Culture and Anarchy

Moving blogs...

2008-11-09T15:08:00.000Z

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Thanks for reading!

Prescott: a class act...?

2008-10-31T09:50:00.001Z

I keep reading reviews of Prescott: The Class System and Me (Mondays, 9pm, BBC2) so decided I should watch it. No great surprises - Prescott is what we all know him to be - proud of his working-class roots but equally proud of his large house ("Prescott Castle"), his Jags and his croquet. What a conundrum the man is! - or so the voiceover kept telling us. I don't have any strong feelings for the man - good on him for getting to where he is, though he can be rather annoying. The reviews have all raved about the wonders of Pauline Prescott, who seems like a pleasant well-meaning woman, if rather less hard-edged than her husband, who declares "The upper classes are the enemy!" Two scenes seemd particularly revealing: firstly, when he met some teenage girls, who explained to him what chavs were and that they weren't chavs. Prescott asked what class they thought they were; one of them asserted she was middle-class. Prescott expressed surprise; he thought she was working class. "But I don't work," she explained patiently. I presume her trust fund keeps her going while she looks for a job. He seemed proud of his ability to communicate with these youngsters; however, this was based on swapping tales of people they have punched. Not a great role model, then. The other moment was at Henley, where Prescott, clearly uncomfortable among the blazers and Pimms, points out to some young men that "only 7.5% of the population go to private schools, but they occupy 80% of high-level civil service, legal and political positions". This is wrong, he explains. One of the lads asks if perhaps that's indicative of the standard of education offered by the private schools. Prescott glosses over this. But surely this is exactly the point. The programme stresses over and over that class is not about money. They don't consider exactly what it is about, but the essence of it, as Prescott agonises over his grammar and claims to never have read a book, is that education is what makes you what you are. Surely, rather than trying to destroy privilege, Prescott should want to improve education, not destroy what already works. He comes across as a man deeply jealous of those who have had a good education, who speak well and use good grammar. One wonders why, if it matters that much to him, he didn't try to remedy this years ago. But then, perhaps, he wouldn't be able to go on about his working-class background and the perceived insidious evil of the middle- and upper-classes so much.

Twenty years of the Pre-Raphaelite Society

2008-10-28T16:49:00.000Z

The Pre-Raphaelite Society is celebrating 20 years since it began in Birmingham. Since it began, the PRS has followed its aims of "the celebration of the mood and style of art which Ruskin recognised and preserved by his writings, and to the observation of its wide-ranging influence. In co-operation with societies of similar aims world-wide, it seeks to commemorate Pre-Raphaelite ideals by means of meetings, conferences, discussions, publications and correspondence, and to draw attention to significant scholastic work in this field. First and foremost, however, it is a society in which individuals can come together to enjoy the images and explore the personalities of the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers through the medium of fine art, the appreciation of good design and the excellence of the traditional arts."

We have celebrated our 20th anniversary with a conference, "Eminent Pre-Raphaelites", in Birmingham this summer, with a cake at the AGM, dinners and teas, and finally with a celebratory issue of the Review, consisting of contributions from well-known names such as Jan Marsh, Paul Barlow, Angela Thirlwell, Anne Anderson, Benedict Read and Paul Goldman, featuring the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Subversive Reading

2008-10-24T11:43:00.001Z

The excellent Birmingham Book Festival commissioned the philosopher A C Grayling to give a lecture at the festival this year, entitled "The Good Reader and the World". This is in part a tribute to the National Year of Reading, which encourages the promotion of literacy for children and enjoyment of reading for everyone. In line with this, Professor Grayling began his lecture by giving a detailed summary of the history of reading, from the earliest known literate communities in Ancient Egypt through to the reading explosion of the autodidacts of the nineteenth century. Grayling particularly emphasised the impacts of the early printing presses, particularly their significance not only in rising literacy, but in the fact that literacy was therefore no longer largely exclusive to the church and the ruling classes. The subversiveness of access to religious texts, for example, is not something we think much of these days, but it meant that more people were able to challenge the church on the basis of their own reading - literacy is pwer, and as it spreads power is disseminated. During the Renaissance the importance of the classical literature of Ovid, Cicero, Virgil etc allowed "insight into the wider mind of Europe", broadening the views of those who could read them (which was of course still a small minority). By the nineteenth century, however, books were cheaper and more available, and more people could read - especially essays and poetry - and many of the working-class were able to educate themselves through their reading. This is hugely significant for social development of a country as a whole, Grayling pointed out, because those who read are thinking more; for example, revolutionaries in the seventeenth century such as the Levellers and the New Model Army were literate, which is hardly a coincidence.

Grayling emphasised the different modes of reading - passive reading, for plot alone, such as one might with a beach novel, and intensive reading, where one puts thought and consideration into the book, permitting a dialogue between reader and author, disagreeing with it, coming to one's own conclusions. This, he suggests, is the way to be fulfilled in one's reading, and it has a transformative effect on the reader. Some books, of course, invite purely passive reading, while others engage the reader sometimes against their will, and it those that are treasures.

Modern British education fosters "literacy" and "numeracy" in the quest to turn citizens into "good foot-soldiers in the economic battle", but as Grayling says, Aristotle said that the point of education was to make "noble use of our leisure". Education isn't about getting a job; it's about one's life and what one does with it, and permits one to be a "responsible contributor to public conversation", and indeed a responsible voter, too. Looking at the future of reading, Grayling is optimistic, suggesting that there will always be readers, and always people who do find necessary stimulation in books, even if the nature of "books" as we know them is overtaken by technology. The content of books "will never be far from the centre of a genuinely civilised society".

Carol Ann Duffy

2008-10-23T07:53:00.000Z

Carol Ann Duffy is, it seems, fast becoming something of a grande dame of British poetry, and with good reason. I have always enjoyed her poems, but it wasn't until I went to hear her read at the Birmingham Book Festival earlier this week that I realised just how well-written her poems are, and how they stand up to scrutiny. "Something for everyone" is a phrase I use but generally dislike, but it does seem to be kind of true in this case: she opened her reading with extracts from 'The Laughter of Stafford Girls High', a poem which rather reminds me of my own schooldays and the infectious laughter of teenage girls (although usually schools don't need to be closed down because of laughter!) It's a funny poem, unsurprisingly, being about laughter, but it's also an amazingly descriptive poems that captures individuals caught up in a mass movement of laughter. Certainly Duffy's reading raised much laughter from the audience.

Her next few poems were also familiar to me, and no doubt to many in the audience: 'Mrs Midas', 'Mrs Aesop', 'Mrs Faust' - these are also funny poems, and yet as she reads, with a dry humour and a delicious slowness which lingers on the words, her choice of words becomes ever more significant. Everyone should have to listen to poetry read aloud properly (not the mangled syllables of the classroom) - listening, one is forced to become a passive auditor, which allows the imagination that much more action, and imbues the poems with something quite different. I was disappointed that she didn't read one of my favourite poems, though, 'A Dreaming Week' from her book Feminine Gospels, which seems langorously to play with words for the hell of it, and the effect is sensuous, soporific and somehow thrilling. Duffy is also a poet who knows the power of repetition - either of words or of sounds of words, and she uses it not just for humorous effect but also for pathos and drama, which even her most amusing poems contain.

Finally, she read some more serious poems from her most recent book, Rapture. This is rather different from her other work, being a book of love poems, but there's nothing soppy or unneccessary here. The book is based on the "fractured sonnet form", she says, suggesting that the sonnet is a kind of secular prayer: short, memorable, adhering to conventions, and expressing very personal emotions. She told the audience that she had abandoned religion at fifteen, and now feels that "prayer must be a comfort for believers, but atheists have only art". The last poem she read, 'Prayer', reflects this, using secular images to fill the mind in a kind of worship. All her poems seem to have a kind of intertextuality - referring to other poems, other forms, works of art - yet she makes them entirely available to the audience, chatting as she goes about Greek mythology, T S Eliot, Shakespeare, mobile phones, cups of tea...I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

National Student Forum

2008-10-22T08:04:00.000Z

I'm delighted to say that the National Student Forum has launched our first annual report. This was presented to the Government by our chair last week, and we have been promised a formal response to the points we have raised about improving life for students in the UK.

We now have a website, which means that hopefully people will start to know who we are! The website, with information about who we are and what we do, and also with a link to the report, can be found here.

Muliebrity and other pertinent words

2008-10-21T15:58:00.000Z

Some oppugnant people at Collins Dictionaries have decided to remove some little-known words from the dictionary - presumably to make more room for text speak, celebrity names and other passing fads. Now, I know that some of these words aren't exactly in common parlance - but why not? I can think of many uses for muliebrity - the condition of being a woman (in fact, that's going into my PhD thesis), and fubsy, griseous and olid are words that nicely describe how I feel about some people. I'm all for the development of the language - English has amazing flexibility and its ability to encompass other languages and change with the times is one of many things that makes English literature such a joy, but if we lose words, they'll be consigned to footnotes, as obscure as some of Chaucer's words, and that's a pity. Perhaps I should start a campaign to revive Chaucerian English. Failing that - have a look at these words and see if you can use them! You can read more about this here.
Abstergent Cleansing or scouring
Agrestic Rural; rustic; unpolished; uncouth
Apodeictic Unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration
Caducity Perishableness; senility
Caliginosity Dimness; darkness
Compossible Possible in coexistence with something else
Embrangle To confuse or entangle
Exuviate To shed (a skin or similar outer covering)
Fatidical Prophetic
Fubsy Short and stout; squat
Griseous Streaked or mixed with grey; somewhat grey
Malison A curse
Mansuetude Gentleness or mildness
Muliebrity The condition of being a woman
Niddering Cowardly
Nitid Bright; glistening
Olid Foul-smelling
Oppugnant Combative, antagonistic or contrary
Periapt A charm or amulet
Recrement Waste matter; refuse; dross
Roborant Tending to fortify or increase strength
Skirr A whirring or grating sound, as of the wings of birds in flight
Vaticinate To foretell; prophesy
Vilipend To treat or regard with contempt

Ancient Landscapes, Pastoral Visions

2008-10-20T18:18:00.001Z

This exhibition, at Falmouth Art Gallery, was curated by Anne Anderson, whose work on the Brotherhood of Ruralists has recently caught my attention. This exhibition features Samuel Palmer, who in the 1820s turned his back on London and the urban scene to consider the countryside instead, surrounded by ‘The Ancients’, likeminded painters with a "back to nature" ethic. As the exhibition blurb points out, in the 1920s the painter Graham Sutherland did something similar, and in 1975 the Brotherhood of Ruralists (a name with a self-conscious echo of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) did something similar, retiring to Bodmin to paint, as did the PRB, "truth to nature".
This exhibition combines the work of all of these painters, together with some wonderful Blake etchings. Indeed, Sutherland’s "Pastoral" (1930) is an etching which is remarkably resonant of Blake, in which the trees appear as if they could at any moment reincarnate themselves as monsters – the Gothic menace of nature is all around in this exhibition, whether more obviously, such as in Sutherland’s "Green Tree Form" (1940), left, where the tree seems to have an animal life, or hidden in the pastel fantasy of Graham Ovenden’s "Spring Morning, Wiltshire" (1984).
I was particularly taken with Robin Tanner’s "Christmas 1929", a wintry village scene which manages to be both homely, familiar and comforting, and sinister, as though menace lurks in the rural hamlet. Indeed, there is a fairytale aspect to many of these paintings and drawings – perhaps when people concentrate on nature to such an extent, it becomes something quite other than what we first think it is. And the idea that nature is pastoral, calm, and even our right to appreciate, is one of town-dwellers, I suspect – "Nature red in tooth and claw" is much more the real thing.
Sir Peter Blake, acolyte of the Ruralists, only features once, with a print entitled "Faery", which is simply a long-haired, naked girl in a field, but again there is something unsettling about this child apparently at one with nature – something in her eyes or stance, perhaps.
The common thread here is the engagement with the rural landscape, but it is a very mixed collection: many of the exhibits are very much of their time, displaying contemporary influences, and while some have a photographic precision (such as most of Graham Ovenden’s works), others seem largely representative (Paul Nash’s "Druid Landscape", for example), and others more impressionistic. But there is much here to admire, and much to think about.

