Monthly Archives: September 2011

Never quite so alone …

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One never quite feels loneliness as the visceral force it can be as one does when in the close company of others, when one’s actions dictate another’s; when you cannot lead, no-one can follow.
Recently I began to learn how to tango. It is a dance of detached intimacy, one which invites the closeness of sexual union while simultaneously keeping the partners at one remove – when the man’s leg goes forward, the woman’s retreats. The word Tango comes directly from the latin tangere, to touch – it is the first person singular. I touch. And yet it takes two, both literally and anecdotally. A dance of contradictions. She wore a plate around her neck: noli me tangere, for caesar’s I am. A dance of eternal chase, a Zeno’s paradoxidance.
Noli me tangere. Jesus, too, used these words. Don’t touch me.
And I have some natural flair. But the disease, oh this fucking disease. It disconnects. It disconnects you from yourself, from everyone you love, from everything that you’ve ever chosen as self-definition. It takes it all, and it fucks it. And then some.
One of the many, many irritating little things it does is fuck up your gait. It takes the way you walk and rips the piss. I went to a military academy for six months. There I marched, a habit yet to leave me. Except my left foot is beginning to shuffle. Thud, scuff, thud, scuff.
The tango is fundamentally a poncy walk, done in time to rather groovy music. I can do rhythm. Really.
Tonight, however, is different. From the very first dance, I feel my partner is stiff, unresponsive – and this is me, not her. She cannot feel what I’m trying to do. I start to lose the rhythm. Even dancing with the tutor, with whom I normally glide as if to the tango born, and I’m unsure, staccato, stuttering.
I dance with one partner and simply have to stop.
The male instructor comes up and I say I can’t feel it so I’m stepping out. He tries to tell me how to feel the beat. This never goes down well. I sit out. I slip out.
I cycle home.
As I sit on the doorstep, in the full knowledge that in a fortnight, I’ll be sat in my own house, surrounded by boxes, pizza on my lap and ridiculous bordeaux in my glass, I’m wondering.
I’m wondering why it is that now, more than ever, I need a hug.

 

Publish and be damned

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But publish.

This morning, after I returned from the gymnasium, where I attempt to stave off the inevitable decrepitude that comes with age and disease, I was checking the comment thread of the latest of this long line of Shakespearean posts on the authorship ‘question’, when there was a great thud on the floor which announced the arrival of a tome. Herr Pete Langman, it read … that’ll be for me, I thought. In it, I found the following -

As for the Shakespeare, just take a peek at this: Shakespeare rides again.

My comment may upset some academics, but frankly, they can grow up.

When subs attack: or, how I learned to stop worrying and not read what I wrote

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As a callow youth of around 25, I landed what, for a guitar player, was the equivalent of a weekly op-ed piece in the Sunday Times Magazine: I became rock columnist for the Guitar Magazine. I wrote like a fool, naturally – a witty fool, but a fool nonetheless. But people liked my foolishness, and unlike my peers, I produced pretty clean copy on time, and to order (I discovered how difficult it is editing musicians during my sojourn as techniques editor). Now I never read what is published, in case I end up doing a Giles. Once, however, I did just that.

Picture a telephone conversation (ignore the rather mixed metaphor). An old student calls: ‘Robert Plant is going to sit in with my old guitar teacher’s band. Sing some Elvis covers in a country pub outside Birmingham. Fancy going?’ Oh, if I must …

Well, less a pub than an extended living room, with a landlord dedicated to sampling his wares, and, wouldn’t you know it, impersonating Elvis. Cue one set in full Las Vegas regalia. Then the special guest does his thing, and afterwards I ‘mention’ my guitar-journo demi-god status to a couple of guys. I promise I’ll refer to the gig in my next column – a reference only twenty or thirty people can hope to get, and only two will actually read. But two happy readers …

It went something like this: ‘ … and that’s about as likely as turning up to a country pub outside Birmingham to find Robert Plant singing Elvis covers while Elvis himself is serving behind the bar.’ Perfect. Two happy readers with the ‘I was there’ smugness.

Publication. I read ‘ … and that’s about as likely as turning up to a country pub outside Birmingham to find Robert Plant singing Edith Piaf covers while Elvis is serving behind the bar.’ Cue Giles.

The sub’s excuse? It was funnier. ‘But’, said I, ‘it isn’t true, whereas what I wrote WAS.’ I fumed. They pretty much stopped subbing me (dammit, I didn’t need it anyway).

And the lesson? Hell, I don’t know. It’s just the story I tell every time I meet a sub. Oh, no, the moral is simple. When it comes to stuff that isn’t grammar and spelling, or elegance of expression, and you find something that looks a bit odd … just mail the damn writer! They may just know something you don’t. True, they probably won’t, but the one time you don’t check …

An upstart crow

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Once upon a time, I was at a party. I began talking with a young lady, and the conversation turned to Shakespeare. ‘Oh’, she said. ‘Francis Bacon wrote that.’

