RosieBell

Eunoia

A delightful Canadian poet Christian Bok on Today this morning was talking about his work "Eunoia". Each chapter uses one vowel only, "a" for the first, "e" for the second and so on.  It took him seven years to write.  He read the opening "I" chapter beautifully.

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script.  I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks, impish highjinks which highlight stick [sidils?] .  Isn’t it glib? isn’t it chic?  I fit childish insights within rigid limits, writing schtick which might instil priggish misgivings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nit-picking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch.  I kibbitz..  Griping whilst criticising dimwits. Sniping whilst inditing nitwits. Dismissing simplistic thinking in which philippic wit is still illicit.

Each vowel has a different character, he said - the "a" chapter was courtly, poetic, Arabic, e elegiac, i lyrical,  "o" jocular, the "u" obscene.

Dons go crosstown to look for bookshops known to stock lots of top-notch goods: cookbooks, workbooks - room on room of how-to-books for jocks (how to jog, how to box), books on pro sports: golf or polo. Old colophons on schoolbooks from schoolrooms sport two sorts of logo: oblong whorls, rococo scrolls - both on worn morocco.  [That last sentence has a clumsy almost rhyme "logo" and "morocco".]

This sounds like Martin Amis.  Is it because it is noun heavy?  Has Amis been trying to write a kind of prose poetry all this time?

It's a nice thing about the Today programme.  After the last politician victim has been submitted to the Gestapo treatment, they will then have a short piece about science or the arts. The power chasers and public relaters and their ephemeral concerns share a platform with the makers of the beautiful, the quirky, and the seekers of knowledge.

Women of Baltimore

At the Cellar Bar in Chambers Street where I played a few number on their enormous Yamaha grand piano, the action of which is twice as heavy as my tacky Yamaha keys.  I followed a lad called Duncan Drever, who played some songs pretty well.  His last song he said was really filthy.  He played it, and he was right, it’s the filthiest song I’ve ever heard, and with a touch of poetry as well.

There were four old whores from Baltimore
Drinking beer and wine.
The topic of conversation was
"Mine is bigger than thine.'
. . .

The third old whore from Baltimore said,
"Mine's as big as the sea.
The ships sail in, the ships sail out,
And leave their rigging free."

Afterwards I talked to him and he said that he should have said he hadn’t written it.  “You’re far too young to have written that.”  It’s a song that would be sung by a bunch of sailors far out to sea.

Conversation in the time of Credit Crunch

Lying on the sofa on Saturday, a blustery day, watching the trees being pushed hard by the wind.  I called a friend and said, "I'm not going out to the supermarket, it's too much of a gale out there."

"Oh, you can afford to go the supermarket?" he said.

"Only to the bins where they throw food out."

"Isn't there a whole crowd there already?  How do you get at them?"

"There's usually some small waif child you can knock over and then nick their stuff."

"It's dog eat dog out there."

"Dogs!  When did you last see a dog?  They’ve all been stir fried."

He then told me a story about a charity that he's a member of.  One of the office bearers realised that they had £100,000 in the Bank of Scotland.  Because deposits only up to the value of £35,000 are protected by the Government, he thought he should withdraw the difference.  He didn't want a cheque, in case it bounced.  When he got the cash out, it was too late to find somewhere to deposit it.  He then walked about with £65,000 in cash on his person.  So, muggers should now target workers for the voluntary sector – usually a shabby lot with Save XX or Support YY on their faded t-shirts, and not worth the robbing.

Speaking through your headphones

I watched Phil Spector on Arena  last night, which twined scenes from his trial for murder with an interview with him, clips of his music and subtitles telling us how wonderful this music is.  He was utterly convinced of his own genius, comparing himself to Da Vinci and the USA under Nixon to Germany in the thirties. 

His crimes include River Deep, Mountain High, a song that tells you “I am great, I am soaring, I am magnificent, a Handel among pop songs” which is mediocrity trying hard; Imagine, the stupidest, most pretentious song ever and he seems to have been responsible for the notorious white piano that appeared in the video while John Lennon sang “imagine no possessions"; the string backing which wrecks The Long and Winding Road – Paul Macartney released Let it Be Naked minus the Spectors and what a relief it was to see that long and winding road plain, without the portentuous thundercloud of strings.

He said of the Da Doo Ron Ron  that it was meant to be silly but has become a classic, like Duke Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing. Ellington's "wall of sound" was in the old style of getting together a gang of skilled musicians.