The Magic of a Line

2008-10-20T18:08:00.001Z

The Magic of a Line: Drawings and prints from the Newlyn School artists, Penlee Gallery, Penzance
After visiting the Laura Knight exhibition in Nottingham earlier this year, I’ve been looking forward to this – and it didn’t disappoint. The title of the exhibition is taken from the title of Laura Knight’s autobiography, and nicely suits the works included. Incidentally, this exhibition is part of the Campaign for Drawing’s annual "Big Draw", to encourage everyone to pick up a pencil, and there was paper and pencils all around the exhibition for anyone who felt so inclined.
Many of the drawings in the early part of the exhibition were by the Birmingham-born Walter Langley, whose Newlyn School drawings display wonderful local flavour and attention to character. "Study for a Daydream" (1884), a portrait of a distracted young girl, had perfect, dreamy eyes, ignoring the viewer. The grainy effects of his lines are put to good use in images of local scenes, and characters such as elderly, weatherbeaten fishermen, whose relationship with the sea is etched in every line of their faces. Langley was clearly particularly interested in the local habitat, exploring the domestic side-effects of the local fishing trade such as wives left at home as their husbands were on the sea, widows and children portrayed inside the bare cottages. The tragedy of life in the area is particularly well-depicted in "Among the Missing", where a woman, supported by an older woman, reads her husband’s name on the list of the dead. Other pictures such as "Alone" show the desolation after the death of a husband, while "Widowed" shows the young widow cared for by her mother.
The sea provides metaphors for other aspects of life, particularly death. In William Holt Yates Titcomb’s "Piloting her Home", 1893, an old woman lies in bed, awaiting death with a radiance of divine love and peace on her face, while those around her raise their hands to God. Similarly, Langley’s Study for "The Seas are Quiet" shows an elderly lady lying on pillows, smiling, with the turbulence of her life past.
One of my favourite pictures here was Stanhope Alexander Forbes’s "The Cello Player" – one can almost hear the sonorous music in this dark and thoughtful study. I found this drawing to be more like his wife’s than many of his are: Elizabeth Adela Forbes’s drawings of "The Bakehouse" and "The Cornish Pasty" depict dark interiors, with only the figure in action lit for the viewer, suggested a theatricality in the ‘staging’ of the drawing. I’d not seen her illustrations for King Arthur’s Wood (1904) before, but was struck by their delightful medievalism – the wonderful texture of her other drawings is here used to evoke myth and enchantment. I was also interested in Thomas Cooper Gotch’s Pre-Raphaelite-esque cartoons for "A Mother Enthroned", in which a mother of many daughters is clearly paralleled to the Virgin Mary. (see painting, left)
Harold Knight didn’t get much of a look-in here, with just a few portraits of almost photographic detail; but beside those of his wife Dame Laura they seem to lack conviction, while her portraits of young women – "Seated Girl Reading", 1892, "Self Portrait", etc, have so much life, feeling and movement even in repose. Knight seems to have a gift, in her portraits, for convincing the viewer of the character of the sitter with just a few lines. I was caught by "Madonna", 1923 – very much of its time, this seems to be an early echo of the later theatrical works by Knight, despite the beatific expression on the Madonna’s face. Few of the works here are theatrical, though there is a wonderful sketch of "George Bernard Shaw Posing for his Bust", but there are some amazing leaves from her sketchbook, which give an excellent insight into the clean lines she uses for movement and grace in the dancers she later painted – especially the ballerinas’ arms, so hard to capture correctly. I also rather liked "Country Girls" (1926) – especially appealing, I think: three girls seated together, side on; one looks anxiously – or is it slyly? – at the viewer, while the other two gaze unconcernedly into the distance. It’s stylised and of the period, yet still seems so natural.
Somehow I find going to an exhibition of drawings a very different experience to one with paintings – less colour, less large, dramatic paintings, more shadows and darkly intense, small pictures. And there are some perfect gems here.

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World

2008-10-20T18:04:00.000Z

This book was top of my pile of holiday reading (well, after a biography so appallingly written I gave up after two chapters). It’s not the book I’d thought it might be, and is all the better for it. Don’t be fooled by the cheery yellow cover and Jeremy Paxman’s comment of "Hilarious" – it’s not a cheery book, and the laughs it provokes are tinged with irony. But make no mistake – it’s well worth reading. I’m not a Guardian reader so am not particularly familiar with Wheen’s writing, but will look out for him in the future. In this book, which is a kind of extended essay on what’s wrong with the world, he is concise, convincing, entertaining. He opens with Enlightenment thinking – how it changed the world for the better, and why it’s still relevant today. Further, he adds that now, "Even intellectuals who respect Enlightenment values often seem reluctant to defend them publicly, fearful of being identified as ‘liberal imperialists’." The book then races through the kind of "mumbo-jumbo" which has swamped us, from the "voodoo economics" of the 1980s, with Reagan and Thatcher bearing the brunt of his venom, through the greed which precipitated the Wall Street crash in the 1980s, to the fascinatingly repellent antidotes to the world this created. (For example, the self-help style books which grew out of and alongside management-speak: from Deepak Chopra’s nauseating Ageless Body Timeless Mind, Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to the incredibly-titled God wants you to be Rich and Elizabeth I: CEO.) As you can imagine, Wheen is merciless in his assessment of such matters.
Another area in which Wheen excels is demolishing the jargon of post-modernism: he lampoons the impenetrable prose of many deconstructionists, and points out that the newly-subjective nature of reality permits people to question the notion of "facts" – as in, the Holocaust is no longer a "fact", and can be dismissed much more easily than before by social historians. He also – rightly – takes issue with Luce Irigary’s statement that E=MC2 is a "sexed equation" – something I have wondered about myself…That the deconstructionists are quick to take on sciences about which they know little is not only foolhardy but dangerous, he argues, and hardly advances the world’s knowledge and understanding.
Wheen proceeds to consider the amazing number of alien abductions (suggesting that perhaps it suits the powers-that-be for people to be so gullible, since it distracts them from questioning other, even more, sinister machinations that go on in the world), pours scorn on the Mayan re-birthing ritual enjoyed by the Blairs, and various other random types of spirituality adopted by people clearly searching for something, however unlikely it may be. (I was surprised to find no mention of Scientology here).
This leads into sentimentality, which is increasing in public life, particularly in America but was manifested in Britain when Princess Diana died: I thought Wheen was quite restrained here. American foreign policy, British politics, irrational public panics, dotcom mania – it’s all here, and demolished. I suspect that the kind of people who will read this book are the kind of people who weren’t terribly susceptible to mumbo-jumbo anyway, more’s the pity – but I hope it opens a few people’s eyes. As Wheen said at the start of the book, "the sleep of reason brings forth monsters, and the past two decades have produced monsters galore". At least this book has brought some of the monsters out of the depths where they lurked and into the public arena.

Any Questions?

2008-10-03T20:29:00.000Z

I've just returned from attending the live broadcast of Any Questions? from the Birmingham Conservatoire, as part of Birmingham Book Festival. Politics can be so much fun! The panellists were Liam Byrne (newly promoted Minister for the Cabinet Office), Alan Duncan (Shadow secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, David Edgar (playwright and President of the Writers' Guild) and Julia Goldsworthy (Lib Dem speaker on Communities and local government). The opening questions were, unsurprisingly, about banking reforms and regulations, in which as might be expected Liam Byrne supported the Labour line ("we will do whatever it takes to ensure people don't lose out", to which Dimbleby replied, "What does that mean?" Byrne: "Well, we will do whatever it takes". Dimbleby: "What is it likely to take?" And so on. Amusing.) A nicely phrased question asked if the Prince of Darkness is the light at the end of the tunnel for the Labour party, referring to the apophrades (sorry, too much lit crit - return from the dead) of Mandelson - the audience was asked to vote on this, and it doesn't seem a popular move! David Edgar had some excellent answers, and also provided a nice literary touch, referencing Milton and Shakespeare among others - appropriate for the book festival. And the final question of the evening asked the panellists if a book has ever changed their lives. Alan Duncan suggested his own book changed his life by nearly getting him the sack, but went on to say that writers who concentrate on freedoms, moral liberty etc, such as John Stuart Mill, have greatly influenced his thinking. David Edgar went for Shakespeare's history plays, Liam Byrne for Graham Greene's Travels with my Aunt, and Julia Goldsworthy - rather worthily - went for the biography of Penhaligon, a Truro MP, which persuaded her to begin her own political career.
You can listen to Any Questions? online here. Everyone should listen to it - it's not just informative, it's also hilarious!

Wuthering Heights

2008-09-29T11:35:00.002Z

Last night I saw Wuthering Heights at Birmingham Rep . Adapted by April de Angelis, it demonstrated the hallmarks of her innovation and style. I must confess I had been rather dubious beforehand; the translation of an epic book like Wuthering Heights into a stage play is no small task, and one that's difficult to do well, especially given the audience expectations that are likely to go with it! To reduce Wuthering Heights, a substantial novel, to a 2 hour 20 minutes play is no mean feat, and with such a complicated plot as well it does mean that it's rather the bare bones of the plot, but given the difficulties it was well done, and the set was well-adapted for the scene changes. The moors are ever present, projected in the background, which worked very well, bringing the wildness of the scenery into the houses.

Susannah York as Nelly Dean absolutely stole the show, as far as I'm concerned - as both narrator of the tale, and participant in events, she really comes to the fore in this production. Amanda Ryan was a good Cathy, though - she certainly looked the part, and had the right mixture of passion, joie de vivre and despair, playing her deathbed scenes in a manner reminiscent of Ophelia (an appropriate comparison on several levels, I think). I was a little dubious about Anthony Byrne as Heathcliff, though - of course, so much is invested in the part by those who know the book, but somehow he seemed more a bit cross than deep and angry, and his maltreatment of Isabella Linton just seemed a little unconvincing - as though he has a good heart, really.

Given that Birmingham has been taken over by the Conservative party conference, I was disappointed not to see David Cameron there, checking out the true nature of our present Prime Minister...How could Gordon Brown have compared himself to Heathcliff? I assume he hasn't read the book, and thinks it means he is a deep man of few words...not an uneducated, wife-beating, sadistic, misanthropic man.

Gwen John at the Barber Institute

2008-09-29T11:27:00.000Z

Last weekend I went to see Reunited: Gwen John, Mere Poussepin and the Catholic Church at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, and was surprised and pleased to find a different John to the one I had enjoyed at the Tate’s John retrospective a few years ago. The exhibition blurb explains the background to these portraits:
"Gwen John’s move to Meudon in France in 1911 marked the beginning of fundamental changes for the artist, in both personal and artistic terms. In about 1913, John was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and, in that year, was commissioned by the nuns in the town’s convent to create a portrait of their seventeenth-century founder, Mère Poussepin. This first commission developed into requests for five more versions — one for each room of the convent. In this exhibition, the Barber’s own version of the portrait—one of the most popular paintings in the collection — is reunited with other versions of the picture. These are complemented by a series of drawings showing women, orphans and schoolgirls in church, as well as sketches of nuns, priests and a cardinal — and even the Pope himself."
John was given a prayer card with a portrait of Mere Poussepin, from which to paint the portraits. This she did painstakingly over 16 reworked versions, changing aspects of it along the way whilst retaining the "pure perfection" of the holy woman’s face. The earlier ones depict Mere Poussepin looking severe, or even slightly smug, sitting at a table with a book; the later ones are simplified (such as the one shown here), having done away with the props and with the beatific face of the nun radiating her divine beliefs.

The exhibition demonstrates John's own convictions and her reverence for the spiritual life which she discovered after turning to Catholicism following the end of her relationship with Rodin. The paintings carried out in the French convent demonstrate a completely human face of the contemplative, devotional life which is spiritually uplifting. This little exhibition gives a totally different insight into John's work than any I had had before, though I am not sure I endorse the comment of Charles Darwent in the Telegraph, who called these paintings "Austen for the eyes" - this is something far more reverential and divine - perhaps a visualised Christina Rossetti...

There is a small "virtual exhibition" on the Barber's website if you want to see more.

DIUS Expo 08

2008-09-28T19:40:00.000Z

Anyway, after my trip to Russia it's back to work and reality. I was pleased to be invited to attend the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills Expo 08: One Year On, to celebrate DIUS's anniversary, as a new department, and to have the opportunity to consider what has been done in that year. The first workshop I attended was from Research Councils UK, talking about "Unlocking the Talents of UK Researchers". Obviously, as a (largely unfunded) researcher myself, this was something I was particularly interested to hear about. The speaker gave some background, stating that in terms of bibliometric data, the UK's researchers are second in ranking only the the US, and are the most productive in a G8 country. Moreover, we're international, apparently - nearly half of postgrads and 1 in 7 academics are from overseas.
The research councils' missions are to support research excellence (good!) However, as the speaker admitted, although the seven research councils cover all possible areas of research, there is still an emphasis on STEM subjects (science, engineering, technology and mathematics). Research, it seems, still equals science. All seven councils have common missions (which I believe can be found on the RCUK website, if you care!)
RCUK have three particular ways of helping researchers: Providing skills/skilled people; stimulating ideas, and providing opportunities. The skills aspect is largely about training, it seems, and the skills needed by researchers include: research techniques, entreprenerial skills, public engagement, management, personal effectiveness, communication skills and networking. Fair enough - mostly. However, I am a little more dubious about aligning research with public policy - yes, to a certain extent that helps to put the universities on the agenda and ensures that much-needed research is being done. But that must not be at the cost of "blue skies" research, in any discipline. (Kind of related to this, an interesting article in the Times Higher talks about universities' role in working with innovation). There are six programmes running involving three or more research councils, and they are: Living with environmental change; Energy; Ageing: Lifelong health and wellbeing; Global Uncertainties: security for all in a changing world; Digital Economy; Nanotechnology through engineering to application. All worthy, but you know, I don't see much room for Victorian poetry, heritage, culture etc there.
In fact, I was at the Expo as part of a panel, representing the National Student Forum - and if you don't know what that is, hopefully you will do soon as we are about to release a report. We're 16 students from across the UK, working with DIUS to represent the student voice, and, building on reports from Student Juries across the country, help the government tackle issues such as finance, teaching standards, employability, accomodation, information and support, etc. We had a session in the afternoon with Baroness Morgan, Minister for Students, who has been immensely supportive of us, and it was great to see that so many of the delegates are genuinely interested in helping to make the lives of students better.

The Pushkin Museum of Art, Moscow

2008-09-28T18:51:00.002Z

The Pushkin Museum is devoted to European Fine Arts, and is the most amazing place, containing many paintings which are familiar to me but I had assumed they were in the Louvre, or somewhere in the UK. Paying particular attention to the nineteenth century (of course!), I managed to get lost here, but it was worth it!

