Tumbleweed and Blues

A couple of days of sun and my mental faculties are all to pieces - it's always the way. I am, as it were, sitting on the stoop, watching the tumbleweed blow by across the wide empty space between my ears. I'm so far gone I can't even vote. Having acquired a postal voting form for the forthcoming EU thing, I proceeded to make such a complete horlicks of it that I had to throw it away. Whoops. I console myself that the EU Parliament is less a democratic assembly than a very expensive collection of rubber stamps. In fact I'm probably doing my democratic duty by not voting for any of them. So there.
As it happened, democracy was the theme of (sadly) the last of Clive James's stint on Radio 4's A Point Of View - the usual procession of dunces and dullards will resume next week. It was a good finale - full text here - but it struck me that, by both Popper's and Camus's definitions, we can scarcely be said to be living in a democracy just now. Our government can't be changed 'at the people's whim'. At present it's the people's overwhelming will - never mind whim - to have an election and change the government, but we can be sure this will never be allowed to happen till the very last minute, as the incumbents know they will lose power when it does. Also, I have an awful feeling that Brown - like Blair before him - is firmly convinced that actually he does know everything, and if people would only listen, rid themselves of 'false consciousness' and stop putting obstacles in his way, this fact would become apparent to all, and all 'problems' could then be 'solved'. The instincts of both Blair and Brown are deeply undemocratic. Both men have seen themselves as heads of state rather than servants of the state - but at least Blair had the sense to remember the formalities. He would never been arrogant and insensitive enough to have the Queen left out of the D-Day anniversary celebrations. He'd have been there alongside her, jutting out his chin in his brave, grown-up, serious look - but at least she'd have been there too.
Never mind - walking on the downs yesterday I saw four species of Blue, including the Adonis, which is in the picture.
And now I must go and stare into the middle distance for the rest of the day...

A Scientist - At It Again

Okay it's Friday, it's sunny - it's time to reveal the latest findings of A Scientist. Wonderful, isn't it, what they come up with? Me, I am of course the Playboy - in fact that could almost be me in the picture...

Subway Sacrilege

Despite appearances to the contrary, I don't actually spend my life being affronted by advertising material, but yesterday evening, outside a branch of Subway - purveyors of cardboard rolls with denatured flavour-free fillings - I was confronted by a placard bearing this message: 'Morning has broken. Fix it.'
With what? Why, with a Subway £2 breakfast.
Now, anyone who has chewed their way through a Subway roll will testify that it has some potential as an adhesive, but what broken thing could possibly be fixed by a cardboard roll and a cardboard flagon of milkfroth? The morning eh? The morning's broken. It needs fixing. Oh dear God, that Eleanor Farjeon's lovely verse should be put to such sacrilegious use. With that beautiful old tune adapted by Martin Shaw - and readapted by Cat Stevens - it is a wonderfully plain and simple song of thanksgiving for God's daily remade creation. The theology is lightly worn - more so than in the similarly themed New Every Morning - and its essence is surely the thankfulness, mindfulness and attentiveness that are at the core of all true religion (or perhaps it's closer to Marianne Moore's formulation, Humility, concentration, gusto). Remind yourself of the beauty of Morning Has Brokenhere - and shake a fist at any branch of Subway you happen to pass. And if I've set the tune buzzing in your head all day, there are worse things to have buzzing there, far worse...

Imagine...

'Imagine If They Worked Together.' That is the slogan of a big poster advertising campaign by... Actually I've never noticed (isn't advertising wonderful?), but I imagine it's one of those huge, exotically named finance companies, and I imagine the aim is to justify some massive corporate gobble-up or merger (somehow I doubt if LloydsTSBHBOS is running this one). The posters show two supposed creative geniuses, and ask us to imagine if they worked together, and we no doubt are supposed to think Gosh yes wouldn't that have been great? Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol feature on one poster, so let's imagine what it would be like if they worked together. Personally I imagine they'd cook up a grand scheme to make a monkey of the art market and gain yet more money for production-line tripe - pretty much business as usual then. Another poster shows Bob Dylan and John Lennon. If they worked together, the result would probably have been, at best, an amusing jam session rather than any kind of creative collaboration.
Of course the campaign is based on just the kind of crass misconception you'd expect from advertising 'creatives', as they're ironically called. It rests on a mathematical conception of creativity: Dali good, Warhol good, Dali+Warhol double good. That may be how advertising works - but look at advertising. And look at art.

At The Pines

A lucky find at Oxfam just now - one I had been hoping to get my hands on for a long time: At The Pines by the gloriously named Mollie Panter-Downes (surely an escapee from a Betjeman poem). Originally published in The New Yorker, this is an account of the respectable years of Swinburne, when he was living in the care of his friend, the now otherwise forgotten Theodore Watts-Dunton, in a villa in suburban Putney. Max Beerbohm's wonderful account of a visit to Number 2 The Pines says it all really - but I'm very glad to have this book. Seriously underpriced too - considering how long it's been unavailable - at a mere £1.99. A lucky find indeed.

Reading Flannery O'Connor

After so many decades of reading (and forgetting), it's not often I come across a book I can truly say is unlike anything I've ever read before. But so it is with Flannery O'Connor, whose first volume of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955), I am reading now. It's an exhilarating, unnerving, even hair-raising experience. These stories seem to come out of a world where the familiar landmarks are either missing or displaced, where the people seem fully, shockingly alive but living by rules and assumptions that are hard to fathom. O'Connor's children are wise, and her villains are courtly, with a horrible dignity and strange philosophical or religious preoccupations (but they kill you anyway). Her characters, Robert Lowell said, are 'wholeheartedly horrible, and almost better than life' (better?). Everything seems harshly lit and foreshortened - transfigured in some way, but by what? If this is Grace, it's of a strange cruel kind, and it's hard to discern anything good happening to anyone. Yet there is definitely a comic undertone too, albeit of the blackest hue. O'Connor, whose bedside reading was Thomas Aquinas, called her style 'Christian realism'... I don't know - but I do know that reading A Good Man is the most bracing, jolting reading experience I've had in a long time - rather like receiving a succession of electric shocks. Certainly nothing could be further from the emotionally correct pieties of most contemporary fiction. I suspect she might be some kind of genius.

Afterthought: The nearest thing I've had to this jolting experience was reading the equally strange and uncompromising - but very English and very Edwardian - Ivy Compton Burnett.

A Painted Lady Summer?

Yesterday's sun brought unexpected - and very welcome - visitors to the garden: several Painted Ladies, newly arrived no doubt from North Africa, nectaring hungrily on Ceanothus in the back garden and a white-flowered evergreen whose name I can never retain in the front. At one point two of them started a fight and flew off at high speed in chase of each other - they are extremely strong fliers; they have to be to make their great migration. The Painted Lady is (as the name suggests) a showily marked and easily recognised species, and most summers, if you keep your eyes peeled, you'll probably spot a few. But some years they reach these shores in great waves and can turn up anywhere - I once saw one battling gamely with gusty winds right under Hadrian's Wall. Tomorrow's early sightings give me hope that this might be a 'Painted Lady summer'...