Hotel, Joanna Walsh, Bloomsbury. Rating: Ink sac

The revolutionary inventor, Nikola Tesla, spent all of his life – practically – living in New York City hotel rooms. One of his inalienable routines was feeding pigeons and bringing them back to his differing domiciles. He left a string of unpaid bills, and was ‘moved on’ from lots of different hotel gaffs, which he would use to court investment opportunities for his frenzied electromagnetic research. He died in a hotel room, which was eventually actually paid for by a small stipend by the Yugoslav government. This is the fitting end for a strangely aloof and antisocial inventor; perhaps mirroring the quasi-humanity of the life that he himself lived.

My own experience of living in a hotel was not quite so anonymous. I lived in a B&B for a month-and-a-half, in York. Yet I supppose I did feel some of what Joanna Walsh describes in this volume, a book about a period she spent reviewing hotels and the sort of effect it had on her psychology and her current romantic relationship. Hotels – she essentially claims – are like temples, in which one must ritually purge and exorcise oneself and yet one must also somehow live, or adopt the pretence of living. In a hotel, one is not compelled to participate in menial labour, so much so that its evidence is almost hidden, as if it is a behind-the-curtains ritual that only the Initiated can have access to. “There are no spades in my hotel, no evidence of any home work, or any other kind of work, only of its results.” (Walsh.) No hotel guest would ever join in with the gardening, the cooking, or sometimes even making their own cup of tea. To do so would be sacrosanct, and the implication of staying in a hotel is that you have something else more important to get on with than these totally human and fundamental aspects of participating in humanity.

I was allowed to cook in the B&B, though in the mornings I mingled with the guests and those who participate in the hotel-temple. My life became a ritual of divine and sanitised exactitude, as I couldn’t act as I really was, or thought I was. My entire existence was a contribution to a TripAdvisor review. It was heart-warming to read about an account of hotels that understands this, or some imprint of it: how hotels are metaphors for what we have turned into life itself. That hotels are essentially home, given that home can only be conceived as institutional. Institutional is familiar, heimlich, and the homely becomes unheimlich. It is only living in a hotel, or accommodation institution, that one can understand this. Accommodation used to be a divine duty; now, it is something that only makes sense from the perspective of logos and sanitisation.

What is it about hotels that give refuge to someone like Nikola Tesla? Perhaps it is that genius is detachment: that someone who can easily transcend time and space must live a life of morbid anonymity. I am curious about hotels, about their origin, about what point paid hospitality became a genuine norm. Was it industrialisation? Protestantism? Joanna Walsh’s book is subjective enough to never answer any of these questions, but I suppose the book is intended as a starting point in thinking about them or doing our own research.

My poem ‘Preston Bus Station’ was shortlisted for the Wolverhampton Literature Festival Poetry Competition. This is me performing it on Sunday, 2nd February: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_lLhYX7JrM. I was a little drunk. The winner was a beautiful poem called ‘Cantabank’ by Jane Burn, ‘cantabank’ being an old-fashioned and exquisite term for an itinerant poet.

I had a delightful evening with a good friend, Ben, who was a stalwart and rakish companion during the whole ordeal. Our loyalties extend back to the University of York Poetry Society. After this award’s ceremony, we broke into the University of Wolverhampton and were lovingly harassed (or moved, by the Holy Spirit) to attend a Pentecostal service. After I didn’t manage to reserve a spot in the open mic, later, we watched it, largely out of earshot. Then we duetted lots of karaoke, unfortunately not managing to perfect the work of any Black Country karaoke stars.

Signet Classics. Front cover missing, found in Tesco’s in Sowerby Bridge. Rating: swollen gladius.

