Liking this a lot #1

Karl's interview with music writer Nick Kent for 3AM Magazine.

The relevance of vicars

As an aside to the Duffy stuff, a great quote from one of the best pieces of literary polemic I encountered last year:

Conservatism is the dominant voice of the age, which is one of steadily rising property prices and ostentation. In poetry, the great fear of radicalism (a kind of taxpayers’ revolt against the destruction of chartered intellectual property) found an outlet in a mixture of infantile regression and stylistic regression, in which inane and artificially irresponsible tones were mixed with a conscious and discreet return to outdated forms fragrant of ‘old money’, to Auden, Betjeman, and Larkin… poetry seemed stuck in a Christian youth club of 1955, with teenagers sneaking puffs on fags and a guitar-playing ‘relevant’ vicar.

Andrew Duncan, The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry

'Limits', you say?

Apparently, Carol Ann Duffy's poetry 'consistently pushes the limits of form and language'.

I'm not bothered about who becomes the laureate: it's a crap job for crap poets to write crap poems to crap spec. If Duffy wants the job, I'm pleased for her, and it seems some mark of progress that a writer whose sexuality 'would not play well with Middle England' a decade ago is not thought of in the same terms now (this is not to say that we don't have a long way to go.) Beyond identity politics, though, the likely appointment is reflective not only of Establishment (whatever that means) tastes, but - as the mood of vindication in the broadsheets suggests - those of people often entrusted with providing the nation with a cultural mirror.

Duffy's visual equivalent would be someone like Beryl Cook - cheeky, even scathing, but not the kind of artist who could be honestly said to be even glimpsing the limits, let alone 'pushing' them. And yet when you dare to point this kind of thing out to people, you're all too often met with a vague and yet pissed-off charge of 'elitism': you're a 'critic' who wants to spoil the 'fun' for everybody else. The consensus seems to be that British people should not be allowed to admire artwork more complex than L.S. Lowry; the argument which points out that the potential enjoyment of modernist and abstract art, poetics, and music by the general population is hampered by a covert (and not so covert) ideology of say-what-you-see realism which is instrumental to Britain's real elitism is generally given short shrift.

So it's not the appointment of Duffy that is the problem here: it's the media's celebration of her simultaneous 'difficulty' and 'accessibility'. The former is a fantasy, and one which is applied to far too much British poetry which has not earned the tag. The latter is still more problematic: 'accessibility' seems to be one of those business-speak buzzwords, implying that most people are too stupid to make their own decisions about everything else out there.

Anyone who feels America or Britain is moving nearer to an Islamist caliphate because of a suicide bomber is a wimp who has no belief in the robustness of democracy.

- Simon Jenkins on the CIA's use of torture as a method of interrogation in today's Guardian. Probably about time that someone set that idea out in terms as clear as this...

RIP J.G. Ballard

There's really not much to say here, is there?

I read Miracles of Life, JGB's recent autobiography, less than a month ago. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone to whom the word 'brave' could be applied with such a vast array of meaning: Ballard seems to have never taken the easy option, either intellectually or in the course of everyday life (in as much as we might use a phrase like that to apply to someone so exhaustingly extraordinary.)

Anyway, RIP.

'Selfindulgent' links

Having recovered from the traumatising words of the muscularly anonymous 'Anon' (see comments on previous post), I thought it might be about time to make a tentative appearance on here to see if said uncompromising dispenser of electronic critique has gone away yet...

Firstly, a poem by John Tranter in the edition of Jacket which is currently being put together. It's called 'Craig Raine's Arsehole', and it's really very funny.

Secondly, Basil Bunting reading his own Briggflatts, the 'northern Waste Land', at an American poetry conference in the 1960s. You'll need to set aside an hour or so.

Pranked

The Guardian's April Fools Day joke this year took me approximately 0.000005 seconds to spot. It's pathetic. Unless that's actually true (I almost, almost, wouldn't put it past them) and 'Iran Offers to Help US in Afghanistan' is the real trick article...