He’s right enough that a silly pop song which makes you wiggle your hips in happiness is worth its three minutes.  Can’t Buy Me Love  is that kind of song.

Artists in fact shouldn’t talk about their own work – they risk sounding like tossers.  I heard a programme (another Arena I think) about Charles Jencks, architect and garden designer, and he sounded like a New Age charlatan.  I’ve had the great good fortune to visit his Garden of Cosmic Speculation one April when the cherry blossom was out and white and I was in a state of open-mouthed, wide-eyed awe at its beauty.  My sister and her partner, who have travelled far more than I have, agreed it was one of the most beautiful places they had ever seen.

My Very Own Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy theory

I recently saw a good comment on conspiracy theories:-

Conspiracy theory usually seems to revolve around “cui bono” analysis and magnification of the importance of small details at the expense of ignoring larger but less specific trends and information.

For example in the 9-11 attacks, the fact that Al Qaeda has been involved in numerous attacks against Western targets, that the nominal “head” of Al Qaeda admitted the attacks and that Al Qaeda had previously attacked the Twin Towers is subsumed to the fact that one of the buildings fell in an at-first-glance odd manner, and that the Bush administration was able to use the event to accomplish one of its goals (the invasion of Iraq).

Well, it’s about time I had my own conspiracy theory.  I can’t take on the collapse of the global financial system for which Mossad, the CIA and a bunch of Zionist bankers are being fingered for as I write, because it’s too big a subject, and I can’t take up 9/11 troofer stuff as it involves engineering and stress levels in metal but I can start small, with the London Review of Books.

The London Review of Books has a load of articles about Israel – - in every second issue for a while but when I exposed that fact here, they went significantly quiet on the subject and the last three four five issues have been Israel free.  There is much less about Islamism, even though Islamism has killed more people in London itself than Mossad/Zionists ever have and there are frequent trials of those who have screwed up in the attempt to murder and maim the populace. World wide Islamism has a large casualty rate – 100,000 in Algeria alone.  During the hot days of Irish republicanism, with bombs being planted and bombers and would-be bombers being tried in Britain, the London Review of Books covered the Northern Irish situation often and in depth.  But they are not much exercised with Islamism and its relationship to British Muslims.  Verso, the publishing house which considers Islam and Islamism a bulwark against capitalism recently published a slew of anti-Israel books and the writings of Hezbollah and Osama bin Laden.  Given their publishing policy, these are likely to be sympathetic to those ultra-Islamists.  They did a full page advertising spread in the London Review of Books.

So follow the money. The Saudi government pours money into mosques and schools in this country that propagate its particular puritanical and exclusive brand of Islam.  The Saudi government is not that fond of Islamists, whom it tends to lock up and torture, but taking the cui bono angle, it does not want the content of the curriculum in its schools and the teachings at its mosques being closely examined. The Sauds would prefer that its religion and the ideology related to it to be rather gently dealt with in this country and any investigator to be branded as hysterical or racist (something that doesn’t bother them in their country, but which they know has the same force in this society as “infidel” in theirs, though as yet decapitation has not been applied to offenders).

The Sauds financing a liberal left intellectual journal?  Not that astonishing – the CIA backed a fine intellectual journal, Encounter, for years.   The people writing for Encounter were too talented to be merely propaganda mouth pieces, they were just broadly sympathetic to American aims and happy to be paid without looking too hard into where their wages came from.

“"The most effective kind of propaganda," explains a National Security Council directive from 1950, is the kind where "the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons he believes to be his own."”

The London Review of Books' reasons for their editorial policity are no doubt that of not wanting to be seen to join in with the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph’s harassing of British Muslims.  They can have the warm sense of being highly responsible as well as being agreeably remunerated at the same time.

Random House editor Jason Epstein observes. . . . Who wouldn't like to be in a situation where you're politically correct and at the same time well compensated for the position you've taken?"

How does the Saudi government slip the money into the London Review of Books' accounts without anyone noticing?  Very easily.  The LRB is famous for its personals ads which are floridly written and have a high word count:- 

 Rusticated with a Desmond, scapegoated by the media world’s own truth and reconciliation committee, righteously avoided a double beeb fine before pole-vaulting into a policy role with a manoeuvre known in wonk circles as a Flying Lamont.  Twentysomething with febrile love of lingo, scanning these pages for insight and now literary ladies to 30.  No Peace Studies grads, natch.  Box no 17/07.

