It's Always More Complicated

Haven't been south of the River for a while:

Last remaining galleried inn in London: the George Inn Southwark.

Nice image on geograph.org.uk with particularly good view of the galleries.

While you could dine at the George, it doesn't seem to gain massive plaudits for the cuisine, and you are very handy for Borough Market.

***

And in other London thing news, the Elephant House is being done up - due to a concatenation of circumstances involving rail chaos at Waterloo, I found myself walking in the vicinity of Grosvenor Square this morning, and would have ventured closer but that this edifice was draped in tarps and hedged about with scaffolding.

This article was amended on 26 February 2012. The original referred to Christopher Marlowe as the writer of The Duchess of Malfi. This has been corrected.

After reading the print version, which has 'Marlowe' in the headline and several times in the text, I was going 'I know there's a lot of revisionism going on around the authorship of Jacobean plays, but it's really pushing it to attribute this one to Marlowe, who was long dead by then - you'd either have to posit the "faked his death" argument, or else suppose that someone found a cache of previously unknown plays. Neither of which is plausible on stylistic grounds alone.'

Lucy Mangan: Isn't reading, like, really, really great?:

This is intended as no slur upon [Hay] festival... It is one of those entities that, even if it's not really your thing, you are still happier for knowing it exists - like Wiltshire, perhaps, or Uncle Joe's mint balls. It is simply because books and reading are to me such a fiercely private joy, and a festival is such a public celebration that the dissonance disturbs me.

Guy Browning, How to - be moderate, which (for me) rings the bell he sometimes fails to (though, Lib Dem joke warning):

It's almost impossible to build a social or religious movement on moderation, principally because moderation doesn't move forward, it budges up to accommodate. You'll notice that municipal statues are generally of people standing up pointing somewhere. You don't get statues of moderates in armchairs, weighing up the pros and cons.

Julian Barnes on Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. One of the mysteries surrounding Ford for me remains how a man so flakey and disorganised and generative of confusion where'ere he walked could nonetheless gain the devotion of a small multitude of competent and talented women over the course of his life.

Sue Tomes reviews Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound by David Rothenberg. On the whole positive, though she is clearly bothered by his cross-species cultural appropriation (Who Stole Whale Music, indeed):

Included in the book is a CD of music that he has created around their songs. Most of the tracks use fragments of whale music he has sampled, transposed, speeded up, slowed down and interwoven with his own clarinet playing, which in turn is a sort of respectful mimicking of the barking, keening and tocking noises of the whales. Best are his live duets with them, recorded by broadcasting clarinet tones into the water. He calls it "jamming", the jazzman's term for free improvising, though sometimes I felt it was a more malign sort of jamming, a deliberate interference with soundwaves. No matter how fine the motive, his interventions often seem an unwelcome dilution of the ancient, haunting noises the whales make when left to their own devices.

James Buchan praises historical epic Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, which, o the cool, draws on Sir Henry Yule's Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases (1886) to underpin its lingustic vitality. But Mr Buchan, when you comment' Ghosh's Baboo is not far from the ugly colonial stereotype, but is also a character of wit and great service to the plot', might you not remark that this is not 1000 miles from Kipling's Hurree Chunder Mookherjee in Kim?

Lahiri, a Bengali-American who's been lauded as a teller of immigrant tales, is at core an old-guard New England writer. As well as this review, leading 'In Praise of' article which makes the point

The experience of immigrants has not been well told in fiction. Writers often play up the foreignness of their subjects so that the stories resemble kamikaze applications for an Arts Council grant rather than depictions of people's lives.... small adjustments with the outside world are what many of us make, wherever we come from.

I am not sure I have ever read anything by Lorrie Moore, but on the basis of this interview I am strongly tempted to give her a whirl:

The story that caused a brief to-do in her hometown is "People Like That Are the Only People Here". In it a baby is diagnosed with cancer and undergoes an operation, and it was widely interpreted as an account of what happened in her own family. She has a son, now aged 13, and he was very ill as a baby, but as she is tired of pointing out, it traduces her skill as a writer to interpret it as any less fictional than all the other things about which she writes.
....
Moore says that her ex-husband, who she was with for 14 years, wasn't that fussed. "That was one of the positive things about him. It was easy to be a writer around him. Like, right now, I'm seeing somebody else and that's not easy, because he's scouring the work for signs of him. But my husband never really did that. It's good to have someone who is mildly interested and mildly proud, and also slightly uninterested. When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute." She smiles. "Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile."
....
I wonder what she thinks of criticisms from the chair of this year's Orange prize judges, who said that not enough women novelists were writing on political themes. "I think women do write politically all the time. Margaret Atwood does, Doris Lessing does. And then there's the whole argument of 'the personal is political' and the way the political world and soldiers and men and global conflict actually does come into the kitchen. It does. I think women are including that and registering that."