Goya, Monet, Manet, Corot, Whistler, Seurrat, Van Gogh, Cezanne - so many big names here, but the gallery proved a useful reminder that it's not the names but the sheer amazingness of seeing the paintings, in the flesh (so to speak) that is important. For example, Corot's Diana Bathing is so sculptural, so cold and yet lifelike, erotic and shadowy, and it's hard to get a sense of that in a reproduction (see right). It should be a cliche, but somehow it isn't.

It amused me somewhat to see Alma Tadema's Queen Fredegonda at the deathbed of Bishop Praesextatus, so English, quasi-Pre-Raphaelite, and somehow unexpected! I was also pleased to see Toulouse-Lautrec's Yvette Gilbert singing "Linger Longer Loo" (1894) (left) - it should be a caricature, almost silly, but it isn't - such expression, it appeals to me. Oh, and so many Degas' - ballet dancers, nudes - always less chocolate-box and more moving in the flesh, especially Dancer posing for a photographer - an interesting set-up. Of course, there were many artists I hadn't heard of, such as Jean-Louis Forain, whose 1880 painting Leaving the Masquerade Ball at the Grand Opera particularly interested me - it should be just a society picture, but seemed much more than that, with a mysterious twist in that the women's faces were obscured, not by masks.

Other highlights were Sisley, who manages to make French landscapes look so English (to my Anglicised eyes!), and Monet's White Water Lilies, so verdant and much less clicheed than I usually think of Monet. Also, while I'm not usually than keen on Renoir, Girls in Black (1880) is contemplative, quiet, while his 1876 Nude (right) seems to me a triumph of female sexuality over the male viewer (discuss!) Van Gogh, always so exuberant and somehow surprising, managed to surprise me again - Red Vineyard is great but The Sea at Saintes-Maries (1888) I love - such thick paint, so reminiscent of the movement of the sea. Another delight was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes The Companion (1887), which seemed almost medieval in style, perhaps reminiscent of Burne Jones's medievalism, while the male presence seems to contain a threatening sexuality despite the anodyne title of the painting. I hadn't seen before, but liked, Buffet's drawings of Notre Dame de Paris, which had an appealing symmetry, seeming to reference th draughtsmanship of an earlier age, reducing perfect architecture to a few lines without losing their beauty.

The Fauvist painter Albert Marquet was someone I hadn't come across before (more info here). His industrial cityscapes have an amazing beauty all there own - it's very much about "the painter's eye" here - and he paints water - from sea to canal - amazingly, with a visible, believable thickness.

The highlight of the museum, though, must be the Matisses. There's a whole room of them, wonderfully vivid still lifes, which test one's perception of perspective. I still can't work out why I find them so visually satisfying, but I do. The ones here were Corner of an Artist's Studio (1912), The Pink Studio (1911) (left), Nasturtiums, La Danse II (both 1912), Goldish (1911) and Arums, Iris and Mimosa (1912) - a blaze of colour and movement. It's worth going to Moscow just for these.

The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

2008-09-28T18:17:00.001Z

I know virtually nothing about Russian art – well, I know a bit more now. We had amazingly informative guides in Russia, who seem to be as knowledgeable about art criticism and history as they are about restaurants, palaces and everything else. The Old Tretyakov gallery gives a taste of Russian art up to the nineteenth century, and there’s too much there for me to do more that give a synopsis. This is a very shortened version of my notes!
The first painting I saw was a portrait of Pushkin by Orev Kiprensky, which immediately reminded me of Byron (the hair and swathed tartan) – it turns out that indeed this was Pushkin’s homage to Byron and Burns, who were his heroes (Byron I can understand; not so sure about Burns). I must explore the Pushkin-Byron connection – Onegin and Don Juan, anyone? In fact this is the only portrait for which Pushkin ever sat; other images were taken from memory or other pictures. Pushkin liked it so much he wrote a poem about it.
I was interested to hear about a serf, Argunov, who painted well, and thus was allowed by the family to have lessons and learn to paint professionally. After painting a remarkable portrait of the family – surprisingly sympathetically, I thought – Argunov was freed from serfdom and permitted to establish a career as an artist. This story, it seems, was repeated throughout history; many serfs were cruelly treated and died as a result of malnutrition and overwork, but some were also trained in various arts, and given their freedom as a tribute to their skill.
One of the central pieces in the gallery was Ivanov’s The Appearance of Christ before People. This is a huge painting, which took ten years to paint (1837-1857) in Italy. In its realist detail it’s both fascinating and slightly alarming! – Ivanov felt that he wanted to paint the most important event that had ever happened, and chose the appearance of Christ to ordinary people, taking in their responses, which range from overjoyed to sentimental to what looks like sceptical. In the foreground a man is sorting out clothes, perhaps foreshadowing the soldiers dicing for Christ’s clothes after the Crucifixion. In fact, that man is a self-portrait by the artist. John the Baptist also features, carrying a cross. It’s the kind of painting you can look at dozens of times and still see different things.
A painting which particularly appealed to me was Zelentsov’s Indoors Drawing Room, which I can’t find an image of but showed a typically Russian interior, reminding me that though there are some obvious parallels with European art of the same time, Russia was – and is – a very different place, and therein perhaps lies its attraction for me.
Speaking of European parallels, though, there were a surprising number of narrative paintings from the 1840s which are highly reminiscent of paintings frequently used to illustrate the covers of Victorian novels nowadays! The titles tell you all you need to know: The Major’s Proposal, The Fastidious Bride, The French Cavalier, The Young Widow, all by Fedotov, and almost Hogarthian in their sequential depiction of social life. Other paintings, such as Troika (Perov, 1866) are akin to nineteenth-century sentimentalisation of children.
I was pleased to see what is apparently the best portrait of Dostoevsky (left), also by Perov. This portrait, so sombre and muted, seems in its interiority to be as much a portrait of the writer’s mind as his face – as are all the best portraits. Actually I was rather taken with Perov’s work – Christ in the Garden at Gethsemane was also an interesting painting.
Another artist who appealed to me was Aivazovsky – follow this link to see more! He painted the Black Sea in all its moods and changes, as well as wonderful almost naïve paintings of St Petersburg showing the five buildings of the Hermitage. Many of these mid-19th century paintings of Russia are amazing - archetypal images such as cityscapes, sledging on the frozen Neva, battles, countrysides. There was a room devoted to war - the futility of it, the pointless loss of life, and in today's political climate this was no less moving than when they were first displayed.

Finally, we saw many ikons - from the fourteenth century until the seventeenth century, since between those periods they were the only form of artistic expression permitted in Russia. Many of them are immediately identifiable as Russian Orthodox - the colours, the jewels, they might not appeal to everyone, but they are fabulous!

Tess of the BBC

2008-09-18T09:42:00.002Z

While I am happy to applaud the BBC for its high-minded intentions in its production of Tess (Sundays, BBC One), I am instinctively dubious about any production that describes itself as "lavish", a word always over-used in conjunction with costume dramas. Since I haven’t read the book for a while now, I decided to revisit it along with the series, which perhaps isn’t the best idea as it has caused some ranting at the television (and thus disturbing my more down-to-earth husband’s viewing). Really, as these things go, it’s not bad. Gemma Arterton (below) actually does look a bit like Hardy’s description, and even the bucolic excesses of maidens in white dancing in a field largely fits with the novel. Actually, the BBC’s Tess is quite close to the plot of the book, so far; what it hasn’t achieved, as the Times reviewer points out, is the "muckiness" – Hardy’s gory scene when the Durbeyfield horse is killed, for example. And what was with the fog during the rape scene? It did cover up things the BBC might prefer not to portray, but I was expecting aliens to emerge from the X-Files mist at any moment.
My problem with it, I think, is neatly summed up in an interesting review of Tess in the Times, "Fun, but is it Hardy?" The review mentions what critic David Thomson calls "the indecency of the visual", and that seems a brilliant way of putting it; books make good films/TV series, but what they make is films/TV series; the book gets lost no matter how closely they stick to the plot. What they can’t do is genuinely recreate the spirit of the book, and somehow the visualisation loses the nuances and makes it "indecent" – not necessarily in a sexual sense, though sometimes that too, but in a slightly mis-translated way. It’s the old chestnut about "the book is better than the film" – well, nearly always yes, but the film isn’t the book, and serves a different purpose (Sunday evening viewing for the middle-classes, usually). Sadly, some of us (ie those who work with Victorian literature – or me, at least) can’t just be entertained, and just watch crossly as the clunky references to class distinction, gender differences and a bucolic past are swept across the screen for the uncritical viewer. I wish I could just relax and enjoy it.

From Russia with love...

2008-09-18T09:42:00.001Z

I have recently returned from a lovely week in Russia. After visiting St. Petersburg on my honeymoon, I’ve been hoping for another chance to visit, and it didn’t disappoint. We had a few days in Moscow first, which I loved, and was very impressed by Moscow State University (picture right). A friend said that although Petersburg was beautiful, she preferred Moscow because it’s more Russian, and I agree, I think. The city smells of fuel and fried potatoes; it was unfeasibly warm when we arrived, and the traffic is appalling, but it’s just such an amazing city, and has an indefinable buzz about it – much as I find in London. We did the usual tourist stuff – the Kremlin (see photo left), the Tretyakov gallery of Russian art (which I’ll post seperately), the Novodevichiy convent, Red Square etc. I think the convent was one of my favourite places, actually: such peace in the heart of the city (yes, a cliché, I know, but it’s true) and the architecture and colours of the Russian Orthodox church, with the gilding, the icons, the faint smell of incense – to me it seems so utterly foreign and exotic, and very appealing. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is particularly beautiful, brilliantly-gilded and adorned with ikons inside, and is apparently where Medvedev attends services, yet there were young women in headscarves standing in front of the ikons in genuine devotion, ignoring the tourists.
The Russians certainly revere their artists and writers, which the cemetery next to the convent displays; there are extravagent monuments to Russian writers, artists, actors, dancers (see grave of Galina Ulanova, right), as well as politicians, surgeons and scientists. The reverence for Pushkin is also striking, and admirable – it seems less aimed at tourists than, say "Shakespeare’s Stratford" and "Jane Austen’s Hampshire", as British tourist boards clunkily define them, and more about a deep local respect for their own. I read some of Eugene Onegin whilst travelling, since my knowledge of Pushkin is limited, and it’s incredible – the facility of expression, the sparkling, butterfly nature of the subject matter – and that’s reading it in translation, which I gather is almost impossible since Pushkin’s fluid use of Russian not only forged a new poetic sensibility in the nineteenth century but also made him extremely difficult to translate. I am working on my Russian now with the aim of one day reading himin the original! (On the left is a pic of a statue of Pushkin.)
St. Petersburg seems (as Jonathan Dimbleby says) to be more Western-facing, somehow superficial city – the facades of the palaces along the Neva seem to be part of the display put on for the tourists. However, I’m reluctant to see the city as only the playground of socialites (despite Onegin’s propensity to do so) because it has had a much more complex history than this; thousands of serfs died during the founding of the city; and more recently, as Leningrad it was besieged by the Nazis during World War II (or the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians term it). Our guide told us a great deal about the damage done to palaces and historic monuments by the Nazi occupiers as they attempted to close in on the city, and about the starvation and bravery of the citizens ("Some people froze to death but would not burn their libraries", she said; "This is how they looked to the future, and preserved their heritage".) Many palaces, such as Pavluvsk, Catherine’s Palace and even the Peterhof, are still undergoing restoration more than sixty years later. The staff at the palaces took photographs and hid artefacts before the Nazis took over, and from these they are still gradually rebuilding and restoring. Life is, perhaps, cheaper in Russia than in Europe, but heritage is precious, and highly valued. Holding onto the past for the sake of the future is clearly important, and not just for the tourist industry; Russians genuinely feel their history in a way that not even the British do, I think.

Culture and Anarchy?

2008-09-03T18:03:00.002Z

Read this. I agree (mostly): It's the culture, stupid.

Ford Madox Brown

2008-08-31T13:33:00.000Z

I've had a busy week - I also went to the opening of Ford Madox Brown: The Unofficial Pre-Raphaelite at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. I only had time for a quick look around the exhibition, but it looks fascinating and I'm looking forward to returning when I have more time. It's been a labour of love for Laura MacCulloch, who has been re-assessing the place of FMB in Pre-Raphaelitism through her Ph.D. at the University of Birmingham.
Brown was not one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but as mentor and teacher to them he deserves a place in their history. This exhibition, which focusses on his drawings, looks at Brown in a wider persepctive than is usual. As BMAG's website says,
"Recent research has revealed the breath of Madox Brown’s achievements as a modernist and a realist in a career spanning some sixty years until his death in 1893."

Life is a Cabaret...

2008-08-31T13:18:00.000Z

On Friday I went to the opening night of Cabaret at the Birmingham Rep. Being me, I didn't realise until I opened the programme that this was the professional debut of Samantha Barks, who was a runner-up in I'd Do Anything (personally I'd say Sally Bowles in Cabaret is a more taxing role than Nancy in Oliver!, but what do I know?!) And it had Wayne Sleep in it. Consequently, I think it's the first time I've seen "Full House" signs outside the theatre; and it was packed. And deservedly so. The set was amazing - flexible and quickly transformed; impressive. Wayne Sleep is both amusing and chilling as Emcee, a role he seems perfect for; and he plays it with a delightful postmoden self-consciousness, asking the audience if they think he's too old to dance, etc. Samantha Barks is good; she's not great, yet, but she's very young, and this was the first night of her first show. She seemed a bit tentative once or twice, but she carried the big numbers of the show very well on the whole, and she does have an amazing voice.

