NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

William Nicholson’s Queen Victoria handcoloured woodcut.

William Nicholson in a letter to publisher William Heinemann:  ‘I have often wept in the dawn to think I only got £10.10s. for my little queen with which you have papered the world. I remember so well how you hated the idea of her and predicted failure and often  I have wondered that you haven’t send me £1,000 hush money by a black-masked messenger boy – even now I would pay the boy at this end’ 

"I know what I like" criticism from rob mclennan in the Antigonish Review on Carmine Starnino’s "Cornage":

"What I find most interesting (no explanation of why) about CREDO, and conversely, most disappointing (no explanation of why, other than "I would have expected better‘), is the fourth section, the long poem "Cornage," a salvage-type operation (say again?) where he works to extend the range of his writing. Both stylistically and through content, many things are achieved (like what?) by Starnino, in a sixteen part piece on the changes in the English Language from medieval times. Through it, Starnino manages an ordinary series of sonnet-sized bits with some great lines (why are they great?). "There are accidents / so serendipitous it’s nearly impossible to stand / out of their way." (p. 54).

When Starnino isn’t playing clever for the camera (heh?) ("waes hail, dear reader! They call this sillyebubbe. / Its frothiness discovered by surprising some cider / with a spray of milk." p. 54), there are some rather worthwhile parts to the poem, (like which?) and interesting too (like what?), because he does manage to reach outside (how so?). Despite this, the attempt still isn’t enough to hold the series together (how come?), of a highly structured form of random bits that seem to go nowhere (where are they supposed to go?).

CREDO is a wildly uneven book, by a poet I would have expected better from( tsk, tsk). In the collection, about every fourth poem is a very good poem (why dat?), and admittedly, Starnino has always been good at what he’s good at ( what dat?).  But still. Critic, heal thyself."

Chris Jennings in the latest issue of Arc Poetry Magazine:

"Take cornage. The first poem in the sequence concludes: "I have thereby stationed this poem on a tout-hill, were,/in time of danger, it will blow a horn as warning." What does this metaphor mean? Particularly in this context and given that this poet frequently writes about a group fo people some reactionaries might call invaders – immigrants speaking a different language born out of a different culture? Answers to these questions should keep in mind the definition of scrynne - "a medieval marvel coffer" of reliquary – and, generally, the poems in the sequence that explicity address the evolution of usage that lets dead metaphors live as literary meanings die. Buckram is "cotton linen stiffened with glue" ‘ but comes to mean ": to give a false impression of strength,"’, and sillyebubbe, "doer/with a spray of milk," comes to mean "writing/ that lacked substance, a spendthrift of phrases/ that pleased the mouth but ignored the stomach." The sequence’s metaphors frequently round on poetry (or writing generally) like this: a poem is itself a scrynne for word-relics, one can "buckram" "stanzas with such long lines," and yes, "deception is part of the game" in the Aristotelian sense of metaphor as misnaming. Starnino insinuates his own, language-changing mepap[hors inot his descriptions of the way the language changes, colouring interpretations of the sequence much the way a pigment (vermiel) made by digging worms out of the ground (words out of the land) gives a blush of colour that makes hoaxes seem holy  )"a duab or two // helped an artist trick the Shroud of Turin into life.") Cornage fuses mediam and subject, but it’s the best kind of poem about poetry, one that shows, rather than tells, what is possible. Along with changes in voice and focus that were its preconditions (here words are objects with the same physical properties as the namesakes of  "The Goblet" or "The Clothesline"), "Cornage" is Starnino’s bridge from a poetry defined by its subject to a poetry defiend by its craft."

sillyebubbe might be the right word to describe what the Antigonish Review here has printed…save for the fact that it doesn’t even please the mouth.

I’d like to dedicate this advert to my mother (difficult cow, 65) who is responsible for me still being single at 36. Man 36. Single. Held at home by years of subtle emotional abuse and at least 19 fake heart attacks.

7 million is good for me. Most days though I plateau at around 3 million. Any advances? Man with low sperm count (35- that’s my age) seeks woman in no hurry to see the zygotes divide.

Bald, short , fat and ugly male, 53, seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite.

You’re a brunette, 6′, long legs, 25-30, intelligent, articulate and drop dead gorgeous. I, on the other hand, am 4′ 10", have the looks of Hervé Villechaize (Fantasy Island) and carry an odour of wheat. No returns and no refunds.

Bastard, complete and utter. Whatever you do don’t reply, you’ll only regret it.

List your ten favourite albums. I don’t want to compare notes, I just want to know if there’s anything worth keeping when we break up. Practical forward thinking male, 35.

Source: They Call me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books, edited by David Rose (Scribner, 2006).

