Fourth of July Poetry Madness: William Carlos Williams

Poetry in motion

Compatriots and non-patriots, rejoice! Several hundred years ago today, one half of my ancestors emancipated themselves from the other half - which worked out well for them, as you can see by the fact that I exist and live in London.

I shall be celebrating the duality of my heritage by spending this evening with a hotdog in one hand and a bottle of cider in the other, but while I do that, you can entertain yourselves with the work of a poet only America in all its glory could produce: William Carlos Williams.

William Carlos Williams is amazing. Not only is his name a work of startling rhythmical genius, but as a writer he had the sheer naked balls to create a poem that goes, in its entirety:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Look at that. That is hilarious. BUT WHAT CAN IT MEAN?

To be honest, I don't think it means anything. I studied Modernism at university and when we got to Williams the professor just sat back and said, "Damned if I know what any of this stuff is about."

Williams was a poet of the Jazz age (think Gatsby, economic trauma and RELENTLESS GLITTERING CONSUMERISM), and as a consequence most of his poems are meant to evoke advertising and confusion. They're so odd and open-ended, though, that you can decide they mean whatever you like. Which is kind of brilliant and cool.

Williams' poetry also contains one-liners which are, simply put, some of the best I've ever read. There's

In my life the furniture eats me

Which I think is actually a ghost story; and

The pure products of America go crazy -- 

Which is clearly a prophecy about Sarah Palin.

It's the sheer simple weirdness of the way Williams puts words together that delights me so much. He's really good at being really strange, and that's made his poems stick in my head for much longer than all those indigestible verses that MEAN THINGS. He's also extremely good at being funny, a vastly underappreciated talent. It is hard to manufacture humour. Some writers even find it difficult to work out what humour actually is (just ask James Joyce.) But I think Williams manages it.

My favourite poem by him is also one of his silliest. It's been parodied endlessly (a sure sign that something's pretty great), and it's just so apt in so many circumstances. It's an ode to everyday life, a perfect description of thousands of tiny household arguments and a how-to guide to not really being sorry.

It goes like this.

This is just to say

This is just to say: I love corn on the cob.

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold 

Happy fourth of July, world.

Delicious Death: Boris Akunin edition

As you may have noticed, I love crime novels. The dissertation that I should currently be writing (but I'm not, because I'm writing this) is, in essence, an excuse for me to read a lot of awesome detective fiction. I can't quite believe that I've managed to trick my department into letting me have so much fun.

For the love of god, never read this book

Now, as far as British detective fiction (and my dissertation) is concerned, the Golden Age is where it is at. Most recent British writers seem to me to be either Trying Too Hard To Be Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayer,  or Trying Too Hard To Not Be Like Them At All, and it makes for awkward, slightly painful reading (see: James, P. D.; also Rendell, Ruth, a writer so dreadful that even remembering the book I read by her makes me feel ill). In my opinion, the best stuff being written today as opposed to seventy years ago is not only not coming from Britain, it's not orginally in English at all.

Now, I know you think that's the lead-up to me starting to go googly-eyed over Scandinavian crime, to which I say: hah. Tricked you. I read a Henning Mankell once, and the experience was enough to last me a lifetime. For 450 pages, Wallander slowly stared up at the birds in the sky and slowly thought about the slow inevitability of death. Slowly. By page 100 I was hoping someone would do him in.

In fact, apart from the works of Anne Holt I've come to the conclusion that I'm not a very pro-Scandinavian person at all, and my two favourite contemporary crime writers are not from Sweden or Norway at all. They're Fred Vargas (French) and Boris Akunin (Georgian/ Russian), and they're awesome.

One day I will give Vargas (don't be fooled into thinking she's male, like me she is just trying to trick you with her name) a proper write-up, but today I'm mainly blogging about Boris Akunin.

If Akunin isn't known much around these parts, he more than makes up for it in Mother Russia. Think about our attitude to J. K. Rowling, imagine her as a writer of adult crime novels (which won't take much doing after September, actually) and you've pretty much got the way Russians feel about Akunin. Over there he is a god of popular fiction, and his detective, Erast Fandorin, is a literary hero, like Poirot but sexier.