And, of course, Cabaret is a cult classic, as it should be. Aesthetically reminiscent of Chicago, Kander & Ebb's later work, it works in the shadows, blurring lines of morality, sexuality, politics etc until the viewer is bedazzled but sympathetic. The shadow of fascism grows throughout the show to a shocking, brilliant climax, and the world of Berlin in the 1930s is evoked in all its tawdry glory. Some musicals make me cross, but this is a feast for the eyes and the mind; it does make you think, so it stays with you.

http://www.birmingham-rep.co.uk/event/cabaret

Klimt

2008-08-31T12:52:00.001Z

On Thursday I went up to Liverpool for the day to see the Klimt exhibition before it closes (which it now has done). - Incidentally, I was very taken with the Walker Gallery - hadn't been there before; lots of 19th century paintings including DG Rossetti's Dante's Dream, lovely. Anyway, I didn't know much about Klimt, and am not sure how much more I know now, but I'm glad I made the effort to go. If you don't know much about Klimt either, here is a good place to start. I did know a little about his involvement with the Wiener Werkstatte and the Viennese Secession, and this exhibition shows Klimt in context, including interiors and designs as well as paintings and drawings.
Amazingly, I'd never even seen a reproduction of the Beethoven Frieze before, but it was one of my favourite exhibits here. What caught me by surprise, though, is how much some of it looks like a kind of stylized, Art-Deco-esque Pre-Raphaelitism (feel free to argue) but look at those women on the left here - they even have red hair! Similarly, Girls with Oleanders has a wonderful medievalism that both looks back and forward, and Fable seems to me to reference Cranach's Adam and Eve - or so I wrote in my notes at the time, though looking at it again now I'm not so sure; but it does seem to refer to the Old Masters rather than contemporary painting.
I was taken with Klimt's landscape painting. I notice the brochure says that his landscapes are "now a highly admired aspect of his oeuvre", but to the layman (me) landscapes are not what I associate with his work. However, I loved them - busy patchworks of nature, yet the images are representative rather than natural - no Pre-Raphaelitism here! Garden Landscape with Hilltop, for example (section of it is on the right) seems almost medieval in its profusion, yet is reminiscent of Van Gogh. (As you may have noticed, I'm quite interested in aspects of influence in art as well as writing, and how an artist recreates earlier artistic ideals to his or her own ends.)
What I haven't got to grips with yet is Klimt's depiction of women - some are challenging, looking directly at the viewer and exuding an independent life of their own, such as the femme fatale depicted in Judith II (Salome) while others seem passive, overwhelmed by circumstance and the (male) gaze of the viewer. Of course, as the exhibition notes point out, this was a time when "Sigmund Freud's theories positing sexuality as a liberating force were highly influential, contributing to an overarching atmosphere of eroticism". True, but liberating for whom? Not many of these women look very liberated; it's the male artist who can paint them who seems to benefit here! And Ria Munk on her deathbed strikes me as a prime example of the nineteenth-century aestheticised dead woman - beautiful, but unable to talk back. Of course, it also channels Ophelia in her many guises - mad, dead, and surveyed best when silenced, apparently.

Neo-Victorians

2008-08-29T16:06:00.000Z

Last weekend I went to "Adapting the Nineteenth Century" at the University of Lampeter, and had a wonderful time! There were so many neo-Victorianists there I felt a bit of a fraud, since I've read and enjoyed Sarah Waters (it was nearly a Waters conference...) but that's about it. I heard lots of papers which looked at how contemporary authors have appropriated aspects of the nineteenth century novel, and have a much longer to-read list now than before (Top of the list: The Crimson Petal and the White and The End of Mr Y). It's fascinating, though, to see how we're still so fascinated with the past (this has set me on the track of thinking about nostalgia as an aspect of memory) and how we are writing and re-writing histories in entirely different ways.
I was particularly fascinated to hear about the Brotherhood of Ruralists, who were a neo-Pre-Raphaelite group formed in the Seventies and appropriated many of the artistic and also literary ideals of the PRB, and I'm looking forward to going to see their exhibition in Falmouth later this year.
I have no time to go into details, but it was a most enjoyable conference - made more so by red wine and feminism on Friday night. More weekends should be like that!

The Ladies of Grace Adieu

2008-08-13T17:32:00.001Z

The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke is a gem. Not just in the contents, but also in the book itself - I won't go on about the materiality of the text, etc, but it's a beautifully designed book, lovely cover and wonderful, ethereal illustrations by the peerless Charles Vess. Actually, the book as a whole rather reminded me of a book of short stories by Walter de la Mare that I had as a child (the name escapes me) with illustrations in a similar style, and stories of similar jewel-like perfection.
Of course Clarke is best known for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I haven't read but have just ordered from Amazon. I can't comment on that well-received work, therefore, but I hope it will be as enchanting as this book. And enchanting is just the right word; it's all about enchantment - Clarke reworks fairytales, or develops her own characters from her earlier novel, creating a world which is entirely seductive. Here, the world of faery mingles with the world we know, bewildering but captivating. Clarke cleverly presents the book as an edited collection by the fictional "Professor James Sutherland, Director of Sidhe studies, University of Aberdeen" (the Sidhe are an ancient race of Celtic fairies - you can read more about them here). This professor introduces the stories as curiosities, relics of another time, collected and edited with footnotes by him. We are therefore invited to read these stories as anecdotes by people who, from the sixteenth century onwards, have actually seen and interacted with fairies. What makes it so intriguing is that the tales are thus placed within an entirely fictional context of a canon of studies which doesn't exist, playing with the boundaries of the academic, the fictional, and genuine research into folk-tales.
I don't think I'm doing it justice here; there is a marvellous wistful quality to Clarke's writing which makes the rhythm of the tales hypnotic; furthermore, she has an excellent ear for the cadences of writing in a certain period; her 18th century prose would do justice to Austen while her Elizabethans are almost (modernised) Spenserian. I don't know anything about Clarke, but I bet she knows her Eng Lit. It's an absolute delight; do read it.

Love is all around...?

2008-08-05T16:04:00.003Z

The National Gallery's Love exhibition seems to have been reviewed everywhere recently, and I'm always a sucker for a freebie anyway, so thought I'd have a quick look. I'm glad I did. It's not often you get to see such an eclectic mix - Emin alongside Rossetti, Cranach near Claude, etc. Generally I'm a bit wary of "themes" - allows generalised and rather trite philosophising, as well as making often rather tenuous connections, and the NG blurb didn't inspire me much:

Arguably love has been the inspiration for more great art than any other human emotion. Nevertheless it presents a challenge to the visual artist. How do you depict love? How do you convey its complexity and intensity?

The wide range of types of love made it difficult to focus, but it was managed quite well, covering divine and human love, siblings, parental, and the usual romantic love. I thought Sandys' Medea was an interesting inclusion - what can go wrong in love (for those who didn't do Classics A-level, Medea killed her children to pay back her husband for infidelity. Lovely.) And I was surprisingly taken with Grayson Perry's God Please Keep My Children Safe (above), a fragile-looking ceramic rabbit with prayers for one's children inscribed on it. Directly opposite that, DG Rossetti's Astarte Syriaca - now that's a twisted kind of love, difficult to disentangle the painter's personal feelings (his adulterous adoration of the model, Jane Morris) from the classical connotations of the subject.

Actually, two of the paintings I liked best were ones I hadn't seen before: Jan Molenaer's A Young Man and Woman making music (1630-2) - domestic and artistic harmony (though he looks a lot happier than she does) and painted so comfortably; and Chagall's Bouquet with Flying Lovers (1934-47), left, which seems a tribute to a happy marriage, though it was painted after her death, and contains shadows and colours of mourning as well as a blissful-looking couple. I guess that's one of the good things about "themed" exhibitions, though - not only does it throw paintings one knows and loves into a different context, it also provides new joys.

Wyndham Lewis Portraits

2008-08-05T15:37:00.002Z

In between getting Russian visas yesterday, I popped into the National Portrait Gallery to have a look at the Wyndham Lewis portraits exhibition. I know more about Lewis's writing than about his painting, due to a friend whose MA thesis was on Blast, but since he demonstrated Vorticism through his art as well as his writing, I thought it would be an interesting experience, and so it was. Firstly, the unnerving thing about it is when you realise you're standing in a room full of portraits, and none of them are smiling. Many also avoid your gaze. I feel - though I may be wrong - that Lewis may have liked painting people, but he didn't actually have much time for humanity in general. The second unnerving thing was how many of the male portraits looked like my head of department, but fortunately that shouldn't affect too many other people....
Lewis's most famous portrait, of TS Eliot (1938), above, is of a "man haunted by a vision" - or that's what Lewis said of his later portrait of Eliot, but it seems truer of this one. Like Eliot, Lewis felt he had suffered for his art, perhaps sacrificing too much of his personal life to his creative vision. Actually, in the portraits of Froanna, his wife, one wonders if it was her that was sacrificed, too. The portraits are beautiful, often in warm colours (Lewis liked monochromatic painting), domestic, and seem tenderly done, but she looks infinitely sad.
I was interested by Portrait of the Artist as the Painter Raphael, particularly because post-war artists were urged to return to a classical style, which Lewis does ironically, only with the title, while the image itself is modelled on one of Shakespeare. His skill seems so unique, though - there is nothing realist about these figures, yet one feels like reaching out and touching them. Cubist influences are evident throughout, particularly in the chiselled noses and foreheads, as though Lewis's role was not so much to paint them as to carve them out of stone. It's suggested that Cubism is a "radical simplification" of what we see, but in some ways it seems infinitely more complicated, as though these shapes out of which people and things are created are endless, going on forever into a background we can't focus on.
Perhaps one of my favourite portraits here was that of Edith Sitwell (left). She is elegant, lean, poised - and almost dehumanised (and Lewis left out her hands, which she saw as her only redeeming feature.) She, too, seems sad, lonely even, in this surprisingly detailed background (for Lewis). But it's also the essence of what we expect of a 1920s writer (I think) - it plays to the image of celebrated writers, alone, sombre, brooding. I think Lewis liked to play with celebrity; he certainly played with his own image enough, with his obsessive hat-wearing and portraying himself as the "Enemy".
Perhaps his most sympathetic portrait is that of Mary Webb, the novelist, whose physical defects he gently disguises, while the tangled profusion of her hair seems to reflect her interest in the natural world in her novels. One of the least sympathetic, however, seems to be of Virginia Woolf (though no-one is sure that this is who it is). Lewis despised the Bloomsbury Group, and described A Room of One's Own as a "feminist fairytale" - and Woolf, if it is she, seems to be a spectre haunting that fairyland, if his portrait is anything to go by! But then, he was a man of strong opinions, and not afraid to show it, which might not have made him pleasant, but it does make him interesting.

Twilight is not good for maidens...

2008-08-04T09:27:00.002Z

This is the abstract of the paper I'm currently writing. Don't think I've ever had so much fun with a conference paper! This is for Adapting the Nineteenth Century at the University of Lampeter, August 22-24 2008.

"Twilight is not good for maidens": The Twilight World of ‘Goblin Market’
‘Goblin Market’ remains Rossetti’s most-studied poem, yet has presented problems for critics since its publication. An early reviewer asked, "Is it a fable - or a mere fairy story - or an allegory against the pleasures of sinful love - or what is it?" In this paper, I shall discuss how a poem which was arguably constructed from elements of multifarious sources created its own world which drew readers in and opened up to a wide variety of interpretations. In the late twentieth century, it was the aesthetics of faery, of landscape and primarily of Gothic, which prevailed in interpretations of the work. While serious critics comment on the religious, moral and typological aspects of the poem, it is the alternative aspects of this constructed world, such as fairytale and vampirism which have elicited the most creative responses. My paper will consider two of these responses, and examine the elements of ‘Goblin Market’ which have made such diverse interpretations possible. The illustrative work of the Japanese artist Kinuko Craft has tapped into a dark vein in the work. Appearing in Playboy in 1973 as part of their "Ribald Classics", ‘Goblin Market’ was presented as "a nursery classic" and a "pornographic classic". By juxtaposing the visual and the verbal, the poem appears as indicative of repressed Victorian sexuality. This is perhaps explained best by Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock:

In these decades [the 1960s and 1970s], the Victorian era became a site for the
renegotiation of definitions of sexuality. It was characterized as a period of
public virtue and private vice, of sexual hypocrisy, an age of prudery and
respectability with a hidden underside of perversion, pornography and
prostitution.

The illustrations are loosely based on those by Arthur Rackham, but draw on the sexually charged language Rossetti uses in her poem. I propose to examine how Craft draws this out in nuanced illustrations which gesture towards Victorian art, whilst appearing in Playboy.
Recent literary criticism is beginning to attempt reconstruction of the original world Rossetti created, but an alternative space has opened up between critical and creative responses. My paper will explore the aspects of Rossetti’s poem which have attracted an interpretative response, and demonstrate the differing aspect of these two interpretations of ‘Goblin Market’.

