Category Archives: ice cream

August 16, 2009 · 3:26 pm

the Ford Fabergé that never was

edsel-ford

By  the way. Look at those absolutely gorgeous letters in the headline. They look as if they’re made of chrome.

The other week Roddy Lumsden posed a question on the poets’ forum I sometimes frequent. He asked: “would you write a poem for a baked bean TV advert for £1500?”

Needless to say, most of the comments ran along the lines of “I’d write a poem for a tin of baked beans.” The first one, which did make me smile (it wasn’t me, by the way) (thanks Rik), went: “C’mon. I wrote a double dactyl and entered it into a competition to win a free colonoscopy. Didn’t win.”

The chat turned a little more serious, revolving around the problems of writing to commission, what is The Muse, and what’s a fair price. In the end it was a slightly non-topic, I thought, because basically we do sell our facility with words in other ways anyway, to pay the bills. Ad men. Teachers. Copywriters. Ghostwriters. Journalists. Crossword-puzzle writers. Quiz-masters. Lion tamers. You know…

But I did think of this today when I saw a rather charming op-ed piece from the New York Times. Pegged on the current rapid demise of the US car industry, it tells the story of the time, in 1955, when Ford Motors enlisted the help of Marianne Moore to try and find a name for the new line of “rather important” cars they were developing.

Throughout the fall and winter of 1955, Moore’s steady stream of suggestions arrived at Ford: “the Ford Silver Sword,” “Intelligent Bullet,” “the Ford Fabergé,” “Mongoose Civique,” “Anticipator,” “Pastelogram,” “Astranaut” and, the highest flight of fancy, “Utopian Turtletop.”

Moore apparently had no qualms about enlisting her muse in the service of the automotive industry. She was also willing to embrace the risks of the marketplace, agreeing to be paid only if she came up with a winning name. As Moore’s biographer Charles Molesworth points out, she “had always enjoyed the language of advertisement, delighting in its inventiveness and ebullience, and even relating it to the poetics of praise.”

I don’t know about you but I find that last quote very telling and wonderful: the poetics of praise… the ebullience of advertising copy. There is SO much to unpack in that sentence, especially when you think of Miss Moore’s exquisite little Fabergé ostrich-eggs of poems.

Some thoughts:

A blog post about how Twitter, with its 140-character limit, can help copywriters hone their headline skills.

The way advertising copy has in fact over the past fifty years become looser, more elliptical, more allusive.

The suggestion of the African praise poem tradition getting mixed up in this.

Enthusiastic description. Values and merits and various applications of.

The possibility of seeing cars – or anything else – a exotic animals?

The way even in her longer, or longer-lined, poems there’s hardly a quotable line or two, because everything is so tightly woven that the whole thing stands together. In other words, even a two-page Moore poem is as integrated as advertising copy.

The absolute enmeshment, even for a poet as meticulous as the divine Miss M, of poetry in the daily world of commerce.

Even the beauty of the commerce itself, the to-ing and fro-ing and lack of pretentiousness about doing.

Also the complete unusability of most of her phrases! The Utopian Turtletop, indeed. You have to love it. Picture the 1955 consumers, riding in their convertibles, chasing tigers around in red weather…

Lorine Neidecker’s famous poem, Poet’s Work:

Grandfather
….advised me:
……..Learn a trade

I learned
….to sit at desk
……..and condense

No layoff
….from this
……..condensery

And – because I can – because I have the late Duc de Baroque’s Complete Moore here, although I had to scrap the remaining scraps of its beautiful and familiar seventies dust jacket:

To a Snail

If “compression is the first grace of style,”
you have it…

The epigraph to Moore’s Collected Poems: “Omissions are not accidents.” MM

The sudden lightning-flash notion that I could somehow make a Marianne Moore Car Name Generator. Yes! It’s what the world needs!

Any ideas, just send them to me in a Pastelogram.

And no. I don’t know what “Edsel” means either.

