Brushes with semi-celebrities

It's safe to assume that from here on out the posts are going to be a bit more sporadic, as this funny thing called "real life" has begun to interfere with my more touristic adventures around town. And while I think the details of my daily life are fascinating, because I'm me, I'd rather not subject the rest of you to such minutiae, e.g.: "Today I went to the organic grocery store." "Today I went to the hairdresser's." "Today I went to Ikea." So rest assured I am still going places -- they're just more like the places where everyone else goes.

That said, I haven't become a complete bore. A couple of weeks ago I went to the launch reading for the fall issue of Poetry London, a magazine similar to America's Poets & Writers. Held in the gallery at Foyles, a fabulous independent bookseller on that fabulous bookseller street, Charing Cross Road, the reading featured a decent-sized and attentive crowd and a larger-than-average share of good readers. I was introduced to some more "big names" in the contemporary poetry scene: Peter Redgrove, who recently passed away; Redgrove's wife, Penelope Shuttle, who read poems by her late husband and by herself; and Mimi Khalvati, who reminded me very much of Toi Derricotte -- a sweet voice but a sharp eye. Plus, there was a crazy Australian woman (ex-actor) named Rosemary Harris reading what actually turned out to be good poems, but in a hideous melodramatic voice. I just want you to imagine the following lines, pronounced slowly and methodically, As. If. Every. Word. Should. Resonate. In. Your. Mind.

"There's a scary bit," he giggles,
"I've got a scary bit."

Well, damn. How scary was it?

The magazine itself has a narrative slant and a lot of formal variety to its poetry, as well as a well-executed review section with plenty of good recommendations. A good discovery for a new kid in town, and there ain't nothin wrong with a free glass of wine.

---

Last week the London Film Festival started; I've been to one film so far, Triple Agent, a French espionage film, but with a different perspective and a far subtler execution than most spy thrillers. Last night, unrelated to the festival but scheduled during it probably to catch some of the excitement, the Curzon Soho screened The Corporation, a Canadian point-of-view documentary on the role of corporations in contemporary society. Now remember, these are Canadians, so you can bet it's not the feel-good capitalism movie of the year. (That will will be the film version of The Polar Express.) That said, I was impressed by the film's cogency -- even if not by its brevity -- and found it to be much more thoughtful than any of Michael Moore's latest efforts, although he is interviewed for the film. Afterwards, there was a panel discussion with the writer, Joel Bakan, and one of the directors, Jennifer Abbott, along with a few Brits from various corporate accountability groups. As with most Q&A's, many of the questioners really just wanted to hear themselves sound halfway intelligent, and so did all of the panelists. I'm always uncomfortable with the way that so-called "authorities" tend to condescend to their audience. One interesting point that was raised, though, was "what can we do?" if we think that corporations should be held accountable. One reply from a panelist was that everybody working for such companies should quit their jobs. Well, if he isn't talking from a position of privilege, Betty, you can call me Al. I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on this, actually -- and that includes those of you who don't think anything about the current situation needs to change. Let's get a discussion going! That way I can be a slacker about the next post.

Poetry. Food. Style.

Last Thursday, October 7, was National Poetry Day here in Great Britain. The theme for this year's NPD? Food. Now, I have a sizable appetite for food and poetry both: if anyone ever forced me at gunpoint to choose between the two, I would cry for reasons having nothing to do with the gun pressed against my head. So to find the two sharing a special day of their own, and a chilly, windy day in October at that, was great fun for me. To celebrate, I ate a hearty lunch at a vegetarian Chinese buffet in the afternoon, and went to a reading hosted by the Poetry Society in the evening. Called "The Magic Ingredient" and held at the Magic Theatre -- literally, a swanky theater just for magicians, those lucky bastards -- it featured three readers I had never heard of, because during my education at the University of Pittsburgh the contemporary poets I read were mainly American. Well, there's so many of them!

First up -- Michael Rosen, a writer of poetry for children and adults who, if he were a food, would be a chickpea. Feel free to analyze that one. In his human form he is tall and lanky, with that basketball belly that many thin men grow in middle age. Rosen writes mostly prose poems, although he said, as way of apology to those who dislike the term, "If that makes you unhappy, you can call them 'things.'" His "things" were mainly autobiographical, short, and witty, and he read them in the dry, self-deprecating tones of a true Brit. I think fans of Billy Collins would enjoy him very much. Here's a short one:

The cat's ignoring me. Which means that I'm ignoring the cat. Which
means that I'm not.

