Tom Roper's Weblog

Poetry London

I rarely sing the praises of iPhone apps, but City Poems is well worth the money will cost you in the apps store. Compiled by Victor Keegan, it mashes-up a map of London with poems about different parts of the city. There is nothing for Wandsworth, nor for much of the suburbs, but very rich links to poems about the City, Westminster and other parts of central London. Richard Ames' A Farther Search for Claret provides many of the extracts, the story of a drunken pub crawl round late seventeenth century London.

I particularly enjoyed some lines about bankers and their capacious beavers, which I can't find at this moment.

Google and China

I was amused the other night to watch a Newsnight reporter try to demonstrate the iniquity of the Chinese government by trying to access Facebook,  YouTube and Twitter from an internet cafe in the Peoples' Republic and failing.  He could have carried out the same exercise in many of this country's further education colleges, with the same results. Site-blocking is on the rise, on arbitrary criteria, depriving students of the ability to learn how to use social media, and services like library and learning resource centres of the ability to use these platforms to promote and deliver services.

But, apart from the big story about Google and China, I came across, in the pages of Le Monde, a different aspect of the relationship between these two titans. A Chinese author, one  Mian Mian, is suing Google in the Chinese courts for scanning one of her books and adding it to Google Books. Ms Mian does not write in the high-minded Leavisian traditions of the novel. One of her works bears the title Panda Sex.

Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday. As it's also exam time please answer the question below. Is Bloomsday:

a) A shameless attempt by Dubliners who have never read a word of Joyce to part tourists with literary pretensions from their money
b) A pseudo-intellectual excuse for drunkenness and bad behaviour
c) Something that was once original and amusing, but has been done to death?

Give your reasons.

'Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!'

Sixty-eight years ago tomorrow, almost a human life-span, Virgina Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse. Every morning the train takes me along the Ouse valley, with Rodmell, where she and Leonard lived, on the far side. I often wonder where she entered the water. I have never swum in this section of the river. The best swimming is to be had to the north of Lewes.

There was a place on the Cam, Dead Man's Corner, just where Grantchester Meadows proper starts. I would swim to it with my father from the university sheds, which he thought was about half a mile. Who was the dead man? Another suicide?

Spring is sprung....

...and all of a sudden this week's  calendar is full of events I would love to go to but have no time (or in the case of Cheltenham, money):
A few this week are:
Monday:
Slavoj Žižek at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (which seems to have vanished from the South Bank website)
Tuesday: 
John Boardman at Kings College London for the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies on Persia Greece and Britain
or
CILIP in London's Digital natives - myth and reality
or
The disease that dare not speak its name; an inaugural lecture by Professor Jackie Cassell, Chair in Clinical Epidemiology at Brighton & Sussex Medical School on the ever fascinating topic of venereology
Wednesday:
Iain Sinclair at the LRB Bookshop
or
Alan Badiou on the Sarkozy Effect at the ICA

I can only find time to hear Quentin Skinner tonight, talking about word and image in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes at the University of Sussex, and tomorrow to go to see my daughter in Seaford Head Schools's annual musical, whose name I cannot mention or the composer, notoriously jealous of his intellectual property, might sue.

Edward Upward 1903-2009

I saw the Guardian's obituary of Edward Upward this afternoon, written by Alan Walker, who complied the definitive bibliography of Upward's work. He died on Friday, aged 105. I first discovered his early work, Journey to the Border and the short stories of the 1930s, then the great anti-revisionist trilogy, The Spiral Ascent, which, I was shocked to learn from the obituary is out of print, and then his late works.

For other obituaries, see the Times, the Telegraph and the Morning Star

He was a great influence and inspiration. No writer has ever understood and interpreted dialectics as well as Upward.

I first read the Railway Accident in 1970 or thereabouts, in a grey covered Penguin classics edition, with Magritte's Time Transfixed on the cover. For some reason, The Rotten Elements was available in paperback when the other two volumes were not, so I read the middle volume of the Sprial Ascent before the others. This made sense: having understood the Sebrills' fight in the CPGB against the draft of the British Road to Socialism, it was then easy to read the back-story of Alan's political development in the 1930s, from apolitical teacher to anti-fascist and communist, and then to the final volume. I believe I then found the whole trilogy in Cambridge public library in a yellow covered edition.

