackbird rolls
that damp ball of whistle round his throat
so it comes out clean on white scrolls
of invisible music, a banner afloat
on thin seas of noise, like the text of an annunciation.

Bring forth, it says, and my soul doth magnify…
and holiness and righteousness…
for every creature that lives shall die
and yet remain, nor ever grow less
in the throat of the blackbird, in each and every variation.

The Great Bill of 1992

The Bill is due, the Bill is here,
the Bill comes this time every year.
In spring the Budget, the Bill in May
when everyone has Bills to pay.
In Bilious blasts spring chickens thrill
and birds in thousands coo and Bill;
umBilical, the knots are tied
in churches between groom and bride;
the Billionth Bride precedes a file
of bridesmaids Billowing down the aisle.
In Billericay builders build;
in Oz the Billabong is filled
with Billet-doux and Billycans
discarded by disheartened fans
of Billie (ie Holiday) who
sang love Bilked and Feeling Blue.
The Bildungsroman blossoms forth
in books of the Teutonic North;
that bloodbound parasitic worm
Bilharzia begins to squirm
or cussedly to self-destruct
by flirting with the Bile-duct.
Billposters post, flyposters fly,
their Billboards blank and bored and dry.
DeBilitated by small beer
the Bilingsgate crew disappear.
Now Bilberries begin to peer
(with hey the doxy, and such gear),
and Thespians in robes and tights
demand a Thespian Bill of Rights.
I too might, were I of that bent,
adopt such an haBiliment,
but fear to seem a Billy-goat
and therefore end upon this Note.

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one,
I wish I thought "What Jolly Fun!"

Some Things Along Strada C. Rosetti


Far too quiet last night out on the street.
Dreams of police. Today we hog four chairs
in a café off Revolution Square,
where solitude and expensive coffee
agitate our collective memory.

The man in the blue bathrobe, he is ours,
blabbering, twisted like an ampersand
on his perch between bank and bar: one hand
on his cane, the other held out for beer.
He hasn’t had a shave in nineteen years.

We claim the palaces and museums,
the royal portraits on the Atheneum,
but blame the stray dogs and immigrant scum
on the old regime, whose blank bravado
still hardens all the faces in the Metro.

This week the diplomats and presidents
will affirm Europe’s doctrine in the East;
the yellow stars of the Union will increase
another star or two, new flags to cover
the old murals, the sickles and hammers.

Still, some things along Strada C. Rosetti
blur more than they clarify: budding trees
compete with wide Ottoman balconies
for the right to make shade. Light, meanwhile,
stagnates in a satellite dish. All style

is sacrificed to communication,
all music to the traffic’s cloying hiss.
The beautiful civil servant knows this,
since she works with facts, and yet her high heels
and headphones imply there’s something she feels

we all feel—we want to hear ourselves think,
we want to rise above the uniform
sidewalk blocks. The old cobblestones were torn
up years ago, along with the mansions
and monasteries. The old city was done

being old, we were informed. Not that we asked.
Those who were shot have had twenty years
to make peace with the silence they silenced here,
even if the dictator failed to confess.
His concrete horizon’s left to remind us

what it takes to scare the mind out of a man.
We want to see ourselves too. The police
block every street today, but they are our police.
Neither gypsy dogs nor glue-sniffing teens
can take that from us. We know it means

something now to sit and read a book,
to read something true. Yes, we want to be
seen, but don’t want to be watched—this, the relief
of a generation who couldn’t say, but knew
the National Library belonged to them too.

There are five real newspapers to read now
and a sign across the street can advertise
LEGAL TRANSLATIONS, but it’s still not wise
to have speech handled by professionals.
Better now to just shut up, pay the bill,

join the amateur rabble on the street,
or claim our place along the balustrade.
Just outside, the uniformed riot squad
is shoring up its bulletproof phalanx.
The anarchists will refuse to break ranks,

will affirm their faith in all disorder.
Yes, we’ve had disorder here. On this square
in fact, here on display, the souvenir
of a body politic that has a soul:
our library, still pocked with bullet holes.