Precisely.

Next, and the star of the evening as far as I'm concerned, was Jean Binta Breeze. She's tall, buxom and has a killer Caribbean accent. Several times, while she read, she would begin to sing the words of the poem, caught up in her own rhythm, and she closed her part of the reading with a song. Her poetry paints a vivid picture of life in the Caribbean and in the West Indian communities in London, using rich imagery: "His hands were working hands. Spread out on the table, they became maps."

Finally, Andrew Motion came up to read. It's clear why he is the poet laureate -- he's articulate, thoughtful, and writes a very respectable, academic poetry. Quite a contrast, though, after the two previous colorful readers. Perhaps, in the metaphorical meal of this reading, you would call him the after-dinner cup of tea. He read several poems from a short series written within the last year, called "Twitching," about different kinds of birds, often exploring the importance of conservation. Hang on, it wasn't that heavy -- in fact, his language is very precise and delicate, and he is quite capable of writing naturally in forms like the sonnet. "Stone slabs scored like the palms of our hands." Almost sounds like a very pretty tongue-twister. Altogether, I'd say the reading was just as satisfying as a full meal and a glass of wine, although sadly, there was no food at the reading itself. Maybe someday I'll host my own version.

*

Saturday was a full day of gallavanting about town with my flatmates. In the morning we headed up to Camden Market, which is in Camden Town, an area just north of central London where lots of students live. Consequently it's noisy and a bit run-down, and the weekend market itself is like flypaper for tourists, but once you pass all the "Lousy t-shirts" and London Underground underwear, not to mention the twelve billion Johnny Depp and Scarface posters, you can find some good stuff. For instance, my flamate M. and I purchased lovely matching headwrap/headband thingies for a fabulous £2 each. Yeah, okay, it's all crap you don't need, but it's fun -- and there's some great curry for cheap by the canal, which is even better on a brisk autumn day.

After lunch and a bit more walking around, we made our way back towards Bloomsbury to a pub called Scream -- not nearly as interesting as it sounds -- to catch the England/Wales football (soccer) game. And we lasted about ten minutes. It's fun to watch everybody in the pub, men and women alike, stare entranced at the huge flat-screen and scream or moan at every goal made, but it's not that fun, especially if you yourself couldn't care less about soccer. And by you, I mean me. So where did we go instead? That's right, a museum. This time, the Victoria and Albert Museum, a museum for "art and design" in South Kensington. At this point it was late afternoon, so we took a quick spin around the South Asian section -- quite an impressive collection of Indian painting, textiles, and stone- and marble-carved deities -- and then headed upstairs to check out the new exhibition, "Black British Style." (October is Black History Month in the U.K. Also, it's not Columbus Day here today. It's fun to rediscover the arbitrary nature of holidays.) For anyone with even a slight interest in fashion or hip hop or black history since WWII, this exhibit is worth the £6. All of the clothes are donated by people associated with various movements or moments -- the mass postwar migration from Africa, the Nation of Islam, church communities, hip hop, and so on. And the people at the V&A are smart -- they know that at the end of an exhibit, everybody wants to sit down, so to close theirs they show a short film, which had in particular some great footage of the Notting Hill Carnival, held in high summer. We didn't catch all of it, because we were pretty much chased out of the museum by some very tired employees.

Frankly, we were pretty tired ourselves at that point, so we headed home for some stir-fry, a bottle of cheap red wine from the off-licence (that's "liquor store" to you Yanks), and an old episode of Poirot. I'm in the land of my favorite television mysteries! It's amazing. I spent the whole of Sunday reading in my house. Some traditions I won't break, no matter where I live.

The lovers, the dreamers, and me

There are a couple of upsides to the 20-minute weather cycles you experience in London. One: If you go on an expedition to the Spitalfields Market near Whitechapel on a Saturday, but get a late start and don't arrive until after it's closed, you can go into a nearby deserted pub, order a pint of Guinness, and wait fifteen minutes until the place fills with soggy Britons. Several of these are actually Saturday afternoon pub crawlers, already drunk and guaranteed to slosh half their pint of Guinness all over themselves and some unlucky backpacker's spare set of shoes. If you're really lucky, they will then shake their dripping hands vigorously, spraying foam on innocent bystanders, while screaming "I'm bleeding Guinness!"

