Bring Down the Government

  Like many people, my music-listening habits tend to go in phases, often influenced by what I come across on the radio (mainly Radio 6 or 3) or websites like Bandcamp or The Quietus, or read about in Wire magazine. I prefer that aleatory quality to it, as I do with the poems, books and authors I come across, at odd moments believing there's an underlying order or interconnectivity to my magpie-ish pecking which signals to me I'm heading in the right direction, whatever that might be.

   The last few months, for example, has seen a revisiting of Radiohead mostly sparked by a celebration of OK Computer's 25th anniversary on Radio 6.

  

Among numerous delights, 'No Surprises' shone out for me in its overlayering of an apparently mellow, anodyne melody with subtly dark, almost dystopic lyrics, especially the lines "Bring down the government/ They don't speak for us now" which could come from a raucous punk song but carry so much more force and depth when delivered in this subdued, understated context to acoustic guitar and a glockenspiel-lead tune.

   In this summer when by far the worst, most inept, most corrupt British prime minister ever to hold office has led his own government to all but implode, Thom Yorke's sweetly crooned lines seem to have resonated with all the more significance.  

Homage to Joyce, Dedalus and Kate Bush

 To celebrate the centennial of the publication of Ulysses, here are three very different responses to that astoundingly multifarious and kaleidoscopic masterpiece, whose lasting resonance has yielded generations of notable epigones, byworks and intertexts. Firstly, the modernist composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) with his Thema: Omaggio a Joyce (1953), startlingly ahead of its time in taking a recitation of Chapter 11 of Ulysses by Berio's then-wife Cathy Berberian and - using tape-manipulation techniques - subjecting it to a "reorganization of the phonetic and semantic elements of Joyce’s text".

  Secondly, I've been reading Chris McCabe's novel Dedalus (2018), a beautifully presented edition created by Henningham Family Press. At first I thought the concept behind this project was too ambitious to work: a sequel to Ulysses? Which writer would think they could manage a continuation of the greatest novel ever written? But in truth I've been won over by McCabe's wildly imaginative take on the day after Bloomsday, very much his own revisioning of the interweaving stories and themes and characters of Ulysses born of an intimate knowledge and passionate enthusiasm for the novel. Years ago I did a Poetry School course lead by Chris on "Ulysses as Poetry" and as well as some chapters that stand as worthy imitations of Joyce's interior monologue prose-style, other chapters metamorphose into visual or sound poetry in a way which feels much in keeping with Joyce's ludic approach both in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

  Finally, the wonderful video for The Sensual World by Kate Bush, which memorably uses the words of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in 'Penelope'. As we know, KB is having a moment this month thanks to Netflix's Stranger Things, which I'm a big fan of particularly for the nostalgia-drenched soundtrack and a plethora of references to tropes from early 80's TV and movies. It's great to see a resurgence of interest in 'Running Up That Hill', which will hopefully send people back to the marvellous Hounds of Love album - and indeed The Sensual World in all its far-reaching, haunting beauty.

Ilya Kaminsky: Testimonies from Odessan Writers

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/03/24/conversations-to-the-tune-of-air-raid-sirens-odesa-writers-on-literature-in-wartime/ 

Electronic Music from Ukraine

A new release on Bandcamp from the US label A Strangely Isolated Place: "To help continue the much-needed support for the people of Ukraine, we have produced a compilation from one of our favorite Ukrainian-based netlabels, Energostatic Records. Released as part of our Portals deep dive series, the feature includes a remaster of specifically curated tracks, in both individual and mix form. These tracks are available here on the ASIP Bandcamp page as Name Your Price, with all proceeds going to Save The Children and their specific activities supporting Ukraine at this time. asip.me/stcukr"

Happy 100th Birthday, Ulysses

  A dedalian bloom of internet articles and radio programmes to celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses in the past week or so, which coincided with Joyce's 40th birthday on 2.2.22 (I'm sure, as a lover of Dante, he was drawn to that rhyming of numbers too.) Due veneration and recognition of its pivotal importance somehow still seem tempered in some quarters with bafflement or peevish contempt for its supposed "impenetrability," as though holding it up as a great cultural monument absolves you of the need to actually read it. Even Anne Enright in The Guardian, while showing some regard for the novel and for Joyce, repeats the notion that "it's a novel in which nothing happens" whereas surely the opposite is the case:

"It is an epic of two races (Israelite — Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). […] It is also a kind of encyclopaedia."

