change your feeds!

I'm all set up over at the other place. All the links, the bits & pieces, all my old posts - the whole thing - it's all there now. I've left Blogger. It all happened so fast I'm not even sure why, but the new place is just as commodious.

Wordpress.

www.baroqueinhackney.wordpress.com.


See you there!

Editing in to say that I have now also got a PR & copywriting blog called Text Pixels. Much the same sort of spirit as Baroque, applied to the world of professional communications. And with a pixie. Check it out.

housemoving

I have suddenly, on a spur, on a wisp, whilst in the middle of having one of those ongoing long(winded) conversations with Mlle B about how she was going to get home tonight, moved my blog to Wordpress. As you do.

The links are not in yet - they will take time, but they needed updating anyway, and for some reason the page where I needed to update them on Blogger has not been working for Some Considerable Period, which was a big factor in this sudden decision.

Do please redirect yourself, and any relevant links, to http://baroqueinhackney.wordpress.com/. And if you spot anything else wrong with it just drop me an email & I'll try to fix it. I'm not even quite sure yet how Wordpress even works.

your tiny hand is frozen

Live from the Met in Zeffirelli's famous production.

The singing, just incredible. Ramón Vargas a heartbreaking Rudolfo - I don't usually like tenors (with one or two exceptions, and please try to ignore the background noise) but he is amazing - and the [insert superlative here] Angela Gheorghiu singing Mimi... Ainhoa Arteta was a gorgeous Musetta, like chocolate if that makes any sense. I don't go to the opera enough. And shock horror, I've never been to the Met. Good old La Boheme.

But oh my God, La Boheme, it's amazing: it turns out you even cry when you're just listening to it on the radio.

...or maybe that's just the commentary. What is it with these people and their loud voices, Rudolfo hadn't even got himself properly flung on Mimi's deathbed yet when some woman starts going, "This opera is all about relationships falling apart and coming back together..." and then: "I heard Puccini lived a life very much like this, didn't he? He was a starving artist... but I guess he had his fun."

Okay, I've turned it off now. Puccini himself wept like a child when he wrote the death of Mimi. Let's just remember that.

before you read that Saturday travel section

"It is too easy to dwell on the contradictions of our concern for things that, in our well-meaning way, we nevertheless conspire to destroy. A more constructive solution might be to take steps not to find out about things like the Sentinelese in the first place, or failing that, to wipe them from our memory. The Iberian lynx. A dying Aboriginal Australian language. Choose something endangered every day and purge it from the servitude of our impotent concern. Forget to visit the fragile Alaskan ecosystem. Forget to visit the zoo to ponder the fate of the caged Siberian tiger. Let us ignore the world into a state of wellbeing. Ignorance has brought us to this and only ignorance will set us free."

This is learned and always-delightful fellow poet-blogger Puthwuth, making a point I made recently myself - with a vehemence unexpected even by me - when I was asked why I don't read the travel section. Only he says it better, as I helplessly veered into a rant about SND and the smug bourgeois with their three-wheel off-road buggies in Fresh & Wild... mind you they are ignorant enough already. Oops! I did it again. I do have to go down to Church St later but I can rest easy: as one of the endangered species, I may be a blot on the new order down there but I'm not exactly endangering any fragile ecosystem.

PS - Editing in: I've just remembered - last night I dreamed I was in Woodstock... shome coincidence shurely...

how beautiful is a semi-colon?

How beautiful, indeed, is the hyphen in "semi-colon"? How lovely is an apostrophe, how bewitching a pair of parentheses? I think the semi-colon is the most beautiful of all, like Snow White with personality.

Apparently the French are up in arms about the possible loss, brought on I'm araid by us, the brutish Anglo-Saxons, of the lovely little point-virgule. It is a shame; I personally have always loved the semi-colon for being the most elegant, most subtle and expressive punctuation mark. I'm glad the French media are discussing this. We over here seem to be only too happy to chuck everything away with both hands, and the baby and bathwater with it.

Jon Henley in the Guardian:

"The point-virgule, says legendary writer, cartoonist and satirist François Cavanna, is merely 'a parasite, a timid, fainthearted, insipid thing, denoting merely uncertainty, a lack of audacity, a fuzziness of thought'.

Philippe Djian, best known outside France as the author of 37°2 le matin, which was brought to the cinema in 1986 by Jean-Jacques Beneix as Betty Blue and successfully launched Beatrice Dalle on an unsuspecting world, goes one step further: he would like nothing better than to go down in posterity, he claims, as 'the exterminating angel of the point-virgule'... (Ms B interjects here: I hated Betty Blue and now I know why. The man's a philistine.)