Christopher Bakken
Bucharest, 2008

Reznikoff is interested only in the primary sources: statements made by witnesses and, to a lesser extent, affidavits and certain official war documents presented by trial lawyers... Reznikoff edits his source material so skillfully that the reader of Holocaust never is aware that the words on the page are drawn from courtroom transcripts.

2.
An old man carrying pieces of wood to burn
from a house that had been torn down:
there had been no order against this -
and it was cold.
An S.S. commander saw him
and asked where he had taken the wood,
and the old man answered from a house that had been torn down.
But the commander drew his pistol,
put it against the old man's throat
and shot him.

6.
Three o'clock one afternoon
about fifty Jews were in a bunker.
Someone pushed in the sack at the opening
and they heard a voice:
"Come out!
Otherwise we'll throw in a grenade."
The S.S. men and the German police with rods in their hands
were ready
and began beating those who had been in the bunker.
Those who had the strength
lined up as ordered
and were taken to a square in a single file to be shot.
At the last moment
a group of other S.S. men came and asked what was going on.
One of those who was ready to shoot answered:
they had pulled the Jews out of a bunker
and were about to shoot them as ordered.
The commander of the second group then said,
"These are fat Jews.
All of them good for soap."
And so they took the Jews to a transport train
which had not yet left for a death camp -
Russian freight cars without steps -
and they had to lift each other into the cars.

This is a movie so unbelievably girly, whirly and twirly that, on leaving the cinema, I felt like reading three Andy McNabs back to back, just to get my testosterone back up to metrosexual level...It tells of their laughter, their tears, their breakups, their bonding, and yet again their tears. As I left the auditorium, the overwhelmingly female crowd were eagerly saying to each other things like: "I was crying for Carrie ..." "Oh no, I was crying for Samantha ..." "I was crying for Charlotte ..." They interrupted their conversations and looked over at me, concerned, as I leant against the wall, bit deeply into my SATC-promotional Galaxy chocolate bar and, empowered by the film's emotional literacy, found that for the first time I was able to weep for Avram Grant.

Working class people have lower IQs than those from wealthy backgrounds and should not expect to win places at top universities.

Said Avram Brown:
I hate to see a man done down,
Especially such a tender plant
As Gordon Grant.

I'm too sexy for my love, too sexy for my love
Love's going to leave me

I'm too sexy for my shirt too sexy for my shirt
So sexy it hurts
And I'm too sexy for Milan too sexy for Milan
New York and Japan
And I'm too sexy for your party
Too sexy for your party
No way I'm disco dancing

I'm a model you know what I mean
And I do my little turn on the catwalk
Yeah on the catwalk on the catwalk yeah
I do my little turn on the catwalk

I'm too sexy for my car too sexy for my car
Too sexy by far
And I'm too sexy for my hat
Too sexy for my hat what do you think about that

I'm a model you know what I mean
And I do my little turn on the catwalk
Yeah on the catwalk on the catwalk yeah
I shake my little touche on the catwalk

I'm too sexy for my too sexy for my too sexy for my

Cos I'm a model you know what I mean
And I do my little turn on the catwalk
Yeah on the catwalk yeah on the catwalk yeah
I shake my little touche on the catwalk

I'm too sexy for my cat too sexy for my cat
Poor pussy poor pussy cat
I'm too sexy for my love too sexy for my love
Loves going to leave me

And I'm too sexy for this song.

Football at its best, and here it was often at its best, is a blend of chess, ballet and war.

Sudek: Tree

The visionary moment comes
just as it is raining, just as bombs
are falling, just as atoms

burst like a sneeze in a city park
and enter the dark
as if it were the waiting ark.

You open your hand and blow
the dust. You pick and throw
the stone. You make the round O

of your mouth perfect as light
and the tree bends and stands upright
in the stolid night.

There is little to say about the poem, except that I was attracted by the photograph - one of a long series Sudek made about the tree in his garden as seen through the glass of his shed, or something like a shed.