Affluenza

2008-08-04T09:11:00.003Z

I like books that make me rant. Books that have really fulfilled this in the past include Naomi Klein's No Logo and The Beauty Myth, various other feminist texts, The Undercover Economist, and so on. This book covers some of my favourite things to rant about - materialism, advertising, what's wrong with society, Americanisation of society, etc.
James is convincing (probably even more so if you read the companion volume which contains all the citations and science bit) - he suggests that "selfish capitalist" society in the English-speaking world has given us phoney values which mean that we are forever striving for more, keeping up with the Jones's etc. He examines this through work, education, relationships, childcare etc, looking at how affluenza strikes across the world and the extent of the harm it does in causing "emotional distress" or depression, mental health problems, insecurity, etc. Basically he's saying, if we did things for "intrinsic reasons" - because we love to - and if we concentrate on our needs rather than wants (ie we need food; we want a new DVD player) we'd be much happier. He's right, I think; but there are areas I struggle with, such as identifying oneself with one's work, which I know I absolutely do, but not for money (who'd be an academic for the money?!) I certainly put my work above most other things in my life, and I still maintain that's not always a bad thing. Also I think he can be a little sexist, and am concerned by his blaming feminism for some social ills such as women's desire to work rather than look after children in Danish society.
James discusses what he calls the "marketing character" - someone else who sees him or herself as a commodity, and permits society to see them as such; someone whose self is constantly marketed, through the cult of "personality", cultivating characteristics which make them appear to be the person they have been persuaded they would like to be, and so on.
This book seems to be somewhere between social criticism, anthropology, psychology and self-help. He uses "case studies" - anecdotes about people he has interviewed - to make his points, which works in a kind of pop-psychology way, but makes me a little wary of his style and also his purpose. After each chapter outlining society's problems, he suggests "vaccines" against the "Affluenza virus", which is where it begins to seem like self-help, though as a general idea rather than to fix what you perceive to be wrong in your own life, it does stand up to scrutiny, just about. Towards the end he becomes increasingly political, ranting against New Labour (which I'm happy to agree with...) and suggesting how an alternative society might operate - very Utopian. Interesting book, though - made me think and caused me to rant again!

That beautiful pale face is my fate

2008-08-04T08:43:00.003Z

Last week I read this article in the Times about Newstead Abbey, Byron's home, and an exhibition being held there concerning the relation between Byron and contemporary culture. As I was in the area over the weekend, I decided to have a look...

I've been working on how contemporary culture adapts and interacts with the past, as I'm writing a paper for this conference about adapting the 19th century, so I was looking forward to seeing this exhibition, That beautiful pale face is my fate (said by Lady Caroline Lamb of Byron) but while I was there, it didn't quite do it for me - perhaps I'm not observant enough, but sometimes I couldn't tell which exhibits were part of the art exhibition and which were part of the standing display. Still, having read the brochure (after I got home) actually it seems much more interesting and relevant than I thought at the time, annoyingly. The Gothic side of it appeals to me, of course, and exhibits like Goshka Macuga's image of Byron etched onto a mirror suggest Byron's interest in his own image, as well as the modern preoccupation with public image and celebrity. I also quite like the idea that there are modern inheritors of the Byronic persona, although I'm not sure I would have picked the same people as Marcia Farquhar. Read the Times article - it'll give a much better indication of it than I can.

The abbey itself is wonderfully Gothic, though - Byron used to sit up at night with his friends, dressed as monks and drinking from a goblet made of a human skull (Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey was based on his circle) and despite later alterations made to the building and its decor by its later owners, you can still sense what appealed to Byron. Anyway, it's inspired me to re-read Don Juan.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
'Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper - even a rag like this - ,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that's his.

Next Poet Laureate?

2008-08-04T08:02:00.000Z

Tee hee (from the Times Books section last week)

The current laureate is Andrew Motion, but as it's now a decade-long post rather than a life-time position, we're nearly due another one. There have been calls for the first female laureate, detailed here, but many of the women have said they wouldn't be interested (see here). Of course, the first female laureate should have been Christina Rossetti, on the death of Tennyson, but Queen Victoria wouldn't countenance a woman laureate (and probably Rossetti would have declined it anyway) so instead they appointed the truly unmemorable Alfred Austin.

Laura Knight at the Theatre

2008-08-03T18:46:00.000Z

Since my knowledge of Dame Laura Knight's painting has been limited to her self-portrait at the NPG and some reproductions in a biography of her which I recently read, I've been really looking forward to the exhibition at Nottingham Castle on her theatre paintings, and it didn't disappoint. There are two fairly large rooms of her work, mostly of her ballet paintings but also some theatre and one or two theatrical portraits. Clearly she liked to paint people - interesting people, or people doing interesting things, and her sense of the dramatic comes across in all her work. She had an enormous output, painting circus people at work, being official artist for the Nuremburg trials and commissions by the government during the Second World War, among other things, but her paintings are all very much of their time - her career pretty much spanned her life (1877-1960, I think) and she manifestly moved with the times, remaining contemporary and vital, never stale or boring. I can't remember when I last enjoyed something visually so much as this.
The ballet paintings are bound to appeal to me, since I have a passing interest in ballet, but I am somewhat sceptical of the prettified 1950s paintings of the ballet; a few here were reminiscent of them, but in the 1930s, before it became a cliche, and they're beautiful. Moreover, she knows dancers, and dancing - she paints them not just performing, but in class, in the dressing room, in the wings, and she gets the angles of their bodies exactly right - legend has it that when she painted dancers in class the teacher would use her sketches to show the dancers what they had done wrong!

The exhibition is a mixture of sketches and oil paintings, and both are a delight, but in very different ways. The technical skill, the colours and vitality of the oils appealed to me, but her ability to catch a dancer's poise and movement in a few lines in her sketches is amazing. Her love of the theatrical life shines through her work. To get an idea of the breadth of her work, there are some examples of her work here. Interestingly, she is often described as an Impressionist painter, but I'm inclined to disagree with this, since her work changes medium and styles, with some of the oils - for example, the painting of Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Juliet - seeming almost Pre-Raphaelite in style. However, such labels aren't helpful; her subjects, not her style, was clearly her own preoccupation.

A critic of one of her exhibitions during the 1960s suggested that she painted what she saw, not what she felt - that her work wasn't cerebral enough, perhaps. For the viewer, I think it's difficult to disentangle seeing and feeling anyway, and these paintings are a visual delight; I found myself smiling as I looked at them. There isn't one painting there I wouldn't have liked to take home with me, and her joy in the visual, in the nature of spectacle, is enough for me; I don't really want to analyse it, just enjoy it (which is unlike me!)

An exhibition which will include some of Knight's work is coming to one of my favourite small galleries, Penlee House, later this year, and I shall definitely be going to see it.

Anna Akhmatova

2008-07-31T10:28:00.000Z

I'm reading the poems of Anna Akhmatova (in translation; I'm learning Russian, but not that quickly!) I don't know much about Russian poetry (other than a little bit about Formalist criticism) so am trying to learn, and was very interested by the introduction which mentions that she was part of the Acemist movement, or Guild of Poets, formed in Russia in 1910. Apparently the Acemists had had enough of Symbolism, and wanted concrete images, bringing poets and poetry back to earth, as it were. Their aim was "direct expression through images", as their manifesto, The Morning of Acmeism suggests.
Akhmatova's poetry is enthralling - unlike anything I've ever read. I'm sure it's partly due to translation issues (and I am planning to get my Russian good enough to read it in the original) but the poems seem to have a flavour of haiku, not just in their preoccupation with the natural world but also their conciseness and lack of high-flown sentiment. Acmeism seems to me to be a readily identifiable movement through this. (If "acme" means "the highest point", I suppose their intention was that this would be the peak of Russian poetry).
The poem 'The Guest' (1914) is both terrifying (in a very Gothic way) and quite concrete in its images; amazing how Akhmatova creates a sinister atmosphere without symbol or surface emotion. Apparently she was attacked by the Soviet state who claimed that the "mists of loneliness and hopelessness [were] alien to Soviet literature". Yet she created these mists from the materials of the world around her, like a sorcerer conjuring up a genie from a lantern. Both this and the haiku-nature of her poetry is illustrated in 'Parting', one of her many poems about love and loss:
Evening, sloping
path before me.
Only yesterday, in love -
he implored, 'Don't forget.'
Now only the winds
and the cries of the shepherds.
The cedars in uproar
by the clean springs.
(Trans. Richard McKane)

Cezanne at the Courtauld

2008-07-30T21:46:00.000Z

Somehow I'd kind of forgotten about Cezanne until I went to the Courtauld on Monday (tip: free before 2pm on Mondays). The Cezannes were familiar to me, since I studied there (briefly, ten years ago) but somehow Cezanne seems so refreshingly new every time you look at those fresh greens and blues. Apart from the Montaigne Sainte Victoire, which I find strangely bleak. Anyway, this exhibition has letters from Cezanne talking about his art, how he works, and so on, and the collection of his works - paintings and drawings - alongside his words is both revealing and appealing.

Lac D'Annecy is wonderful - somehow Gothic and geometric, representative and realistic simultaneously. The notice adds that this view from the French border of Switzerland was painted by "young lady travellers", but Cezanne turns it into something quite different, and far removed from the delicate watercolours of a nineteenth-century young lady's album. For me this was the central piece of the exhibition (others would certainly disagree!) but what he painted was, as he said, "a harmony parallel to nature". I like the musical analogy; it isn't nature, but it's in harmony with it. Surely that's what art should be - after all, not only is it not the real thing, it both can't be and shouldn't be. This painting is Cezanne's own idiosyncratic take on nature, and a harmony is exactly what it is.

Votes for Women!

2008-07-20T13:06:00.000Z

I've just finished a fascinating book, The Militant Suffragettes, by Antonia Raeburn. Given my occasional feminist ramblings, it's shocking that my knowledge of the Suffragettes was basically gleaned from a couple of novels and Mary Poppins, but this book filled the void (not sure if it's still in print though). Amazing to think that it's less than a century since women got the vote in the UK (women, if you don't vote EVERY time you have the opportunity, you should be ashamed of yourselves!) The book is largely based on interviews, letters and diaries and is sufficiently detailed and historical, but it reads like a novel - absolutely fascinating, and I couldn't put it down! What particularly impressed me is the amount of damage women did to themselves in the name of suffragism. Yes, they did damage some property etc (window-smashing was particularly popular) but they went on hunger- and thirst-strikes; they were force-fed, they (in the case of Emily Wilding-Davison) threw themselves under horses and died. They chained themselves to railings, were assaulted by the police, and so on. And it struck me that, in a period when morally if not legally women were still seen as the property of men, it was a particularly apposite protest, to damage themselves (or allow themselves to be harmed) in their cause, since to men this would seem to violate a sacred image. Furthermore, it demonstrated their bravery and fitness for the vote, since they conducted their schemes as a war, and went into battle like any man. Yes, I'm aware of the arguments that they were a bit demented in allowing themselves to be harmed, and in their window-smashing etc, but looking back now, doesn't it seem that any protest was right? Imagine if women still didn't have the vote!

The Uncommon Reader

2008-07-13T16:02:00.000Z

The Times recently described Alan Bennett as a national treasure, and here he is writing about another national treasure: the Queen. Yes, the real Queen - Elizabeth II, though he never actually names her, but contemporary references make it quite clear who she is. This book has been reviewed a lot recently as a perfect beach-read; for me, it was the perfect accompaniment to a train journey - not too demanding, suitably thought-provoking and just the right length (121 pages). The premise of the book is perfect: what if the Queen stumbled upon a mobile library whilst walking her corgis, and became an avid reader? What if she discovered the hitherto unknown and often subversive delights of literature, even neglecting her duties to pursue this new voracious interest?

Not only the Queen - who becomes more and more human and interesting as her reading takes over - but also the characters surrounding her, stuffed-shirt Palace officials, librarians etc, are comically described. It's an amusing read (for example, after reading Proust, she says, ‘the curious thing about it was that when he dipped his cake in his tea (disgusting habit) the whole of his past life came back to him. Well, I tried it and it had no effect on me at all.’ However, it's more thought-provoking than that; the effect that literature can have is explored in all its glory. Actually, I was gripped by the very first page, in which HM questions the president of France on his views on Jean Genet: 'Homosexual and jailbird, was he nevertheless as bad as he was painted? Or, more to the point,' - and she took up her soup spoon - 'was he as good?'

Of course, a Queen who reads - really reads, proper literature, the written equivalent of heroin -is dangerous; she is perceived by those around her as being out of control. Is literature that dangerous? Can it upset what we see as normal, stable, day-to-day life? Of course it can - or what's the point of it? Bennett is gently poking fun, on the surface; but underneath one suspects he is raging at the lack of cultural understanding there seems to be in this country. This particular reader is 'uncommon' not because she is the Queen (and therefore as uncommon as one can be!) but because she is really reading, with a sensitive inner eye that understands, digests, really thinks for herself and is not afraid of the consequences. If only more readers were that uncommon.

Jonathan Dimbleby's Russia

2008-07-08T19:59:00.001Z

Last week I went to hear Jonathan Dimbleby lecture at the Royal Geographic Society, about his book and TV series on Russia. He's an entertaining and, I think, genuine speaker - he doesn't seem pre-programmed and although he talked from notes he was engaging and off-the-cuff. Also, he didn't just rehash the TV programme, but instead tried to give his listeners a different insight, which was fascinating. He thought twice when the BBC asked him to do the programme, as it was a new venture for him, but decided it would be interesting to see if he could unravel Churchill's famous quote, "Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". It's a country of extremes, Dimbleby says rightly, not just extreme temperatures but extreme wealth and poverty, extreme emotions and extreme temperaments (this last he illustrated amusingly with tales of reckless drivers and sailors).

His newfound fondness for the Russian people shone through; a people that can initially seem cold turned out to be welcoming, tactile, entertaining and amusing, and, he emphasised, have a deep-rooted fondness for us, as their war-time allies, which the Brits sadly rarely display. Furthermore, Russia has such a complex and often tragic history that we cannot under-estimate the significance of it in understanding its people - while this is of course a truism for any country, Dimbleby explained carefully how this is particularly true for the Russians, still recovering from the scars of the past.