9 Comments

Filed under America, ice cream, Living With Words, poetry, wallace stevens

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

February 10, 2009 · 12:20 am

to sleep, perchance to dream, of Smokey Bear and Anthony Hecht and the wedding sequence from You, the Living

i74

First of all, we would like to extend our thoughts to our friends and readers in Victoria, Australia. The news is really shocking – some of the stories are horrific – and it takes me back, sorry if this seems too trivial, to that particular primordial fear that is conjured by being taken to see Bambi on the big screen when you’re only five. And Smokey the Bear: “Only you can prevent forest fires. So stern, yet so kind if only you would never, ever light a match in the forest. And now unbelievably they’re saying there are suspicions of arson! It’s hard to credit.

Ms Pants, for one, tells us she is fine and I am glad to hear it. There’s no saying how she would have fared if the fire had come any nearer her than it did, especially with Barney about, being all over-excited. I’m told Owly Cats can behave pretty strangely in forest fire situations – it’s because they’re hypo-allergenic and forget their natural instincts. I’ll just go on the record now, though, as saying I think she ought to relent and get the garden hose. If there’s still one to be had.

Secondly, I know I have been complaining rather a lot lately, and I would like to reassure those of my readers who may think there was something wrong that, no, it is just my nature. I seem to have got all the natural instincts that have been syphoned off an Owly Cat. My best friend, Ms So-Called Rational Self-Determinism (and I have not yet had my Christmas present), has a name for this tendency:”just plain dissatisfied,” she calls it. Things seem to be improving slightly today, for the simple reason that Ms B has a terrible cold, which presents a set of circumstances challenging enough to coax the attention away from all the things that are getting on one’s nerves, just in the effort to stay with it.

Mind you, I wrote to a friend earlier today: “I have a stinking cold/racking cough; probably cheerful as a bluebird once that’s gone.”

She wrote back: “Cheerful as a bluebird? That doesn’t sound like you!”

(She’s wrong, of course: I’m always cheerful.)

I am still reading Iain Sinclair’s marvellous new book. Those of you who live in, or like to go to, Hackney itself might like to remember this after the first week of March, when my scintillating review of the book will be available all over the borough for free – including in the dastardly libraries that banned Sinclair’s book launch because he is “anti-Olympics.”

Here it is, for the record: I too think the Olympics is a disaster for the East End, extending into Hackney and yea up to Stoke Newington itself and even Stamford Hill. I think it’s a(nother) crock of crap, increasing our Council Tax exponentially up to and possibly after 2012, and if it results in any opportuniy for local kids to shine in any capacity more interesting than ticket seller I’ll be very surprised indeed. Hackney Marshes – oh, yeah, they’re going to take down the parking lots after the Olympics. Suuure they are!

No, and I can also tell you that I have, in the line of professional duty, been present at professional presentations, lectures, general bragging and the link, by various members of the PR team for the Olympics. “Smug” doesn’t come into it. They make Brad & Angelina look like John Denver.

In fact, I can remember hearing the news about the Olympics coming to London, and my heart sinking as I thought: that’s it, then. The next day, 7/7/07, when the newsreaders were all telling us how happy we had all been only the day before the bombs, I knew they were wrong. Well, don’t get me started. Watch this space.

Perhaps they could have Sally Hawkins open the Olympic ceremony, all costumed up as Mike Leigh’s adorable, plucky character Poppy in her multi-coloured lacy tights; surely a heroine for our times; she could take some giant microphone and say, winsomely, “I know you can’t make everybodayy happay, but you can only tryyyyy…” (only she’d go on for five minutes saying it) and then scrunch up her shoulders (and nose) and laugh, in that weird sucking, intake-of-breath way, for billions and billions of spectators around the world. It’ll be just like the Oscars, and a really jolly little piece of Londoniana. The Chinese in particular really won’t get it: they’re the ones who dubbed some Little Miss Priss rather than let an ordinary cute little girl sing the opening number.

Well, that’s enough of that! (Though what was Goldie Hawn thinking at the Baftas, I ask you.) There has been no poetry here for days. There has been work, and more work, and rain, and Iain Sinclair’s gloriously derelict Hackney ramble. (The part where he bought his house for £3,500 back when I was freaking out over Bambi is pretty depressing, though.) There has been thought about words, the nature and texture of them, but I’m not sure why: maybe I dreamed it. There has been a birthday (not mine) with a big pile of presents (mine) and Facebook messages (not all mine) and whistling and a huge Sunday lunch, and you’ll be pleased to know my chocolate mousses came out great, even though I had to remember the recipe out of my head. Apparently it took till nearly 2pm today to clear the house up.