The Fandorin series is set in late nineteenth century Imperial Russia (think Tolstoy with stabbings), and it follows the life of State Councillor Fandorin (his official title changes a lot, and trying to remember it makes me bewildered, but the essential point is that he is The Business, beloved of kings, emperors and actresses alike). Each novel lets us drop in on Fandorin at a certain point during his life - the first, The Winter Queen, is set when he's twenty and not yet cool, and by the time we get to Special Assignments, the one I've just read, he's about thirty-five and owns a very large house and several demanding mistresses.

The series (apart from being about crime and nineteenth century Russia) has an overarching theme, which in my view makes it especially cool: Akunin has identified thirteen subgenres of detective fiction (locked room, espionage, consipracy, country house and so on) and has written a Fandorin title for each of them. It's a brilliant idea, and means that the formula of the novels never begins to feel boring. In one book, Fandorin is creeping through back alleys in search of a mysterious evil, and in the next he's galloping about during the Russo-Turkish war. He goes on boats, he goes on trains, he goes to Japan and learns fabulous fighting moves and then he presumably does a lot of other stuff, but in later books that I haven't got to yet.

To be fair, Akunin's more a charming writer than a great one, and I'm also forced to conclude that there's stuff going on with the character of Fandorin's Japanese servant Masa that, if it isn't overtly racist, is definitely teetering on the edge of it. But all the same, the books are an enormous amount of fun to read. Their scenes are interesting, their plots are clever and they're laid out in a sharp, engaging, fast-paced way that means you can read 100 pages of one without even noticing.

It also doesn't hurt that Fandorin himself is a top-notch detective creation. He's got just the right balance of endearing quirks (he stutters and is somewhat strange) to sexy mystery (he has a troubled past and a startling ability to win every game of chance he plays), making him familiar but essentially unknowable and therefore insanely cool. He's even got that essential Man of Mystery accessory, a lock of pure white in an otherwise black head of hair. Ooh, Erast, you saucy thing.

As I said, I've just read Special Assignments, and I've got The State Councillor sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to finish Moby Dick (sharp-eyed readers may have noticed the new 'currently reading' widget in the top right corner. At the moment I am on page 212 and Cap'n Ahab is being a FEROCIOUS CRUSTY DEVIL, but so far the White Whale is just rumour and hearsay). I am having surprising amounts of fun with Moby Dick (more on that later, and don't be so dirty-minded), but all the same the thought of Erast Fandorin pursuing wrongdoers on a train is a lot more enticing than 300 pages more of salty sea dogs harpooning each other (at this stage, the jokes are writing themselves). What can I say? Crime novels are fun, and good crime novels are things of endless delight.

In conclusion, if you like Russia, history, mystery and dark-haired men (and who does not?) you should put down your Scandinavian crime and your P. D. Jameses and read these books. Agatha Christie would definitely approve.

National Poetry Day: Have a Poet and a Poem

Aw hell, it's National Poetry Day today! Nobody tells me things. But anyway, in the spirit of this day I am going to do something I've been meaning to for a while, and introduce you to a very much forgotten poet, James Elroy Flecker.

I'm very fond of Flecker, partly because no one else seems to be interested in him at all. Here he, is in his Edwardian get-up, with a small and charming dog (I think it's a dog. Unless it's a very small sheep?). Note particularly his fabulous moustache. He wrote some poems, he wrote a play, he married a lady and then he died of TB when he was 30.

Flecker, bless him, was an Aesthete and very into saucy exoticism, and his poetry can be quite full of wafting roses and naked marble statues and ladies with naughty eyes. He's also apt to tip over into rather overblown teenage emotion, but at the same time I think there's something quite lovely about him. He tries, and though sometimes it all goes a bit wrong, sometimes he really does manage something pretty great. Career-wise, he seems to have come in at exactly the wrong time, when Tennyson, as A Thing, was way over and even Swinburne (who is like a later Tennyson but with added whips and chains) was a bit passe, and because of that he's very much ignored. I'm not saying he deserves a retrospective Laureateship, or anything, but there are plenty of far worse poets who have managed to stick around like mould and so I always feel a little sad about how very much Flecker doesn't get a look in.

