Last night I had the good fortune to meet Billy Collins after he had performed at Edge Hill’s Poets Laureate event with Carol Ann Duffy. As my students know, American Literature is a bit of a blind spot with me, but I have been a fan of Collins since first hearing him read on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. His poetry is wry, funny, thought-provoking, and accessible. Its deceptive simplicity is its strong suit. Collins observes life and re-presents it to his reader with gentle irony and wit. Its art lies very much in its seeming lack of art.
My friend and colleague Daniele Pantano was instrumental in bringing Collins over, and he did not disappoint. Together with Carol Ann Duffy, he provided a memorable evening’s entertainment. Duffy was sharp, sour, rather angry at times (she self-deprecatingly referred to herself as ‘Disgusted of Didsbury’ at one point) and showcased some new work, alongside old favourites from The World’s Wife. Collins read some new poems too, but also delighted with a reading of ‘Forgetfulness’, quirkily interpreted in this video:
Thanks to my friend Tim Power who took the photograph which captures brilliantly Collins’s air of slight bemusement. I’m told video of the event will soon be on the EHU website – do have a look.
Housekeeping- Apture should now be enabled across the blog, so anything that takes your fancy, highlight, and you’ll get some links.
To Venice, with ‘er indoors. Both of us were experiencing The Serenissima for the first time. The new image at the top of the blog is a photograph taken from the Rialto bridge, and it, like so many other photos we took, is eerily reminiscent of a Canaletto painting. And that’s the thing with Venice – it oozes history at every turn. The first thing we did when we got back was to begin planning our next trip. So – what is it that makes Venice the destination of choice for sophisticated travellers like what we are? A colleague of mine who went to Venice a couple of years ago reported meeting a couple of English people who had been on a day trip. They didn’t like it: “Just like Blackpool,” they said. I lived near Blackpool for seventeen years, and don’t recall its abundance of Renaissance palaces, its churches stuffed with priceless works of art, its gondolas… It seems that they hadn’t got much further than the Piazzale Roma, which is, it has to be said, an unlovely bus depot enlivened only by a scattering of souvenir stalls selling cheap made-in-China tat. Even so, I’d prefer it to the Golden Mile, if only because it leads to the treasures of this sublime city. Venice has twenty million visitors a year, and less than half of them stay overnight. So it’s no surprise that the Piazza San Marco and the Rialto bridge were, even out of the main holiday season, packed with camera-clicking hordes. They might only have a few hours in the city, so they were going to prove they were there by taking as many photos as possible against iconic backdrops. When we first started exploring, this was annoying, but it soon became apparent that when you moved away from the honeypot sites, the rest of the place was, whilst often busy, surprisingly easy to move around. We walked everywhere – the vaporetti are expensive, with a single trip at €6,50, and usually we could walk where we wanted much quicker anyway. We did splash out on a 36 hour ticket to visit the outlying islands, and that was well worth it. So, armed with the wit and wisdom of J.G. Links’s lovely book Venice for Pleasure, (thanks to the Coopers for the tip) we followed his suggestions and walked around each district. We stayed in an apartment in the Cannareggio district, which was very handy for the Ghetto and Madonna dell’Orto, both well worth a visit. Even staying in that area, away from the main tourist trail, we found that a fifteen-minute stroll would land us pretty well anywhere we wanted to be. It’s such a compact place, so, with (obviously) no traffic, it’s ideal for walking.
After a while, we began to enjoy the unsung corners of the place – a quiet fondamenta, a local campo – as much as the gorgeous excesses of the churches and palaces.
