travels in the unholy land

for this please check Maggie's blog which is http://magssjournal.blogspot.com

walking, Walken and watching

Another belated update, this time because M and I have been regularly walking around the city's "Green Circle" (15 miles worth of wonderful countryside surrounding us, via bridle-paths and footpaths and fields). This very pleasant activity has kept us happy and fit in all weathers, before we take off soon to join a small group of walkers in the West Bank. From where, eventually, we shall both blog on. Should be an interesting trip in any case.

Meanwhile 2 recommended films, both by Brit directors, excellent oddities I've recently picked up for a couple of quid apiece in local charity shops. Donald Cammell's Wild Side, starring our old favourite, the wonderfully weird Christopher Walken, well over the top as always, and especially so in this lurid little psychosexual thriller. And one from 1971, Red Sun, directed by Terence Young, a generally undistinguished action specialist (e.g. he orchestrated all the early James Bond flicks). Red Sun has the utterly superb Toshiro Mifune in vivid Eastmancolor and quite resplendent in full samurai kit. Swordsman Tosh easily steals the show from a strange international cast heavily reliant on both beef- and cheesecake – Bronson, Andress and Delon. They're all Out West, by the way, circa 1860, and this violent East-Western oater (plus railways, Mexicans and Comanches added to the mix) is nevertheless something of a neglected gem. Both these films are, you could say, colourful escapism , but thoroughly good, decadent fun for any true cinephile. Entertaining nonsense and none the worse for that.

festivities, flu, Ambit and Angela

Long lapse in the journal, or 'dear diary', aspect of this blog. Perhaps not so surprising, for after the successful book launch of Haiku At Seventy last December, as noted, came the snow and ice: minus 15 degrees just across the River Exe. Then 2 weeks of flu over xmas and my birthday, so the celebrations were necessarily scaled down. Lethargy ensued, along with the depleted energy of septuagenarianism etc.

Visitors from France, providing excellent and convivial cheer, arrived early on in the New Year, staying 10 days, a time which also proved most enjoyably inimical to writing anything here, except for a couple of miserabilist poems… We were given 2 extraordinary films, Claude Miller's Mortelle Randonnée (Deadly Run), a terrific thriller from 1982, with Michel Serrault and the wonderful Isabelle Adjani, about whom I've already raved. This sumptuously photographed and surprising movie (from Marc Behm's rather original American pulp noir) was quite a contrast with Vitaly Kanevski's gritty monochrome Russian epic, Bouge Pas, Meurs et Ressuscite! (Dont Move, Die and Rise Again!) (1989) which chronicles a nightmarishly wretched childhood in Siberian wastes. Marvellous children's performances: how do directors manage to get these non-professionals to act, or rather, exist, this way – so movingly and convincingly on the screen? The grimness though was riveting and quite relentlessly conveyed. Nothing like horrors of one kind and another to cheer one up, I always say! Read Gissing, for example; you'll feel so much better about your own health, finances, relationships and prospects etc: "there but for the grace of Fate" [certainly not god!] go we.)

Revitalised by these and other wintry experiences, I was glad of a brief London trip to see old friends Paul & Val and read at the launch of Ambit magazine's splendid issue no. 203. Apart from my own poems (of course!) there are excellent graphics and prose, and no less than 12 pages devoted to the unique American poet Fred Voss. Voss is absolutely one of a kind, and how many machinists in steel foundries are there who write anything at all, let alone such funny, moving and utterly distinctive work?

Finally, a superb concert a few nights ago, given by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in Exeter Cathedral, with the great Angela Hewitt playing Mendelssohn and Schumann. A nice note on which to close.

new haiku book

Haiku At Seventy my new collection from Anarchios Press (see website) was launched successfully at the gallery and bar of the beautifully refurbished Exeter Picturehouse on December 8th. This proved to be a very enjoyable occasion. Despite quite a few people unable to get there (snow and ice around Dartmoor area in particular), over fifty did turn up, bought books and said how much they'd enjoyed the reading. (Their reactions were especially welcome, as I'd felt I had a hard job to equal, if not top, the reading at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea, on fireworks night, as mentioned in earlier blog.) Friendship and euphoria alike are all too often fleeting: who said that? It has an alliterative ring about it, but I think it's actually a fugitive line of mine from some unwritten poem… Anyway, I'm blessed with some lovely friends, two of whom were staying over with us, and so being a septuagenarian doesn't worry me unduly: I want us all to live as long and happily as possible, compos mentis and in decent health. Keep well all of you, and remember it's books not blogs and poems not politicians, that will survive.

Catching up, new book, film fun, etc

Lapsed grievously (no it's not RC guilt!), in not having written up the blog for exactly 2 months. But much has happened during that time, of course: inspiring – rescued Chilean miners; sad but inevitable – deaths of Tony Curtis and Joan Sutherland; gruesome and/or surreal – the Pope's visit to UK; and the usual depressing jawjaw deadlock between Israel and the Palestinians, as mediated/invigilated by an increasingly powerless Obama administration, biassed as always in favour of the occupiers… But enough of World-stuff and Large Issues.

We've been to visit friends in St Ives, Paris and Wales during this time, and have also produced a new book Haiku At Seventy, which will be launched at Exeter Picture House on 8th December: if anyone out there happens to be local – you're very welcome to come along! (The newly refurbished Picture House, with its fine bar/café/gallery is indeed impressive.) I'm very much in the mood to read again after some recent gigs, especially the latest, at the Dylan Thomas Literature Festival on Guy Fawkes Night. A full house and lovely, lively audience, with fireworks over Swansea docks as a spectacular backdrop!