This is an excerpt from a letter Joyce wrote to his friend Carlos Linati, quoted in the most fascinating of the articles I've come across, "Deadline Ulysses" by Phillip Keel Geheber in the LA Review of Books, who makes the point that up to a third of the novel was added at the final revision stage in 1921 including some of the most original, innovative material.

   Just as Ulysses repays frequent re-readings throughout a lifetime, because its kaleidoscopically multiple perspectives and layers will yield a intrinsically different novel to the reader at different points in their own timeline, so does it morph and undulate in its wider valency to history and society. What I keep noting on my current re-perusal is how much a novel for own rancorous, divided times this is. Most of the other high Modernist classics   - from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and The Waste Land to A La Recherche, The Man Without Qualities and The Magic Mountain - counterbalance a fraught vision of fragmentary modernity with plaintive nostalgia for a more stable age d'or when high culture supposedly held societal values in place and liberal humanist sensibilities had not begun to suffer dissociation. Joyce - a life-long socialist (in distinction to almost every other major Modernist) - was more inclined to celebrate the bustling, interactive heterogeneity of the modern city than deplore it, in particular foregrounding the rich linguistic buzz of different registers and idiolects weaving in and out of one another. 

   However, in choosing a second generation Jewish inhabitant of Dublin as his wandering mock-hero, Joyce hones in on the potential prejudice and ostracisation caused by what we now call "othering". You might miss them on a first reading, but the early chapters involving Bloom (especially 'Hades') are subtly dotted with moments of "micro-aggression", of slights and shrug-offs, nothing overt but enough to mark him as an outsider within the bluff, jokey discourse of Dublin street-life. This rises to a mock-heroic climax in his encounter with The Citizen, a one-eyed Cyclops who demonstrates that nationalism of any kind (even the anti-British, Irish nationalism with which Joyce had some sympathy) invariably masks a xenophobic agenda - as we have seen disastrously writ large in the age of Brexit and Trump. But Bloom's rejoinder to the antisemitism of the grandiloquent myope sums up the novel's underpinning ethos: 

    "Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life (...) Love"

   This is why Joyce's encyclopaedic epic of the human race, of the human body in all its fallibility and persistence, culminates in a small act of kindness between two apparent outsiders - Bloom the intinerant Jew, continually on the run from thoughts of his wife's adultery and his son's death in infancy, helps out Stephen Dedalus the malcontent poet, in flight from the nets of state and religion and thoughts of his mother's recent death. Nothing happens in Ulysses the way it does in War and Peace or A Tale of Two Cities or even Middlemarch - but if a profoundly rich and detailed celebration of the ordinary "life for men and women" and an unlooked-for action of support for another human being is nothing then we need to keep reading and re-reading the novel for another hundred years.

Blame by Gabriels

Hamish Hawk, The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion 1973

 

Their Numerous Cancellations

  The recent furore around Kate Clanchy's Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (Picador, 2019) brings up some pressing questions about what has come to be called "cancel culture" and its impact on writers. Clanchy, of course, started out as a poet, winning the Forward for Best First for Slattern in 1995, one of the plethora of talented female poets celebrated in Roddie Lumsden's Identity Parade anthology. She developed her career as a poet alongside her career as an English teacher, with a particular interest in using poetry and creative writing to allow children from under-privileged and ethnic backgrounds (additionally with a focus on girls) to tell their stories. This lead to her being awarded an MBE for 'services to literature' in 2018 - the memoir about some of her teaching experiences Some Kids I Taught came out in 2019 and won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020 apparently because it tackled issues around class in education.

  So it seems bizarre that this experienced, lauded writer and long-standing teacher used to working in multi-cultural classrooms would not have picked up on the fact that she was using language associated with racial stereotypes such as "chocolate skin" or "Ashkenazi nose" or that she was negativising some autistic children as "unaccountably odd" and "jarring company".* Equally, it seems remarkable that neither an editor at Picador nor one of the judges on the Orwell Prize panel would have picked up on these breaches in politically-correct discourse; nor did any of the book's early reviewers - uniformly positive as far as I can tell - identify these snagging-points. 