Scott’s Ivanhoe is supposed to be a revolutionary work of liberalism and empathy. John Henry Raleigh alleges that it is one of the first works to challenge the pantomime depiction of the Wandering Jew in English Literature, challenging the “simplistic portrait” that was afforded to Jews. Yet, when I subject myself to this battered, historical copy – feeling like Beaumanoir, the ascetic and austere Knights Templar Grand Master of the novel – I begin to understand how farcical it is, and how idiotic a literary culture must have been to venerate it as something radiating with compassion. When I began reading it – feeling like the Crusaders, loyal to Richard I, who are an endless force throughout the novel – I find one defence for it: at least Scott has done his research. Yet I later discover that, despite getting his hands on something called the Wardour Manuscript, and faithfully reading it on our behalf, he hasn’t, really. It is a novel about the twelfth century, yet you have lots of talk about friars and St. Francis. St. Francis didn’t start preaching and loitering around Italy until well after the events of the novel have occurred, in the thirteenth century, not to mention the time lag between St. Francis’ ideas coming to Italy. I knew that, but a simple search reveals countless other historial accuracies, which aren’t exactly like the kind of trivialities you find about modern films on an IMDB page. It isn’t just people having the wrong swords, it is that the kind of tournaments that he depicts post-date the events that are supposed to be occurring in the novel by about 200 years. Then there’s the improbability of the fact that the Knights Templar were about to burn Rebecca, a Jewish cabbalistic sorcerer and fitty, at the stake, before she was saved by the unproblematically heroic Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the hero of the novel. This would never have happened in the twelfth century, in which witches were simply not burned, and would not have happened until the mid-thirteenth century.

Surely if Scott had done minimal research he ought to have known that? Yet maybe we’re just laughing at Scott’s futile attempt to depict history from our quaint digital vantage point, and we should rejoice instead in the entertainment and rich dialogue of the novel. I am not really entertained by battles, especially when I know the Normans, despite their number and arrogance, are going to lose, just this once. (A huge theme of the novel is the supremacy of the Saxons as the indigenous English, although they are a little hard-headed and arrogant. Even Richard the Lionheart is traced in terms of Saxon genealogy, who was presumably very ‘Norman’.) Nor am I entertained by the dialogue. The characters all speak in this sort of hyper-racialised way, as if they are only aware of their own culture and the relevant cultural reference points, despite living in the same country and so presumably having to interact with each other a fair bit. One exception to this might be Rebecca, the Jewish lass who knows Latin and is one of the first non-anti-semitic portrayals of a Jew in English Literature, although I am sickened by the way that this point has to be made by Normans and Saxons alike finding her fit. At the end she finds Rowena (who Ivanhoe marries, despite being brought back to live by Rowena and continuing to find her fit until his dying days), and announces her departure. This is fortuitous because Ivanhoe can stop fantasising about her and get to the serious business of having a fiery Saxon wife (although it’s probably too unfair to Scott to expect him to put something as radical as intermarriage in a novel for the early-nineteenth century reading public.) Yet even Rebecca is effectively a synecdoche for the Jewish people, deprived callously of her own individual consciousness. Her speech includes the phrase, “Not in a land of war and blood, surrounded by internal factions, can Israel hope to find rest during her wanderings.”

This is just to mention the most thoroughly amazing character in the novel. There is a totally ridiculous incident – which Scott acknowledges is ridiculous and defends by saying that he was simply asked to put it in – in which the pure-blood Saxon Athelstane is resurrected at the end of the novel. He was clearly killed earlier in the novel in a battle when Our Lovely Saxon Heroes attack Torquilstone, the Norman fortification in which the Saxons have been wantonly held captive by these pantomime Frenchies. Yet he appears – alive! – in this ludicruous and fatuous deus ex machina moment in which Richard I returns to England and Richard, Ivanhoe and Cedric (Cedric became an English name because Scott misspelled the older ‘Cerdic’) all meet in the Castle of Coningsburgh, a Saxon fortification. What follows is the usual ahistorical Saxon babble: “It is certain that Zernebok hath possessed himself of my castle in my absence.” Zernebock is an evil Slavic deity, which no Christianised twelfth-century Saxon nobleman is really going to invoke. But that’s the point: Scott carefully twists and manipulates the dialogue of every character as if their whole animus is bound up in their connection to their racial identity, even in a way that is totally anachronistic. He seems to have no gift, whatsoever, for emotion, psychology or anything else that we might selfishly expect from characters.

