Armamentarium
Posted on | May 9, 2012 | No Comments
In the New York Times, Amanda Fortini refers to a reality series Extreme Couponing “which portrays outlandish superconsumers clearing shelves and maintaining armamentaria of processed foods in their homes”. The noun is perhaps used ironically, for, of later nineteeth-century origins, it denotes a surgeon’s equipment, and replaced the seventeenth-century noun of armamentary which emerged soon after armament while arms to mean weapons appeared three centuries earlier from French and Latin: the “ar”, which had occurred in various languages, means to join. Whether these superconsumers would be allowed to join up and wield arms is another matter.
Try This At Home
Posted on | April 30, 2012 | No Comments
While strolling the other day in Hove I met one resident who introduced me to a neighbour who, it turned out, works at Glyndebourne. At first our talk turned to the wind turbine recently installed up there, to some controversy. She pointed out that it had previously been the site of a mill, and confirmed the news from another friend’s son that it produces 115% electricity.
Somehow, our talk turned from that to lifting weights – in the general sense rather than any misplaced exertion in a gym. She said that, up at Glyndebourne, an expert had come along to tell them the knack of lifting heavy objects. This is partly a matter of holding one’s arms straight out and having somebody push them downwards (or simulate that force oneself); such an action means that the arms become more easy in their sockets, hence better placed to pick up the object for which one then bends the knees to retrieve and rise again.
Be that as it may, she continued by saying that she had been in a supermarket queue. Ahead there had been somebody struggling with a number of bags, and so she offered to demonstrate this way of lifting objects, for which the customer had been grateful. Now you might expect the queue to be vexed by such a display, dark mutterings and staring at watches. On the contrary: they all wanted to be shown how to do this. As for the check-out operator, she did not object but came from behind her desk to be shown how to do this. At which point, the security man on the other side of the store had seen apparent chaos on his screens – and sent somebody across to remedy the situation: lo and behold, this agent joined those eager for such guidance.
You simply never know what you might hear when strolling through Hove.
Tags: Glyndebourne > hove > weight lifting > wind turbine
On David Gascoyne
Posted on | April 20, 2012 | No Comments
With pressure on space and delay in its appearance, my piece on David Gascoyne in today’s Independent was shorter than envisaged. Here is the full version, including reference to the many others who popped up in his life. That said, the printed version appeared neat enough.
Night Thoughts:
The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne
Robert Fraser
OUP £30
Many know about the death by drowning of W. S. Gilbert; others are aware that in 1933 Hemingway, incensed by a review, trashed the Paris bookshop in which he read it; few, however, could point to the incidents’ one degree of separation. Such surprises regularly punctuate the soberly engrossing chronicle which Robert Fraser has created in and around the life of a poet whose modest fame has burned steadily, almost brightly, since his Thirties emergence as a teenage prodigy.
Born into a family where his father’s office life proved as fraught as his wife’s stage ambitions, Gascoyne would have learnt that, as a girl, she had been in the water when Gilbert swam out to save her friend, and met his own end. No sooner had Gascoyne’s peripatetic childhood brought him to Salisbury than this tall, elegant boy was in the Cathedral choir – and performed Elgar, in the composer’s presence and on an early disc. From the start he was such an omnivorous reader that prose and poetry came readily to him, and he published, at nineteen, an enduring study of the Surrealism which had inspired him in Paris (where he met Hemingway the day before the novelist’s mood soured). A co-organiser of the famous 1936 Surrealism exhibition in London, self-educated, bookshop-haunting Gascoyne moved, elegantly dressed, in literary and artistic circles with a certain charming diffidence born of precarious sexuality and finances – and persistent recourse to off-the-shelf benzedrine. One lover, he later, harrowingly, learned had died in Auschwitz. His own war was spent touring England in farces (Michael Redgrave a hopeless amatory quest) before many returns to France, where – as his poems turned from surrealist to apocalyptic – accumulated angst brought a first asylum sojourn and worsened as his mother ailed, and was not held at bay by his fine foray into painting. Convinced that he had to inform the Queen of worldwide conspiracy, he went to Buckingham Palace, where a guardsman halted him – and, police summoned, he was despatched to another asylum, where a smashed television landed him in a padded cell.