  What happened this year seems a demonstration of how social media can seize hold of a cultural phenomenon and amplify aspects of its character to the point of distortion, inciting hordes of onlookers to contribute their voices to the clamour of outrage and moral opprobrium. On GoodReads and Twitter a growing number of posts started not only to call out these problematic aspects of the book but also to see them as symptomatic of a text that was soon widely reinterpreted and in effect demonised as an adumbration of patronising, middle-class "white saviour complex", full of misguided stereotypes and prejudicial, "othering" perspectives on Clanchy's multicultural pupils. Clanchy herself made matters worse by initially denying and then overreacting to the criticisms, while some of the accusers (including authors of colour Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh) went on to receive racist abuse from social media users themselves.

  It's not my place to defend the book; I'm in the process of reading it and would like to make my own assessment as to its qualities and flaws. The danger is we lose sight of the text itself in this kind of trial by social media (often pitched at a heightened tone of angry, censorious disapproval), where blame rapidly migrates to the personal and simplistic lines are drawn between the words of a literary artefact and the author's subjectivity - I suppose with an autobiographical memoir the presumption that these lines are straightforward is greater than with a poem or novel but there is still a parallax effect operating in the space between writerly intention and reader reception. No doubt it was appropriate for Clanchy to apologise for what some saw as offensive passages or phrases in her book, but it was saddening to see her almost internalise the accusations of transgression by saying "I'm not a good person" and promising to rewrite parts of the book "more lovingly". This sounds like a critique of some undoubtedly ill-judged, questionable elements of a text she has written have morphed into a moral critique of herself as a person, apparently devaluing decades of practice as a teacher and writer who seems to have tried hard to validate the voices of marginalised, non-white female students.

    It's informative to compare this incident (which I'm sure also has implications for how publishers and awarding bodies vet and assess both language and representation in texts they are considering) with the trend for outing/'canceling' earlier literary figures for historical indiscretions or un-PC behaviours. I recently discovered, for example, that Virginia Woolf had a half-sister who had a learning disability and was perhaps on the autistic spectrum. Laura Makepeace Stephen was shut away in institutions and never visited by the family throughout her adult life although I believe she outlived Virginia - no doubt fairly typical attitudes for the time (and later - look at the Royals similar treatment of the "special needs cousins" Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon in the 1970s). But in 1915 Woolf wrote in her diary about a walk she took in Sussex during which she came across "a long line of imbeciles". She went on to say: "everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead or no chin & and an imbecile grin, or a wild, suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

   Perhaps because this kind of extreme ableist/eugenicist perspective is read as historically determined or because of her status as an icon of 20th century feminism (or perhaps because this is a diary-passage never intended to be published rather than an excerpt from her literary writings), but I have never read any calls for Woolf's work to be "cancelled". It's all the more disconcerting to read this knowing as we do about her own mental health condition and the compelling exploration of post-traumatic breakdown she makes in Mrs Dalloway (which I re-read with great pleasure over the summer) through the character of Septimus Warren Smith, as well as the scathing attack on the psychiatric provision and treatment available to him, which tellingly is implied to be the motive behind Smith's brutal suicide rather than his delusional condition itself. 

    It's true to say that a century ago a learning disability and a mental health illness were seen as two very different things, whereas one of the huge steps forward we have made in comparatively recent years is in believing that they should both be perceived within a spectrum of neurodiversity, a spectrum which certainly reaches far enough to include all of us. In the same spirit, if we examine the life and work of any writer - contemporary or historical - , it will no doubt become apparent that they were or are at best (as Auden wrote of Yeats) "silly like us" ie. flawed, muddled, frequently wrong-headed human beings just as all readers are. This is not to excuse elements of serious prejudice within the works we read (and it seems that examples of questionable ideation and articulation can be upturned in the works of so many acclaimed writers, particularly of the Modernist period) but just an inkling that we should be prepared to make up our own minds about the books we choose to give time to and enter into dialogue with, rather than allowing the blunt, mutable instrument of social media to police our thoughts and dictate what we are allowed to read. 