Because the tree looks luminous and faintly ominous too it struck me like something in a vision. It wasn't the meaning of the vision that interested me, not some kind of prophetic insight into the future - so much as that there existed this way of seeing a perfectly ordinary tree. Its existence in a world of big things (the bombs) and small things (the atoms) - both destructrve - conjured the miraculous aspect of life, the sense that all phenomena are extraordinary, in this case, the beautiful shimmering tree. Its darkness suggested death - not heavily, but just enough to suggest that we do not have forever. The dust that the 'you' (you being anyone at all) blows from his hand may remind people of Eliot's "I will show you fear in a handful of dust". I think I might have had some memory trace of Eliot as I was writing the line. But in my poem the figure blows the dust away. It acts by throwing the stone and preparing to make a sound. It asserts itself, if only by a contextless act and making the O shape with its mouth. Of course O is a cry of wonder, but, at the same time, the figure 0 means zero. In other words the sound has no importance other than that it exists, like the tree. And the fact that both exist is a kind of miracle.

It is, I suppose, despite the darkness, a 'glad to be alive' poem. I should stress that the paragraph above is not what I had in mind when I started writing. The paragraph is about what I discovered as meaning. It isn't THE meaning. You will notice that the poem is made up of four verses of three short lines each and that each stanza has three end rhymes. Once that process starts the writer is to some degree having to deal only with what it is possible to rhyme and fit into the short line: in other words one has to wait to see what comes up before writing the next thing. You can't figure it all out from the start then go ahead and write it. Sometimes it seems to me a kind of miracle in itself that language will push you into certain corners that lead to thoughts and feelings you would not have discovered otherwise. Discovered meanings are not intentions. Unlike intentions, discoveries are never complete. Writing poems is like bat flight: bats don't know exactly where they will fly when they set out. They operate by sonar. As we all do. Randall Jarrell had something about that in The Bat Poet.

The Roman Catholic Church has branded the use of hybrid embryos as "monstrous" and says tinkering with life in this way is immoral.

These holloways [he says] are humbling, for they are landmarks that speak of habit rather than suddenness. Trodden by innumerable feet, cut by innumerable wheels, they are records of journeys to market, to worship, to sea.

There's nothing to be done
Save follow the lost shoes.

The Dead
from The Penig Film

The stone-cold body that is dressed to lie
along the couch. The stone-cold body dressed
for flames. The stone-cold body in its dry

pod lowered into the ground. The still chest.
The flat hair. The calm statement made
to last. This little life that is compressed

into calendars, into cupped hands, its unplayed
movie locked inside its cells. Where to begin
so the arc of it should rise before it fade

like the rainbow that hovers a few minutes in
the gap between rain and sun, nothing special,
just the usual rainbow, the usual rain, the tin

and copper sound of water falling? To fall
like that is the most natural thing. You raise
your arc, someone observes its brief unofficial

blossoming, utters a few words of praise
then carries on contemplating the arc
of their own being. Here we’re in a dead daze.

Here is only Penig, the rainbow gone dark,
all inky greys and blacks, a film’s crude
shifts. Once there were girls running in the park,

once there were dates and weddings with fine food,
once there were offices and lifts and beds
that offered sleep like a filmic interlude.

Wrong movie here. Those terrible shaven heads
rise out of a doomed quarry in the last scene
of a discarded reel that the director shreds

as incriminating evidence. What we see on screen
is what remains of it. The arc is chopped
into pieces then spliced together, a vague sheen

of events without detail, everything cropped,
cropped hair, cropped hours, cropped fields and grass. Time
is given short shrift, as if darkness had dropped

on it from a height, crushing it to a single chime.
Ask not for whom it chimes. The extras are paid
in dead coinage, dime by worthless dime.

Scots peer Lord Laidlaw liked to arrange Monaco parties with fine wines, an elegant dinner and post-prandial entertainments provided by a tri-lingual bisexual, a gigolo, a bondage queen and their assorted lively friends.

Far from castigating him or labelling him a hopeless addict, I suspect many men would do exactly the same - if they had a personal fortune of £730 million and the energy to get the whole thing organised.

However, be honest, most husbands couldn't arrange anything more complicated than a golf four ball or a bit of toast and marmalade without generous input from their wives and two written reminders.