It’s laughably obvious that that is not the cri of a genuine lonely coeur, (to use their kind of language) and that no normal English spoken person would try to pull in that way.  Some of the entries are about a 100 words long, and each word is charged at £1,000.  So the dubious source of funding is book-kept under Advertisements Personals.  Expect the pages to go glossy soon, and if you meet any contributors, it will be because they crashed into you in their Porsches.

That’s my conspiracy theory.  It is no accident that there is no factual evidence for it whatsoever, since of course all evidence has been suppressed.   But that never stopped a good conspiracy theory from flying round the internet.

Update:- A round up of conservative anti-Obama conspiracy theories, which show up my effort as puny stuff.

Money Talks

I know less about finance than a slug, but have to quote from here:-

Are economists missing an aspect of the cause of the financial crisis? In looking for its cause in stupidity, organizational dysfunction or macroeconomics, we’re taking for granted something that’s true but not inevitable - that individuals are motivated by narrow financial self-interest..

Imagine banking were a practice with its own internal meanings and goals - that there were virtues of banking, and that bankers were motivated not just by money but by the desire to exemplify these virtues. Such men would not have lent to sub-prime borrowers, as the virtue of banking is to only lend to those who can repay. And they wouldn’t have speculated much on mortgage derivatives, as another banking virtue lies in investing only in what one understands.

In this world - which romantics might argue actually existed once - the financial crisis might not have occurred

Bankers should be sour faced elders of the Kirk who won’t lend you £10 unless they know you will have £11 next week, and won’t let you spend it on anything frivolous. 

I knew the rot had set in when after admitting that they had made a mistake in their favour of £120 on my account, such a sour faced fellow from the Bank of Scotland apologised and then tried to sell me something. 

My friend reminisced about when she was a student and getting a loan the manager called her in and lectured her and her flatmates about prudence.

The bank managers have gone from being Kirk elders to used-money salesmen and spivs who will give a credit card to your grandmother, especially if she has Alzheimers.

A reader writes:-

“My work colleague thinks he's found the key to the economic cycle. Looking at the recessions during the tenures of chancellors Healey, Lamont and Darling, he concludes that there's a strong link - perhaps a causal one - between recession and chancellors with comedy eyebrows.”

Evidence:-

 

Winter of discontent

Denis Healey 1974 – 1979

Black Wednesday

Norman Lamont 1990 – 1993

 

Whatever it’s going to be called – Bailout? Credit crunch?

Alastair Darling 2007 - 2008

Colour in October

In my chilly garden there is little colour left.  However, these michaelmas daisies are going strong.  I put them in last year, they disappeared, I forgot about them, and they came back and are now flowering magnificently.

 

Our Policy

HBOS, desperate for custom, pounced on me when I was paying in a cheque and begged me to change my house insurance policy, offering me a good deal and £50 every year.  It looked like I would save money so today I went to see their personable young salesman to discuss the policy.  I asked if they would insure my bicycle both in its shed and when I took it out (which usually involves high premiums).  He said yes, just a little extra per month. I asked if the contents insurance would extend to my flatmate’s stuff, including his bicycle.  He tapped something into his computer.  (In our old age homes we will be sitting talking to each other, our fingers moving on imaginary keyboards, as another generation mended imaginary nets, or plied imaginary needles in their post-working years). Did I want special cover for malicious damage by a tenant?  No, I said, indignant on behalf of my honest, good-natured flatmate.  Well, the fact that I had a tenant meant that I couldn’t get my bicycle insured.  So they think my tenant is going to nick my bicycle and cause malicious damage?  I said.  That’s what it amounts to.  Now if you were in a relationship it would be all right.   But it’s much more likely that an ex-boyfriend should damage stuff or steal your cycle when you broke up than your tenant would, I said, recalling stories of wronged women who had cut the crotches out of a husband’s suits or poured sugar into the petrol tank of his Porsche.  It does seem unreasonable, said the salesman. But those are the conditions.

I thought insurance companies were supposed to be brutally realistic.  Actuaries calculate how long it will be before they can reasonably expect you to peg out, and then offer you the terms of your life insurance.  But a boyfriend is at some point far more like to chuck your property about in a rage than a tenant, who shares your house in the spirit of mutual convenience.  No passion, no malice, no trashing the place.   The insurance companies must have ideas of doting couples and happy families, menaced by Cape Fear types of destructive outsiders. They evidently are like those parents who guard their children neurotically in case they are kidnapped by strangers when it’s really the trusted uncle who’s doing the fiddling.