Amazingly, someone at the birthday Sunday lunch yesterday spoke to me, out of the blue, about Anthony Hecht! Can you believe it. It was remarkable. Alceste in the Wilderness. So there has been a little poetry after all. And the poem is amazing and even has that yellowness-imagery I am talking about in my Hecht essay, though it is slightly too  sinister thank God to have been of any real use to me even if I had thought of it. But I’m too tired to type any out for you; maybe in the morning if I wake up in time, though one does hope to sleep. And I still have that other thing to type out, too… I will get a copy of my essay to the person in question, though he probably only likes that poem and will bitterly resent having an as-yet-unpublished essay foisted on him…

So when I got home tonight there were teenagers everywhere and they had made a really beautiful, buttery sponge cake (and now we are out of butter) with Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

I haven’t slept a whole night through in about a week, and what is that about?? I even had a dream about a certain erstwhile Shakespeherian actor (I don’t like to name names; several people reading this will know the chap I mean) of the general Baroque acquaintance (if that isn’t mixing the periods up too much), and he wasn’t best pleased – though I can’t now recall why. Maybe it was just a dreamlike manifestation of the general malaffection. It was weird, but quite funny. And there have been others. And I keep waking up at 6am when I don’t have to. When I go to bed at night, no matter how much I’ve been falling asleep before that point, I am instantly awake. But for now I think I will go to bed and read my book.

6 Comments

Filed under birthdays, dream, Hackney, Hecht, ice cream, la famille Baroque, sleep, the movies

Tagged as , , , ,

April 17, 2008 · 9:34 am

poem in your pocket day

Today’s the day when we’re all supposed to put a poem in our pocket and share it with the people we see throughout the day. It sounds silly and saccharine; it certainly does! But there have been times enough when I’ve carried poems in my pocket. Sometimes you just need a sort of talisman. Or you want to have a poem on you so you can refresh your essential nature with it, as at a spring. Sometimes it’s even been one of mine.

When I was 20 I had a job at the Aetna, or was it the Hartford? Life Insurance company, doing a job so boring it wasn’t even filing. I was trying to raise money to come back to London. I had to take these files, some with up to 400 documents in them, and arrange the documents in order of type – which meant memorising this painfully boring material, the types of documents – removing all staples and paper clips, and unfolding any folded corners. I sat in a little room, on a chair or stool at a counter which ran along a wall, facing the wall. The room was in the basement of the building, and had no windows. In America the working day is eight hours PLUS your lunch break. I lasted three months, I think: I made absolutely sure that I passed through Mark Twain’s garden on the way there. I would pick up a leaf from Mark Twain’s tree and put it in my pocket. And I had The Lake Isle of Innisfree taped up on the wall in front of me, which was about a foot and a half from my face.

The guy who sat next to me in that job – the only guy to talk to, Steve I think – had recently done an EST course. Remember EST? Jesus. Well, it changed his life and it pretty much tried to change mine for a while, but let’s say I was impervious. The main change is that it was going to make me more violent.

Other poems:

I mean, when I was a teenager I had Ash Wednesday tacked to the wall above my bed. I cut it out of the book and hung it up. Srsly. I found that copy recently, with its thumbtack holes. God, you are all getting the real picture here! I couldn’t read it, because it was on the wall over me, so this was poem as pure talisman.

Wallace Stevens’ Anecdote of a Jar. “I placed a jar in Tennessee,/ and round it was, upon a hill./ It made the slovenly wilderness/ surround that hill…” This poem mystified me for a long time, & because Wallace Stevens’ house was another I often went past I tried to figure it out, reading and reciting it to myself. It’s just beautiful: like a painting it speaks through itself, rather than trying to convey something external through narrative. Stevens. Don’t let anybody tell you he’s not the greatest American poet of the 20th century.