I first came across Flecker in the epigraph to an Agatha Christie novel, Postern of Fate - which, it turns out, is a quotation from his poem 'The Gates of Damascus'. So off I went to find this unknown poem, and I found it on the internet, and then it blew my teenage mind.

What I thought at the time - and still think now - is that 'The Gates of Damascus' is an amazing fantasy novel that happens to have been written as a poem. It's just so weird and mad and full of things that you don't understand but want to. At times it tips over into complete fever-dream territory and you get lines like

Have you heard
That silence where the birds are dead yet something pipeth like a bird?

I mean, what is that? That's terrifying! That's a Doctor Who episode in waiting, is what that is. Actually, the whole first section of the poem is like that, with mad stalking bird men and people dying of various inventive causes and awesome, gruesome lines like

The Sun who flashes through the head and paints the shadows green and red,
The Sun shall eat thy fleshless dead, O Caravan, O Caravan!

And then you get to the second section and things get even better, if possible, because we're off to sea for an adventure. At this point Flecker comes up with my all-time favourite description of the sea:

The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea,
The snow-besprinkled wine of earth, the white-and-blue-flower foaming sea.

Not only does it scan beautifully, but it's full of booze and sea monsters. And on these mythical-creature infested waves Flecker goes and makes up his own creepy, crazy version of the Odyssey, which features not only pterodactyls and bleeding rocks but also ROBOTS:

Beyond the sea are towns with towers, carved with lions and lily flowers,
And not a soul in all those lonely streets to while away the hours.

Beyond the towns, an isle where, bound, a naked giant bites the ground:
The shadow of a monstrous wing looms on his back: and still no sound.

Beyond the isle a rock that screams like madmen shouting in their dreams,
From whose dark issues night and day blood crashes in a thousand streams.

Beyond the rock is Restful Bay, where no wind breathes or ripple stirs,
And there on Roman ships, they say, stand rows of metal mariners.

Do you see yet why I think it's a fantasy novel in disguise? I had a year or so when got obsessed with it and made several awful and luckily abortive attempts to write the book hiding in it, because the book hiding in it would be amazing.

Things sort of tail off after the sea-shanty part, excitement-wise, and we get a bit about saucy Eastern commercialism and then another bit about emotive Eastern mysticism, but all the same, I love this poem. I love it ridiculously and unreservedly and despite the undeniable fact that it's bloody weird. Actually, that's why I love it. That, and it sounds really nice when you read it out loud.

So there you have it: 'The Gates of Damascus' by James Elroy Flecker, my favourite book-that-isn't.

And a happy National Poetry Day to you.

Alice Day

Come to my arms, my beamish readers, and listen well, for tomorrow (for reasons best known to itself, but probably involving the tourist season) Oxford celebrates Alice Day.

I shall be marking it by dressing up as Alice (I have the hair, it was inevitable) and handing out squishy and highly sugary cupcakes (I know this because I made them, I went a bit mad with the food dye too so they are wildly colourful) to children at the bookshop, but before I do that I wanted to take you on a magical mystery tour of the story behind Alice - because, little bats, it is a good'un.

Alice - the real Alice - and I actually grew up about 100 yards away from each other (give or take 100 years, but who's counting). Her father was Dean of Christ Church, and my father was Master of Pembroke (a much smaller and less impressive breed of animal, as colleges go, but nevertheless just across the road), so we both spent a lot of time playing by the river in Christ Church Meadow, and we both had our sleep patterns messed up by Tom Tower ringing 101 times at nine every night (I'm not making this up, this is the sort of impossibly mad and pointless tradition that could only be real in Oxford). But while I was generally left alone, free to hang off the top of Oxford city wall and throw bits of twig at passing tourists, poor Alice was constantly being pestered by a mad don who insisted on taking a lot of scantily-clad photos of her in her garden.

I'm not making that up either. Here is Alice Liddell, aged about seven, in a picture taken by Charles Lutwige Dodgson - which, of course, is the real name of Lewis Carroll. Whether he was actually a paedophile, or just very good at pretending to be one, is one of those things that Alice academics enjoy spending a lot of time arguing about, but at any rate Carroll is one of the long, long list of distinguished authors who would probably not pass a CRB check were one to be carried out today (See also Alighieri, Dante and Ruskin, John).

