Perhaps Mr. Plimpton's career was best summarized by a cartoon that once appeared in The New Yorker. In it, a patient looks at the surgeon preparing to operate on him and demands, "How do I know you're not George Plimpton?"

(The wonderful) George Plimpton, 18 March, 1927-25 September, 2003

At the moment I'm struggling with The Mask of the Beggar, the latest novel from the ever-inscrutable Wilson Harris. A dozen pages in, I'm ready to conclude that the book is almost literally unreadable, & banish it forever to a dark & dusty shelf. Fred D'Aguiar seems to have fared better.

The Museum of Lost Art is a low glass building set in parkland, a place you drive past on the motorway, barely registering it. Approach across the rape fields and what at first had seemed to be a greenhouse turns out to contain not tomatoes but paintings. Hanging low in pale daylight are vanished masterpieces by Rembrandt, Cézanne, Manet, Braque and Vermeer.

The museum extends deep underground. Inside, Bill Gates, Charles Saatchi and Osama bin Laden sip champagne at a very, very private view. In the cafe, the salt-cellar is a stolen work by Cellini, and in the bookshop, Thomas Pynchon signs copies of the catalogue which he has written. Everything in the Museum of Lost Art is invaluable and everything is illegal. There are even masterpieces the world believes to have been lost in floods and fires. As you wander through, paintings take on the appeal of something wrong and sinful. It is my favourite museum.

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. What I described in Another Life--about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened--is a frequent experience in a younger writer. I felt this sweetness of melancholy, of a sense of mortality, or rather of immortality, a sense of gratitude both for what you feel is a gift and for the beauty of the earth, the beauty of life around us. When that's forceful in a young writer, it can make you cry. It's just clear tears; it's not grimacing or being contorted, it's just a flow that happens. The body feels it is melting into what it has seen. This continues in the poet. It may be repressed in some way, but I think we continue in all our lives to have that sense of melting, of the "I" not being important. That is the ecstasy. It doesn't happen as much when you get older. There's that wonderful passage in Traherne where he talks about seeing the children as moving jewels until they learn the dirty devices of the world. It's not that mystic. Ultimately, it's what Yeats says: "Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed." That's always there. It's a benediction, a transference. It's gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his nature. I've always felt that sense of gratitude.

-- Derek Walcott, interviewed by Edward Hirsch in the Winter 1986 Paris Review. An excerpt is currently available online at the Paris Review website.

The double heart of a secret fruit, / an "X" in the equation, / an open book

When Lord Kitchener lent his piercing eye, laser sight finger and dodgy moustache to First World War recruitment posters, he probably didn't imagine that several decades later a Calypso singer from Trinidad would borrow his name. And put a sassy spin on the relationship between the Empire and its "exotic" children.

Kitch sang "London is the Place for Me" back in 1948, the year the Windrush brought 492 Caribbean immigrants to Britain, yet the tune made "mas" on the capital's more discerning radios in 2002. It was featured on a compilation released by Honest Jon's, the premier record shop in Portobello Road, a jewel of the capital's alluring yet thorny crown of multi-culturalism. The song's lifespan is roughly in parallel to the ascension of the Notting Hill carnival.

The point is that London has the Caribbean, Africa and Asia fluttering in its subconscious as well as nestling in the marrow of its bones. The sons and daughters of Britain's former colonies have a long and complex history of economic, political and artistic engagement with the capital. They have given it as much as it has given them.

-- From Kevin Le Gendre's review of Sukhdev Sandhu's London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, published in last Sunday's Independent.

One of the very finest writers about London, regardless of colour, was Trinidad-born Samuel Selvon (1923-94). His novel The Lonely Londoners was published in 1956 ... set in a city still struggling to get back on its feet after the war. Joy itself seems rationed. The capital is blinded by peasoupers, and reeks of pigeon feed, paraffin fumes, week-old hair oil, drip-drying workers' overalls. There are sweatshops, immigrant hovels, junk-littered yards behind railway lines. Ex-servicemen wander the streets confused.