In the blue corner are an array of linguistic patriots who cite Hugo, Flaubert, De Maupassant, Proust and Voltaire as examples of illustrious French writers whose respective oeuvres would be but pale shadows of themselves without the essential point-virgule, and who argue that - in the words of one contributor to a splendidly passionate blog on the topic hosted recently by the leftwing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur - 'the beauty of the semicolon, and its glory, lies in the support lent by this particular punctuation mark to the expression of a complex thought'."

Anyway, here from the Guardian are some bagatelles from current perpetrators of written English:

Will Self: "I like them - they are a three-quarter beat to the half and full beats of commas and full stops. Prose has its own musicality, and the more notation the better. I like dashes, double-dashes, comashes and double comashes just as much. The colon is an umlaut waiting to jump; the colon dash is teasingly precipitous."

GB Shaw, writing to TE Lawrence on The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: "You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life."

Kurt Vonnegut: "...do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing."

Gertrude Stein: "They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature."

We in Baroque Mansions disagree with this last: a comma is a sweet enough creature but very common compared to a semi-colon. It is like comparing hot-smoked salmon to tinned tunafish, nice as tinned tuna may be. But after all a Stein is a Stein is a Stein...

;click on the picture

in which Ms B is shot away - or is it that she is just one double shot away?

the elixir of life, with cake, as shot by a charming monkey

Whichever. She has already had several shots today.

The combination of beng up till after 3am, "seeing through" the "thing" which had already "acquired a momentum of its own" - to wit, the drinking of a couple of bottles of wine which commenced at midnight, see how louche things can get, just as she was pouring a cup of tea with which she was going to give up and retire to bed - and waking up at 7.15 (admittedly to take some Nurofen) - has rendered the day rather lovely and dreamlike. (Of course, the company was only of the best, as judged by the fact that they didn't want her to go to bed.) The soft spring air didn't hurt, either. Nor did the pub lunch, featuring two giant Diet Cokes and a gorgeous perfectly-cooked steak-burger. I am now (still) at work, too dazed suddenly to type up the notes of all my lovely dreamlike meetings - but type them up I must , because I am off next week, writing about Ted Hughes and sorting out the atrocious state of the lighting in Baroque Mansions. And taking out the recycling. And I don't know, some other things.

The good news is that all the coffee I have drunk today, though it may have had no immediate effect, and though my brain feels disconnected (honest; it was connected all afternoon; this thing only happened to me at 5pm), has done me good!

Yes. Caffeine protect the brain from a terrible thing, a leaky blood brain barrier. Eugh! And thus prevents Alzheimer's. Here's the science:

"A vital barrier between the brain and the main blood supply of rabbits fed a fat-rich diet was protected in those given a caffeine supplement.

UK experts said it was the 'best evidence yet' of coffee's benefits.

The "blood brain barrier" is a filter which protects the central nervous system from potentially harmful chemicals carried around in the rest of the bloodstream.

Other studies have shown that high levels of cholesterol in the blood can make this barrier 'leaky'.

Alzheimer's researchers suggest this makes the brain vulnerable to damage which can trigger or contribute to the condition.

The University of North Dakota study used the equivalent to just one daily cup of coffee in their experiments on rabbits.

After 12 weeks of a high-cholesterol diet, the blood brain barrier in those given caffeine was far more intact than in those given no caffeine."

See? Frabjous day! And we all know that red wine protects you from heart attacks, don't we, which is also great news, especially as my hamburger also had bacon and some very good crumbly cheese on it. So now the only thing I need to worry about is this research, where getting less sleep slows down your metabolism and makes you fat. Seriously.

apparently they really are kitties

Sorry - nobody will thank me for this. I don't even know what it is, my brother sent it to me. All I know is that it makes me strangely happy.

launch of mobile poetry archive leads to "April madness"

Never a huge fan of April Fool's Day - I think I took it personally as a child because my birthday was not long after, and resented the implication - I have slightly edited this press release from the Academy of American Poets, and am bringing it to you a fashionable two days late.

Gotcha...

April 1, 2008—When the Academy of American Poets announced the launch of a mobile version of their poetry archive in March, no one could have predicted that poetry would become the concern of Fortune 500 companies across the nation. But this is just what is happening, says Rich Richardson, CEO of Tercet, a Duluth-based import-export firm.

"It started in a very benign way with an all-company email," Richardson says. "Our comptroller forwarded 'Birches' by Robert Frost. This poem touched many of our employees, leading several to spend their work hours looking for poems on Poets.org."

Says Richardson: "Once they had a taste for lines like 'They click upon themselves/As the breeze rises,' there was no stopping them."

Richardson says he began using SmartFilter, a tool for blocking websites, to combat his employees' Poets.org usage. "Unfortunately, this did not keep them from getting their poetry fix on their mobile devices," says Richardson.