But it is the art and architecture that astonishes, and we did explore it at length. If our top tourist tip is to walk everywhere, our second is to buy a Chorus pass. This entitles you to one visit to a group of churches, each of which has its particular charm, and all of which are replete with jaw-droppingly magnificent works of art. In most of our visits, we were amongst a small number of visitors, so we really had time to look at everything. Some highlights for me were the Frari, of which more later, the aforementioned Madonna dell’Orto, with its Tintorettos – he is buried there – and Sant’Alvise, with its amazing ceiling. But everywhere the visitor is ambushed by the rich artistic heritage of the place, and it’s almost impossible to single out particular sites for a special mention. That’s what I am going to do for the Frari, though, if only because we spent more time in there. We visited in the daytime, and were suitably bowled over by such items as the Bellini altarpiece, the various Titians, and the beautiful interior, with its stupendous scale. We noticed that a concert was to be held the next day. We went, and it was one of the highlights of the holiday. The Frari is the church where Monteverdi, maestro di cappella of San Marco, is buried, and where Philip Thorby, the leading scholar-performer of early music, had assembled a choir, soloists and orchestra to play the 1610 Vespers in the year of their 400th anniversary. This was sublime. The music, which as maestro Thorby pointed out in his bilingual introduction, would have seemed daringly avant-garde to a contemporary audience, echoed beguilingly around this impossibly sumptuous building. Thorby laid a wreath at Monteverdi’s tomb at the end of the performance, to rapturous applause. And it was ingresso libero, too!
We did use the vaporetti in order to visit San Michele, the cemetery island, and the subject of a moving poem by Simon Barraclough. We found the graves of Ezra Pound and Stravinsky, as well as some unexpected ones, often British exiles. We also visited the Lido, where the famous Hotel des Bains, as featured in Visconti’s Death in Venice, is now closed and covered with scaffolding as it is turned into apartments, but where there is a remarkable art nouveau exterior at the Hotel Ausonia:
The most rewarding journey to the outer islands was to Torcello, the original settlement of the refugees who created Venice. There, the church of Santa Maria Assunta contains some thousand year old mosaics, and a wonderful display of Byzantine religious art. And you can sit on a throne carved out of rock, allegedly used by Attila the Hun…
On several evenings we escaped the tourist hordes to enjoy a quiet drink in one of the biggest campi, the Campo San Margarita, where young kids charged around playing football whilst their mums gossiped.
This seemed a much better bet than a visit to Florian’s at San Marco, where a coffee will set you back at least €10, with a further €7 if the band is playing insipid cocktail jazz or easy-listening classics at the time. For two people, having a quick drink and a cake can easily cost thirty quid. Nearby places will serve you delicious coffee for less than a quarter of Florian’s price. There’s lots more to say, and I’ll return to the Venice theme again, I suspect.
To the new headquarters of the IABF for the first in its series of events with contemporary writers. Mancunian Howard Jacobson was presenting his latest novel, The Finkler Question . What an excellent speaker and reader he is! Too often, writers are not actually terribly good at reading their own stuff, as students in my Modernism class who were subjected to recordings of T.S. Eliot will attest, but Jacobson has a Martin Jarvis-esque command of the spoken word, and entertained us hugely with his lively reading of some extracts from early in the novel.
He answered questions in animated fashion, and really engaged with his questioners. It helped that the questions were mostly well-informed and intelligent, though one, which seemed pretty banal (‘Which books should I read?’) elicited a highly entertaining riff on the importance of the classics. I had a short conversation with him, picking up on something he’d said about people’s opinions on books, that when stated baldly (“This book is boring”) they are the least interesting thing to say. As he said, an opinion is more about the speaker than the book; only when you show by your close attention to the text what your opinion is based on can you really say what you think. People used to instant responses (e.g. nearly everyone under 30) find this difficult, hence the sort of conversations academics have with students.
He also said something about the complexity of comedy which struck a chord. Earlier that day, I had been talking to a colleague about a mutual acquaintance, who simply doesn’t get irony, or indeed tone at all. Jacobson made the point that comic effects need the reader to engage in order to succeed, in a way a tragic passage doesn’t. Comedy is more intellectually demanding, because you have to work out the joke, to oversimplify a complex point.
The Finkler Questionhas had excellent reviews, and is longlisted for the Booker. It examines some fundamental questions about life and death, but, if the extracts Jacobson read are anything to go by, does so in a hugely entertaining manner. Review to follow, when I’ve read it. Thanks to all at the IABF for a great event.