I won't go into too much detail here, but he covered a multitude of aspects of Russian life - from politics (obviously) - he's sceptical about Putin and Medvedev, and is surprised by how many Russians revere Stalin, and feel that Communism had more to offer them than democracy - to agriculture, history, and particularly literature, which he read on his long train journeys and includes discussion of in the book (which I haven't yet read). In fact I even managed to have a brief discussion with him about Russian literature at the end of his talk.

I was impressed by how much ground (physically and metaphorically) was covered in the lecture, the series and the book; there are plenty of amusing anecdotes, but Dimbleby patronises neither his subject nor his audience, and takes his analysis very seriously, which makes a welcome change in the current "bitesize" media world. The Royal Geographic Society, of course, provided a wonderful setting for this; wonderful to think of all the lectures that have taken place there, discussing the world of which we once (and perhaps still) knew so little.

The Edge of Love

2008-06-29T11:45:00.001Z

Saw The Edge of Love over the weekend (seemed appropriate as I was in Wales). It’s billed as “the first film about Dylan Thomas’s life”, but really it’s not so much about Thomas as about the two women in his life; his wife, Caitlin, played by Sienna Miller, and his childhood sweetheart, Vera (Keira Knightley). In fact Thomas (Matthew Rhys) seems a remarkably unattractive character – there are flashes of humanity – when he gets beaten up for “not being a hero” (ie not fighting in the war – he had weak lungs) – but generally, he seems flabby, child-like, self-indulgent, and entirely undeserving of two beautiful and independent women. How true to the real Thomas this is I don’t know, but as ever, it seems that being a great poet doesn’t make you a likeable – or even particularly interesting – person.
The relationships in the film are fascinating, though. Thomas clearly wants to have his cake and eat it; the women don’t just put up with this but instead form a friendship that seems to transcend the usual petty boundaries of love, rivalry and jealousy. The war (the film is set in London during the Second World War) is seen mostly as bombs, soldiers and a brief bit of fighting when Vera’s husband is in Greece, but the real war is at home, as relationship battles are fought and not won but truces are called. It’s not a particularly active film, though – you do leave the cinema wondering what, exactly, happened...
Actually in tone – poetry read over scenes, gloomy passages when no-one speaks, ‘artistic’ layered images – the film reminds me of Sylvia, the film of Plath’s disintegrating relationship with Ted Hughes. There are, it seems, no happy endings for anyone involved with a poet. I’m still not sure whether or not I actually enjoyed The Edge of Love, but I’m glad I saw it – like Sylvia, it’s a film that will stay with me. Unlike Sylvia, though, it hasn’t particularly made me want to return to Thomas’s poetry.

O, reason not the need!

2008-06-28T16:41:00.000Z

Recently I went to see King Lear at the Globe. One of my favourite A-level texts, I went with the some school-friends to relive our A-levels, and we were amazed by just how much we could still quote – we were obviously taught well! Lear is an odd play, I think. A slightly silly plot (man gives away property to daughters based on how much they claim to love him; war and madness ensue), it seems like the end of a Shakespearean comedy rather than the beginning of a tragedy. It seems less about filial affection, and property, than about reason, madness and human nature, to me. The programme talked about homelessness being central to the plot, which I suppose it is, but only in the sense of what we need – one of those things, we assume, being a home (emotionally and mentally as well as physically). And yet Lear claims (in his madness) that we need none of those things we assume we need:
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beasts.
David Calder’s Lear was perfectly judged – venerable yet vulnerable in his madness, he was a traditional yet utterly believable Lear, opening himself to the heavens on the heath (at which point it obligingly rained). The Fool, played by Danny Lee Wynter (Joe’s Palace, Hot Fuzz), so difficult to get right, was both unnerving and comic, echoing Lear’s madness and attempting to get him to face it. I was however slightly disappointed by Edgar and Edmund – the former seemed to lack the gravitas needed, particularly in the closing lines of the play, while the latter was, well, not quite sexy enough for the dastardly villain he plays – but this may be because our teen-age minds were clouded somewhat by seeing Adrian Dunbar as Edmund at the Royal Court in (I think) 1993.... The mark of conviction in a performance is when you know what’s going to happen (here, Gloucester’s eyes; Cordelia’s fate) and you are still on the edge of your seat somehow praying for a reversal of the inevitable, and I certainly felt that here.
I’ll resist deconstructing the play itself, but suffice to say I highly recommend this – it shows King Lear as everything it should be – tragic, funny, moving, unsettling, cathartic; and indeed the Globe itself, with its attempts to give an authentic experience, with only the faintest whiff of commercial tourism.

Aurora Leigh (essential reading for EVERYONE)

2008-06-26T13:07:00.002Z

I just like this:

For 'tis not in mere death that men die most;
And, after our first girding of the loins
In youth's fine linen and fair broidery,
To run up hill and meet the rising sun,
We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,
While others gird us with the violent bands
Of social figments, feints, and formalisms,
Reversing our straight nature, lifting up
Our base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,
Head downward on the cross-sticks of the world.

From Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1856

RA Summer Exhibition

2008-06-25T19:23:00.002Z

Went to the RA Summer Exhibition yesterday, which was - well, quite overwhelming actually. Talking about it afterwards with the other people I went with, we all managed to miss quite a few things - I don't think I've ever been to an exhibition with quite so many varied pictures before. But - it was fascinating, it made me realise that I know virtually nothing about contemporary art, and I'll definitely be back next year. Anyway, there was so much there that it's difficult to say much meaningful about it, so I'll stick to some basics: it helped me realise that I particularly like gloomy things (despite what I said about primary colours recently), and I find trees endlessly fascinating. I like Matthew Ablitt's etching, By the Moon (left), for example - dark (rather than necessarily gloomy) and somehow romantic. I am still in love with Jeff Koons' egg, though - and it's even better in situ, since it's bigger, bluer and shiny than I'd expected, yet so fragile (apparently if it is touched it has to be repainted), and, best of all, it reflects the domed, skylighted ceiling above it spectacularly.

I was also quite taken with Jean Cooke's Dream Dream (right) - both child-like but with the dark lilies seeming to be a portent of something threatening. I'm no art critic, but I just find it fascinating to see what certain paintings make me feel. I wished I could buy some - many were much more affordable than I expected - but I restrained myself - this year...

What surprised me - and this shows my ignorance of contemporary art, perhaps - is how traditionally representative many of the works were, which led to a discussion about the purpose of art: I suppose I've always been one of those slightly (no, sorry, very) pretentious-sounding people who thinks that the arts make the world, educate, inform, whatever - but of course, perhaps sometimes it's just meant to be decorative (can it ever "just" be decorative?) I have to think about this. As Aristotle said (and it's true for all the arts), "poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars." True - but the exhibition was also a warning not to be too high-flown about stuff - some of it we took with a pinch of salt and a few giggles, and I was fascinated by the people standing around what looked like a lampshade saying, "This is deeply meaningful". Deeply something, anyway.

Phantom

2008-06-18T15:29:00.000Z

Yesterday I went to see Phantom, an exhibition of paintings by Alison Watt, at the National Gallery. I’d noticed on the NG website that Watt was fascinated by "the suggestive power of fabric", which sounded cryptic and possibly interesting, so I thought I’d have a look. It’s a small exhibition (and free) – only 7 paintings, plus Saint Francis in Meditation (1635-9) by Zurbaran, a painting which began Watt’s love-affair with fabric – she describes the fabric in the painting as "like a living mass", "so sculptural, it seems as if the folds have been carved rather than painted."
There is a short film about the pieces, in which Watt says that it’s about "negative space" – something particularly apparent in Eye, which is not so much a window of the soul as a porthole looking out onto nothingness. However, I think it appealed to me because of the very – fabric-ness of it. White is usually seen as uncomplicated, simple – white sheets, white paper, white snow. This is a very complicated white indeed – shadowed and textured and deep, somehow more complex than colour (and usually, I’m a sucker for colour, bold primaries, hence my interest in Pre-Raphaelitism). Walking towards Root, I felt as though I was going to be sucked into a vortex of whiteness, and quite welcomed the idea (even though my childhood nightmares were about this!) The paintings reminded me of rumpled sheets, which are usually fraught with emotions - even if only in an "I must do the laundry" kind of way...

Sound poems

2008-06-16T12:36:00.000Z

I spent some considerable time this year explaining "what is poetry?" to undergrads. No, it doesn't have to rhyme, it doesn't have to have a narrative thread, etc etc - but does it have to make sense? In fact, does it even have to use words? Seahorses and Flying Fish had my class in hysterics, and I still can't decide if I think it's poetry. I like multi-media work, so this is interesting in that it juxtaposes image and sound, but....well, there are lots of buts. In some ways it's closer to music - perhaps.

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

2008-06-16T12:24:00.000Z

I saw The Culture Show programme on the RA Summer Exhibition (you can see it here) and am very pleased to have found a willing friend to come with me to see it next week. I'm fascinated by the large shiny blue egg - aka Jeff Koons' "Cracked Egg (Blue)", left, which won the Charles Wollaston award for the most distinguished work in the exhibition. Not sure I understand it but I like the colour...will report back when I've seen it in the flesh, so to speak.

I've never been to the Summer Exhibition before so am strangely excited by it!!

And another thing...

2008-06-15T15:40:00.000Z

The point of my re-vamping my blog was to re-inspire my interest in things cultural, basically. (And possibly to procrastinate in writing a hellish conference paper). A very apt poem by Dorothy Parker says

Travel, trouble, music, art,
A kiss, a frock, a rhyme -
I never said they feed my heart
But still they pass my time.

twilight is not good for maidens is about the things that pass my time - and perhaps feed my heart a little too :-)
Incidentally, I read somewhere recently (Frieda Hughes in the Times last week?) that no-one can say they don't like poetry; it's just that they haven't found the right poem yet. That does sound a bit like the gut-wrenchingly vomit-inducing phrase "There are no strangers here, only friends you haven't met yet", but I applaud the sentiment.

Research proposals

2008-06-15T15:33:00.000Z

At the moment, I'm going through the infamous mid-Ph.D. slump, when I'd rather do pretty much anything (including marking GCSE papers, and, apparently, updating my blog) than actually get on with my thesis. However, this is what my thesis is supposedly about:

Thesis title: Christina Rossetti and the Influence of Gothic
Director of Studies: Professor Fiona Robertson
My original title was "Representations of Pre-Raphaelitism in Criticism and Fiction", and I proposed to examine the myth-making process instigated by the Brotherhood themselves, and subsequently perpetuated by their biographers, who were often related to members of the group or had axes to grind. It became apparent early on in my research that such a study would not be manageable in the context of a Ph.D. Having reviewed recent secondary literature in the field of Pre-Raphaelite studies and the Rossettis, I concluded that there is increasing critical interest in Christina Rossetti's poetry, but that existing scholarship neglects the important influence of Tractarianism and Gothic literature on her work, and tends to ignore her both her early poems and also her later explicitly devotional poems. I thus decided to make Christina Rossetti the main focus of my research, since this is an area which touches on several developing trends in nineteenth-century studies, such as the increased attention paid to Victorian women poets and the "poetess tradition" since the mid-1990s, and the associated revival of interest in nineteenth-century religious culture, within which women played a central role.
Further research into Rossetti's poetry from her early poems, often dismissed as juvenilia, which refer to her reading of the Gothic novels of C R Maturin, and the apocalyptic prose of her last years, suggest a Gothic sensibility. Few critics have examined her early engagement with the Gothic, notably through the works of Maturin and Ann Radcliffe, and also through 'The Vampyre', a tale written by her uncle, John Polidari. Both her poetics and her subjects reflect this interest in Gothic literature, and my research will cover much new ground by considering Rossetti's poetry in terms of the Gothic, and exploring her use of the tropes of Gothic, such as fallen women, doubles and spectres.
My planned chapters are:
Christina Rossetti and Gothic Literature (Introduction and literature review)
The Maturin poems and the early influence of Gothic
‘Goblin Market’ and its multiple interpretations
Spectres and spectrality
Gothic and Rossetti’s devotional poems and prose
Gothic, Sing Song and children’s literature

The Mitford Sisters

2008-06-15T14:00:00.000Z

A few years ago, I read The Mitford Girls by Mary S. Lovell - mostly because The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford are two of my most re-read books. I wrote this about it when I read it:
This has to be one of the most enjoyable biographies I have read for a long time. Although it's not a short book, it makes easy reading, written as it is in Mary Lovell's delightful style that is strongly reminiscent of Nancy Mitford's books. If you know her books, you'll love it for the insight into her life behind the books, particularly the girls' fascinating childhood; if you don't you'll be intrigued by the ups and downs of the family fortunes and their friendships with notable figures from Hitler to the Kennedys. This book is not just a biography of a famous and remarkable family, it is also a panoramic view of the history of the last century. Whatever happened, a Mitford was there - the war (both in Germany and Britain), the Communist movement, and so much more.Reading biography is almost as much an art as writing one, in the way each reader relates personally to the characters with whom they become intellectually involved, and in the reading of this book it is easy to become very involved indeed and, unlike many biographies, it does not seem to fade away towards the end; Mary Lovell's writing retains our interest right until the close.

So, at Easter this year I commenced reading The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley, while I was on holiday. A word of advice: for goodness' sake read the paperback. I started this in March; I finished it yesterday. The only other book that's taken me that long to read is The Golden Notebook - but that's another story... Anyway, the problem is that the hardback Mitford letters is so heavy that my usual reading-places - the bath and the bus - are out, so I got through it reading about ten letters a night in bed. But I have to say, it's been worth the slog! Sometimes reading editions of letters is about as exciting as reading a shopping list, so I've been trying to work out why this one kept me interested. Well, as the review above notes, they did know everyone, which is interesting in itself. More, though, it's their acerbic wit - no qualms about being rude, about others or to each other. I loved their names for everyone (the Queen Mother is Cake, because of a comment she made about a cake); and the little anecdotes they tell each other, very amusingly (such as Roy Hattersely's teeth falling out in the middle of lunch).

