tastes like bitter lemons and judgement day

Taste is such a strange thing. Why is it that we�re so defensive about our individual tastes in music, literature, and members of the opposite sex when, even in one lifetime, these tastes will change many times. Okay, so taste in whatever is a great tool. We make snap judgements about people we might not know so well by nosily browsing their bookshelves or iTunes library because it�s easy, fast, and occasionally useful. It�s rather odd, but most people feel a bit hesitant about sharing these things with others. Fine art seems to be the one area where we get away with making grandiose judgements: �that Turner exhibition was ABSOLUTELY awful,� you sigh to your friend who promises not to see it. Nobody really seems to get that offended � we don�t align ourselves to artists the way we do poets or singer-songwriters who �understand what we�re going through�. Blah blah blah.

Compare the first time you listen to music at your boyfriend�s house. He puts on some art-house indy-rock band music that you can�t stand. No way are you going to tell him how much you hate it, for fear you might crush the fledgling buds of romance. No matter that you might find, in a few months time, no doubt after many listens, that you�ve become a skinny-jean wearing, indy-rock devotee. No more Tori Amos for you.

This is what I mean: why are we so defensive of our own tastes when they so often change depending on what we�re exposed to. Humans are the most forward-thinking, constantly evolving, creatures of habit in the world. How remarkable that we, in so many ways, stay the same, and yet alter our appearance, our tastes, our partners, our jobs, all the time.

What brought these ramblings on? A break up and a poet. I thought my partner was a decent chap. It turns out I was mistaken. I thought I didn�t like the poet Auden. Also mistaken.

Regular readers will know that I am a devoted fan of the Josephine Hart poetry nights put on at the British Library. It must have been about six months ago now that I went to the Auden evening, which as I wrote here, was very enjoyable. Hart also produces CDs of the British Library readings. I recently purchased the first collection called Catching Life by the Throat which features Ralph Finnes reading a selection of Auden poems. Unfortunately the sound quality of the recordings leaves much to be desired but Finnes is an excellent reader and Auden suits him particularly well.

Auden is cheeky, witty, snappy and incredibly poignant � don�t know how I missed that the first few times around. There�s a whiff of melancholia that I�m particularly drawn to, an almost elegiac quality in some poems, particularly: Lullaby; September 1, 1939; and O Tell Me the Truth About Love.

My favourite poem though has to be Song of the Devil. It�s laugh out loud hilarious and brilliantly clever. I can�t find it anywhere online so I�ve transcribed a very messy version below from the recording. I haven�t a copy of the poem in print, so I have no idea where the line breaks or even punctuation should go, but it�s a really funny, fantastic poem, read superbly by Finnes on the recording.

So it turns out, some things really are worth a second chance. Worth an adjustment of taste. Then again, some definitely aren�t.

Song of the Devil

Ever since observation taught me temptation
As a matter of timing, I�ve tried to clothe my fiction
In up to date diction. The contemporary jargon of
pride. I can recall when, to win the more obstinate
round, the best bet was to say to them:
sin the more that grace may abound.

Since social psychology replaces theology
The process goes twice as quick. If a conscience
Is tender and loathe to surrender, I had only
To whisper: you�re sick.
Puritanical morality is madly non-U.
Enhance your personality with a romance, with two.
If you pass up a dame, you�ve yourself to blame,
For shame is neurotic, so snatch.

All rules are too formal. In fact, they�re abnormal,
For any desire is natch. So take your proper share,
Man of dope and drink, aren�t you the chairman of
Ego Inc? Free will is a mystical myth as statistical
Methods have objectively shown: a fad of the churches.
Since the latest researches into motivation, it�s known
That honour is hypocrisy, honesty a joke. You live in
A democracy: lie like other folk.

Since men are like goods, what are shouldn�ts
or shoulds when you are the leading brand.
Let them all drop dead, you�re way ahead.
Beat them up if they dare to demand what may
Your intention be or what might ensue. There�s a
Difference of dimension between me and you.
If in the scrimmage of business your image should
Ever tarnish or stale, public relations can take it and
Make it shine like a knight of the grail.

You can mark up the price that you sell at
If you are packaged as glamour and show.
Values are relative, dough is dough. So,
Let each while he may think you�re more okay,
More yourself than anyone else. Till you find that
You�re hooked, your goose is cooked and you�re
Only a cipher of hells. Believe while you can that
I�m proud of you. Enjoy your dream. I�m so bored
With the whole fucking crowd of you I could scream.

September 1, 1939

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night. 

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.  

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again. 

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong. 

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good. 

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone. 

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb? 

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die. 

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Auden wrote this poem in the first days of WWII, hence the title. For me, this poem is a clear descendant of Eliot's Waste Land - the tonal links are strong, even if Auden is the more penetrable poet. The first two-thirds of the poem focus on the everyday frustration, felt by individuals and the collective alike, at the horrors and hypocrisies of interfering war. But unlike the total desolation of Eliot, Auden offers his reader a hope for the future - a truth for us all: 'we must love one another or die.'