Intermittently stable, he moved to the Isle of Wight, only to be incarcerated again. One day came a visitor, Judy Lewis, who had recently ushered Bob Dylan around a Festival there. She read patients poetry as a salve for them, including one by Gascoyne, who stood up and announced that he was Gascoyne; which she politely answered, assuming this a tall’s man Napoleon complex. That muddle sorted out, they married, and he was to enjoy an Eighties renaissance after his journals’ publication – belying one entry: “the truth about my sex-life: I cannot stand up for ladies, and I have an innate sense of chivalry.”
The index entry for “Gascoyne, David” in Robert Fraser’s biography is a surreal poem in itself; the text is a marvellous evocation which sets such sensational summary – even an appearance in the Spanish Civil War – in an emotional and intellectual context, from hopeless fumblings with Antonia White and trainbound fling with William Holden’s unknown brother to his inspiration in Jouve’s work which led him to Holderlin’s or a private performance by Bartok contrasting with a glimpse of Stravinsky as “a little fencing-master spy”. There is illumination at every turn, bringing any reader similar delight to that found by Gascoyne on his bookshop trawls. Robin Skelton – who gave Gascoyne welcome prominence in his Sixties Penguin anthology of Poetry from the Thirties – had a wild alter ego Georges Zuk which fooled the British Library cataloguers into labelling him Algerian. An inspiration to Waugh, that fascinating figure – and support to Gascoyne – Meraud Guevara turns out to have been subject of a book by her daughter, published in Paris five years ago. Something to seek out sooner than attempting the recipes with which Gascoyne experimented, chaotically, in others’ kitchens. Read his short lyric “Snow in Europe” – “the warring flags hang colourless a while” – and you will be charmed into exploring a writer given due dignity by Robert Fraser.
Tags: antonia white > bob dylan > david gascoyne > elgar > ernest hemingway > georges zuk > judy lewis > Meraud Gueavara > robert fraser > snow in europe > w s gilbert
Donnybrook (n)
Posted on | April 15, 2012 | No Comments
In a recent piece about a natural-history programme Queen of the Savannah, Clive James observed that “when half a dozen new queens are born at once, one of them will poison all the others, usually with a quick stab through the cell wall but sometimes as the climax of the full bitch-slapping donnybrook”.
This has gained transatlantic currency since its emergence in the middle of the nineteenth century – around the time, in 1855, that a Fair, held in a village near Dublin, was closed down for having become the scene of one riot too many in the years since it had been granted a licence by King John in 1204. Two years after the Irish fair had been silenced, it was revived, albeit in Walsh, Ontario, where it continues, with an emphasis upon encouraging schoolchildren rather than rioting – unless, of course, you count that strange, automobile-smashing joust known as a demolition derby. Meanwhile, has any parent inadvertently named a child Donny Brooke?
Tags: bees > clive james > demolition derby > donnybrook > King John > Queen of the Savannah > Walsh Ontario
Son of a Gun n
Posted on | April 9, 2012 | No Comments
This phrase is memorably whispered by Carly Simon over the bass and drums which open “You’re So Vain”. Far from that chronicle of high-life shenanigans is a moment in The Wind when the cook is asked about the evening meal. She – or, rather, the intertitle – replies that it will be “son of a gun”. Asked to elaborate by a newcomer to that State, she alliterates, “liver, lights and lungs”.
As in Ms Simon’s aspersion, “son of a gun” is a well-known substitute for a terser phrase which in fact goes back to thirteenth-century England (and a variant appears in King Lear). As H. L. Mencken put it in The American Language (editions from 1919 to 1936), “swearing, of course, is not the prerogative of all men. Many lack the natural gift for it, and others are too timorous. For such toters of of inferiority complexes there is a repertory of what may be called denaturized profanity”.