The book is highly entertaining; but it's more than that. For one thing, as an only child I just don't understand sibling relationships, so for me it was an interesting insight into the wildly differing relationships they had with each other. The letters are also very telling in their frank, sensible way of discussing marriage, children, society dinners and the trials of old age - the latter being particularly moving, especially as the sisters die. Another intriguing aspect was their concern - particularly Deborah, Diana and Jessica - for their public face - the books they wrote and that were written about them, and their desire to protect the memory of their parents and sister Unity.

The letters are sensitively edited (Charlotte Moseley is Diana Mitford's daughter-in-law), with footnotes explaining in-jokes or obscure references, and the volume is also indexed, which must have been a labour of love. It's well worth reading - it just shouldn't take three months to do so!

Brontean Abstracts

2007-11-14T18:13:00.001Z

Cornelia Parker at the Ikon Gallery
Last weekend I went to see Never Endings, Cornelia Parker’s exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham (on until November 18th). My attention was particularly caught (unsurprisingly) by Brontean Abstracts, her work which came out of the artist’s time at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth. The exhibition guide talks of Parker’s "forensic interest in the stuff of the Brontes’ lives", and this section of the exhibition features photographs taken through an electron microscope, displaying in the most minute and scientific detail a pin hole made by Charlotte Bronte, the hair of the three sisters, their nibs and needlework. I was fascinated by the level of detail, presumably representative of a "never ending" search for the essential, real Brontes, the people behind the novels, because that seems to be what we, whether as literary critics or the reading public, want. One might assume it’s a modern obsession, this consuming interest in celebrity, wanting to be close to those in the public eye, but as I have previously mentioned in the case of Tennyson, this has been going on for a long time now. And, of course, wanting to know every minutiae of the life of the Brontes is arguably a very different proposition to wanting to know who Kate Moss is going out with and which moisturiser Victoria Beckham wears; this, one can argue, is a "literary" interest, one for the erudite, the well-read. It isn’t, really, though. I wonder if Parker was really suggesting that we are trying to get too close, that the scrutiny of biography and reworkings of history is all a bit much, extraneous, almost. What impact would that image of the pinhole have had if it had been made by Mrs Jones of Cardiff who lived and died in obscurity? But then, what material value would be placed, at auction, say, on Mrs Jones’ nightdress, for example, when compared to Charlotte Bronte’s? It’s all about association, and Parker is making us question, uncomfortably, if we have over-emphasised these associations – it’s cynical, but celebrity sells; is it right that these anonymous pictures become more interesting because of their associations? It’s an idea Parker plays with throughout Never Endings, in works such as Stolen Thunder, handkerchiefs with smudged marks on them which come from contact with tarnished metallic objects such as Dickens’ knife, Nelson’s candlestick and a suit of armour belonging to Henry VIII. Stolen thunder is exactly what it is – an almost religious iconography lent to everyday objects by virtue of their illustrious owners. The catalogue suggests that:
"Just as the perception of a religious artefact is transformed by belief in its reality, Parker’s treatment of the objects she selects often plays off the possibility of cliché that characterises cultural memorabilia."
Perhaps what Parker is commenting on in contemporary society is a frightening tendency to replace traditional religion with celebrity-worship, in which mortals become deities.
What particularly caught my eye here, however, was a framed series of photographs, twelve in all (I think) of deleted words from the manuscript of Jane Eyre. Only academics tend to look at manuscripts in such detail, so it’s thought-provoking to see these deleted words turned to their own use, as art. The materiality of the text is thrown into relief here, as words become meaningless as signifiers, taken out of their context (and some barely legible) but exist purely as pictures, the lines of handwriting becoming strokes of paint on a canvas which exist for the purposes of decoration only. The frames seem to break up the continuity of the text, until one recalls that since these are random, deleted words, they had no continuity and little textual status anyway. It forces the viewer into a different relationship with the text, and provokes discussion about the place of text-as-object, and, in the context of the exhibition as a whole, the object-as-text, in which an inanimate object provides a "text" for the viewer to "read".
You can read about the Brontean Abstracts exhibition at the Haworth Parsonage here.

Gothic Landscapes

2007-09-18T17:20:00.004Z

Hockney On Turner, Tate Britain, 11 June 2007 – 3 February 2008
I’m happy to admit that I don’t know as much as I should about Turner (or Hockney, for that matter, though I love his trees - see Bigger Trees Near Water, right). Turner’s affinity for wild landscapes seems to be the focus of this exhibition, displayed through sketches and watercolours to the more finished-looking oils for which he is most famous. What had not really occurred to me before, though, is that Turner paints the landscapes of which the Gothic writers write. I am at the moment programmed to find the Gothic in everything, and the Gothic landscape is at the forefront of my mind – critics see it as the representation of the inner eye, a depiction of the mind, as well as indicative of the heights the hero/ine needs to scale to succeed. Yet it is these heights which help the protagonist to achieve the sublime, that state where they are stronger than their opponents and see the world’s frailty for what it is. When Turner paints St Gotthard, for example, and Snowdon Valley, the craggy splendour both terrifies and uplifts (if you are in a Gothic frame of mind like me) and his Gothic eye seems to me to be painting the indistinct period of overlap between the Romantics and the Victorians. Consider the towering, bleak landscape of St Gotthard (below), and compare it to this extract from The Mysteries of Udolpho:
"At length, the travellers began to ascend among the Apennines. The immense pine-forests, which, at that period, overhung these mountains, and between which the road wound, excluded all view but of the cliffs aspiring above, except, that, now and then, an opening through the dark woods allowed the eye a momentary glimpse of the country below. The gloom of these shades, their solitary silence, except when the breeze swept over their summits, the tremendous precipices of the mountains, that came partially to the eye, each assisted to raise the solemnity of Emily's feelings into awe; she saw only images of gloomy grandeur, or of dreadful sublimity, around her; other images, equally gloomy and equally terrible, gleamed on her imagination."
Of course, for the Gothic writers the landscape can depict the awe we feel at the creation of the world, and combine it with the terror of the unknown which lies within it. The natural landscape, with no sign of human occupation, spoke to the readers of Gothic romances as the work of God; and yet Gothic horror is very much the work of mankind, with the bad things that happen being rarely actually supernatural but machinations of the scheming world. Those paintings here which cover manmade scenes (Interior of a Prison, left, for example) still display a towering strength in which a carefully-constructed edifice encloses the space and traps the viewer (particularly when the interior is empty of human figures – it is designed to enclose or confine something other than empty space, so if there’s no-one there then it is you that it encloses). This is of course particularly reinforced when the structure is a prison.
Even in the freshness of his mid-period, his watercolour washes with their pastel colours and intense immediacy, with the brush-strokes apparent, there is a lurking threat of gathering storm clouds: this seems to be the pastoral image of the start of a Gothic novel, where all seems tranquil but the reader knows that something must threaten the happiness of the as yet undeveloped characters. Gothic has strong overtones of temptation and fall, and as such Milton is considered to be a great influence on writers of Gothic, so perhaps the apotheosis of the Gothic that I saw here is in The Temptation on the Pinnacle, which illustrates Milton, though the illustrations for Scott’s Poetical Works come close, depicting the untamed Scottish scenery of which Scott was a masterful illustrator in words.

The Poet's Scissors

2007-05-19T18:38:00.001Z

My final call at the book festival was the Tennyson Research Centre. We were treated to a short talk on its holdings, and it’s amazing what’s there – a piano which may have belonged to Emily Tennyson, the majority of the Tennyson library (his father’s, his wife’s, his own), and some surprising memorabilia. Grace Timmins, who gave the talk, made it clear that any collection of Tennysonia (a real word?) is self-conscious, since even before he died people were hanging onto anything that might possibly have been connected with him, as he was such a celebrity (and not a fake tan in sight…) I suppose this is how they come to have two small pairs of scissors labelled "The Poet’s Scissors", which amused me, as well as numerous pipes and quills (enough DNA to recreate him?)
The insight into Tennyson's father (alcoholic, unstable, rather mad vicar, extremely educated) impacts upon one's understanding of the poet; and Tennyson scholars are fascinated by the books he had access to in his father's library. It's also amusing to think of this mad, clever man giving impenetrable, erudite sermons to Lincolnshire peasants who probably didn't understand a word of it. There's also what could be considered to be Tennyson's first work - his translations of Horace, and some fascinating marginalia - doodles, genealogies of the Greek gods, and some workings out of the number of ships that were sent to rescue Helen of Troy!
It's sad that the library of the remarkably intelligent and educated Emily Tennyson consists largely of religious books and novels, but of course she would have had access to her husband's library and read much more widely than this. Tennyson's own library is, it appears, rather selective - the Research Centre owns far more than they display, and despite the poet being a well-known voracious reader of novels, it's the more serious works that are on display. Of course when space is limited choices must be made, but this does seem a rather fascist way of editing his 'legacy'! - it's quite comforting to know that Tennyson indulged in the Victorian equivalent of EastEnders!
His family life, with 10 siblings, seems chaotic and dream-like, reminiscent of the Brontes. I love the vision of his mother being pulled around in a cart drawn by a Newfoundland mastiff, pausing unpredictably while the children recited poetry; and of the young Tennyson taming an owl to sit on his mother's shoulder, which is lovely until it fights with the monkey... When three of the Tennyson brothers had their first volume of poetry published, they hired a coach to take them to Mablethorpe to shout their joy to the world! People just don't seem so interesting today, sadly.
The Centre has many editions of Tennyson's work, though few manuscripts (most are at Trinity College Cambridge or in the States), but they do have a ms of 'In Memoriam', which is so valuable it's kept in a safe, and I was disappointed that we didn't get to see it. We did get to see multiple proofs of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', though, and it's amazing how many times he changed his mind about where in the poem the famous "Half a league..." stanza should appear. One almost pities his publishers. In fact he was rather careless with his manuscripts, since he had excellent recall. Apparently he once asked Coventry Patmore to look for something he had written, and it was found in the grocery box, written in the butcher's book. He also had an uneasy relationship with illustrators, only liking Julia Margaret Cameron. The Centre has a 6th edition of The Princess, illustrated by Maclise, with a comment in Tennyson's writing next to an illustration which simply reads "Wrong!" I was intrigued by an 1866 edition of his poems with a remarkable, intricate fore-edge painting which shows Farringford when bent one way, and Somersby the other.
There are also some excellent letters to view, including comically illustrated correspondence between Emily and Edward Lear, and a sincere letter of condolence from Queen Victoria on the death of his son, Lionel, not to mention an autograph-seeking letter from Prince Albert! This archive provides a wonderful insight into the ways of Victorian celebrity! There is also an unsent letter to the soldiers in Sebastopol, who (rather surprisingly) had asked for copies of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. Tennyson sent 1000 copies, and wrote them a letter talking patriotically of the glory of the soldiers - but there's a little note on it by Emily suggesting that "while it might be pleasant to write to soldiers, one is afraid to seem too regal"!! I could go on, as there was so much to see and so many anecdotes told to us, but the most important thing is that I now have a strong desire to reread Tennyson and to think about his poetry and not just the physical things he left behind.

Books in Lincoln

2007-05-19T17:33:00.000Z

I have recently returned from a lovely trip to Lincoln. I'd never been there before, but have a friend who recently moved there, who lured me to visit him by supplying me with a brochure for the Lincoln Book Festival. I'm pleased to say that Lincoln struck me as a remarkably literary city, but my view may be warped by the things I did while I was there...So many excellent secondhand bookshops! I particularly liked this one, halfway up Steep Hill (they're not kidding) - Reader's Rest; how appropriate! I'd hardly been in Lincoln for two hours when I went to my first event, a talk by Joanne Harris about her new book, The Lollipop Shoes, which I have to admit I haven't read yet, but she's an engaging speaker whom I've been to hear before (and you can read about that here). She suggests her new book is about fear, and managing what we are afraid of, which is often reflected in fairytales and European folklore, which has permeated Western thinking and affects every story we tell. Perhaps we're not as sophisticated as we'd like to be, she says; we still believe there are monsters out there, be they disease, stalkers or other threats; and so we also need to think that there are people who can fight for us and vanquish these dangers. As she put it, we're still sitting round the campfire hoping the light will extinguish the darkness.
The next day I went to a discussion on A S Byatt's Possession, one of my very favourite books. Actually I didn't feel it covered a great deal that I didn't know, though I was intrigued by the suggestion that Christabel LaMotte is signposted by Byatt as being based on Christina Rossetti by referring to her as the "Monna Lisa" instead of the "Mona Lisa", thus referencing Rossetti's sonnet sequence "Monna Innominata". Much could be made of that, in terms of gender roles in romantic relationships etc, but this was sadly skipped over - and besides, Byatt says she intended to base LaMotte on Rossetti but eventually settled for Emily Dickinson (for rather odd reasons, I think, but I won't go into that now!). What did strike me from the talk, though, is how you can read Byatt's book as a kind of puzzle she's set, for those with the patience to unravel it. It's an enormously intertextual, referential, erudite volume, drawing on classical and Norse mythology, Victorian literature and history, genre boundaries, academic mores and so on - you could spend a lifetime unravelling it.
After an exciting day of bookshops, tea and the cathedral, of which Ruskin said: "I have always held and proposed against all comers to maintain that the Cathedral of Lincoln is out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles", we went to hear the linguist David Crystal lecture. Like most linguists that I have come across, he is afflicted with an enormous fascination for place names, with which he entertained us for a while (did you know that Bricklehampton is the longest place name in the world - I think - that is a first order isogram?) We also learned some interesting terms such as an unkindness of ravens, a puddling of ducks (really!), and a wisp of snipe (which may be specific to Snitterfield.) I was fascinated to hear about the Americanisation of Harry Potter, which has changed crisps for potato chips, crumpets for English muffins, wastepaper basket for trashcan, and so on, but his (and my) favourite is that the nicely English "That's a bit rich coming from you!" has been changed to "You should talk!" American English seems so pointless when you compare it like that...We also heard about naming places (why don't we have a town called Shakespeare? The Russians even renamed a town Gagarin, to honour Yuri). Equally, why do we name objects? In the course of researching his book, Crystal came across Yorrick the Yucca (Alas, poor Yorrick...but apparently he lived longer than the owner anticipated); Tardis the garden shed, Cedric the ashtray, and a butter knife called Marlon. The best, though, is a car called Simon because of the Rattle...and a teddy called Isaiah, because one eye's higher...I have to confess, I went through a stage in my teens of calling things Engelbert; the last, I think, was Engelbert XIII, who was a potted baby Christmas tree. I loved the Victorian phrases that people learning English were taught: "Unhand me, Sir, for my husband, who is Australian, waits without." "The postillion has been struck by lightning." But the most uproarious moment of the evening must have been Hamlet's soliloquy delivered in words which began with H, concluding with "Head holy housewards!" I have a feeling I may be working on King Lear with words starting with L...