Tercet's CFO, Abby Abramson, says the widespread internet searches for poems during business hours will not be tolerated beyond National Poetry Month. "Despite the obvious personal benefits of reading poetry, we can't condone something that decreases productivity," Abramson says. Abramson estimates that employee interest in poetry could cost the company $2.2 million in lost revenue by the end of the fiscal year.

"Printing out Elizabeth Bishop's poem 'The Moose' and posting it in the cafeteria is fine. Reciting 'The Moose' to your spouse on the phone during work hours then using Poets.org to find more poems about animals is an abuse of our employee policy," says Abramson.

Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, sympathizes with the concerns of Tercet's management, but her responsibility is to the poetry readers. "We believe that poetry expands the possibilities of daily life, as imagination alters reality,” says Swenson. "If that possibility is blocked, you may have a revolution on your hands."

That revolution may come during National Poetry Month, when the Academy of Amercian Poets launches the first national celebration of Poem In Your Pocket Day. Poetry readers across the country will be carrying a poem in their pocket and sharing it with co-workers on April 17, says Swenson. "I would hate to hear that Tercet's workers were being penalized for acknowledging those 'unacknowledged legislators of the world,' our poets."

Happy April Fool's Day.


Nice work, eh? They must have had fun writing that. And imagine naming your child Tree - that part's real.

how true, how true

But. Teenager kitteh wd do this no matter what Momcat does. Srsly.

This contribution to The House of Baroque has been brought to you by Dr Francis Sedgemore, PhD, scientist, freelance science writer to the stars and Verry Seeris Pursen.

Kthxbai.

elegant second April

Here is Edna St Vincent ("Vincent") Millay in 1913, when she was 21. Her long poem Renascence had gained her a degree of acclaim the previous year by coming third in The Lyric Year competition - it was widely regarded as the best poem by far in the resulting volume - including by the winner, who said he felt his prize was an embarrassment - which resulted in a scholarship to Vassar, among other things.

Here is the beginning of Renascence:

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I'd started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.

Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.

But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I'll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,

And -- sure enough! -- I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I 'most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.

I screamed, and -- lo! -- Infinity
Came down and settled over me...

Millay's collection Second April - one of her prodigious output of books - was published in 1921.

Millay was, I may as well say here, a huge influence on me as a child. I'm sure I've written that before. I was given a book of her poems edited for children at about age 7, and read and read it. They were so simple! They were fun! "We were very tired, we were very merry/ we went back and forth all night on the ferry" - once you've read that and know it's poetry, you never have to be afraid of poetry again.

Older, I read the sonnets, of which I do feel some people miss the point nowadays. Yes, they are written in flowery, "sonnet" language. But they are poems about sex and love written by a young woman in the teens and twenties, so the content alone was shocking enough. Plus she livedin Greenwich Village and was bisexual. Millay was fiercely intelligent and independent and sure of her own identity as a writer - and as a woman - at a time when middle-class women didn't work after marriage (she had an open marriage for 26 years and was devastated when her husband died), women couldn't vote, and to be a brainy woman must have seemed almost a contradiction in terms. And she was very pretty, too. (All the pictures I've ever seen of her showe her wearing simple, chic, dark clothing, with white blouses: very elegant.) And her letters are wonderful. Happy Second April.

Picture details: Edna St. Vincent Millay at Mitchell Kennerley's house in Mamaroneck, New York, by Arnold Genthe. Autochrome made 1913. I know the picture looks a bit girly-wirly (but then, so do Steichen's photographs, for example, of New York) but I do love her dress.

not to brag...

... but one has begun National Poetry Writing Month ("NaPoWriMo" just annoys me, sorry) by writing the first (naturally) drafts of two poems, or two parts of one poem entitled First: the first and First: the second. I'd love a third part for it, but nothing came to me today; maybe it will on the third.

(Once I wrote a poem about bigamists on different sides of platforms, waiting for trains, and intercut this with images of Mother and Child Divided, the cow and calf cut in half by Damien Hirst and suspended in formaldehyde. The poem is in three parts, numbered i, ii, and i. No one has ever got it. It's can't go in Me and the Dead because there is not room, but I like it - it will go in the next one.)

So I'm thinking April might work out after all.

clinging to the future like one of those little clippy koala bears

Well, National Poetry Writing Month has so far got off to a bad start.

I know it's early days yet: my horoscope says that today I will succeed through creativity, so I can cling to that - although last Saturday it said I would meet my deadlines through getting a late start, and that basically sounded a lot better than it was. In practice.

Of course, horoscopes are not supposed to be just about the future, they are about deepening the present, and that is what National Poetry Writing Month is all about. Innit. So we'll cling to that instead.

