Two Greats

Well, it's Vermeer's birthday today (1632), so why not? And it's also Keats's (1795) - an autumn baby - and it's autumn (and it's even being used on a commercial, read by the inevitable Roger McGough), so again, why not? It's easy to forget that a great poem - or a great painting - that we take for granted is indeed great.

Westfield and the Scourings

Yesterday, amid scenes of retail frenzy, a ghastly new shopping mall opened in Shepherd's Bush, of all places, as the splendidly named Harry Wallop reports. As a chap who deeply dislikes shopping and tries to buy everything online, I simply cannot understand what is going on here. When I was growing up, shopping consisted, reasonably enough, of going to the shops to buy something you needed or wanted, and that was that. When did shopping as a leisure activity, as an end in itself, come in? I think the answer is probably that it rode in on the first wave of Thatcherite prosperity in the 80s - and I fancy it was around that time that another incomprehensible phenomenon hit these shores: Halloween, hitherto unnoticed and uncelebrated by us Brits. Now it seems to get bigger and brasher with every year - why?
Shopping (in its modern sense) is often labelled a 'new religion', and there are certainly analogies to be drawn, especially when retail cathedrals like Westfield spring up and fill with worshippers. Perhaps what it comes to is this: that our glibly rationalist zeitgeist has hollowed out real religion to such an extent that all that remains are substitute observances (shopping, sport, celebrity worship, green faith) and the scourings - the ghosties and ghoulies of Halloween, the psychics and hauntings that are all over multichannel TV, and of course bloody Santa Claus. Don't get me started on that one...

The Pound Problem

I just walked past a Blue Plaque to Ezra Pound (off Kensington Church Walk), and it's his birthday today - Happy 123rd, Ez - (and, as it happens, his deathday on Saturday). So it seems only fitting to say a word. But what word? Am I alone in finding it very difficult to get any kind of a grip on Pound, to decide whether he is a great writer or merely a great figure? Like Byron (another one I can't get a grip on, come to think), Pound 'was much in the habit of fancying that all the world was spinning on his pivot'. For some time he was right, at least inasmuch as modernism as we know it would have had a different birth without him - and poetry at least owes 'il miglior fabbro' a huge debt for his work on The Waste Land. And yet, when it comes to reading Pound, the experience is patchy in the extreme. Leaving aside the problems of his rebarbative persona (the adjective could almost have been made for him), for myself I find the Cantos largely impenetrable - are they really worth the trouble? - and even the shorter verse of his imagist years often seems faded and artificial. This, however, is beautiful, I think...
Any views?

Stubble 3

Well, it seems that edgy old BBC has mishandled this one so spectacularly that the story's still making headlines and they've even lost one of these two precious specimens of 'talent' (and, for the time being, have as good as lost the other). This time the old tactic of issuing anodyne statements, setting the bureaucratic mills grinding and waiting for it all to blow over haven't worked. The BBC assumption that the real problem is not with them but with the Public's silly benighted attitudes never fitted the case this time, and they should have dealt with it swiftly and decisively. Yes I know - 'swiftly and decisively' are words that don't belong in the same sentence, the same world, as BBC management. Now that they've allowed it to blow up into a colossal row, they have predictably drawn their wagons into a circle. Astonishingly (well it would be if this wasn't the BBC) no senior executive (with one minor exception) has given an interview anywhere in the media. The gaze of the sclerotic, hypertrophied, barely mobile BBC is, as ever, turned inward on itself. The controller of Radio 2 has let it be known that she'll resign if any of her production people are sacked. This can only mean that she thinks the Ross/Brand broadcast was acceptable - in which case it would be better if she did go. We should remind ourselves that what those two did was probably illegal, and the broadcasting of it was certainly a massive editorial misjudgment - and symptomatic, as the scale and duration of this row have demonstrated, of something very wrong, especially with the BBC but also with the whole of broadcasting.
Well, I've always said that no good would come of a BBC whose Director General sports stubble all over his face.

Pointless!

Here's a headline I never thought I'd see. Isn't it in the nature of rock reunion tours that they're pointless, apart from serving the obvious purpose of swelling the band's coffers? With rock music truly you never go through the same river twice - and equally truly the original river was the only one worth going through.

Signs of the Times

As a new Age of Auserity dawns, it seems only fitting that Fray Bentos is resuming production of the corned beef that made it famous. I do hope it will still come pressed into those finger-shredding tins with the impossible-to-turn keys. Soon, I predict, we'll be tucking into tasty and nutritious snoek, measuring out the powdered egg and swappping recipes for Woolton pie. Yes, happy days are here again. Britain can take it!

Money: Madness and Sadness

The money madness continues. It seems those shorting hedgies have got their fingers burned by trying to short Volkswagen just as the shares were about to soar. They could, according to the unsleeping Robert Peston, have lost £20 billion (yes, billion) - excuse me a moment while I staunch my hot tears...
For a touch of sanity, let's turn to Philip Larkin. Here he takes a cool look at money, wondering what it is and what it does. What sets the poem spinning - as so often with Larkin - is the sudden drastic shift of focus towards the end, as, in a kind of reverse zoom, he pulls far away from the ostensible subject and finds someting else altogether that is yet the essence of it. And it is indeed intensely sad.