This is a necessarily brief post, but I'll end with another weird and wonderful recommendation, the newly released dvd of Andrzej Zulawski's extraordinary 1981 film Possession. This manages to combine psychodrama, horror, politics and is filmed stunningly in Berlin's Turkish area, Kreuzberg, in sight of the dreadful Wall. It has one of the most ferocious and bravely committed performances by a film actress that I've ever seen: Isabelle Adjani giving her all! The performances, script and photography are all, shall we say, striking, while the emotional and physical mayhem, after 30 years, remain gorily convincing, the special effects still awesome. Adjani got a deserved Best Actress award at Cannes, but the film was regrettably butchered (by half its length!) in the USA, and greeted with general incomprehension and supercilious moral outrage elsewhere. But Zulawski, a longtime Polish exile in Paris, is a considerable and very intelligent filmmaker, as anyone who checks out the fascinating extras and interviews on the dvd will soon learn. I've already previously praised Z's earlier film The Third Part Of The Night, but it now seems that this new, full-length version of Possession (not to be confused with a later novel of that title by boring Dame Byatt) will reach a wider audience and transcend its earlier reputation as a lost, cultish film maudit. Fair enough: it's a dark classic of sorts, a flawed gem, but a gem nonetheless.

Purveyors of tripe, literary and other

Just been reading an unspeakably dreadful book I found in our library. (Why did they order it and why did I bother? Not sure, but if I manage to put a few people off this abomination, I shall have performed a literary-critical service, that's for sure!) Between The Sheets, by one Lesley McDowell, is subtitled The Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th Century Women Writers. And yes, you guessed it, I was curious to check out the chapter [fourth out of nine] on Jean Rhys.

But in all fairness, I did read the book through with growing exasperation and speed (for one can't, at my age, afford to waste too much precious time on clumsy and shambolic drivel). Here then is a brief taste of this fanciful, ill-written, appallingly proofed, shoddily 'edited' and wildly misbegotten tome. Katherine Mansfield, "possibly the greatest short story writer in the English language rivals masters of the art like Chekhov". H.D. produced "some of the most brilliant poetry of the twentieth century". Elizabeth Smart was "author of one of the greatest works on love ever written." Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn "were a literary Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the Posh and Becks of American letters". Phooey, piffle and codswallop, of course, and therefore hilarious passim. Who is she, this sublimely insouciant humourist, perhaps one of the funniest of the 21st century?

Ms McDowell, we learn from the jacket, is a young literary journalist who writes for the TLS and the Independent on Sunday; she's gleaned "a Scottish Arts Council award for her second novel" and "earned a Ph.D. for her work on James Joyce". Wow, all very impressive. Yet I do hope her clunky, turgid style eventually improves, and hope too that, however assiduous her future researches may be, her accuracy and fact-checking prove less slipshod. It's pretty clear that Ms McD. never met or knew the people about whom she blithely pontificates and fantasises, but that of course needn't necessarily be a stumbling-block to the litcrit faculty. The trouble is, all this pretentious pseudo-feminist tosh is relentlessly recycled, fifth and sixth-hand stuff, as the citations and bibliography make clear: the devil is very much in the detail here. And boy, does the girl get those details wrong! One example (I can't bear to trawl through this 365pp. weighty tome looking for more, but just take my word for it): Dr McDowell imagines that Sleep It Off, Lady is a Jean Rhys novel.

Well I did happen to know four or five of the excellent writers selected for her tendentious generalisations, and so found both style and content doubly depressing. Libelling and labelling the dead is a cheery post mortem pastime, it seems, and perhaps now even a profitable one. As for this sort of slack, unappetising, fashionably speculative piece of trash, it's neither useful literary dissection nor detection. I'm really rather relieved that my own two books about Jean Rhys are apparently unknown to McDowell. She does, though, draw upon the equally fanciful, if marginally better written, recent 'portrait' of Jean by Lilian Pizzichini, whose The Blue Hour (2008) seems to derive its title and some other biographical angles via pp. 233-4 of my first book about Jean, Jean Rhys revisited (2000). Pizzichini was inevitably lauded for her gushing middle-of-the-road fabrications by the dreadful Sunday Times panjandrum and hackademic, Professor John Carey (for whom, see also pp. 149-151 of JRr). But she did deign to mention my memoir of Jean, even though the publication was listed incorrectly… As to the whole issue of spurious criticism and tired, sensation-seeking books about 'fascinating personalities' who reportedly behave in a larger than life, bold or 'bohemian' manner, we've surely had enough of them: save the trees, for heavens' sake!

Polish And Hungarian Movies

We caught up with a couple more Second Run dvds of Central European movies, both Cannes Special Jury prizewinners: the Polish Mother Joan Of The Angels (d. Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1961) and the Hungarian Diary For My Children (d. Márta Mészáros, 1984). What else do these have in common, apart from their powerful originality, terrific B&W photography and excellent acting? Well, they're both about ideology and dogma : religious superstition and sexual repression in the former film, political corruption and state control in the latter. Of course both directors therefore incurred suspicion and criticism within their respective countries, losing work and opportunities as a result. Both were married to actors and directors, after training at film schools; progressing from editing and writing scripts to direction, they became highly professional and original filmmakers.

Based loosely on the French 1634 Loudun 'possession' case, MJOTA is appropriately intense and claustrophobic and far more worthwhile than the often risible Ken Russell flick from the 1970s. Kawalerowicz died in his eighties, a few years ago, and is now largely forgotten, his other films currently out of circulation. Mészáros's Diary is highly autobiographical, and has been called "an unusually graphic picture of Hungarian political, cultural and social life in the late 1940s". Both films, dealing as they do with eras 300 years apart, offer grim yet convincing, almost coldly-observed perspectives on gullibility and fanaticism. Not feelgood entertainment by any means, but still very relevant and provocative today. (Think Papal visits, holy hypocrisy, personality cults, self-serving memoirs by corrupt politicians, etc!)