Edited in: the koalas, or else the spirit of Ted, or else my creativity, or else my Facebook list, are helping me out here. As my kids could tell you - as any fule kno - when playing computer games the thing that makes you good is knowing the cheats. One day maybe I'll tell you what happened when Matty Bradley found the cheat for free will on Sim City. Well, it seems I've found one for this! For my Facebook chum Robert Lee Brewer has got a gig blogging NaPoWriMo prompts on a magazine called Writers' Digest! One a day! That's before the Academy of American Poets poem lands in your inbox, but after you thought you'd run out of ideas. Great stuff. And if I never get a usable poem out of it at least I get to spend the month kidding myself. I might also keep a list of rhyme words open on my desktop...

Meanwhile, here's a picture of Ted Hughes.

keep the doctor away

Every year people are saying to me - okay, on the internet not as I walk down the street or whatever - "Hey. it's National Poetry Month in America, everybody's writing a poem every day for the month of April, wanna try?"

I walk on by stony-faced. I don't have time for that kind of shit.

This year, though - perhaps because I'm not feeling quite overcommitted enough, or maybe there's a little patch of blue hovering over beyind the horizon of my Ted Hughes letters piece (due mid-April), or maybe it's just a mystery - I thought, well, why not? Let's give it a go.

Yes, folks. That's a poem, a whole new poem, every day for thirty days (hath September, April June and oh yes so that's okay then). It sounds good from here, write on the tube, jot down in lunch hour, maybe a scribble in bed of an evening... but then that's how I currently do all the other things I'm doing! The things that make it so I can't write poetry! But then the whole point is that I do, occasionally, write a poem. I fit them into the cracks. Isn't that where they belong, really, I mean really? (Hm. Tell Ted Hughes that. Or Milton. But then, women have always written in the cracks.) And but thirty, in one month? Maybe by the end of it I'll be like the old guys, Keats and Shelley etc,who could knock off a perfectly-rhymed sonnet as a parlour game, or Byron who could write Don Juan while fighting a duel with the other hand...

Anyway, the good news is, it seems that the Academy of American Poets is going to give us something back. I love their little pill box. By signing up to their newsletter you can receive a poem a day, every day, to sweeten the pill of having to write one of the damn things. Not sure it will keep the doctor away in practice: I fully expect to go insane trying to keep up.

And I won't be posting them up here. Bit redundant, that. But I might tell you about them.

just dashing through

A technical issue at work has yielded this bagatelle from good old Wikipedia. I might add that it is possibly the best and most carefully punctuated Wikipedia entry I have ever read.

"Traditionally an em dash—like so—or a spaced em dash — like so — has been used for a dash in running text. The Elements of Typographic Style recommends the more concise spaced en dash – like so – and argues that the length and visual magnitude of an em dash 'belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography'."

(I'm crushed. I used to love that aesthetic; I can remember, as a wee child... but never mind. Why, why??)

"The en dash (always with spaces, in running text) and the spaced em dash both have a certain technical advantage over the unspaced em dash. In most typesetting and most word processing, the spacing between words is expected to be variable, so there can be full justification. Alone among punctuation that marks pauses or logical relations in text, the unspaced em dash disables this for the words between which it falls."

Something for all of us to think about, I think - I just wish Blogger would keep up!

Seek, as they say, and ye shall find

Long time since I posted up any search terms via which people have reached Baroque Mansions. It is sort of boring. But this one I like:

elegantly dressed girls with pretty, bare feet

See?

being the view; and the viewed

The other day in Victoria I was standing on a traffic island waiting for the light to change. A couple of coaches went through the intersection on their way to the coach station (I could tell: they had "Victoria" emblazoned across their front ends; one of them even said, "near to London's Oxford Street!" on the back), full of tired-looking passengers. I idly watched the passengers, the girl sleeping, the guy getting his stuff together, someone looking out the window.

And with that, I suddenly became the View, not just me, with a coffee, waiting for the light. It took me straight back to the days, so long ago now, when I used to get the coach to New York City, and how the people on the streets would look to me - glamorous, native - as I watched them through the slightly tinted windows. Like characters scurrying along in a silent, air-conditioned movie.

Well, so that was fun. I don;t think many of the people on the Oxford tube were entertaining any such romance about the streets of SW1, but this kind of feeling is like a virus, isn't it: once in, never gone.

A week or two before that I had been walking through Eaton Square, in Belgravia, with its white terraces and its air of perennial calm and money. However, we all know money is not always calm. On that occasion, surprisingly, I was carrying a takeaway coffee, which had been overfilled as it happens and kept dripping on my hand. But it was too hot to drink down. There were a well-dressed couple walking too slowly, annoyingly, and a man washing a car with a hose thaty stretched across the pavement. I was late. Anyway, I got past all them and was beginning to like it there, when I noticed a policeman standing in a doorway. He wasn't going anywhere. I got closer, then closer, and he stood and then stood. As I approached, he just glanced at me and smiled, a bit sheepish. Sweet. I wonder who he was guarding. And which of us was the view, and which the viewed? The lady or the tiger?