Meanwhile, in parallel with that insult there grew this Texan term for a stew made from ingredients fresh from the bull. The cook could improvise with such rougher elements as heart and brain stirred into the onions.
As for Mencken, he appears not to have known about this culinary aspect (nor does the OED) but he continues by asserting that son of a bitch “seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or a Latin as ‘fudge’ does to us. There is simply no lift to it, no shock, no sis-boom-ah. The dumbest policeman in Palermo thinks of a dozen better ones between breakfast and the noon whistle. The term, indeed, is so flat, stale and unprofitable that, when uttered with a wink or a dig in the ribs, it is actually a kind of endearment, and has been applied with every evidence of respect by one United States Senator to another. Put the second person pronoun and the adjective ‘old’ in front of it, and scarcely enough bounce is left in it to shake up an archdeacon. Worse it is frequently toned down to ‘s.o.b.’, or transmogrified into the childish ‘son of a gun’. The latter is so lacking in punch that the Italians among us have borrowed it as a satirical name for an American: la sanemagogna is what they call him, and by it they indicate their contempt for his backwardness in the art that is one of their great glories.”
What expletive a cowboy would have brought to bear upon a plate of Italian food scarcely bears contemplation. The plate would surely have become a pistol target – a veritable Glen Baxter drawing.
Tags: Carly Simon > Glen Baxter > H L Mencken > sanemagogna > son of a bitch > son of a gun > The Wind > You're So Vain
From The Bran-Tub: Twenty-One – Marc Behm
Posted on | April 9, 2012 | No Comments
When Marc Behm died a few years ago, this was the only obituary that he received in England. I had been watching Help! and wondered what had become of hime, only to find that he had recently, quietly, died. A distinctive talent: seek him out.
Tags: Audrey Hepburn > Beethoven > Dick Lester > eleanor bron > Marc Behm > the beatles > The Eye of the Beholder
Chuck n
Posted on | April 9, 2012 | No Comments
Does anybody now read the Southern, even feminist novels of Dorothy Scarborough? These were popular in the Twenties, and best known is The Wind(1925), first published anonymously and soon made into a popular silent movie with a Lilian Gish unblemished by the eponymous weather which assails from all sides with all the ferocity that she finds in the male of the species. On the screen, it is almost an existentialist drama in which, from time to time, there come such quotidian touches as a call from the stoveside: “chuck’s ready!” We shall not dwell upon the food that reaches the table (and especially not the practical joke played there). As for “chuck” itself, this is now more American slang than English, although its origins were in early-nineteenth century England, perhaps first used aboard ship: the quality of such meals is indicated by a probable link with “chock” – a burning log, from Old French.
Wisenheimer n
Posted on | April 9, 2012 | No Comments
This word recently leapt at me from the pages of The New Yorker. The context made it clear that the term is one of derision, akin to smartass. It is not, though, a term that I have ever used, handy though it would have been upon many an occasion. Equally, the synonym of wiseacre appears to have faded away. As for wisenheimer, this was an early-twentieth century coining, in America, part of a vogue for adding -heimer to many an adjective. Most of these soon faded but, evidently, wisenheimer has survived a century while wise itself goes back a millennium, into the mists of an Old English from Germanic forms which, in turn, reveal a connection with wit (defined by Johnson as “imagination; quickness of fancy”).
An Inadvertent Tomb
Posted on | April 8, 2012 | No Comments
Towards Portslade, but still in Hove – as some residents insist – there is a pub which has gone through various permutations in recent years. For some while it was the Golden Cross, and said to be grungey, before mutating into the Jamaica Inn, whose Sunday lunchtime roast-and-reggae sessions were popular but found it difficult to survive the rest of the week.
It has now been taken over, but as an independent establishment, and renamed Noble House.
This is in tribute to a Hurricane pilot, twenty-year-old sergeant Dennis Noble, who, after taking off from Tangmere in West Sussex, was shot down in the very first minutes of 31st August 1940. In the pub there is a photograph of him, and some details but this does not make clear that the plane crashed into what is now the driveway of 59 Woodhouse Road.