Selvon goes on to introduce us to some of those West Indians who, invited to rubble-strewn London to help the capital build itself up again, were all too often regarded as if they were part of that dereliction, the problem rather than the solution. There's Sir Galahad, the dandy loverman; Cap, a green-stripe-suited Nigerian, who spends his days hustling and his nights chatting up foreign students; Big City, a bluff self-promoter, who's always making up tall tales about the fancy toffs he's been consorting with in Mayfair and Belgravia. They're rogues, chancers, colonial wide boys. And we love them.

Selvon writes a kind of pavement poetry. He shows us the city from the point of view of those blowing into their palms on their way to an early shift, or tramping up to the dole office, or having just done a runner from a hostel when they can't pay the rent. It's through their eyes that we gaze at pretty secretaries leaving their offices on summer evenings, at the friezes hanging from the cornices of aged buildings, at the sheer pandemonium of the metropolis.

This is not the sad sociology of old Pathé newsreels or Picture Post stories about the "colour problem". For sure, we're shown young men, wrapped in overcoats beneath their thin blankets, staring forlornly out of the grubby windows of their Notting Hill Gate basements in winter. But just as often we see them loping up the Bayswater Road, coasting up to Marble Arch where they bump into their "spars" who are also on their way to cruise for girls round Hyde Park, lapping up the noise and smell of late-night Leicester Square. All of this in a style that is slangy, vulgar, sing-song, tender.

-- Sukhdev Sandhu, author of London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, in an essay called "Love Letters to London", published a couple weeks ago in the Telegraph.

The stars reconciled & remitted: / there should have been no world not blue for you

Naipaul's new collection of essays appears like a last wrap-up of the 2001 Nobel ceremony, a pastiche of previously published work: old prologues, forewords and book reviews to package with his Nobel lecture, "Two Worlds."

... The new book is really a critique of Naipaul by Naipaul, so perspective is limited and redundancy is guaranteed. He presents his writing life as a sort of international case study, emblematic of all who embody the enigmas of a cultural migrant. But Naipaul remains the stubborn representative of one.

-- From Lois Wolfe's review of Literary Occasions, the "new" Naipaul, in last Sunday's Miami Herald. There's also a review by Terry Eagleton in the September Harper's--not available online, but nicely digested over at the Literary Saloon.

Letter of the week

From today's Stabroek News (not a permalink):

Dear Editor,

At the age of 15 I began to express my views in the letter columns of the dailies in Guyana.

Soon, I began to submit poems and stories. I have enjoyed publication in the Guyana Graphic, Sugar News, Gleaner of Jamaica, Caribbean Contact, Mirror, Stabroek News and others.

I have restricted for years now my letters to the Stabroek News because I believe it is the only Guyanese newspaper that does not present a partisan outlook. I feel that Stabroek News attempts to be fair to itself and its readers. I am comfortable with it.

I am most impressed by its refusal to lower its standard to accommodate base language and ridiculous sexual jokes.

The time, Sir, has come for me to tell your letter column an eternal goodbye.

In alignment with my destruction of all my writings in my possession, I have decided to cease submitting letters to editors for the rest of my life.

I wish Stabroek News the best!

Yours faithfully,
Krishna Nand Prasad

Reporters sans frontieres has been working hard to make sure the world does not forget the 26 journalists arrested in Cuba last March & subsequently sentenced to long prison terms (between 14 & 27 years), for the "crime" of speaking freely & doing their jobs as journalists--reporting the facts of life under Castro's rule. The RSF website includes a special Cuba section, containing information on the 26 imprisoned journalists; an online petition calling for their release; & a page where you can download PDF versions of the two underground publications, De Cuba & Luz Cubana, with which many of these writers were associated.

The 2003 Man Booker Prize longlist has been announced; among the nearly two dozen novels is Caryl Phillips's latest, A Distant Shore.