Note for Burgessians: he was asked about the review of Any Old Iron.* He said it embarrassed him to read how he had rubbished established writers when he was a young turk, and he wouldn’t say that now. He still doesn’t like it, but was very laudatory about Earthly Powers. So we’ll let him off. *Note that some deluded person is trying to flog this on Amazon for £155.95, which is £155.94 more than one needs to spend to acquire this fine novel.
In 1966, Manchester Education Committee decided that the city was to abolish grammar schools, and go comprehensive. So that was the last year of the 11-plus examination. I was 11 at the time, and sometime in March of that year – I think – my class at Alfred Street sat the final Manchester exam, the results of which would decide whether they would be the last intake in a grammar, technical, or secondary modern school. It consisted of maths questions, logical puzzles (which is the odd shape in this sequence, etc) and what was then called a ‘composition’. This was the creative writing bit, and we were expected to come up with something based on titles such as ‘A Day in the Life of a Penny’ or ‘My favourite place’. I chose one about pets, and, with the contrariness of youth, wrote about a hamster, despite knowing nothing about them- we were always a cat family.
I passed the exam, and sometime later, we received a letter from the Mayor’s office to say that my hamster essay had been judged one of the best of that year in Manchester, and inviting me and my family to a ceremony at the Town Hall to receive a prize. My mother took time off from working in her uncle’s greengrocer’s shop to take me. I was wearing my smartest clothes, which comprised my new secondary school uniform – short trousers, obviously – and was very impressed by the splendour of the mayor’s parlour. It’s difficult to find images of the old smoke-blackened Town Hall now, but this one though taken in the late nineteenth century, gives an idea of what it looked like back then.
The mayor turned out to be a Lady Mayoress, with an ideal name for a northern civic dignitary: Nellie Beer. She would obviously be played by Hylda Baker, if we had been casting, but in truth she was, to my junior eye, quite posh. Not as posh as Lady Simon, who was, with her late husband the sponsor of the prize. Lord and Lady Simon’s good works, particularly in education, were a feature of the civic scene in Manchester, but still… She served Manchester well, it seems, and is remembered on this curious website thus:
Mrs Beer served for thirty-five years (1937 – 1972) as a member of the Manchester City Council and was appointed OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) (1957) by Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of her valuable civic work. Mrs Beer served as an alderman (1964 – 1972) and then as the Lord Mayor of Manchester (1966). She was also a Justice of the Peace and received an honorary degree from Manchester University (1978). Nellie Beer died (Sept 17, 1988) aged eighty-eight.
My prize, and this is the point of this post, was the newly published Penguin Encyclopedia, priced 12/6. It advertised itself as the encyclopedia for the modern age. I have it still, and still occasionally consult it for its concise and authoritative entries. It was obviously conceived as the reference equivalent of Penguin’s trendy paperbacks of the time, and, like them, it has stood the test of time. I don’t think Penguin pursued it much after this initial publication, but its ghost still lives in the rather bigger Penguin Encyclopedia now edited by the ubiquitous David Crystal.
My version was edited by Sir John Summerscale, about whom I know next to nothing. Google, the twenty-first century reference source of first resort, offers very scant pickings, and most of those are book listings of the Encyclopedia. I think he must be the Sir John Summerscale who was the Commercial Secretary of the British Embassy in Iraq before the Second World War, mentioned in a footnote to a fascinating article on Jewish Refugees From Arab Countries. I imagine a gentleman’s club in Mayfair, and a meeting between Allen Lane and this pillar of the old Empire: “John, old thing – we’re thinking of publishing a modern encyclopedia. You’ve lots of time on your hands now- do you fancy being editor?”
“Well, I suppose I could.”
“Good show- I’ll get the lawyer chaps to send over a contract.”
Whatever the circumstances, Sir John seems to have assembled a top team – none of whom are named, by the way – and those subjects about which I have reasonable knowledge appear to me to be very well covered in clear, unfussy prose. The book is illustrated by line drawings, contributed by Wolf Spoerl, a designer with a knack for rendering complex things simply. Spoerl is mentioned en passant in this interesting account of the design revolution at Penguin in the sixties. Here’s Spoerl’s rendition of eclipse:
The book, at 650 pages, is compact for an encyclopedia, following the editor’s wise decision to “assume the reader to be a reasonably educated, intelligent person who at least knows what ‘every schoolboy knows’ “. Simple dictionary definitions, and biographical information were also excluded, so relativity is in, but Einstein isn’t.