David Brent’s reading of Slough (via Carmine Starnino)

Slough’s reading of David Brent

Slough (Written in 1937)

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

Writer, comedian A. L. Kennedy lives and works in Glasgow and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2003 she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. Her novel Day (2007), won the Costa Book of the Year Award. She reviews and contributes to most of the major British newspapers, and has been a judge for both the Booker Prize for Fiction (1996) and The Guardian First Book Award (2001).

Please listen here: (Subscribe to the Biblio File Podcast here)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

…Publishers Weekly 2009 Bookstore of the year. Carmichael's, Louisville, KY.

NB Bookstore Photos.

I was concerned that there might not be any meat. And I was right.

A mere publicity stunt, with Amis's slapdown of J.M. Coetzee in Prospect consisting of little more than this gratuitous cold cut:

MA: Coetzee, for instance—his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure.

TC: Do you admire his books at all?

MA: No. I read one and I thought, he’s got no talent. The denial of the pleasure principle has a lot of followers. But I am completely committed to it, to pleasure.

TC: Why have people felt the need to do this to the novel: is this puritanical?

MA: Dryden said, literature is instruction and delight, and there are people who think that if they’re not getting delight then they are getting a lot of instruction, when in fact they’re not getting that either. But it has a sort of of gloomy constituency. If there is no pleasure transmitted then I’m not interested. I mean, look at them all: Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Smollet, Fielding, they’re all funny. All the good ones are funny. Richardson isn’t, and he’s no good. Dostoyevsky is funny: The Double is a scream. Tolstoy is funny by being just so wonderfully true and pure. Gogol, funny. Flaubert, funny. Dickens. All the good ones are funny.

This, plus stand alone accusations of cliche mongering.

I agree that Disgrace was no chuckle-fest;  In the Heart of the Country even less so…pleasure tops my canonizing criteria chart…damned it, if it weren't for Dostoyevsky we wouldn't have 'as loyal as seven hundred poodles' would we?…but, pleasure isn't everything. There is something to be said for pain. Here's a squib I wrote on the topic written a few years ago shortly after reading In the Heart of the Country:

Coetzee delivers like few others on this planet when it comes to eliciting intense feeling, in this instance, anguished, dull-faced loneliness. He does this by drawing negative space so convincingly that the reader falls helplessly into it, forced to inhabit, fill, an often bleak outer world. With superfine pencil he sketches just enough, in just the right way, to trigger an often overwhelming emotional, empathic response. No other contemporary writer I’ve read makes you live his character’s lives so completely. Coetzee stands with the great Russians in this regard, and with Kafka on bleakness. But its a bleakness that’s strangely bracing in hindsight; you’re filled with gratitude when you get out, relieved that real life isn’t as bad as where you’ve been. Reading Coetzee reminds me of something Oscar Wilde once told Andre Gide: "My duty…is to amuse myself terrifically…no happiness only pleasure. One must always seek what is most tragic."  

While the Amis interview is worth reading, it would have benefited greatly from a bit more flesh.

So says Martin Amis about J.M. Coetzee in a interview with Prospect Magazine's Tom Chatfield. He also says that the Nobel prize winner has no talent. Pretty good sucker punch/ teaser I'd say. Let's hope there's more meat in the piece to fortify the beef. The interview and Chatfield's review of Amis's new novel (which the former hails as one of Amis’s greatest) will both be published online on Monday 1st February at www.prospect-magazine.co.uk

Wait a minute…that's in 10 minutes…and England is six hours ahead…so

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (1944)

Dropped in on Charlie Rose's site as I am wont to do, and found this interview with the curator of this past summer's Francis Bacon retrospective at the Met. I happened to attend the exhibition. These were easily the most arresting of the works on display.

"Head" VI, 1949.

Both capture a frightening post-war zeitgeist: the horrified realization/ comprehension that men can fall to grotesque depths; that they have a proven capacity both to commit inhuman ungodly atrocities and inflict massive, unthinkable pain on their fellows. Note the phallic, hyena-like aggressiveness; the cage surrounding the screaming pope is reminiscent of the glass enclosures at the Nuremberg Trials.

After touring in quick succession this exhibition and Titian, Tintoretto,Veronese at the Boston Fine Arts Museum, I was struck by how Bacon and the others all used very similar techniques

Titian Portrait of an Archbishop

to convince the viewer of the correctness of their diametrically opposed positions: God is great and good versus God doesn't exist, men are beasts. A battle for hearts and minds through the depiction of facial expression. The mouths especially, and how, if you get them right, you succeed in conveying incredible emotion, genuine anger, empathy,

Art scholar

benevolence, sadness and

Titian: self portrait.

evil.

Head 1 (1948)