'The French fog machine'

 You can say what you like about Facebook – and many of my acquaintance won't go near it, indeed flinch at the very name – but I find that it does throw up some unexpected gems from time to time. Here's one that popped up today –  

'Enough already of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault poured like ketchup over everything. Lacan: the French fog machine; a grey-flannel worry-bone for toothless academic pups; a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt. Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso. The entire school of Saussure, including Levi-Strauss, write the muffled prose of people with cotton wool wrapped around their heads; they're like walking Q-tips. Derrida: a Gloomy Gus one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope already available in the varied armory of New Criticism. Derrida's method: masturbating without pleasure. It's a birdbrain game for birdseed stakes. Neo-Foucauldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knocking down the pins.'

That's Camille Paglia in full flow, giving us what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed. 
I first became aware of Paglia when I heard her deliver a lecture on Radio 3, an audience event chaired by Bea Campbell. It was strong stuff, in the course of which Paglia, among much else, declared that feminism had been unfair to men, intimidating 'sad, pallid and puny' boys and making them desperate to satisfy female sexual demands, and that girls develop eating disorders because motherhood is no longer their primary goal and they grow up in ambitious, demanding and overprotective families. There were gasps, laughs and cheers at various points, and the lecture ended well enough, followed by some questions from Bea Campbell. But then came questions from the floor, and Paglia became increasingly impatient with their banality, until finally, emitting a furious hissing growl, she walked out, striding from the stage and leaving Campbell to wrap things up as best she could. It was terrific radio, and I've admired Camille Paglia ever since. Of course I don't agree with everything she says – could anyone? – but I love her outspokenness, vigour and take-no-prisoners directness. As in the above.

Larkin's Administration

 Here, to lower the tone, is a little something that Philip Larkin wrote on the, er, challenges of personnel management...

Administration

Day by day your estimation clocks up
Who deserves a smile and who a frown,
And girls you have to tell to pull their socks up
Are those whose pants you'd most like to pull down.

It seems Larkin wrote these lines after discovering one his prettier library assistants canoodling in the stacks with her boyfriend. 
It's a piece that could have found its way into either or both of the little anthologies I bought the other day, being both short (and actually rather sweet) and funny. 

Who knows the fate of his bones?

 At the risk of turning this blog into a calendar of saints' days, I must, as a Mercian and now a Lichfieldian, note that today is St Chad's Day, marking the death in 672 of Chad, Bishop of the Mercians and Lindsey People, and founder of the church that is now that tri-spired wonder Lichfield Cathedral. Chad's death was heralded by the beautiful sound of angels singing joyfully and telling the saint (he was already regarded as a saint) that they would return in seven days to take him to his heavenly reward. They flew back, punctual to the day, and, still singing, took his soul to its rest. Egbert, a friend of Bede's, related that someone in Ireland (perhaps Egbert himself) had seen the heavenly host coming for Chad's soul and later returning with it to heaven.   
   Chad's body was buried in the nave of his church, but his head was preserved in a specially built Head Chapel beside the south choir aisle, where it became a revered object of pilgrimage. 'But,' as Sir Thomas Browne asked, 'who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?' Sadly, the chapel was destroyed at the Reformation, and Chad's relics were passed, as it were, from hand to hand, turning up in the mid-17th century under a farmer's bed, then being divided, with some bones sent to St Omer in France, before the relics returned to Staffordshire, and were finally given to the new Roman Catholic cathedral of St Chad in Birmingham, where they still reside in an ark designed by Pugin. Happily, one bone was returned to Lichfield cathedral in 2022 and is housed in a new shrine in the retrochoir. 
   It is thought the famous, and beautiful, Lichfield Angel might have been the end piece of a shrine containing the bones of St Chad.

And this year St Chad's Day also turned out to be the day I saw my first butterfly of the year – a Brimstone (unusually a female) flying vigorously over the garden. It begins again – hurrah!