Inevitably, some material is badly dated now, though usually not in a way that grates. (‘Computer’ begins: “Machine for solving problems that are essentially mathematical”.) I have another encyclopedia, published in 1990, (the Cambridge, edited by the industrious Prof Crystal) which includes items such as lists of sporting records, winners of Oscars etc., which must have been out of date on publication day. The Penguin has a timeless quality, though time has taken its toll on some entries – the section on Educational Subnormality makes for painful reading today:
Educationally backward children fall into three categories: (a) Educationally subnormal (ESN) with IQ between 80 and 60; (b) Ineducable, with IQ below 60; (c) Morons, with IQ still lower.
Elsewhere, though, the book is a model of concision. Could this entry on Dadaism be bettered as a clear initial statement for someone who has just encountered the term?:
Dadaism. An extremist anti-art movement, rooted in the nihilism caused by the First World War, originated with Arp and others in Zurich in 1916 and spread to France, Germany and (with Marcel Duchamp) U.S.A. Its members set out to shock a bourgeois public with productions which outraged all accepted literary and artistic traditions, e.g. its productions included a urinal obtained by Duchamp and exhibited as The Fountain under the maker’s name. Max Ernst, Picabia, and the painter-photographer Man Ray were among the prominent Dadaist artists. Betrayed by its own nihilism, the movement dissolved in the early 1920s; by contrast, Surrealism, which grew out of it, had a constructive philosophy.
The encyclopedia has been superseded of course, as, it appears, has the dictionary. But when I don’t want to google away, my old Penguin remains a trusted friend.
My friend Harriet Devine is once again up in the stratosphere of literary bloggers with her latest placing in the Wikio listing where I come a distant 2000 places behind, but I was pleased to be notified that someone must have liked me, because Topsyturvydom has received an award as one of the 2010 Top 45 Literary Studies Blogs from Awarding the Web. Yes, it isn’t exactly the Pulitzer, but hey, you get a nice badge… Image: Ruminatrix
To the Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill for the launch of Any Human Face. Hugh Grant seems to have ceased employment there, so the paparazzi were not in evidence as I mingled before the event, trying – and failing – to look elegant on a sweltering evening. The very quaffable Italian wine, provided by our hosts certainly oiled the wheels, and I had the great pleasure of meeting Charles Lambert in the flesh for the first time. I also met Anne (A.C.) Tillyer, whose intriguing collection of short stories, An A-Z of Possible Worlds, comes, BS Johnson style, as a boxed set, and Simon Barraclough who read poems with an Italian connection from his collections Los Alamos Mon Amour and Bonjour Tetris. The event was introduced by Charles’s agent – and a considerable poet herself – Isobel Dixon. Simon read some of his thought-provoking poems first. More of these anon – suffice to say that I was ashamed not to have read his work before. Charles read three passages from early in the novel, one for each of the three narrative threads. I enjoyed revisiting the book, and people I spoke to who hadn’t read it were very intrigued- they were hooked by the thriller aspect, and reeled in by the superbly evocative language.
Charles Lambert
All in all, a lovely way to spend a balmy summer evening in Notting Hill.
