January 14th - January 20th 2002
Sunday Hair, again
Saturday Later, life
Friday Odd ones out
Thursday Here or there
Wednesday Rattlebone
Tuesday Rehab
Monday Gua...
Sunday 20th January 2002
As part of my new post-pony-tail hair regime, I conscientiously steer clear of anything remotely resembling salon-chic: I have my hair shortened at irregular intervals in a vaguely ethnic barbershop due south of Spitalfields Market at ten quid a pop.
And God forbid I should have to make an appointment - I just wander past and look through the window to see if the bloke that usually cuts my hair is in, and free.
The last couple of times I've wandered by ("with your hair!") I couldn't spot my usual little man. He seemed to have left. Gulp.
So I've had to nerve myself to start up a whole new set of intimate personal relations with his replacement, who is, it must be said, an extremely attractive, tall, slim, young, dark-haired guy of uncertain ethnic extraction: Greek? Indian? Turkish?
Sally (well that's what they call him - Salif? Selim?) turns out to be not only attractive, but highly chatty to boot. Until the conversation moves onto my sideburns:
"How long do you want them?" says Sally.
"Oh, short, short, short," I reply. "They're so grey these days you can hardly see them anyway."
"Well, you know what they say," says Sally.
"No," I answer, "What do they say?"
"They say the ladies like a bit of maturity in a man. So if you want be a hit with the ladies, you should keep your sideburns long."
Pause.
"Yes. Well. That's not exactly a high priority for me."
"Are you married?" says Sally.
"No."
After which... it all went rather quiet. Ah well.
Saturday 19th January 2002
After our ritual exchange of complaint about how difficult it is to find anything to blog about these days, one of the things David and I spoke of at the Retro Bar last night was troubled_diva's extended series of recollections, 40 in 40 Days, which we've both been enjoying.
Later, David started some extended riff about what each of us bloggers have in common, and what separates us, pointing out something which I already know all too well, thank you: that I'm considerably older than almost every other blogger out there.
Taking that as a preamble to a suggestion that I should write more about life from, ahem, the mature perspective (as opposed to, say, lengthy expositions of articles from the London Review of Books) I wittily and defensively cut him off at the pass with my best imitation of the blog entries I write to myself as I stumble home blind drunk at the end of an unsuccessful evening: "Shnot bloody easy, y'know, being old and ugly, 'n' all yew young kids... etc."
We agreed: ok, maybe not.
I don't know if troubled_diva knows much about Ian Hamilton. Not much more than me, I'd guess - I know Hamilton was a poet, and an inveterate progenitor of small literary magazines, and that he once set out to write a biography of the famously reclusive JD Salinger which, when Salinger threatened to sue him, he successfully turned into a sort of biographical detective story.
The current issue of the London Review of Books, which Hamilton helped to start and for which he wrote the occasional piece, carries the first half of a long interview of Hamilton by Dan Jacobson which, with the previous night's conversation still echoing in my head, I settled down to read.
One of Jacobson's questions struck me with particular force:
"There's a famous bit in one of Henry James's essays where he says that the trouble with periodical publication is that it's like a train that has to leave the station every hour, according to the timetable, and if there are no genuine passengers then you have to put in dummies, so that the train will look full."
Although Jacobson and Hamilton are discussing (of all things) The South Bank Show at this point, it seemed to me to be even more relevant to the problems of finding something to blog about, especially at this dead time of the year. So I tracked down the quote.
Like most of Henry James, and all of the Victorian rail network, the original quote makes a lot of noise and takes a long time to go nowhere very much, but the description of a passenger-dummy bears repetition:
"It looks sufficiently like a passenger, and you know that it is not one only when you perceive that it neither says anything nor gets out. The guard attends to it when the train is shunted, blows the cinders from its wooden face, and gives a different crook to its elbow, so that it may serve for another run."
Bloggers, take note.
I enjoyed much of the rest of the Hamilton interview, too.
The bit where he says that, as a child, he had to move to Darlington and "get used to these rough Northern boys who masturbated all the time." The bit where he admits the main reason he kept starting new magazines was to reassure his printers that they stood some chance of getting paid for printing the old ones. The bit where he confides the titles of the two plays he wrote as an adolescent: 'Like a Leper' and, even better, 'Pity Me Not'.
But most of all I enjoyed Hamilton talking, in his rather dour way, about poets and poetry, and his own poetry in particular: "They are poems about loss, about transience, disappointed hopes... the wish to alter something that cannot be altered."
His earlier poems are often concise to the point of opacity, full to the brim with emotion - yet with the source of that emotion always left unvoiced. He felt, he says, that there's a "difference between giving voice to moments of intensity which have a sort of general interest or application, and airing in public things which are essentially confidences. I wanted to create the illusion of privacy, of an overheard thing. The question of printing it or pushing it as a finished artefact.. I've always been nervous about that."