Two: When you exit the pub in another fifteen, twenty minutes, the sky will begin to clear. Looking back at Christ Church, you'll find a pronounced double rainbow. Now, there's something to be said for seeing a rainbow (or two) in person. Sure, they get roped in with unicorns and ponies, or leprechauns, or The Wizard of Oz, or Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers. When you see one, though, you remember why they're such a subject of fascination and awe. I think it's human nature for people to be navel-gazers, but I always welcome the reminder that while humanity is capable of creating real beauty, nature does it better.

I've seen two double rainbows this week -- one on Saturday, as just described, and one yesterday just before dusk. I think it's a good sign.

Then

On Friday, practically delirious with joy because my bureaucratic scavenger hunt was over, I decided to celebrate with a couple of cultural adventures. First up, the Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank of the Thames. I found out about this place a couple of months before my arrival, and had imagined it vividly as a Greco-Roman temple full of beautiful people reciting poetry and sighing, so as I approached that concrete bunker of an arts venue -- god, the mid-twentieth century was a dreary time for architecture -- I had to keep my hand under my jaw so it wouldn't keep dropping. "Brutalist" architecture indeed!

The RFH itself is quite a trip once you get inside. The best way I can describe it is in comparison to the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining: lots of big windows and trippy, hideous carpeting. No crazy ghost ladies in the bathtub, though, and no bathtub, for that matter. The Poetry Library is tucked away in a comparatively cozy little corner of the fifth floor, and while it's not the grand palace of verse I'd envisioned, it avoids a sterile, institutional, Jack-Nicholson's-around-the-corner feeling, and has the charm of all things well-worn. Ads for readings and writing contests, as well as a "Lost Quotations" bulletin board -- for absent-minded readers who have a snippet of some unknown poem stuck in their heads -- are posted all over a big chunk of wall on the right of the entrance. The collection itself is impressive; I was ecstatic to find a large number of older books by one of my favorite poets, Alice Notley. Still daunted by lack of adequate "proof of address" (I've only been in my place for a week, after all), I couldn't check anything out, and instead spent an hour sitting in the back reading Robert Creeley's Hello: A Journal, a collection of "postcard poems" he wrote while traveling through New Zealand, Australia, and southeast Asia. It felt fitting, as I am still in the traveler mentality here, and will be for some time, I expect. These lines, which Creeley wrote in Sydney, struck me:

Your voice
so quiet now,

so vacant, for me,
no sound, on the phone,

no clothes, on the floor,
no face, no hands,

-- if I didn't want
to be here, I wouldn't

be here, and would
be elsewhere? Then.

Such simple language, but the use of couplets, and commas, and all of that space he creates around the words -- he really gives them a lonely, haunting feeling, doesn't he? Lovely.

After waving goodbye to the Ugly Poetry Bunker -- the RHF does other things, too, like hold concerts, but that's by-the-by -- I made my way towards Pimlico and the Tate Britain, thankfully housed in a much nicer building. The Tates are really great museums, because they rotate their vast collections and are a much more manageable size than, say, the National Gallery (where I'll return for a second try Tuesday evening). In May I visited the Tate Modern, which specializes in modern and contemporary art,and was pleased by the organization of its collections, which are displayed by themes: History/Memory/Society or Nude/Action/Body. The Tate Britain is a bit more traditional, with rooms displayed by period or by artist, although that makes it easy to eyeball which rooms are not to be missed. First up I checked out the Turner collection (that's Joseph Mallord William Turner, the great 19th-century landscape artist, if you weren't sure). A great introduction, with rooms organized by the developments in art and society over the course of Turner's career. Context receives its rightful place here. Even for those not so interested in landscape art, Turner's work has a wonderful sense of movement, of light, of a scene just about to change; it has a real presence.

I also visited the rooms displaying work by Vanessa Bell, painter, and sister of my favorite Londoner, Virginia Woolf; Francis Bacon, an Irish emigre a la Joyce and countless others, who has a museum in his name in Dublin, containing his studio exactly as it was when he died, and a database to read about everything in it; and Tracey Emin, one of the Young British Artists, many of whose works are also on display at the Saatchi Gallery in the South Bank Centre. Bacon and Emin's works are very intense, and very moving, so after that I was ready to head home.

Once I did, I found myself feeling a bit homesick. Luckily a cure was ready-at-hand: a pizza, a couple of beers, and the Must-See TV lineup, which shows here on Fridays rather than Thursdays and is two seasons behind. But, no matter -- when it comes right down to it, nothing says "home" to me like Will & Grace.