All of this is a shame because I wanted to like Scott, and I’m earnestly sad that nobody bothers to read him any more. Yet his crimes extend beyond this: Scott even makes Robin Hood into a Saxon nobleman, despite the fact that part of Robin Hood’s charm is that he is a yeoman (the class above a peasant; basically, an ordinary bloke.) So how can we work up a defence of Scott? Perhaps the only way is to say that historical authenticity is impossible, and so undesirable, and Scott has at least had a good go. Yet I cannot help but think of Scott as the perpetrator of the modern period drama. There is a great quote from Joyce (who was apparently influenced by Ivanhoe, John Henry Raleigh arguing that Blazes Boylan is based on the lusty Knights Templar, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert) in which he says something like, “The past for some is just what hat you happen to wear”. I don’t remember the quote. I think we can thank Scott for the idea that historical dramas should be quaint little dramas in which people talk in a nice, old-world way and wear certain clothes. Of course people in the past don’t stutter, defecate, have thoughts and individuality, or even exist beyond their race. Yet, please, read Scott; you might learn something that you can at least take the pleasure in unlearning.

The reason Iain Sinclair chose the M25 as the motorway of choice to walk around in London Orbital is because it encompasses the sacred orbit of London. John Clare was exiled there, and the refuse of the city ends up circulating vertiginously around it. Sinclair’s psychogeographical project has led him to the gradual realisation that the whole city is dictated by invisible patterns of sacred geometry.

The M60 is the only actually orbital motorway in the UK. Like a planetary ring, it whirrs constantly around Manchester. As I begin my journey along its sacred orbit, I walk along Oldham Street, past the Chinese Arch, then endless developments, and a single hotel, The Sheridan. I walk past voluminous, unreadably discarded lager cans, which are more florid than dandelion leaves, and Central Park, a police station cosmeticised by its modernism.

I reach an abandoned church, which I decide to tour; the only point of entry is a door earmarked ‘toilet’. Instead of a toilet, flanked in stone are mysterious construction implements and plaster, an unfinished conversion into a bar or a nightclub. More probably, earmarked for demolition, but nobody can conjure the money to actually demolish it.

After a man informs me he’s had a call, I politely continue. There is an abandoned pub – The Weavers Arms – which taunts you with the allure of its preserved 80sness. I walk along Broadway, past the blackbird clarions and bogs of Moston Brook.

As I walk along Hollinwood Avenue, I begin to walk adjacent to the motorway. The sound of cars accelerates around my eardrums, and all I can smell is gasoline. The concrete is lined with bracken and birches. I remember I am on a prayer retreat and am supposed to do a contemplative prayer exercise now, so I perch beside a concrete pillar like a stylite. It is Ignatian visualisation. I begin but every sound is stolen by the parries of vans and lorries, and the Gospel is stolen by the morbid circularity:

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdom of the world, and the glory of them

All I can hear is some quality in the rhythm of my motorway-voice. I am on somewhat of a hill at the moment so I begin to imagine Jesus’ whole ministry conducted thus. I imagine Jesus being tried and crucified on the M60, drivers unable to look at him.

I navigate a truly tree-infested path, which I ought to have had a scimitar to clear. I am surprised to find old-fashioned paths, which have lost their necessity. I discover beautiful landscapes that will be mostly unexplored: moss upon concrete where forests must have been cleared. I see a dead finch, and become habituated to the thrum of the motorway. I think of plans to build motorway burial corridors and reflect that these would be a charming spot for them; the dead buried under uncleared glades and will-o-the-wisp dells. Clerics would be unable to hear the prayers they made for the dead, but would be attentive only to the rhythms.

I reach Hollinwood. I take a quick tour of the locality. It strikes me as a fairly deprived place. The Hollinwood Branch Canal was scrapped and the town has been struggling ever since. The complete fall of Oldham – the great luminary of the Industrial Revolution – does not help matters, and I assume that many Hollinwooders commute to Manchester for work. Oldham was nothing before the Industrial Revolution, and is now nothing again: a cycle. Unemployment and deprivation in Hollinwood is one of the highest in the UK, with 15% of Hollinwood claiming unemployment benefits in 2019.

I find that Hollinwood has an extremely quiet section, with mock-Tudor houses and a beautiful cemetery. I listen to the birdsong, my lungs and ears gradually recovering from the unfortunate shock-treatment.