I was sorry to see his library for sale by Maggs a few years ago. The well-illustrated catalogue survives (PDF): http://www.maggs.com/catalogues/pdfcatalogues/upward.pdf . I hope the books went to good homes.

Postscript: an interesting appreciation of Upward by Guillermo Parra may be read at Venepoetics and also in a magazine new to me, The Can.

LRB: Patrick Hamilton's drinking and Athenian democracy

The paper version has yet to arrive, but the London Review of Books Newsletter alerts me to two articles I must read in the new issue:
Christopher Tayler on Patrick Hamilton's Drinking
David Runciman on Athenian Democracy and Google

The e-versions are for subscribers only, but readers who want to follow this up could either buy a copy of this issue, or even subscribe.

Writers' rooms

Though I've had my own study, for the first time since school-days, for nearly three months now, the Guardian have yet to send a photographer to capture it for their writers' rooms series which appears in the Review on Saturdays. They prefer to give space to less significant  talents. No matter, because now we have blogs and every man and woman can be their own Guardian Review.

My desk. It belonged to my father, a GP, and he sat behind it in his surgery on the ground floor of our house in Cambridge. It is Victorian, but I do not know its provenance. It may have belonged to my grandfather, also a doctor, or my father may have bought it. He would sit behind it; on the other side, tens of thousands of patients sat on uncomfortable chairs, to be told good news or bad, to hear diagnoses and prognoses, to be given prescriptions or referrals, to have their infants vaccinated and their suffering alleviated.

This pestle and mortar sit on the desk. My father still, in the early stages of his career, dispensed his own medicines, my mother acting as apothecary's assistant, but he kept these for decorative purposes. I still regret that, when he retired, he sold his leech jar to a local chemist who collected such things, though it would have been too large to keep on a desk.

Some books. At last all my books are out on shelves, rather than inaccessible in boxes in a garage. They are two or even three deep in some cases, and the arrangement is not yet logical. There are a lot to add to LibraryThing.

Technology corner: this doesn't do justice to the mare's nest of cords, chargers and other electronic detritus here. It needs a thorough purge.

A writing case, used by my mother. Like so many of her generation, she was a great correspondent, with her mother, her sister and old friends, and disappointed that the practice fell into abeyance. I know use the case for writing paper and envelopes for my much rarer letter-writing.

And finally the view from the window of Seaford rooftops and gardens. Corsica Hall stand slightly elevated to the left of the photograph, behind it the sea

CILIP speaks out on Hackney's ban

More on l'affaire Sinclair: there's a well-argued letter from Caroline Moss-Gibbons in today's Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/oct/27/olympics-2012-iain-sinclair

censorship, hackney

Hackney bans Iain Sinclair's book launch

On the Today programme this morning, Iain Sinclair, the author, psychogeographer and bookseller, was interviewed. His new book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report was to have been launched at an event at Stoke Newington Library, by invitation of the library. Hackney Council has now banned the event. The book, as Sinclair points out in the interview, will not be published until next February, so it is hard to tell how it can have caused offence so long before publication. The truth, it seems, is the councillors and officers are upset by Sinclair's scepticism about the benefits the Olympics are supposed to bring to the borough, expressed in his essay in the London Review of Books, The Olympic Scam.

Whichever latter-day Alderman Foodbotham on Hackney council took exception to a novelist daring to appear in a library must be rather behind in their reading. The article appeared in June.

I'm not surprised. Once a Hackney resident, when I lived there the borough had fifteen or sixteen public libraries; it now has eight. And, as Sinclair reports, Stoke Newington library then had a strong local history section. It now consists of a few pamphlets in a carrier bag under a desk.

Thanks to Robert Greenwood for spotting this. You can hear the interview again here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dywq8 It starts at 49:40 minutes and runs through to 54:20. This link may not work after Wednesday morning's programme is broadcast.

Update, Wednesday 22 October: Iain Sinclair writes on being a banned author in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/22/hackney-library-book-ban