In his later poems, Hamilton turns from addressing other people and talks, increasingly, to himself:
These poems "have a different atmosphere and are more other-worldly, in a curious way. As one has perhaps become. They are poems of later life. I could not have written them earlier.
"Life isn't the way we thought it was going to be, and also it has changed in ways we don't and can't fully understand. It's as if we're living in a world that's not meant for us; it's meant for the next lot; yet we are still here.
"I think there was a certainty of personal survival in the earlier poems, and so you worried about somebody else's precariousness or extinction. But as life goes on you get to the point where you know just how precarious you are too.
"You cannot be, you cannot represent yourself to yourself, as a source of strength; you're more in touch with your own weakness, your own vulnerability, your own... well, precariousness is the feeling those poems seem to turn on.
"And the feeling that it's all coming to an end. What next? It's as if you are experiencing the future in advance. There's a feeling of disaster in the air, which I now know I have felt for a long time...
Steps
by Ian Hamilton
Where do we find ourselves? What is this tale
With no beginning and no end?
We know not the extremes. Perhaps
There are none.
We are on a kind of stair. The world below
Will never be regained; was never there
Perhaps. And yet is seems
We've climbed to where we are
With diligence, as if told long ago
How high the highest rung.
Alas: this lethargy at noon,
This interfered-with air.
"Shnot bloody easy, y'know, being old and ugly, 'n' all yew young kids... etc."
Ian Hamilton was 63 when he died - a dozen years older than I.
Troubled_diva will shortly be 40. It's not too late to catch up with his train of thought: 40 short pieces about his life to date - and not a dummy amongst them.
Friday 18th January 2002
Six gay bloggers went to a very nice party.
One lives east, two live south, and three north.
Four of them have boyfriends.
One of them had a haircut.
All of them got drunk.
And three of them shared a cab home.
Thursday 17th January 2002
Nice to see no less a luminary than Tom Ford supporting my prediction about Afghan street chic by nominating Hamid Karzai as "the most chic man in the world".
- Disgruntled commuters set fire to station.
- Conservative leader marries his boyfriend.
- Government drafts 10,000 soldiers to canvass votes.
It couldn't happen here. Could it?
Wednesday 16th January 2002
Keen Eastenders fans that you are, you already know that Mrs Queen hit the headlines with her second-ever visit to a pub last year.
You may, however, have missed her son's campaign, a month or so later, intended to reinstate the village inn as the centre of village life.
Until recently this campaign ('The Pub is the Hub') occupied pride of place on Charles' web-site; now, you will look for it in vain.
The report is still there though, complete with a quote: "Pubs have a huge potential to act as one-stop shops. Now, perhaps more than ever in their history, they must draw on their resourcefulness and resilience, built up over centuries, to meet changing circumstances and find new ways to help themselves."
No reference to The Rattlebone Inn intended. Presumably.
Tuesday 15th January 2002
So Solid Crew to Adam Ant: Try harder.
Adam Ant, from the back of a locked ambulance: How's this?
The only time this year I've felt smug about being older than David: Swish Cottage is 1 year old. Literally.
Once I stopped giggling over the idea of Harry Pot-head facing random drug-tests at Eton, I remembered a conversation I had with a relatively senior member of the aristocracy six months or so ago.
After we'd noticed that His Lordship was no longer drinking nor smoking ("Haven't touched a drop since last I saw you, old bean. Can't deny there are times when I get nostalgic for a fat five-skinner though, what?"), I politely enquired about his kids, last seen in the nursery.
"Well, of course, they're grown up now," he replied. "Let's see. George is in rehab in Arizona. Sophie comes out of her halfway house next week. And Mark.. well, no-one's quite sure what Mark's up to these days."
Some interesting figures from the Mixmag survey of the clubbers' lifestyles, with one in ten respondents believing that ecstasy has made their life worse overall, and one in four showing symptoms of mental disorder. Closer to home, though:
More than a third of male respondents said that they spent more than four nights a week in the pub.
One in three had unplanned sex after taking ecstasy
And 6.7 per cent of drug-users had taken ecstasy anally, compared with 3.4 per cent last year.
No indication of whether these figures hold true for the patrons of the Rattlebone Inn, despite reports elsewhere that at least one of them has a tendency to tear his clothes off and run around naked after a pint or two...
"My mother always said 'Chew before you swallow.' Always listen to your mother."
Sound enough advice - though, personally, the last person I would want to think about when chewing, let alone when swallowing, is Barbara Bush.
Monday 14th January 2002
Naval base leased by Cuba in perpetuity to the United States, currently holding 50 Al-Quaeda and Taliban 'unlawful combatants': Guantanamo.
Traditional Cuban song popularised by Pete Seeger, based on a poem by Jose Marti, a tireless fighter against colonial rule in Cuba: Guantanamera.
Mexico's 'pearl of the west', home town of Guillermo del Toro, director of very stylish vampire movie Cronos (C4 0115 tonight): Guadalajara.
......previous entries