However, be honest, most wives couldn't arrange anything more complicated than a shopping expedition or change a plug without generous input from their husbands and two written set of instructions complete with diagrams.

She stands in the kitchen, in a kitchen, not our kitchen, not the old kitchen, not any of our old kitchens, but her own kitchen, an unfamiliar one, not mine, and she cooks, stirs something. She is cooking for me. That’s another new thing, a strange thing. But there she stands, repeating anything I want, anywhere, whatever I happen to want most, at the time I want it. I am here: she is not. And there are things I do want. But even if I didn’t want them she would carry on coming and going, doing this and that, entering my head, calling me, talking, listening, now in delight, now in pain, thinking of me or looking at me, ringing me, asking me things, writing to me as if she were alive. I am insatiable: I am interested in all that is not me, in what is private, in affairs before me and after me, in her existence as distinct from mine, and I try to fit the jigsaw together, but nowadays, whatever she is doing – and I can’t do anything about this – is always, invariably done for me, because of me, to me, with me or on my behalf – or rather, of course, was done for me.

At this very moment I want her to stand there, there in that kitchen, stirring away. Let’s have her cooking one of those dishes she learned abroad, making a caper sauce to go with that sizzling grilled steak. But I often have her repeat a great many other things too: for example I have recently taken to observing her secretly from the bed as she slowly removes her make-up at the antique dressing table with the great gilded antique Venetian mirror hanging over it, looking into the antique silver-framed standing mirror before her, going about her task in a business-like manner, applying cream with balls of cotton wool, her hands working in a circular motion, efficiently, always in exactly the same way, pulling faces if need be, puffing out a cheek, rubbing her skin then smearing with, among other things, a liquid she refers to as her ‘energizing mixture’ and which dries immediately so she looks like a white-faced clown. Then she wipes it off and I fall asleep again. The room is covered in mirrors, each of the six doors of the built-in wardrobe has a mirror-panel right down to the bottom. My bed is there in her bedroom: my own bedroom is being used by the German Fräulein. Sometimes I wake late at night just as she enters from the shower, wearing her yellow silk dressing gown and I hear her as she applies creams and lotions for the night before going to bed, as she moves around, gets comfortable, clears her throat and gives a great yawn before falling sound asleep, her mouth open, contented, breathing loudly exactly the way I catch myself doing nowadays. Or I am watching her at eleven in the morning, as she steps into a car, fully made-up, elegantly dressed wearing a hat and gloves and high-heeled shoes, as she throws back the fashionable half-veil, pulls out of the garage, turns in the drive, takes the left-hand lane – the traffic is still driving on the left – and sets off from our Sas-hegy apartment in what is now Hegyalja út, into the city centre to execute her various commissions before meeting her friends in the recently opened Mignon Café – the first of its kind in Hungary – or at the Gerbeaud where she might go on to meet my father who sometimes strolls over from his office to talk over their plans for the next day or whatever else is on their minds.. Then they come home together to eat. Or I see her in Márianosztra, or possibly, later, in Kalocsa, at the end of her monthly interviews, being led away by a guard armed with a machine-gun, out of the hall that is divided in half by rolls of barbed wire, leaving through double steel doors, overlooked by enormous portraits of Stalin and Rákosi, and I catch a glimpse of her as she is shepherded away in a procession of prisoners and guards, and she freezes for a moment, conscious perhaps of me looking at her to look back over her shoulder, sensing me standing there, staring at her. The guard’s flat cap is covering half her face but her half-closed eyes, her shrug, her faint smile and her suspiciously lively expression tell me more than she has said in fifteen minutes to the flat-capped guard.

Thou shalt feel good about thyself.

1. Hair dark but greying: beard every colour under the sun, hence no beard.

2. David Bowie cleaned our house in the days when he was David Jones, c. 1967. Long story... Single occasion

3. Doctor once told me I had an extra rib. Was briefly fascinated but have never checked and seems unlikely. (All the same I remember it...) Either the doctor was a joker or I really have one. Could donate it, either to Chinese restaurant or to womankind....etc etc etc

Linda
Stephen
Alison
Jonathan
Andrew
Meghan