The True North

The bill for 42 days detention without charge did not get through the Lords this time and the government has dropped it, for the present of course.  Like the bloke who doesn’t punch you in the pub, but waits outside for closing time when you’re not in a state to put up a fight.

42 writers contribute to a website protesting about the proposed legislation.  Each offers a short piece on 42 days detention. 

It’s worth going to the site to read the piece by Rachel North, an eloquent speaker for civil liberties, whose speaking gains great force from her having been in the carriage when one of the 7/7 suicide bombers exploded himself and twenty six other people to death.

She gets it.  The government doesn’t.  Far better Churchill offering us blood, sweat and tears in a time of much greater peril, than Brown offering us databases, surveillance on every communication and banging everyone up.  It’s stranger danger government that won’t let the kids out to play.

Terrorism is the dark art of wielding fear as a political weapon. To provoke a horrified reaction, to seed fear and hatred and division is the goal of the bomber. He harnesses our nightmares and uses them against us. It gives him power when we deem him our terrible enemy and demand the government respond.

But the unspoken truth is that it is not possible to keep us safe. There is no legislation that can protect us from the man who moves amongst us with a bomb on his back and hate in his heart.
Even if every man and woman and child is watched over and monitored every moment of every day. Even if every conversation, every email, every transaction is recorded; if armed police and sniffer dogs travel on every bus and train and stand guard outside pubs and schools and shops and stadiums. It still would not keep us safe.

Accepting this is hard but it is the price of our freedom.

We walk out of our homes and into the world every day as free men and women. We are protected by ancient liberties that thousands have died to protect. They are to be cherished as much in the age of the suicide bomber as in the age of the threatened enemy invasion.

To give them up is to let terrorists win.  

Tomorrow Belongs to Me

It’s one of the most chilling movie scenes I know, that one in Cabaret, when Michael Yorke and his rich friend are sitting in a restaurant out in the countryside and on the soundtrack comes the pure young voice, then we see the handsome lad singing with all his youthful and serious heart:-

The sun on the meadow is summery warm
The stag in the forest runs free
But gathered together to greet the storm
Tomorrow belongs to me

An accordion starts accompanying him. The camera moves down the handsome lad’s uniform and we that see he’s a member of Hitler Youth.

Everyone else in the restaurant starts joining in as the song carries on up the keys and starts moving at a military beat, singing those verses about nature and hope and promised glory, which sound so innocent and fresh, and which in the context of khaki and swastikas are a hideous omen of horrors to come.

The other day the news arrived of the death of Jörg Haider, the leader of a far-right movement in Austria.  According to his obituary in the Washington Post:-

Mr. Haider's parents had been members of the Nazi party, and he sometimes praised aging Third Reich soldiers at their reunions. But he also mixed easily with a younger generation in nightly visits to discos to recruit new party members.

His rallies attracted throngs of young people who responded to Mr. Haider's pleas to banish immigrants and to challenge Austria's two long-reigning parties, the Social Democrats and the more conservative People's Party. . .

At times, Mr. Haider's followers would start singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," an anthem from the musical "Cabaret" that symbolized the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

“Tomorrow Belongs to Me” was written in the mid 60s for the musical Cabaret by Fred Ebb and John Kander, both American Jews.  According to Broadway Babies Say Goodnight:- 'it was immediately denounced as a grossly offensive Nazi anthem.  “The accusations against “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” made me very angry,” says Fred Ebb.  “I knew that song as a child,” one man had the audacity to tell me.  A rabbinical person wrote to me saying he had absolute proof it was a Nazi song.”'

Young Austrian neo-Nazis singing a song written by American Jews for a great anti-Nazi musical.  It’s a strange world.

The babe in his cradle is closing his eyes
The blossom embraces the bee
But soon says a whisper, arise, arise
Tomorrow belongs to me

No it doesn’t.

Oh, and Broadway Babies Say Goodnight is an engaging and interesting book about the history of Broadway, written by Mark Steyn, Steyn of Eurabia, the Canadian version of Mel Phillips, only much funnier.  He is an apologist for the excesses of the Bush regime, and at the moment is strenuously defending Sarah Palin and covering her opponents with ridicule. On politics he’s a thug, on song writing and performance he is shrewd, amusing and shows a real love for his subject.