This definitely puts him on my own personal list of authors who were mad, but not in a good way (as distinct from authors who were mad in ways that I wish I had been there for, like Coleridge and the Mitfords). Working where I do, I have had a lot of experience of Oxford dons, and so I can say with reasonable certainty that he also smelt faintly odd and tended to get breakfast on his shirt and then forget about it. (This is, of course, very cruel to all the Oxford dons who are well-adjusted individuals. To all three of you, I apologise).

But despite all of that, I love the stuff that Lewis Carroll wrote. He's the absolute master of creating things that don't make any rational sense at all, but which your brain works out immediately. Jabberwocky, for example, has so few English words in it that it might as well be in another language, but all the same it's instantly understandable. Carroll's word games are just so beautifully clever, and funny about it too, that it absolutely makes sense that Alice has never gone out of fashion.

Oh, and in case you were wondering - that drawing from the beginning of my post is by Tove Jansson (she of Moomins fame). She illustrated the first-ever Finnish language translation of Alice, back in 1966, and for some odd reason it's taken someone until now to realise that they might make the English version sell rather well too. I think I nearly like them more than Tenniel, which is heresy but I can't help it. Here, at any rate, are a brace of Mock Turtles, to help you decide for yourself.

You're welcome.

A Book By Its Cover

Today a family of Chinese tourists came into the store and insisted on having a picture taken with myself and my co-worker, as though we were tame animals or interesting pieces of architecture. It is disturbing to think that, because of this, we have been inserted into their precious holiday memories for ever more; in fifty years' time, when they are leafing through their photo albums, they will come upon the horrible grinning picture of the two of us, look at each other and say, "Who the hell were those bitches?"

My only consolation is that I was wearing my new Great Gatsby t-shirt (eyes right, if you please, for the full effect), so at least the middle section of me was looking presentable. Book cover t-shirts are our newest non-book selling venture, and I think the ones we've got in are quite brilliant (here's the supplier's website if you want to have a look). I was hoping we'd get the Hound of the Baskervilles one in, since it has a satisfyingly floppy and hound-like dog on it, but in its absence I went for Gatsby. True, Daisy's eyes do stare blankly out at the world from the lower part of my bosom, and when I put it on I am probably aligning myself with roughly a million unique hipsters, but it's such a wonderful cover that I truly don't care. It's a picture of the

girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs,

 - which is the book's in-joke reference to its cover, rather than the other way around: apparently Fitzgerald saw the cover art before the book was finished and liked it so much that he wrote the image into one of his descriptions of New York. Fitzgerald, by the way, was a proto-hipster himself - he coined the phrase 'jazz age' to describe the 20s and seems to have spent most of the decade mad drunk, using long words and talking about the meaning of life. A hipster if ever I heard of one.)

And that, in a very roundabout way, brings me to what I had meant this post to be about in the first place, which is book covers, and how much they affect the way people read. Of course, there are people who claim that covers, like clothes, do not matter - it is what's on the inside that counts. These people are sweet, and well-intentioned, and they are also completely out of their minds.

Until I was about thirteen I bought into this notion, fed me by my mother (who is American - this may or may not be relevant), at which point I realised that although appearance certainly does not reflect inner goodness, there is a lot to be gained in life by not looking as though you have just emerged from a witch's lair and/or the 1970s.

The same is true for books. A book can be beautifully written, but if it looks like ass then very few people are going to want to get close enough to it to discover this fact. Conversely, you can disguise almost any content within a package that promises a certain reading experience and people will go mad for it - and if you don't believe me, consider the recent re-release of Wuthering Heights, cunningly disguised as teen romance.

Its target market might not typically touch a Bronte with a bargepole, but because the cover of this edition tells them that it's Edward and Bella's favourite book, their minds are suddenly filled with desire and they buy three copies on a whim. Or at least that is the theory. (Even though I'd love to get snooty about this concept, by the way, I'm fairly sure that the Brontes would have gone absolutely mental for Twilight, given their fondness for angry, brooding males. Much as I hate to admit it, this is one bit of marketing that they are probably heavily endorsing from beyond the grave).