In the summer of 1940 it had been assumed, such was the force and speed of the crash, that the pilot’s body would have disintegrated, lost beneath the earth from which the emergency forces cleared as much as they could. As Judy Middleton notes in her splendid, multi-part , double-columned, 1500-page Encycloaedia of Hove and Portslade, the pilot’s coffin was weighted by the authorities so that his relations would assume that they were burying all of his body.
Come 1996, however, an aviation enthusiast, Keith Arnold – based at Tangmere – was given permission to excavate the driveway in a search for any parts of that Hurricane. Such permission had been granted because the authorities were certain that nothing would be found. Within hours, however, some metal surfaced, including live bullets, and, later, to considerable horror, the pilot’s body, which had evidently been shot dead in the sky before he could even think to bale out. This discovery brought a coroner’s inquest, and Denis Noble’s full burial in Nottinghamshire.
Judy Middleton’s great work is full of such stories – Unexpected Hove – and recently I discussed it with her on a bus and, since then, with some at the Council: an idea grows to make it available once again.
Meanwhile, at Tangmere’s Aviation Museum, the fragments of Noble’s Hurricane have been assembled upon a frame, along with his parachute-harness, parachute, fragments of his uniform, and log-book.
Tags: Dennis Noble > Encycloaedia of Hove and Portslade > hove > Judy Middleton > Noble house
Virginia Woolf Returns to Hove
Posted on | March 23, 2012 | 2 Comments
And so, this week, once again to Hove Town Hall, a building which Virginia Woolf would have seen in its previous, splendid incarnation. Alas it burned down in 1966 and has since been rebuilt in, shall we say, a somewhat different style.
That fire – yet another suspicious one – was seven decades after she had visited the town each Easter with her father and siblings to stay with a friend who owned a tall, terraced house at 9, St Aubyn’s. This building – now converted into flats with an unfortunate front door – stands on the corner of the coast road and, in 1897, had looked across the empty ground upon which was later built the ever-controversial King Alfred sports centre.
Even before I became a Green Councillor for this part of Hove, I had been inside 9 St Aubyn’s and – call me romantic if you will – it is a leap across time to climb that splendid, original staircase, whose handrail she would have gripped some 115 years ago.
Not, it has to be said, that she was much sold on Hove.
Had she but known it, there was an equally disgruntled spirit in the town, on The Drive: Ivy Compton Burnett, whose experience there of family life was to inspire many decades’ brilliantly idiosyncratic novels (one of which was, alas, turned down by the Woolfs’ publishing firm).
This is to digress before I have even started.
I had gone along to Hove Town Hall for a meeting of the Full Council. I shall not trouble enthusiasts for Mrs Woolf with details about the earlier part of this gathering, although I feel that she would have had greater sport with it than many a tweeter (after all, she attended Labour conferences with her husband and was not an entirely charitable chronicler of the Webbs’ visits to her house).
Which is to digress again.
Hove Town Hall. In the later part of the meeting there was a Notice of Motion, proposed by Green Councillor Ian Davey – Transport honcho – which urged members of all political parties to support a bid to make this somewhere fit for cycling. This was something partly inspired by The Times’s current campaign inspired by the terrible accident which befell one of its journalists, Mary Bowers.
Ian introduced this Motion, and it was seconded by another Green Councillor Matt Follett.
Meanwhile, I had signalled to the Mayor that I wished to speak on the subject. To my surprise, I found that I was next up, after ever-rebarbative Tory Councillor Tony Janio had said something or other about his being willing for once to look on the bright side of life and support this, but in such a way that caveats loomed.
Anyway, the day before – while cycling along the front – an idea had come to me to contribute to whatever debate this motion yielded.
I had got something together and, as I arrived at the meeting and sat down, I showed, whispered my pencilled draft to Councillor Mike Jones, on my left, and said to him, do you think this stuff is all right, and he had said, great: go for it.