Stevens again: I wrote my Diaspora of the Snail poem, and a girl in the workshop said it reminded her of The Emperor of Ice Cream. She was wrong, it’s nothing like – it was more like a sign that she hadn’t figured out the imagery in the Stevens – but it was still lovely to be told that, & I guess attests to some infiltration of the aesthetic – not surprising, given the years of poring.

From about 2003-2006 my screen saver at work was the scrolling marquee, “Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.” I used to let my screen go still just so I could see the words come up. This came to have added significance, as it happened, with a synchronicity that attests to the power of the lines. It’s a story about Michael Donaghy. When he died, one friend said the last he’d heard from Michael was sometime during that summer when he had received a text, out of the blue: “Let be be finale of seem.” My friend immediately texted back: “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

Once on the way to work, years ago, I suddenly felt desperate, got off and jumped into a bookshop, where I bought the little anthology, Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems, edited by Simon Armitage. You can read one in about fifteen seconds. But why is reading one so different from reciting one? I memorised poems as a child: particularly Millay – who I have often said is so perfect to give to children (Silver bark of beech, and sallow/ bark of yellow birch and yellow/ twig of willow”) – and EA Robinson. (Speaking of sounds, I loved his whole name: Edwin Arlington Robinson. Beautiful.) I could still recite you Richard Cory right now, from start to finish. Or Miniver Cheevy, which has my favourite opening stanza:

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn

Grew lean as he assailed the seasons.

He wept that he was ever born,

and he had reasons.

(Oh, let’s see! My Miniver Cheevy’s not so good.)

Miniver loathed the commonplace

something something something something

He missed the mediaeval grace

of iron clothing.

So why, with these amazing skills of being able to half-recite all these things – I can do Ozymandias, too, and “Oft have I travelled in the realms of gold” – do we want the poem in our pocket? Maybe to help with the lines we can never remember now matter how hard we try. Maybe for the visual pleasure of the words on the page, which for me I think is a big thing. Maybe because then it is an amulet, not “just” [sic] a part of us, something we know. Maybe we want the surprise of the object, maybe that is the magic that enables the flying

Even if you’re already at work and you read this, you can google something. Put it on your desk, or in your pocket! Why not!

The poem in my pocket today I think will be one I’ve been reading all week, by EA Markham, who died nine days ago. It’s rather stark: Night. I hate reading serious poetry on blogs, but as it’s Sharing Day I will give you some of it! It begins:

Teach me, nevertheless, not to be consumed

by regret: that voice on the phone

fractured from family, wish it good health,

long life and better music than I allowed

in support. I wake from screech and flare

of another man’s success and, hearing you,

forget the bafflement – left stranded

wrong side of the road – of that random woman’s

preference of partner for something more obscure

than human. Stop me, then, bullying

a small talent to confine itself beneath us,

to feet, well-hidden, the colour of clay.

4 Comments

Filed under America, ice cream, Life, Living With Words, National Poetry Day, poetry, wallace stevens

Tagged as

March 26, 2008 · 10:27 pm

what a difference a word makes

The banana split boat hasn’t sailed, has it? Some reader of mine, somewhere, must have missed the storm in a sundae dish over the anonymous poem found in the House of Commons – or somewhere – nobody has actually said where it was found, or how – was it lying upon the stair? Anyway, somehow everybody got to know of it, and very funny it is too:

“As I was going down the stair, I met a man who wasn’t Blair.
He wasn’t Blair again today. Oh how I wish he’d go away!”

And no one knows who wrote it! It’s a complete mystery – a government scandal! A couple of ministers have completely denied that it’s anything to do with them, but then, they would say that, wouldn’t they.

Of course we’re all jolly glad whenever anyone isn’t Blair, and we hope it stays that way, but you have to admit that it’s a fine thing for Parliamentarians to be taking to their pens like this. It may be only doggerel but revolutions have been started with less. And it pleases me, partly because the original upon which it is based (“As I was going up the stair/ I met a man who wasn’t there./ He wasn’t there again today…”) was told me many many times by my dear Papa, le duc de Baroque, back when he was about ten times bigger than me.