לַמְנַצֵּחַ, מַשְׂכִּיל לִבְנֵי-קֹרַח.

כְּאַיָּל, תַּעֲרֹג עַל-אֲפִיקֵי-מָיִם– כֵּן נַפְשִׁי תַעֲרֹג אֵלֶיךָ אֱלֹהִים.

(For the leader, Maschil of the sons of Korah.) “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” – King James Bible.

The original Psalm is replete with ideas of breath, comparing men to plants and their souls to breathing essences. The King James Bible is translated as if the translators are looking forward to their next opportunity to hunt, or at least translating it in those terms so that it could be understood. I learn that the original ‘אַיָּל’ (ah-yawl) is a male deer – a ‘stag’ – and nothing as specific as a ‘hart’. A hart is a mature, male deer which was coveted by hunters, a term adapted from the Chase. It is a nice image, yet actually more specific than the original goes, almost as if the KJV translators are trying to inflate the image for some reason. Perhaps because the Psalms are supposed to be from King David – who could aptly be compared to a ‘hart’ – or perhaps because the recitation of the Psalms in Jacobean England is simply an old man’s game. Although it makes us blessed that, unlike now, the Jacobeans were sufficiently attentive to the natural world that they bothered to distinguish between different kinds of deer. Now, most translations render it as ‘deer’, which is a little more unspecific than it’s supposed to be.

Why are we supposed to imagine a ‘stag’ in the original, and why do most translators render this as ‘deer’? It might be that we are supposed to be imagining some essentially strong creature, yet one who pines for simple, innocent comforts like drinking water. It makes us curious about the recitation of Hebrew psalms, which I suppose remains shrouded in mystery. Yet such recitation must have been more grounded in ideas about the human situation within the living natural world and ecosystem, and a less clear theory of how one is separated from animals. This is evidenced by the fact that the Hebrew world for ‘soul’  – נַפְשִׁ  (nah-fesh) – merely means ‘that which breathes’. I am led into an insatiable curiosity about what the natural world was really like when the Psalms were composed and recited, which no film will ever satisfy.

“Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself overwise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?”

I learn that all of these translations are based on the difficulty that English does not have a verb ‘to be wise’, a static verb (tit-hak-kam, תִּתְחַכַּ֖ם), in the original Hebrew that must have allowed a lot of very arrogant and assured phrases. “I wise”, “he wises”, “he was wising”. I think that it should be translated “don’t overwise yourself”, which makes enough sense in English to sound like a sufficiently weighted admonition you might yell at your uncle during a particularly heated argument.

I like the fact that, in this verse, Qoheleth negates ‘be wise’ and admonishes too much wisdom, in a piece of wisdom literature. There’s a great contradiction to this and it encompasses its paradox as a “Christian” text. This is the same Christ who was extremely righteous (sad-diq, צַדִּיק֙) and extremely wise, so much so that he famously effectively destroyed himself. Yet clearly the text has been chosen by centuries of scholars of all theological persuasions as fitting for the Christian canon. Maybe the text doesn’t refer to something as extreme as “destroying yourself” (תִּשּׁוֹמֵֽם, tis-so-w-mem) as “disorientating” yourself, “confusing” yourself? Apparently the original verb can mean “grow numb”: perhaps Qoheleth is referring to the sort of feeling you get from trying to milk your tired little human brain of all possible wisdom before sundown. Also, perhaps the Messiah – Christian or non-Christian – is exempt from anything that wisdom literature has to offer. Regardless, there’s a great apophatic beauty to Ecclesiastes, and I am left thirsty to actually learn Hebrew, although not too much that I feel like I’ve snorted bucketfuls of wisdom cocaine. I read about how Qoheleth is the only Hebrew Bible figure to literally address his heart, as if he’s given up on pathetic human beings and their inability to listen and turns to his own body instead.