The conversation continued thus:

Me – I don’t think he did.

Her – He did.

Me – I know a bit about Shakespeare, and I don’t think he did.

Her – No, he did.

Me – Hmm. I teach Shakespeare at university, and I’m pretty sure it was Shakespeare.

Her – No. You’re wrong. It was Bacon.

Me – Hmm. I know a little bit about Bacon, and I don’t reckon he wrote Shakespeare.

Her – He did.

Me – Ok. I know a lot about Bacon, and I’m sure he didn’t write Shakespeare.

Her – He did.

Me – Right then. I have a phd on Bacon, and I can categorically state there is no evidence whatsoever that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. For one thing, he wouldn’t have had time.

Her – You’re wrong.

Me – So … er, what do you do for a living?

Her – I’m a waitress.

Me – Well, it’s been lovely.

Now, I don’t mean to insult waitresses anywhere, but this is the single-minded idiocy that emanates from the so-called anti-stratfordians.

The release of Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous has started this all over again. Now let’s get this straight. Shakespeare was not written by the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon, and Marlowe did not fake his death and then write under the pseudonym Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

I contributed a couple of things to the Guardian post on this today (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/sep/05/shakespeare-anonymous-roland-emmerich?) The first was this:

The problem here is simple, really. We suffer from a post-Romantic notion equating artistic genius with the tortured artist pose. Shakespeare seems to have died fat and happy. Which utterly denies the way we want to view artists.

That the greatest writer the world has produced wasn’t a Kit Marlowe (Spy, ‘homosexual’, ‘atheist’ etc), or a Ben Jonson (cantankerous git), or even a Francis Bacon (polymath, serial underachiever, genius, practically written out of the history he began) simply will not do.

Shakespeare was too great to have been a normal bloke.

Except that he quite plainly was. Get over it, people – the author of all those great plays was … William Shakespeare.

Are we done now?

It’s all getting rather dull, this. The argument turned to Shakespeare’s ‘illiteracy’ (yes, the ‘upstart crow’ was illiterate).

This was my reply to one commentator’s asserting of the following:

My evidence that Shaxspere was illiterate :

1) His letters – there aren’t any. Can you defenders of the status quo tell us why?

2) His library – he didn’t have one.

The quill on his monument – where he was inexplicably writing on a woolsack – was added later.

This is high-level intellectual stuff, as I’m sure you can see. I got a little sarky at this point:

Wow! I’m utterly convinced suddenly.

A lacuna proves nothing – even King Lear worked that out

No letters … hmm, let me have a think. Ok. No-one kept them. They all burnt with the Globe in 1614 or whenever it was. They were eaten by rats. They perished in the Great Fire. The paper was recycled – or ‘put to posterior usage’, as one wag had it.

HIs library – how do you know he didn’t have one? Have you evidence of people writing to each other saying ‘cor, that Will, he doesn’t have any books, you know …’?

Sorry, but this is non-evidence of the highest calibre.

One anti-stratfordian told me that the Merchant of Venice contained specific legal stuff Shakespeare could never have known. But Shakespeare knew Ben Jonson, who knew Francis Bacon, who was Lord chancellor and knew a bit about the law. But not Venetian law! he crowed … well, yes, but if you think that Bacon only knew English law, and knew nothing of any other country, you’d be a bit daft – he had clients all over the place, Henry Wotton in Vienna, for example.

Just get over it. So far as we know, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. With a little help from his friends, yes … but nothing wrong with that.

Jeepers. Can we all get on with something sensible now, please?

Thanks …

The fact is that some people are desperate to believe that Shakespeare wasn’t just an actor manager who wrote the plays because he did it best. It was Jonson who started this ‘I’m an author’ nonsense …

Now, I once taught a class full of anti-Stratfordians, and jeepers were they a pain. Clever. Very clever. Well-informed. Totally single-minded.

I was teaching palaeography, or reading old handwriting. As the final test I gave them a really tough letter from 1611. After a few minutes I went to see how they were doing.

‘Stuck on the first word.’

‘I’ll get you started, then …

[blank] whereunto J referr you, sence [blank] J have [blank] of the

12 August, the which was most welcome unto me; and by the contents

thereof do rest fully satisfyed of all former doughts, wherewith

J was (before the receipt therof) much intangled, for [blank] …

They looked at me askance. But what about that word?

Can’t read it – we’ll work it out later …

but, what about that word …

And I realised the problem. They spot one tiny thing, and that’s it. The pivot point around which everything revolves.

Sorry, but like life, literature and bibliography simply don’t work like that.

The one thing may look momentous, but is the result of tons of other stuff – at least, if it’s truly significant it is.

Bacon wrote that the human mind is predisposed to find order where there isn’t any. He was a clever bloke. And a great writer. But he didn’t write Shakespeare.

The rest is silence. Isn’t it?