After enjoying Charles Lambert’s Little Monsters so much, I was looking forward to his latest novel, Any Human Face, and I was not disappointed. Set in Rome, this novel is a fast-paced and dark tale of murky deeds in high and low places, recounted from multiple perspectives over a span of nearly three decades. What Hitchcock would call the McGuffin (and there is something Hitchcockian about this) in the tale, is a set of photos, entrusted by an investigative journalist to his gay lover on the night of his (the journalist’s) brutal and apparently homophobic murder. The photos come into the possession of Andrew Caruso, half Scottish, half Italian, whose shambolic existence centres around the secondhand bookshop he runs. Soon, he is involved in a frightening chain of events that may have something to do with the journalist’s murder, a quarter of a century earlier. Lambert handles a complex narrative with great authority, moving in cinematic style from the near present day (2008) to 1982, to 1985 and back, each time focalising his narrative through the perspective of one of his characters. One of the many things I like about Lambert’s work is that he doesn’t give the reader an easy ride. There is not here, or in Little Monsters, a character with whom we can readily empathise – all of them have their frailties and vulnerabilities. They are all too human in their failings, and Lambert’s unflinching and unsentimental portrayal of their interlocking lives is a fascinating exercise in close observation. Paradoxically, because Lambert is so good at unfolding the delicate nuances of individual behaviour, the reader soon becomes involved in this seedy world of clandestine affairs and shabby deals, and does indeed care about the fate of the protagonists. Indeed, I found that this was one of those books that demanded to be read through as quickly as possible, so immersed did I become in this world. There are dark hints throughout at institutionalised corruption, whether of the church or the state, but the focus throughout remains on the human story, and how we are all connected, in ways we can’t begin to comprehend. I was struck by one passage on this theme, where Alex, the journalist’s lover, reflects on the transient world he is part of:
“All these nameless friendships that entangled the city in a taut invisible web. A secretive web, because no one knew anything about it, or everyone pretended to know nothing about it. A web that stretched across hotels and galleries and studio flats in the richest parts of the city, from the Vatican to the senate to the station, of favours and small, sweet acts of generosity and asked-for, insisted-on violence. And then it went wrong and someone died, and the web closed to hide the rift so quickly no one would know it had ever been torn. Webs heal themselves.”
This novel is, in concept, an excellent, disturbing, stylish thriller, but one with aspirations beyond the working out of a criminal act. It uses most of the thriller conventions, but goes well beyond them, to offer a story which deals with universal themes, particularly of man’s inhumanity to man, and the dark heart of loneliness at the centre of many lives.
Chez Topsyturvydom, our Sunday morning news source tends to be Radio 5 Live, on the basis that Radio 4 is god-bothering until 9.00 a.m. Today’s top story was about the discovery of a car-bomb in Times Square, New York. Part of the report featured an admirably factual and concise statement from the NYPD police chief, who explained the circumstances of the car’s discovery, what exactly had been found in the car, what the police bomb disposal team had done, and that, as yet, they had no information on who might have planted the device. Job done, you might think. Time to move on to the next item. But no, we instead were taken live to New York where a British man who had been in Times Square at the time was waiting to be interviewed. What could he add to what we already knew? Well, er, nothing. He had been on his way to the theatre when a lot of police had appeared and cordoned off the square. He had been instructed to get out of the way quickly. He had heard that someone had been told by a police officer to run. “So, you’re saying the police told people to run away?” Well, that’s what he had heard, he said. Not him personally. It must have been scary, the interviewer prompted. Well, no, actually: in fact the theatres carried on, after a delay. Finally, the classic fatuous question – how did he feel? He felt OK. People seemed to take it in their stride. End of interview. So what was the point of this? Presumably to get the “human angle”. It’s another indication of the relentless tabloidisation of the BBC. Instead of being content to report the news authoritatively, we have to suffer the vacuous follow-up, itself longer than the original item, which reveals precisely nothing about the incident, because the interviewee knows nothing. Image: joiseyshowaa
My sharp-eyed reader will have noted that Topsyturvydom now proudly displays the badge proclaiming that we are the 2161st rated general blog in the UK and Ireland blogospshere. The estimable Dovegreyreader is at number 1 in culture and literature. She is veritably the Chelsea to my Forest Green Rovers. Unfortunately, there’s no prospect of a third round giant killing act, so I will just have to accept that we have a mountain to climb, Brian, we’ve got to take the positives, and take each game as it comes. Oh, and the ref was diabolical. Image: Nicksarebi
Here’s an example of how books are marketed these days. I’ve admired David Mitchell for some time, particularly for his brilliant Cloud Atlas. Thanks to my friend Anthony Levings for the tip.