‘The Fifth Estate’ by Robert Taylor. Published in 1978. Recovered from a Tesco book exchange in Sowerby Bridge. Rating: Radula

There is something oddly pornographic about reading late-1970s economic treatises in 2020. In this lusty little tome, Taylor expresses a vision for Britain as an “industrial democracy”. This vision – which, in the time of Brexit, Johnson, blah blah blah, etc., seems almost like the Kingdom of Heaven – is helped rather than hindered by the statistics. Taylor’s juicy oeuvre was published when the proportion of the unionised workforce had increased from 44% to 52%. Not only this, the amount of people in the National Union of Bank Employees increased by 78%. ‘Union penetration’ in sectors like banking and administration was increasing sharply.  Despite Taylor knowing full well that unions had often been used as a ‘scapegoat’, he was still somewhat optimistic that unions could continue to decentralise and to collective bargain.

Only 11.6% of people aged 20-24 are in a union. In the drug-haze of modern capitalism – which has penetrated us more deeply than any union ever could – perhaps our own relief is to be found in a wildly different set of economic assumptions. It is a matter of psychology. ‘The Fifth Estate’ is filled with union leaders of the past and curious snippets of their personal histories. These include Moss Evans, former Secretary of the now-defunct TGWU, who would drink three pints of real ale on a Sunday morning and who had not had a full cup of tea until far late into his adulthood. Let us devour these strange histories, as well as Taylor’s treatment of the TUC in almost-Gothic terms as a “mighty influence in the land”, now that unions have been mass (herd?) scape-goated to Oblivion.

There are two ways of denying that human beings are having an irrevocable effect on the global climate through the massive damage they are inflicting upon the ecosystem. The first one usually tends to defer to science and experts. This is becoming so extinct in the genuine scientific community that it is usually the preserve of journalists and politicians who defer to fringe scientific understandings. James Delingpole goes in for this: he maintains that human beings have not had a huge impact on climate change, and he tends to quote scientists largely out of context in order to maintain this opinion. James Delingpole’s resistance to the idea of “global warming” is based on the misconception that the phenomenon in question is just some sort of generalised “warming”, and not a general array of negative weather patterns. The Professor Myles Allen he quotes is the author of many studies which show the ultimate impact of anthropogenic climate change on several extreme weather events in the world: for example, Myles Allen’s work shows that anthropogenic emissions like aerosol emissions doubled the probability of extreme rainfall events in North Bangladesh.  We hear constantly about the magnitude of the climate crisis, which is intimately tied up with the damage human beings have done to it according to scientists: one disaster is occurring every week, according to the UN.

So this strategy of deferring to climate scientists is increasingly flawed based on the fact that every climate scientist’s work shows the absolute pressing urgency with which we need to stop causing unavoidable damage to the Earth. Yet there is another strategy of denying man-made climate change: rage against the whole concept of experts, professionals and global establishment lizards. This is probably a position that makes slightly more sense, and there is definitely a frustrating cult of experts and professionals in 21st century society. We are invited to worship them and see them as more than figures of mere expertise in certain aspects of quantitative data. An endless set of regulations forbid us from natural human activities like science – our lives are defined by the stronghold of institutions, which largely perpetuate their existence rather than improving society. The rage against the cult of the expert has obviously fuelled the rise of Donald Trump, and is fuelling the rise of leaders around the whole world.

Yet raging against the cult of experts and relying on your intuition still leads you firmly to the opinion that something like “man-made climate change” (perhaps not in those words) is happening, although you might not call it that. The work of Ivan Illych helps us with this. In Tools for Conviviality, Illych protests against experts, who safeguard their role as “experts” simply because they are part of an institution and have access to financial resources and pay-walled academic papers. Illych rages against a society ruled by the diktats and priorities of experts. “People get better education, better health, better transportation, better entertainment, and often even better nourishment only if the experts’ goals are taken as the measurement of what ’better’ means.” ‘Education’ , ‘health’, ‘transport’ etc. have become merely institutions gifts bequeathed unto us by a benevolent society. One if Illych’s points is that we are told when we are ‘sick’ – we are not allowed to decide for ourselves what our illness might be. For Illych, everything connected to describing and facilitating human experience has become mass-produced. This has something connected to the modern rebellion of what Anne Widdecombe calls the “ignored majority”.