However, the real genius of the piece comes in when my brand-new favourite-ever politician, Austin Mitchell MP (Great Grimsby – fancy a weekend away, anyone?) posted this delicious, and far superior, bagatelle on his blog: the cherry on top. Poetry truly lives in the corridors of power! Austin’s whole site is well worth a read. Take these snippets from his “House Diary“:

“These are the times that try men`s socialism. Polls disastrous. Morale low. New chums wondering if ritual suicide might be helpful. Blairites in the ascendant with crazed proposals to force the disabled back to work (assuming the Poles leave any jobs) or proclaiming the virtues of wealth, Mandy announcing that Gordon has forgiven him, and Tony sucking up more jobs in his flibbertigibbet progress to the throne of Charlemagne II.* …Oldie of the Year lunch. Hockney harangues me for voting for the smoking ban, announcing that it will be the death of reflection.”

Even his home page is fun. And did you see the picture above? He has something I want.**

* Flibbertigibbet is one of my all-time favourite words.
** & I don’t mean a house – although, yes please… (edited in: on reflection I think I mean a nice big empty room, with a polished floor. You could have a vast abode and not have that! But mainly it’s the Friendly’s sign, of course.)

9 Comments

Filed under America, bagatelles, ice cream, le Duc, Living With Words, poetry, politics

March 25, 2008 · 11:09 am

infamous indolence

To say it’s been a slow weekend in Baroque Mansions would be to do a disservice to the Ice Age.

There have been sleeping, eating, and the cooking necessary to have the things to eat; there have been lolling, slumping and more eating; and there has been more sleeping, followed by some eating and lolling. Ms B never left the house at all between 4pm on Thursday and about 4pm on Saturday, except for a doomed, misguided attempt to go for a walk which left her (well – the car – not hers, of course, but even so not even a very competent attempt at a walk) pelted and battered by inch-wide raindrops and then a hailstorm worthy of Good Friday itself – oh, wait. It was Good Friday.

Saturday brings us, recovered from the pelting, to the thrilling heights of Morrisons, where I discovered that 6pm the day before Easter Sunday is not the time to find a nice leg of lamb.Thus my lamb in white wine, lemon and egg sauce became a delightfully plucky and inventive lamb-&-lemon meatballs in white wine, lemon and egg sauce. There were also rice, an entire Savoy cabbage, some very beautiful grilled courgettes, and a bread & butter pudding made with brioche rolls (2 extra free), cream and 100g of dark chocolate.

Later that day, when the kids and auntie had gone, I ate the last meatball, the leftover vegetables and the rest of the pudding standing up at the counter, and drank the rest of the cooking wine, a cheap Orvieto.

DVD: Infamous. Very interesting but I’m not really in the mood to write a movie critique… Toby Jones deliciously over-the-top as Truman Capote, I will say – but as for what’s her name from Truly Madly Deeply playing Diana Vreeland? Just NO.

Yesterday woke up remembering that I had three egg whites left over, plus the rest of the double cream, and there was a girl in the house whom I knew it would be very easy to thrill with a sudden meringue… it’s so hard nowadays with one’s own offspring. Mlle B, who was “too full” to eat even a morsel of the bread-&-butter pudding (Duh! Like that stopped anyone else), simply doesn’t like meringue. For this reason alone it is always great fun to make it when this particular friend is there, so we can offer Mlle B some and, when she refuses, shake our heads pityingly in unison.

Then several hours of saying I was going to write my stuff, and not, followed by almost being late to the cinema because I’d actually forgotten how to leave the house: it was a delightful, if suitably leisurely, French gangster film circa about 1960 give or take, called Le Doulos, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, a lot of menacing shadows and an all-but-forgotten family of performing overcoats. Then an asparagus risotto.

Work tomorrow. The meringue is finished, there’s no meat in the house, I never had to resort to white sliced, the place is Armageddon of laundry, and as I write this – at 11.26 – I have not yet been outside today, either. In the few hours left to me I have all the writing I was going to do over the preceding five days to do, plus the laundry.

PS: Does anyone want a signed, limited edition of The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis, fine, no d/w? Numbered 176 of 1,000. It’s very large… offers accepted.

Leave a comment

Filed under books, Easter, ice cream, la famille Baroque, Life, sleep, supermarkets, the movies