Llanddewi-Brefi

 The first day of Meteorological Spring, and the sun has been sighted here in Lichfield, though it seems to have disappeared again now. It is also Chopin's birthday (born 1810) – and St David's Day. To mark the last of these, here is a poem by R.S. Thomas – one that requires a word of explanation. First, the title: Llanddewi-Brefi, long before it found fame as the home of Little Britain's 'only gay in the village', was the scene of a sixth-century synod, at which the Welsh saints and bishops (pretty much the same thing in those days) gathered, and various miracles were performed, some of them by St David (Dewi). While he was preaching at the synod, the ground mysteriously rose under him, elevating him to a position from which he could be heard and seen by the large crowd that had gathered. It is this miracle that Thomas is recalling in his poem, which begins with a surprising echo of 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' – 

Llanddewi-Brefi

One day this summer I will go to Llanddewi,
And buy a cottage and stand at the door
In the long evenings, watching the moor
Where the sheep pasture and the shadows fall
Thick as swathes under the sun's blade.
And there I will see somewhere beyond the wall
Of the old church the moles lifting the ground,
And think of the saint's cunning and how he stood
Preaching to the people from his secret mound,
A head's breadth above them, and they silent around.

PS

 Here's something I wrote about J.L. Carr for the excellent Engelsberg Ideas. Follow the link...

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-man-who-gave-books-away/

Park Life

 Yesterday I came dangerously close to falling in love with London again – but then I reminded myself that it was not London, that 'human awful wonder of God', that had stirred my heart, but one hallowed spot: Holland Park, the city's most beautiful park, and one for me replete with fond memories. I had been having lunch with my old friend Bryan (Appleyard), and we spent the afternoon strolling in Holland Park and visiting Leighton House, with its gorgeous oriental interiors, vast studio and impressive art collection, a monument to high Victorian taste at its most Olympian level. But the park was the thing. This was the park to which I eagerly escaped on so many lunchtimes of my working life, breathing its air, seeing its sights, delighting in the butterflies and birds, the trees and flowers, enjoying the woodland walks, the Japanese garden, the remains of the big house – and the pigs and longhorn cattle that were occasionally employed to do some useful rootling and grazing. Holland Park was for years balm to my soul, a microcosm of so many of the things I love – and all within a short walk of my workplace. London has nothing else like it – which is why I am not, after all, falling back in love with the place.  
[More on my Holland Park lunchtimes here...]

Cotswolds and Celandines

 Yesterday I was walking in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. It was a well planned five-miler, taking in three good churches (Turkdean, Hampnett and the magnificent wool church of Northleach – all open), a decent lunch, and glorious rolling countryside with wide views – pastureland and paddocks, drystone walls, picturesque villages, cloud shadows passing over the landscape. We didn't get the unbroken sunshine promised in the weather forecast, but the sun came and went, never staying long enough to really warm things up. Disappointingly, there was not a single butterfly to be seen – it wasn't quite warm enough – but bumblebees were flying, and at one of the churches darker, smaller bees were swarming high up on the South wall. Birds were singing – a cheery twitter of small birds, rooks conversing loudly as they built their nests, skylarks rising singing from the fields, buzzards and kites mewing... As for the wild flowers, these were in their early spring glory, with snowdrops, crocuses, primroses and daffodils all in full flower, along with speedwell, lungwort and a few early windflowers. Also in full flower was that golden harbinger of spring, the Lesser Celandine – a flower that Wordsworth loved so much he devoted three (pretty bad) poems to it, and wanted to have one carved on his gravestone. That stone, however, in Grasmere churchyard, remains unadorned, the celandine featuring instead on his memorial plaque, originally intended for Westminster Abbey but now in Grasmere church. Alas, the sculptor – Thomas Woolner, no less – embellished the plaque not with the ground-hugging Lesser Celandine that Wordsworth loved but with the upright, poppy-related Greater Celandine. Oh dear.