*As a teacher of students with autism and other complex needs myself, I would suggest these kind of comments are pretty commonplace even among less experienced staff within SEND departments and certainly when mainstream teachers like Clanchy are asked to work with our students - perception of "oddness" is a measure of non-conformity to neurotypical behavioural norms

8 Writers Who Also Made ( or Make) Music

At long last I am conforming to that classic format for the informative blog-post, the listicle of numbered items on a shared theme, even as I toil under the stinging indictment that "no-one reads blogs anymore" (I can't remember on which American sitcom I heard the quip "2006 is on the line, it wants its blog back"). Ploughing on:

1. Frederico Garcia Lorca (who as an adolescent had dreamed of a career as a musician and composer rather than a poet), played piano on this rather crackly 1932 recording of traditional flamenco songs performed by the Spanish-Argentinian singer and dancer, La Argentinita (Encarnación López Júlvez). During this period, he was concentrating more on his work as a dramatist and theatre-director; in the same year he produced his most famous play, Blood Wedding.        

2. Boris Vian was a multi-skilled creative dynamo: not only a poet, playwright and novelist (author of one of my favourite French novels L'Ecume du Jours (1947)) but also a singer, songwriter, actor and jazz trumpeter, as this video of Vian playing with his brothers Lelio and Alain captures. Dead at 39, his life was an intense blaze of literary and musical endeavours, bohemian parties and desperate attempts to cobble money together: he wrote parodic potboiler-thrillers, the earliest French rock'n'roll numbers and even a single for Petula Clarke.

                             

  

3. Out of the extraordinarily varied career outlined in her seven volumes of autobiography, in the 1950s Maya Angelou was working as a dancer and chanteuse in New York nightclubs. She was chosen to perform one of her own songs in Stan Katzman's 1957 movie Calypso Heatwave, which hoped to ride the wave of a new fad for calypso music, briefly seen at the time as a youth trend ready to supplant rock 'n' roll.

4. Nicola Griffith was the lead singer with Hull-based all-woman post-punk band Janes Plane, seen here playing in Brixton in 1982. Griffith went on to write the science fiction novels Ammonite (1992) and Slow River (1995), as well as other works of speculative and historical fiction. In 1993 she received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and has since written on disability and LBTQ issues. She now lives in Seattle with her wife, the writer Kelley Eskridge

5. In early editions of Ursula K Le Guin's 1985 book Always Coming Home, a kind of "future archive" of texts and images relating to an imaginary people called the Kesh, a cassette was included containing the album she made with electronic composer Todd Barton Music and Poetry of the Kesh, a rich amalgam of field recordings, sounds generated on invented instruments (such as a 7 foot horn called the hambouta) and Guin's intoning of poems in the language of the Kesh.

6. Don Paterson - a stunningly accomplished guitarist as well as poet and aphorist - formed the "folk-jazz crossover" group Lammas with saxophonist Tim Garland in 1990, about the time when his poetry career was also taking off. This video captures a more recent revisiting of the first piece they composed together, demonstrating his intriguing style of playing jazz voicings on a classical guitar. What I didn't know until just reading it on his website was that Paterson also took some lessons with the seminal improvisatory guitarist Derek Bailey in the mid-80 and was part of the London "free-improv" scene before Lammas. 

7. The Kolkata-born novelist and essayist Amit Chaudari is also a singer in the North Indian classical tradition, a skill he learned from his mother Biyoja Chaudhari, also a highly acclaimed singer and performer. He has recorded two albums fusing Indian and western stylings, despite one being called This is Not Fusion (2004) - the other is Found Music (2010). Most recently he published a book exploring Indian music entitled Finding the Raga (2021).

                                       

8. English-Welsh poet Zoe Skoulding, whose poetry is often preoccupied with resonance and transmission (cf. her 2013 Seren collection The Museum of Disappearing Sounds), is also the bass-player and vocalist with "psychogeographical musical/artistic collective" Parking Non-Stop, alongside musicians Alan Holmes and Dewi Evans. In its melding of urban field recordings, industrial soundscapes and elements of krautrock and retro-pop, their album Species Corridor (2008) recalls the evanescent sub-genre of "hauntology" disseminated by Simon Reynolds et al circa 2006, inhabiting a roughly commensurate sonic zone as Broadcast, Stereolab and the brilliant Ghostbox label.