Anyway, I duly stood up, pressed the microphone button: remembering Councillor Janio’s interruption of my previous speech, I began by saying that transcripts of this one would be available for anybody who needed it (I had thought of offering limited-edition, signed, well-bound copies at a premium, but that would have hobbled the pace).
Instead, I continued by remarking that I was glad to hear that, for once, Cllr Janio would not “look on the blight side of life”’.
(I heard afterwards that Labour leader Gill Mitchell had burst out laughing at this punning gag.)
This Cycling debate was intended to bring cross-party support. That said, I said, I felt that as there are no longer any LibDems on the Council here, I could safely point out that, last spring, in Central Hove, Virginia Woolf had attracted much more interest than the LibDems had done: they came last; by contrast, time and again, I had attracted great interest, on Green street stalls and elsewhere, by drawing attention to a framed, manuscript entry from her diary which describes a Hove visit in 1897.
And so, at this week’s Full Council, I did so again.
I prefaced this by saying that, in that diary entry, Virginia had complained about the weather that spring, when rain and wind had lashed 9, St Aubyn’s, all of which made Hove “a most disgraceful place – nothing else seems to happen…”. I then pointed out here and now that, despite those muddy, pre-tarmac roads, bicycling had alleviated her chagrin that spring. What’s more, another day, she and the others had set off from St Aubyn’s “at eleven and rode through Brighton to the Lewes road – There was one long hill, and a bad piece of muddy ground to begin with, but when we had scaled the hill, which we did comfortably on our feet, behold a beautiful smooth descent of two miles and a ½ lay before us! Georgie, Thoby & Adrian flew down this with their feet up, but Nessa & I were more prudent – it was most exciting and splendid. If I was a poet […}, I should write something upon this way of travelling.”
I could have quoted more, but left it there, summarising the rest of that day’s journey, to Uckfield and back, and pointed out, that, a few days later, they cycled eighteen miles from Hove to Arundel and its “hideously rebuilt” Castle; and I said, as I glanced at Bill Randall, that if in those muddy but safer days the teenage Virginia Woolf could cycle such distances, in such a spirit, then we should endeavour to enable people to do likewise now. Or something like that.
And then I sat down, astonished by the applause around me, felt my heart beating quickly against my chest. That is no reflection upon what I had said, but testament to the way in which Virginia Woolf’s teenage words resonated (she had a lifelong belief in trying out words aloud). Back in Hove, 115 years on, she had indeed proved to be a poet with that diary entry.
And I was chuffed, touched, by Labour leader, Gill Mitchell’s then saying that she “doubted whether I could follow that”, but she did go on to say something estimable about cycling’s benefits.
A bit later on, Tory Councillor Janio was back on his feet, and – after some reference to whatever I had said about Virginia Woolf’s pan-Sussex combination of bike/train journeying – he snarled that I was living in a “fantasy world”. Strange that, I thought to myself: after all, the Tories set some store by the past-in-present, and Mike whispered to me, as I clutched his hand: don’t worry about that, you’ve gone over the Tories’ heads but residents appreciate what you say, which was a sentiment echoed in a note from Councillor Ania Kitcat.
And, as I said in talk afterwards with others – including one of Labour’s Virginia Woolf enthusiasts – I think that Virginia, and Leonard, would have delighted in such posthumous riling of the Tories.
Which had not been my intention: I had simply wanted to make cycling tangible, cite an example of pedallings’ joy, which that paragraph, in a small manuscript volume, does so well. That entry, on my hallway wall, is a continual talking point when residents – after tying up their bicycles outside – arrive to discuss life in Hove nowadays.
Meanwhile, it’s a further leap across time to think of another Sussex resident, Lord Hutchinson, Defence QC in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial. In his turn, as a teenager, in the Thirties, Jeremy had known Virginia Woolf well. As he told me, her advice was always to stick with it, go out on a limb.
Tags: Arundel > Brighton & Hove City Council > cycling > Gill Mitchell > hove > Hove Town Hall > Ian Davey > Ivy Compton Burnett > Jeremy Hutchinson > Mary Bowers > mike jones > The Times > tony janio > Virginia Woolf
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