Author: Harry

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The New Sincerity

Anyone reading this who’s not up to speed on the poetry movement called the New Sincerity should start by digging around in the archives here and here.

I’ve cheerfully read the manifestos without reading any of the poems. I daresay I could find some poems by the central New Sincerists if I just dug around the web for a bit, but it would seem a pity to dilute the purity of the manifesto-reading experience. From these manifestos (manifesti?) I have learnt that the New Sincerists write poems which are sincere. I don’t think I’ve ever written a poem which was intended to be insincere; so perhaps I have been a New Sincerist (or at least a Sincerist) all along, without even knowing it.

But I wonder if a lack of insincerity is enough. The word ‘sincerity’ leads me to expect poems which are earnest, heartfelt, and, if not confessional, at least personal. I don’t think I’ve written a poem in the last few years which was about me in any important way. Most of them are things like this. Does it even mean anything to say that this poem is or isn’t sincere?

Bamiyan

The saints and rood screen
have been broken up and burnt,
the murals covered with limewash.
Only the stained-glass windows glow,
and the face of the transfigured Christ
has been scratched out
that the light might shine through clearer.

I guess I’m just trying to pin down what ‘sincerity’ means in poetry. The Romantics generally seem pretty sincere, except perhaps Byron. I’m pretty sure Milton was sincere; was Donne? Herrick? Are Shakespeare’s sonnets sincere? Is there any way of telling? Does it matter? What about Pope? Is The Dunciad more or less sincere than An Essay on Man?

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Culture

The greatest painting in Britain shortlist

Only one of the six paintings I picked (the Hockney) got onto the final shortlist of ten. That shortlist in full:

The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck

The Hay Wain by John Constable

A Rake’s Progress III: The Orgy (1733-4) by William Hogarth

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her Last Berth to be broken up, 1838 by Turner

The Baptism of Christ by Piero Della Francesca

The Bar at the Folies Bergere by Manet

Sunflowers by Vincent Van Gogh

The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown

The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch by Sir Henry Raeburn

Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy by David Hockney

A lot of British paintings, not surprisingly. The only one that seems wildly out of its depth is the Madox Brown, which looks like a very ordinary piece of Victorian narrative painting to me. The van Eyck and the Turner are both paintings I considered picking – you certainly have to have something by Turner, the only question being which one. The Hay Wain is certainly a much better painting than its status as a piece of kitsch Englishiana would suggest, but I’ve never really connected to Constable, somehow. Sunflowers isn’t even the best painting by Van Gogh in the National Gallery. I’m not wild about the Manet – I said something earlier about the Impressionists not being at their best painting people; that may have been a bit sweeping, but I think this is a case in point. It’s attractive enough, but lacks the transcendant quality of the best Impressionist landscapes. The Hogarth is lively and entertaining, but those aren’t qualities I rate particularly highly in painting.

A couple of other observations. There are no paintings from between the C15th and C19th, which means no Vermeer, Velasquez, Rubens, Caravaggio, Titian, or Rembrandt for a start. And the only C20th painting is the Hockney, which means nothing abstract and nothing foreign. Britain isn’t especially rich in modern art – Tate Modern’s collection is distinctly patchy – but there are paintings by, for example, Picasso, Miro, Mondrian, Modigliani, Rothko, and Pollock. I suppose in a lot of cases there’s a sense that the very finest paintings by an artist are elsewhere; the Botticellis in the National are OK, but nothing to the ones in Florence, and similarly with Vermeer, Velasquez, Picasso, and Matisse. I would have thought the Rembrandts in the National might make the cut, though.

EDIT: Hogarth is C18th, of course. A better way of putting it might be: all the non-British paintings are either Renaissance or Impressionist.

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Search engine robots

In the seven days this domain has been in existence, it has been visited by the robots/spiders of search engines 745 times – mainly Google and Inktomi (which I think may be Yahoo). I find that extraordinary. But then Google is pretty damn miraculous anyway. Paul Simon was right – these are the days of miracle and wonder.

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Me Other

Radio Cymru

Languagehat led me to discover Morfablog. I have no idea what any of it is about, but several of the pictures on the front page feature waterproof clothing, which chimes with my experience of Wales.

It reminded me of being at university in Bristol and listening to Radio Cymru. Since Welsh takes quite a lot of words directly from English, it was a bit like the Gary Larson cartoon:

The first panel is titled 'What we say to dogs.' A man is scolding his dog. The man's word-balloon says this: 'Okay, Ginger! I've had it! You stay out of the garbage! Understand, Ginger? Stay out of the garbage, or else!?' The second panel is titled 'What they hear.' The drawing is exactly like the first panel, but this time the man's word-balloon says 'Blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah blah.'

except it would be things like “blah blah blah blah blah Phil Collins blah blah blah blah supermodel blah blah cannabis blah blah blah blah blah blah television…”

And because of the limited Welsh-language music available, one moment they’d be playing Welsh folk tunes, and the next a Welsh-language cover of Wet Wet Wet. I haven’t been to Wales for ages, actually. I’ve always wanted to go to the Pembrokeshire coast and see choughs.

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Slavery monument

There was a documentary on TV last night (which I forgot to watch) in which Dr Robert Beckford argued the case for the government to pay reparations for slavery. What I’ve gathered from the web is: he consulted “an economic historian, a compensation lawyer and an expert on loss of earnings” and came up with a figure of £7.5 trillion. The total GDP of the UK is only about £1 trillion, as a comparison, so it seems like a very big figure to me, even allowing for the scale of the slave trade. Anyway, whether or not that figure is sound, Beckford apparently didn’t seriously suggest it was a possibility. And, btw, he visualised reparations being in the form of debt relief to African and Caribbean countries and educational support (scholarships?) for the Afro-Caribbean community in the UK, rather to individuals. He also suggested building a memorial.

I’m all for debt relief, and indeed educational opportunity, but I’m unsure about linking it explicitly to the slave trade.There has to be some kind of statute of limitations on these things, and whatever it should be, I think 172 years is long enough. That is, after all, about seven generations since the UK outlawed slavery.

But I do think we should have a slavery memorial somewhere. Bristol or Liverpool perhaps. Not just a plaque – a bloody great thing like a war memorial, or the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Something institutional, which would make it absolutely clear that those who put it up (i.e. the UK government) recognised the scale of the tragedy represented by slavery and unreservedly recognised the British involvement in it. William Wilberforce has a statue in Westminster Abbey, as he should do, but something specifically remembering slaves seems appropriate.

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Me

Talking out of one’s arse – an apologia

Mr Duemer (Joseph?) has, as I mentioned in the comment box down the page somewhere, just torn a strip off me for talking out of my arse. Probably fairly, in that case.

I’ve always been one to offer strong opinions from a position of ignorance. But, at the risk of turning a character flaw into a philosophy of life, I’m not sure it’s such a bad thing. That’s because I see of it as symptomatic of thinking for myself. Sometimes it means spending hours thinking about something and then reaching an opinion which everyone else thinks is bloody obvious anyway. Sometimes it means saying something which you look back on later and feel like an eejit. But at least it’s an attempt to reach your own opinion rather than just accept what you’re told.

There are some caveats, though. You need to be aware of the ignorance, so you are aware of the possibility (likelihood?) that you’re talking crap. You need to be willing to change your opinion in the face of a new fact, or a better argument. And you have to try and take it in good spirit when someone points out the crap that you’ve been talking.

I’ve always been annoyed by people who are proud to be ignorant – even if it’s just being proud never to have watched Desperate Housewives. But I also think it’s a pity when people don’t feel able to offer opinions on things because they feel that somehow it’s not their place to do so.