Book covers can also totally influence the way you think about a particular story for ever more. When I first read Jane Eyre, when I was twelve, I had the old Penguin Classics edition, a painting of a girl sewing in a garden. Now, beyond her taste in clothes and her punch-a-hole-in-a-wall-with-the-power-of-her-mind stare, this girl bears no physical resemblance to any of the book's descriptions of Jane, as she is a hefty lass with a hint of monobrow, but all the same she has become absolutely and forever my mental image of Jane.

These days I get irrationally annoyed whenever I see any other Generic Out Of Copyright Painted Lady taking her rightful spot on the front of Jane Eyre. Even worse, my Jane has now been given a gig pretending to be Dorothea on the front of Penguin's new edition of Middlemarch. SinceI know that Jane Eyre, if called upon to do so, could take Dorothea Brooke down, this is deeply offensive to my mind.

A good book cover, I think, ought to be eye-catching, good-looking and go some way towards explaining to a potential reader what the book is really about. One of my all-time favourites is Penguin's cover for On the Road, which is just brilliant in its simplicity.

Here is a book, it seems to say, that is all about male friendship (friendship? friendship), with main characters that are closely based on real people who have been elevated into Icons of Hipness. They're badass, they're cool, and don't you want to buy this book and become just like them? I bet you do. I know I do. Or maybe I just really fancy Jack Kerouac.Whichever.

So, in conclusion, covers matter. A good one can boost sales and a bad one can crush the selling potential of its book like a bug. If I had to make a list of my favourites I'd be here all day, but some of the ones I'm fond of at the moment include: Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke (so blue! so swirling!); Rachel Hunt's Mr Chartwell (the dog looks like Winston Churchill, genius); Alexi Zentner's Touch (I am a sucker for gold leaf) and the repackage of China Mieville's backlist to coincide with the release of Embassytown (I just want to buy them all because they are so creepily attractive.)

Beautful.

Happy fecking Bloomsday

 

 (Cartoon by the excellent Kate Beaton)

So, it's Bloomsday today, is it? Well! Fascinating James Joyce fact time!

Did you know that, charming man that he was, he had an enormous poo fetish, and devoted hours of his leisure time to writing great big dirty letters to his mistress Nora Barnacle? They are touching stuff, containing as they do heartbreaking and finely crafted sentences such as

I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.

That right there? That is true love. The Nora Barnacle letters are far and away my favourite things about James Joyce. They turned him, in my head, from simply being a monolithic asshole into being a monolithic asshole who knew and willingly used the word 'farties' in his correspondence.

As you may have guessed, I don't like James Joyce. I said so, once, in a seminar in my first year at university, and the professor looked at me as though I had just announced that I had licked a live chicken. However, I maintain that if you have read 900-odd pages of someone's writing, you can form a perfectly valid opinion about whether or not you personally like their style, and I disliked Ulysses intensely. I also, for the record, dislike mustard, Pearl Jam and fish and chips, and yet I sleep perfectly soundly at night.

In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath has her main character Esther's final descent into total depression happen when she tries to begin reading Finnegans Wake, which first of all says something about what Joyce's prose can do to people, and secondly makes me think that Sylvia Plath and I would have got on very well. It seems to me that Esther's crucial error was in choosing to read Joyce's fiction in the first place. If she had only read the Nora Barnacle letters instead, The Bell Jar would have probably been riotous fun and ended with Esther in Bimini drinking Mai Tais with a lion tamer named Frank. Probably.

Obviously, since taste is subjective and we do not live in a totalitarian state (imagine a totalitarian state where everyone was ordered to read James Joyce! Christ. We'd all better make sure Kim Jong-Il doesn't get hold of a copy of Dubliners) you are perfectly justified in thinking James Joyce was the literary second coming of Christ - and evidently people do, since today is the festival of his fictional character. But I maintain that it is my right to think that he was a tit, albeit a tit who wrote amazing dirty letters. On this day, let us give thanks for Nora Barnacle.