It is impossible to watch The Revenger's Tragedy without thinking of Hamlet, argues Gary Taylor: O RLY??

Surely we have been here before? A child's vocabulary, cognitive abilities and behaviour are tightly linked to their family income, with children from the poorest homes much less equipped to deal with starting school, new research suggests.

Ben Goldacre, Please reinforce my prejudices without perpetrating crass errors and getting the basic arithmetic wrong.

The legacy of the pitmen: A new play reminds us of the noble tradition of working class ambition and intellectualism.

Just back from watching a production by Fallen Angel Theatre Company of Fletcher and Massinger's The Custom of the Country at the White Bear pub theatre in Kennington.

Very enjoyable and well done.

Very much the sense that the authors were having a lot of fun with various existing tropes of Jacobean drama and riffs on them: there are several 'sudden conversions to a better way of life and more altruism', a disguise plot that seemed particularly improbable (son supposed dead manages not to be recognised by his mother - this within a few days of the supposed death, not after years at sea or whatever), etc etc.

The custom is droit de seigneur, which gets the plot moving when the chaste and determined lovers flee Count Clodio's determination to have Zenacia, willing or not.

Shipwreck! Separation! Everybody arrives in Lisbon, including eventually Count Clodio (see above, sudden conversions) and Zenacia's father.

Scene in which male character is importuned to have sex with amorous female in exchange for his beloved's life!

Scene in which his elder brother discovers that working as a stud for hire for the procuress and witch Sulpicia is not as much fun as he thought it would be!

Various complications in which I think we can see several other v distorted shadows of Measure for Measure.

Happy ending!

There is a not very good - clunky and in some places inaccurate - history and description on Wikipedia.

Not surprising that there were long centuries during which this was not produced, given that Dryden cited it as an example of how much cleaner and more moral the Restoration theatre was.

From today's Guardian:

Laurence Norfolk likes Judith Flanders' Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain.

Kathryn Hughes on new group biography of the Impressionists, and useful meditations on this genre:

Group biographies are popular at the moment for a variety of reasons. For one thing they get around the dreary insistence that one follow a single subject from cradle to grave, instead allowing the biographer to swoop in on the interesting bits of the life and skim the rest. They also, as here, allow the biographer to lean heavily on secondary material yet still arrange it in a way that feels fresh and valid. Finally, and most subtly, group biographies speak to something in all of us that is concerned with issues of belonging and not belonging. Reading about the Romantics, the pre-Raphaelites, the Bloomsburys and the Impressionists allows us to rehearse our own conflicts about friendship, loyalty, inclusion and exile. For the Impressionists, just like any other group, were never as coherent or static as the label implied. They lived, as Roe persuasively shows, in a constant muddle of alliances and counter-alliances, fallings-out, reconciliations and, perhaps most painful of all, plain indifference. They lived, in short, just like the rest of us.

And on the subject of group biographies, Simon Callow clearly much enjoyed Stanley Wells' Shakespeare and Co: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story.

Michel Faber on Yet Another Book on Van Meegeren and His Vermeer Forgeries: the strapline suggests that Faber 'admires the brushstrokes', but he's actually quite critical, clearly not in sympathy with the author's belief that 'he's absolutely sure what's art and what isn't', and pointing out that 'Hidden beneath the surface layers of I Was Vermeer are several previous studies of Van Meegeren, long out of print'. However, he concedes that 'Despite this book's flaws, I'm glad it exists. Van Meegeren's story is fascinating and deserves to remain in the public consciousness''.

John Sutherland (about whom I am somewhat ambivalent most of the time) is quite interesting on opening lines and their often ironic or at least complex relationship to the following narrative.

And the charming and touching story of Leonard Woolf's late romance with Trekkie Parsons, another exemplar of how relationships which go far away from conventional models can be rewarding for the parties concerned. I rather look forward to Glendinning's biography.