The cartoon in today's Express takes on the MSBlast worm that's been slaying PCs left, right & centre around the world the last day or two. It depicts a terrified little computer fleeing a vicious serpent-like creature, calling for help from "pest control". But the unfortunate machine, as drawn by the cartoonist, is clearly meant to be either an eMac or one of the original iMacs--that shape is utterly distinctive. Yet MSBlast only affects Wintel PCs, of course. Simple ignorance--or part of a sinister anti-Mac campaign on the part of the Express?

A young CLR James sailed to London from Trinidad in 1932, and wrote nine essays recording his responses for the Port of Spain Gazette. You could hardly imagine anything more ephemeral, more tied to its place and time, less likely to achieve the reaction "blimey, this could have been written yesterday". And on the surface it is very much of its time. The prose may have been written by an intellectual, but it is simple to the point of artlessness. It describes the present and is not primarily given to making timeless statements that will ring down the ages. It is as concerned as a photograph with what is going on. James's task is to be a meticulous observer. Yet this is what makes the book seem, by the end, strikingly contemporary.

-- Nicholas Lezard, reviewing C.L.R. James's Letters from London ("my" book!) in today's Guardian Review.

Possibly because she got to me so young, her effect is rather out of proportion with what any movie star should mean to anyone, but I am immensely grateful for it. The kind of woman she played, the kind of woman she was, is still the kind of woman I should like to be, and an incidental line of hers, from the aforementioned The Philadelphia Story, remains my lodestar every time I pick up a pen to write anything all: "The time to make your mind up about people is never!" This line was written by Donald Ogden Stewart, but in its utterly humanist commitment to the peculiarity and beauty of individuals, it was 100% Hepburn.

-- From Zadie Smith's moving tribute to the late Katherine Hepburn, in today's UK Guardian.

First up was Mel Cooke, a Jamaican journalist and poet with a booming voice and a bone to pick with Jamaican violence and American politics. One poem rhymed "rub-a-dub" with "blood," and another called the president of the United States a "son of a Bush." The young poets who followed him were mostly obsessed with sex, with much ado about flesh-slapping, the divine B-O-D-Y and wombs "stuffed like cumulonimbus."

Then Adziko Simba, a British-born poet living in Jamaica, performed her poem "Crazi Ladi Daze." With long arms waving and bare feet moving up and down as if on hot coals, she had a poetic breakdown, a long, agonized "Ahhh!" and then confessed breathlessly: "Sometimes I have a need, a need to have a crazi ladi day ... And suck thumb and suck thumb and rock and suck thumb rock and suck thumb ... and scream ... I need a day." She was a knockout.

Colin Channer's Calabash Literary Festival made the NY Times yesterday. Of course the Jamaican newspapers covered the event extensively for weeks--see Mervyn Morris's summary in last Thursday's Observer here.

What I'd really like to know is why Walcott pulled out at the last minute. Anyone have the inside story?

Meanwhile, over in Baghdad:

Ya Allah have mercy on our souls. The old state owned Internet center in Adil district has been taken over by anarchists and they are offering internet access for FREE. You just need to dial up a number, no password, no special settings. Whoever heard of anyone doing that?

Assuming each monkey typed a steady 120 characters a minute, mathematicians have calculated it would take 10 <+>813 (10 followed by 813 zeros) monkeys about five years to knock out a decent version of Shakespeare's Sonnet 3, which begins: "Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest, Now is the time that face should form another." And that's if they had a computer each.

--From a story in today's U.K. Guardian about a team of scientists who recently attempted to test the "infinite number of monkeys" theory.

Salam Pax is back.

At Algeciras--A Meditation upon Death

The heron-billed pale cattle-birds
That feed on some foul parasite
Of the Moroccan flocks and herds
Cross the narrow Straits to light
In the rich midnight of the garden trees
Till the dawn break upon those mingled seas.

Often at evening when a boy
Would I carry to a friend--
Hoping more substantial joy
Did an older mind commend--
Not such as are in Newton’s metaphor,
But actual shells of Rosses’ level shore.

Greater glory in the sun,
An evening chill upon the air,
Bid imagination run
Much on the Great Questioner;
What He can question, what if questioned I
Can with a fitting confidence reply.

November 1928

--W.B. Yeats