I heard this read last night at the Josephine Hart poetry night, which I've mentioned before in a post. I didn't think the Auden evening was as good as the Larkin evening, but that's in part because I don't respond much to Auden as an aural poet. Auden's need to convey truths means that he sometimes sacrifices aurality for sentiment. September 1, 1939 was one of the few poems which really made an impression, in tone, truths, and sound. Listening to the early lines I thought how contemporary the resonances of this poem were even today, with the general pessimism of society about the state of politics and economics: 'Waves of anger and fear / Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth, / Obsessing our private lives.' Auden could be poetically paraphrasing our moral judgement of City Boys with: 'Mismanagement and grief: / We must suffer them all again. / Into this neutral air / Where blind skyscrapers use / Their full height to proclaim / The strength of Collective Man'

But then you come to lines, like: 'The unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night' or 'Faces along the bar / Cling to their average day: / The lights must never go out, / The music must always play.' This was where I stopped thinking that you could make these kind of modern comparisons. How could I possibly compare what must have been the electrically uncertain and fearful atmosphere of 1939 to the comparative innocence of what we're faced with now. Yes, people are losing their jobs and the economy isn't doing as well as it was five years ago, but we aren't sending an entire generation of men to war. Personally I'd rather have to comfort my friends who have lost their jobs than comfort my friends sending their boyfriends and husbands off to war. I know it sounds trite to break it down in such a way, but I wonder why we can't take all of the nostalgia for simpler, purer times and channel this desire into something productive and positive.

And while the following lines could easily be applicable to today's London-bound commuters, trudging to work contemplating tedious self-improvements, the context of WWII raises these meaningless resolutions into a kind of mass cultural affirmation that life must go on : 'The dense commuters come, / Repeating their morning vow; / "I will be true to the wife,/ I'll concentrate more on my work,"'

But even more impressive in light of the fear and darkness that must have been pervasive toward the end of '39, is the sense of hope, uplift and affirmation - but without the patronising tone of Britain's 'keep calm and carry on' - present in the last, beautiful, stanza:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

but Larkin will never go out of fashion...

Nicole Farhi A/W '09 at the Royal Opera House

Even though London Fashion Week isn't technically over, my involvement in it is as the copy for my piece on LFW is just about finished (not half as crap as I thought it would be). I wouldn't say I enjoyed the shows, but it was interesting to see how they operated. It's funny because I think I'd enjoy them a lot more were they less laden with all the weird fashionista self-righteousness: I want to scream at these people 'you work for fashion magazines! you don't even make clothes, you sell them by wearing them! why so smug?' Via the forces of PR, the fashion world has created an aura of 'exclusivity' and I'll tell you why that aura is so essential for the success of the industry. If you knew just how shallow the people were, how uneventful the shows are, how scary the models look in real life, but especially how crap the parties are, you'd never ever shell out the big bucks for a pair of Prada shoes. Sure, you might still admire the man-hours involved in making an avant-garde McQueen dress, but it wouldn't be surrounded in a halo of celebrity-coveting desire if the 'fashion world' lost its lustrous lustre (tautology, I know).

If nothing else, I'm glad I went if only to strengthen existing beliefs. Yeah - cool, well-constructed clothes are fun, but when people start using designer labels (and all that they imply) to prop up an ailing sense of self, then the fashion, advertising, and PR people are doing their jobs too well.

On to more interesting things... Far more desirable, and strangely enough almost more difficult to obtain, were tickets to the great Josephine Hart's poetry evening at the British Library. A few of these evenings have been broadcast on Radio 4 and I heard a repeat broadcast one sunny afternoon last May (of the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning) and have been trying to get tickets ever since. Hart is an Irish novelist, married to the other Saatchi (Maurice), and has brilliant connections in the acting world. The premise of her evenings is based on a simple idea: poetry is meant to be heard with the ear, not seen with the eye. She picks a different poet for each monthly reading and then selects a number of actors for their affinity to the selected poet's work. This month's poet was Philip Larkin and the readers were Charles Dance (best know as Mr Tulkinghorn in Bleak House) and Dominic West (apparently plays Jimmy McNulty in some show called the Wire). Hart is absolutely right about the necessity of hearing poetry and not reading it, and it is so much better to have actors performing the poems rather than the author's stilting and self-conscious reading. I've never been a huge Larkin fan and before the readings began I was secretly disappointed to have missed other, favoured poets, but the actors made the poems come alive in such an inspiring way, that you can't help but make immediate connections. I absolutely loved it and when I got home later that night I tried to book for March's reading (Wilde!!), but it was already sold out...

A little Larkin to leave you. I really liked this poem, read last night, called 'Dockery and Son':

'Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn't he?' said the Dean. 'His son's here now.'
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. 'And do
You keep in touch with-' Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
'Our version' of 'these incidents last night'?
I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In '43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much . . . How little . . . Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of . . . No, that's not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They're more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we've got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son's harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.