Poetry's Remote Community

   If poetry is built on paradox, perhaps one reason poetry seems to have thrived under lockdown is the paradoxical nature of so much in our current lives. Hived off in our disparate households we are nevertheless engaged in a range of virtual interactions we have all had to stumblingly embrace (Zoom meetings, remote interviews and for we 'nincompated pedagogues' the muffled,  stuttering pleasures of online teaching). Equally, our sequestered, inward-facing condition seems to have fostered a renewed sense of community in us, a concern for the less fortunate which has often been lacking from our discourse under a government intent on stripping back any of 

the commitment to public funding and social care many of us had thought the bedrock of a responsible, thriving society. 

    If at times it has seemed that the whole project of lockdown has been a self-sacrificing effort to preserve the most vulnerable members of our society at the cost of economic benefit, those of us fortunate enough to continue working will feel this a price worth paying, even as cabinet members all too quick to pay lip-service to such noble rhetoric are never far from revealing their true, Thatcherite colours. This was amply demonstrated in the latest disclosure that millions of pounds of tax-payers' money has been siphoned off via the furlough scheme to wealthy non-residents (such as tax exile Jim Ratcliff and members of the Saudi royal family) rather than focused on the smaller businesses it was earmarked for. This seems all the more insulting in the context of the government's proposed pay rise of 1% offered to nurses and other frontline healthcare workers who have continuously put their lives on the line by playing a key role in confronting the crisis in our hospitals under unimaginably difficult conditions.

   Poetry is built on the further paradox that it is invariably conceived and written in solitude but ultimately must function as an act of communication if it's to fulfil its fundamental motive (even if it is a case of "communicat(ing) before it is understood".)  Although the thoughts of writers seem divided about whether lockdown has been beneficial for their creative process or not (eg. this Guardian article), many of us have experienced a fillip purely in the additional writing-time and solitude being at home has afforded us, as well as increased access to the ancillary activities that feed into our writing (eg. reading, nature walks, online research). But at the same time the communicative side of poetry, at least as it is manifested in live readings and face-to-face poetry groups and workshops, has suffered quite as much as the other performing arts and with it the sense that poetry also comes out of a living, breathing, talking community of other poets, "silly like us" (as Auden wrote of Yeats) but also bonded by that strange obsession with making lasting shapes out of the flyaway words that surround and confound us.

   It could be said, however, that poetry has adapted to lockdown circumstances perhaps more easily than music or theatre, many of its live events migrating online with comparative ease. Attending a virtual reading from home can, of course, have its advantages over travelling to and from a venue, especially during winter and especially (as in my case) when you have two small children to put to bed with no literally no chance of a baby-sitter thanks to lockdown restrictions.

   The launch reading for Tears in the Fence 73 which took place last week seemed at first an ambitious undertaking, as the editor David Caddy had invited every single poet with poems included in the issue to read at the event, a generously inclusive gesture which seems in keeping with the ethos of the magazine. In the end an extensive range of poets contributed to the reading, which lasted for well over two hours. As well as the eclectic range of styles and themes on display in the magazine's selection, what was also wonderful was the international diversity of the readers, something again which Zoom facilitates much more practically than a physical reading. The sense that writers from around the world were coming together in a shared purpose was palpable and did restore that feeling of poetic community we often - immured in our little microclimates - mislay. That the Tears in the Fence poets fostered by David are a supportive and highly receptive listenership was also apparent, with generous comments in the Chat panel the norm and an active sense of encouragement in how the writers interacted with one another.

   I almost didn't make it to the reading for the very reasons cited above: my partner was also engaged on an online evening class so it was my turn to put the little ones to bed. I had literally just rocked my crying son to sleep and rested him on the sofa. I logged into the reading which seemed to take a few moments because of connection problems, but as soon as David's face came onto the screen he said "Is Oliver there?" I hardly felt prepared but fortunately had the edition of the magazine to hand and didn't have time to be nervous so just launched into the reading of my poem ('Elegiac Improvisation on the Death of John Hartley Williams'). This first foray into online reading, to an audience of listeners across the UK, Europe and beyond, felt like extending my voice and my words into a broader echo chamber of resonances, taking their place within a creative conversation that is ongoing.

  Copies of Tears in the Fence 73 are still available from the website.