Yet Illych is also firm that modern forms of transportation, like the car, are clearly divorced from the ecosystem as well as being out of fit with connected and integrated communities. And Illych is plain that it is painfully obvious from intuition and without adherence to scientific professionals that we have messed up the Earth. We can tell from the air quality, or the unnatural speed of motorways. For Illych, “The degradation of the environment is dramatic and highly visible.” Nor is the environmental crisis, for Illych, something that will be solved by purely scientific and investment goals. For Illych, the crisis was started by a kind of belief in the power of institutions and speed to create a better form of humanity. In fact, for Illych, “developed” countries are backward: they create a world in which events like birth and death are screened off from you. “Only the very rich in the United States can now afford what all people in poor countries have: personal attention around the deathbed.” Illych’s thought beautifully complicates the modern “debate” about climate change because it is convicted towards creating a slower, more human and less technologically-dependent society, though maintaining the right wing’s beloved skepticism about people in authority who delight in confusing. Yet it answers them by different means: instead of carry on as we are, perhaps rediscover who we were. Then we can answer how we might solve many of the geopolitical problems which will plague us to an unprecedented degree.

(Édité et corrigé par Adeline Rivard. Merci mille fois)

“L’Europe après la pluie” par Max Ernst (1940)

Est-il vraiment possible de comprendre ou reproduire le surréalisme de notre point de vue au vingt-et-unième siècle? Définitivement en Angleterre le surréalisme est, de nos jours, simplement un synonyme d’étrange, mais on ne peut pas oublier qu’au début était une philosophie sérieuse. En fait, les poètes surréalistes avaient plus confiance en leur philosophie que par exemple les symbolistes. Ils avaient tendance à s’identifier au terme “surréalisme” et d’autre part, le terme “symbolisme” et le manifeste qui a constaté sa philosophie a été publié après l’apparition de l’œuvre principale des poètes symbolistes, par exemple ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ de Charles Baudelaire, etc. Mais André Breton, le théoricien du surréalisme (une tâche difficile, comment théoriser l’inthéorisable?) a constaté plusieurs fois le dogme du surréalisme.

La fondation du surréalisme n’est pas si difficile à réimaginer. Après la Première Guerre Mondiale et sa fête galante du mort inimaginable, on ne pouvait pas retourner à”l’Iliade”, “la Chanson de Roland” ou même “le Bateau Ivre”. Plusieurs qui ont survécu à sa brutalité massive et ses litanies de fièvre et d’horreur corporelle ont trouvé une nouvelle réalité où toutes les associations esthétiques ne fonctionnaient plus. André Breton en était le partisan. Un de ses essais au Point du Jour constate que le mot “donc” n’est plus possible. De plus, le mot “comme” est plus important, mais le surréalisme ayant supprimé le mot “comme”, il n’y a plus besoin d’un mot qui lie sans cesse des associations. Cependant, la Première Guerre Mondiale est à l’origine de toutes ces remarques. On peut voir cela en analysant le début de l’essai dans lequel apparaît les remarques citées: “Sans croire à la folie, j’ai connu pendant la guerre un fou qui ne croyait pas à la guerre. D’après lui, les pretendes hostilités n’etaient, à une échelle très vaste, que l’image d’un tourment à lui infligé, encore qu’il ne sût dire à quelles fins (mais nous étions beaucoup dans le même cas.) ” Breton affirme que, puisque la réalité est un rêve, la poésie devrait l’être également. Selon Breton, “pour ma part, je ne refuse à y voir autre chose que l’expression d’une idée transitionelle, d’ailleurs assez timide, et qui, en ce qui regarde les tentatives poétiques et picturales d’aujourd’hui, ne rend plus compte de rien.” La guerre a encouragé ce refus, et une pensée libérée malgré elle doit devenir plus onirique et plus attentive aux racines ou aux essences d’un objet plutôt qu’à ses résonances symboliques.

I leave this at your ear for when you wake

A creature in its abstract cage asleep

Your dreams blindfold you by the light they make

The owl called from the naked-woman tree

As I came down by the Kyle farm to hear

Your house silent by the speaking sea.

I have come late but I have come before

Later with slaked steps from stone to stone

To hope to find you listening for the door.

I stand in the ticking room. My dear, I take

A moth kiss from your breath. The shore gulls cry.

I leave this at your ear for when you wake.