Firing at the Canon...

2007-05-12T16:34:00.001Z

At the moment I'm writing a paper ambiguously titled "Christina Rossetti and the Problem of the Canon" for a conference, and I'm finding it remarkably easy to be side-tracked by the canon debate, so here are a few of my overflow thoughts...
The online OED describes a canon as "a list of literary works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality". I could take issue with that, but will resist for the moment. Actually, no, I won't resist, it seems a good starting point. The canon is generally accepted as being works (of fiction - I can't cope with anything else now!) which are deemed to be of such high quality and lasting value that they are always in print and - the key bit - available to the reading public (so although the canon is a notion that only academics care about or debate, it's meant to be much wider than that). So far so good - and everyone (that I've read) more or less agrees that Shakespeare is the centre of the canon - as Harold Bloom says in The Western Canon, Shakespeare invented us, or how we think of us and are constructed as social creatures - so it stands to reason he should be the spider who created the web, as it were. But the canon changes (hence my taking issue with the OED). No work, no author, can be assured of a permanent place in the canon. The secular canon (as opposed to the somewhat inflexible list of books in the Bible) is by definition an open canon - in many ways (more of this to come) it follows fashions, it's subject to constant change. Some authors are always there, some come and go.
My paper points out that initial reception is no guarantee of a lasting place in the canon: not many people read the once immensely-popular Felicia Hemans now, for example. (Though they should, in my opinion). The problem with Rossetti's work is that it comes and goes - very popular, then rather sneered at by the Moderns (though Virginia Woolf deigned to patronise her), then seen as sweet and flowery, a bit of a period piece, in the middle years of the 20th century - and then, trumpets, put out the flags, she's rescued by the feminists because she was a victim of patriarchal repression...Yes, she was. Well, aren't we all? (I'm very much the feminist, but feminist criticism can't encompass everything). But this means that the most- (if not only-) read of her poems is 'Goblin Market' - which is amazing, and both precise and ambiguous in a way which has lent itself to pornography (yes, PlayBoy 1978), opera, lesbian interpretations, depictions of a female Christ, and so on. All no doubt valid in their way, but what about her other work? Germaine Greer said that apart from 'Goblin Market', Rossetti 'wilfully' wasted her life - but how dare anyone say that a life of faith - which produced some devotional poems comparable to George Herbert, precise, witty, structured yet personal poems - is wasted? So although Rossetti's now canonical, really it's only a handful of her poems which are - those which serve a social purpose, that of feminism.
And this is Bloom's biggest concern about the canon. Surely the canon should be largely about aesthetics - encompassing works which are generally agreed to be 'great' works, poetry and novels which change lives and world-views, which use language sublimely and rescue us from the moral mires of contemporary society? Yes, but then...we have to teach literature, and the predominant way of teaching seems to be in historical context (valuable) but often to the exclusion of admitting the beauty of the work (pointless). So, Bloom argues, we are 'reducing aesthetics to ideology', promoting content over form, turning literature into no more than social documentation - and it also means, of course, that the canon is beginning to encompass work that (ahem) isn't that good, because it makes a point (the favourite points being the repression of women, post-colonialism, ethnicity and so on). This is mere tokenism, and is as insulting to the writers who become ciphers for a social agenda as it is to those who have earned their place in the canon.
So should there be more than one canon, since the canon already seems so fractured? (People sometimes argue there shouldn't be a canon at all, especially feminists since the canon is a patriarchal institution like...marriage? but then, you can destroy the word, the idea, but you can't actually stop certain books being read and taught more than others. It's not as though there's a website somewhere that lists all the books in the canon, which you can just shut down.) A multiplicity of canons would allow for a feminist canon, a religious canon (broken down into different religions?), a canon of ethnic writers (again subdivided), oh, there could be so many...And who would ever read it all? You'd only end up with a canon of canons.
Finally, what is the relation of the canon to popular literature? Where do the (widely-read and available, but not that aesthetically agreeable) books in the best-seller lists of the day fit in?
I don't have any answers; this is just a way of musing, really. If there's anyone out there reading these, please let me know what you think!

Read more about The Western Canon: http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html

Hysteria in Birmingham!

2007-05-01T14:35:00.001Z

Hysteria by Terry Johnson, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 24 April to 12 May 2007

About ten years ago, I queued for a long time in the West End to get to see this play, but never managed to get a ticket. So when I heard it was coming to my favourite place in Birmingham, I booked tickets immediately. Sad to say, when we saw it, four days after it opened, it wasn't a sell-out, but it should have been. I won't do the usual reviewing stuff about the actors, since I don't watch enough TV to even know who they are, but let's just say they were very good, and all the multiple meanings of the play were nuanced but definitely present. It is, of course, a bit of a farce - that's the point, you know, Freud and humour and all that, and there are a few uncomfortable laughs as well as some audience-freezing dramatic/sad moments. But if humour is about what makes us uncomfortable, what we feel strongly about, and our repressed desires (with sex being top of all lists) then a farce is the obvious background.

The premise is that Freud, living in Hampstead in 1938 having escaped Nazi-infested Vienna, is visited by Dali. This much we know is true, and Dali said he had to meet Freud because he was the father of Surrealism, while Freud said afterwards that the meeting changed his views on modern art. But Johnson makes sure we see the relevance of other contemporary events, referring to Kristallnacht and, at one point, having a troop of mostly elderly Jews (denoted by the Star of David on their coats) creeping across the back of the stage. Yahuda, his friend and doctor, is also trying to get Freud to destroy a manuscript of a book which denies religion, particularly the Jewish religion, by saying that "Now is not the time to destroy what people are dying for".

Freud is of course most famous for his work on hysterics, nearly always women, initially attributing it to a childhood sexual trauma. Though he was usually gentle towards his patients, they were, of course, just patients to him - case-notes. So when a young woman turns up and declares her mother was just such a set of case-notes - and that she subsequently killed herself, Freud has to look very carefully at his work, because he later denied his theories of hysteria. Johnson suggests this is because he felt this could cast a shadow over his own family, and indeed one of his last actions in the play is to ask Yahuda to delete a few words that suggest he might incriminate his own father. Integrity, then, in the work of someone who has had such an enormous impact on Western civilisation, is a vital pivot in the play. In a way, this is about the collision of worlds that the eve of World War Two precipitated: the Victorians and the Moderns, thinking and feeling. Dali and Freud represent two extremes, yet extremes that go well together and can discover much common ground.

One point that the play highlighted to me is that paintings that paint from life, that are not trying to represent the subconscious, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, reveal a great deal about the subconscious - a tiny flick of the brush, a choice of setting and colour and props can speak a thousand words. But in Surrealism, when the intention is to draw out the subconscious, perhaps the attempt to explicate the id in fact makes it simply more opaque, though what Dali's paintings depict is certainly difficult to describe in words. For the first time, though, I saw a huge appeal in Surrealism as something which doesn't obey the rules, which the logic of the psychoanalyst cannot deconstruct. There is a Surrealist denouement to the play, when suddenly the walls fly away, the young woman turns into Freud's daughter, the clocks melt, the telephone becomes a lobster and the doorhandles turn to rubber when one tries to open them. It's like a dream, or nightmare, because the rules even of physics have gone wrong and nothing is what it seems, and yet we have to believe it's real life. Anything is possible, and that's the world of the creative imagination - to go beyond the rules.

At the end, I was left unsure if perhaps none of this happened. When Yahuda gives Freud his medication at the end of the play, he warns him that he may hallucinate. And then, it starts all over again... So did all that really happen, or was it the product of Freud's fevered imagination, worrying that he may have done the wrong thing by some of his patients, concerned about the collision of thinking and feeling that imminent death had brought him to? A play that requires you to make up your own mind is usually a good thing, though - there's no point in having it handed to you on a plate. So, I think it was a product of Freud's id. Which, of course, makes it even more significant, and certainly no less real, than if it had really happened.

One more thing. I'm working a lot on Gothic literature at the moment, and, despite being a farce, this represents to me a good example of modern Gothic. All the action takes place within an enclosed space, in which a hysterical woman is confined, trying to find a way to be (mentally) free. There is the family drama (the possibility of childhood abuse, the unknown and somewhat feared mother, the alienation of the small child grown into a young woman); there is the horror (of childhood abuse again, of the secrets of the id, of the nightmarish Surrealism, and of course of the imminent death of Freud); and there is the fact that 21st century Gothic does rely on the surreal, as much as 18th and 19th century Gothic relies on the apparently supernatural or unexplainable. When the walls fly away and the outside world is exposed, it is of course even more Gothic - with the Jewish women, the horrors of impending war; and suddenly the domestic space seems like the best place to be.

A Room of One's Own

2007-04-19T14:58:00.003Z

Women Writers at the National Portrait Gallery

9 December 2006 - 17 June 2007, Room 31 - 20th Century Galleries. Showcase display.

This is possibly the smallest exhibition I've ever gone out of my way to see, but I'm glad I did, because it got me thinking about things. It's one case, with no more than 25 (at a guess) portraits, but there's a lot of food for thought there. The exhibition is all photographs, all black and white, and all very evocative. The most striking thing about it is that if, like me, you write, you look at these women and wonder what there is that's like you, and what's different. This is, of course, both dangerous and utterly pointless, since these immaculate women in (usually)carefully posed photographs from the early 20th century are worlds away from us - much further, of course, in person than in their work, which remains relevant and is enduringly enjoyed. Nowadays writers are stereotyped as people who sit at their computer in their pyjamas all day; then, they seemed to have beautiful studies in country houses and always, always wore lipstick.

There's a strong feeling in me that what they looked like shouldn't matter. Male or female, rotund, glamorous, hairy, whatever, it doesn't matter; what matters is their writing, which comes from inside. (Although that leads me to another question I wonder about - how does our outward appearance - pretty child, ugly duckling, spotty teenager, etc, affect our character? Haven't got time for that now though.) But if the external doesn't matter, at least as far as writers are concerned, then why do we look? Why do we turn to the back inside cover of a novel to look at the picture of the author? And why, for that matter, would anyone go to this exhibition? Perhaps we put too much emphasis on appearance. Although - a slightly exonerating factor - I at least like the period detail, the immaculate desks and the glamorous women writers, because to me that's aspirational. It would be interesting to know how many people who went to see this exhibition were writers themselves. I suppose the other appeal is how independent they are. Writers, it seems, are never photographed with anyone else. And given that for many of these women, independence was the point, it's highlighted here. (Ivy Compton Burnett is quoted as saying that writing flourished because of: 'Being single, and having some money, and having the time - having no men, you see'.)

The other thing that struck me is their eyes - or, more specifically, their gazes. The situation of women in the world has often been defined by the (male) gaze, and the relative aspects of womanhood that appear through the gaze. For writers, this is, arguably, intensified. Writers both divert the public gaze from themselves, deflecting it with words, hiding behind their writing. Equally, though, they are opening up to the gaze, becoming public figures (hence these photographs) and revealing themselves through their writing. So what happens to their own gaze? The all-seeing eye of the writer is fanously feared; they scrutinise, dissect with their eyes, minutely examine. Many of the writers featured in this exhibition represent this, with their challenging gaze piercing the camera (for example, Daphne du Maurier).

Some look just slightly away, like Dodie Smith. And aren't you thinking, "Does she look like the kind of woman who wrote 101 Dalmations and I Capture the Castle?" I think so, but it's irrelevant, because she did.

Others appear reticent, however, gazing down or away from the camera, evidently lost in writerly reverie, but perhaps simply being evasive. After all, if you create worlds in books for the public to consume, why would you want to give them any more of yourself? Why not be evasive, not allowing the world any more of you than they have? If the eyes are a window of the soul, maybe that soul needs to be cloistered sometimes. Writers are often very private people, they say, so why expect anything other than a challenging belligerence or an evasive reserve? I think we expect too much of our writers; they are, as these pictures show, only human after all - and perhaps that's what we need to see.