I've mentioned Elizabeth Bishop before, on Pondblog. Wrote stunning poetry. She developed, in her life, a plainness of speaking which allowed the poetry of ordinary things to grip our attention in a way we knew as children, but forgot in the tumult of becoming adults. My friend Don points out that David Orr, who writes about poetry for the New York Times Book Review is today reviewing a collection of Bishop's unpublished work called, for reasons he doesn't seem curious about, Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box. (He says, and I'm sure he means to be kind, that this book "isn't just a significant event in our poetry; it's part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life," whatever the hell that means.)

In passing, he mentions the first line of one of her poems, I caught a tremendous fish. It happens to be a favourite of mine. You can read the whole thing at this site, and believe me, it is worth reading. It is a good example of how that plain language of hers lets something elusive free:

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight...

I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
- It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.

Andrew Motion is Britain's poet laureate, and the author of, among other things, a good biography of Philip Larkin. In the Guardian this morning, he shows that he can be a pretty perceptive critic as well.

He's reviewing Seamus Heaney's latest book, District and Circle, which is a reference to...but, you'll figure it out. He says it is "the single most impressive poem in the book, chillingly in sympathy with modern anxieties, and widening from particular circumstances to include themes of belonging, placement and responsibility. This is typical Heaney, in that it squares up to 'now' but - like Anything Can Happen - also poses broad questions about fulfilment or its opposite. It creates a world which is compellingly actual (A crowd half straggle-revelled and half strung / Like a human chain, the pushy newcomers / Jostling and purling underneath the vault), but ends in a condition which is almost if not actually visionary. Yeats might well have taken this as the cue for vatic declarations or the rhetoric of defiance; Heaney flies lower in the atmosphere but travels as far:

And so by night and day to be transported
Through galleried earth with them, the only relict
Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward,
Reflecting in a window mirror-backed
By blasted weeping rock-walls.
Flicker-lit.

"Heaney has often written about literature's ability to work a 'salubrious' effect on its readers. It's a profoundly decent and humane idea, which can seem quaint in a quizzical and sarcastic age. Salubrious, how? After all, politicians (and terrorists) don't pay much attention to poems, and no responsible person wants to claim that writing is a reliably effective sticking-plaster. But Heaney doesn't mean to suggest a clear and easy relationship between cause and effect. He means (among other things) that literature has the chance to comprehend the self, and on the basis of that understanding to create an exemplary wisdom. This is the journey that he describes in District and Circle: in the Dante-esque labyrinth of the Underground, it tracks the journey of an alert and nervous individual, as he tries to define what is durable and true about his loyalties. It is a poem about faith, which never uses the word."

Well, I reported yesterday that Canadian Conservative MP Colin Mayes had managed to stick his foot in his mouth, so I suppose I ought to report today that he seems to have returned to his senses. The Globe and Mail says: "Mr. Mayes adds that he fully respects the freedom of the press and regrets making the earlier comments."

Claudia Rosett, who seems to have been absent from the scene for most of this young year, re-appears with an interview of Benon Sevan, in hiding, in the Wall Street Journal. She says she had to agree not to ask him any on-the-record questions about Oil-for-Food in order to see him, and the result is pretty thin, but...

"It is a strange limbo in which Mr. Sevan now lives, apparently alone and with a lot of time on his hands. Just three years ago, he was running a multibillion-dollar U.N. operation in Iraq, and together with his wife, Micheline Sevan (who also worked at the UN), was renting a midtown Manhattan apartment for $4,370 per month, owned a house in the Hamptons, and was jetting around the world on UN business. Today, if Mr. Sevan wishes to remain out of reach of various criminal investigations spawned by Oil for Food, he is basically confined to self-imposed exile on Cyprus.

"Mr. Sevan denies this, saying, 'I am not running away. I always planned to come back here.' But it's hard to believe this is the manner of return he had in mind. His apartment is comfortable but not plush. There are several rooms and two balconies, but the interior is an odd mix of slightly shabby furniture inherited from his aunt and exotic souvenirs of his 40-year UN career."

When a journalist like Rosett goes to the trouble of mentioning that she agreed not to ask on-the-record questions about something, she's saying she did ask off-the-record questions. She was with him for two-and-a-half hours. This interview might have taken her half an hour. So we can look forward, I think, to the results of a couple of hours of off-the-record conversation about oil-for-food popping up in future pieces by Miss Rosett.

Now the tale can be told. Winston Churchill planned to come to Bermuda in 1952 with HM Queen during her state visit, but cancelled at the last minute. The reason, apparently, was that he had suffered a heart attack. The Scotsman says: "The delicate health of wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill was revealed yesterday in documents that showed he suffered a heart attack in 1952, during his second term of office.

"Three months after the death of Queen Mary and just over three weeks after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Churchill had been due to leave for a state visit to Bermuda. But on 23 June, 1952, he took ill following a dinner party and despite managing to attend some small-scale events and a cabinet meeting over the next two days, the Bermuda trip was cancelled and the prime minister ordered to take a month's bed rest by his doctors."

He did, however, manage to make it out to Bermuda the following year, in 1953 (for his second trip, the first having been in the middle of the war, in 1942).

Thanks for the tip, Brenda.

Here's a fine mind at work! The Globe and Mail says: "A backbench Conservative MP, blasting the media for its testy relationship with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has suggested reporters who write distorted articles be jailed.

"In a brief column sent to several newspapers in his Okanagan-Shuswap riding, Colin Mayes said that might help the public 'get accurate and true information.' Mr. Mayes seemed to suggesting in his column that the media be covered by something like the Conservative government's proposed Federal Accountability Act, which would prosecute elected officials and senior public servants who break the public trust."

I've been reading People's Daily online for a couple of years now. I've developed a great admiration for the way the Chinese people are emerging from rather a dark past to embrace the modern world with dignity and self-possession. Much of the behaviour the West doesn't understand can be put down to their efforts to avoid the sleaziness capitalism can generate, and to preserve the best of their old way of life. There are lots of slips and misses and darting up blind alleys, but how could it be otherwise? They do, though, have one or two real blind spots - like their hatred of Japan, for example.

This piece in the Times of London illustrates just how crazy it makes them: "This week, all over East Asia, cherry trees are putting forth their froth of distinctive white and pink flowers. Anti-Japanese activists in China, however, are calling for them to be uprooted because they symbolise Japan's brutal invasion of China in the 1930s. Almost a year after violent anti-Japanese demonstrations in cities across the country Chinese internet users are denouncing the cherries as 'sinful trees' and 'flowers of shame'. On one of China's leading websites, NetEase, contributors have been evenly divided in defending the trees and calling for their extermination."

Paul Vallely is an associate editor of the Independent in Britain, and an author in his own right. He has written a fine, engaging little pastiche to help his newspaper mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Beckett, Ireland's greatest writer. He strings together bits and pieces of found information that paint a portrait of a man whose complex personality has been under more microscopes than the amoeba, and manages insights that make it all sound as new as it did half a century ago. Vallely quotes Beckett, for example, as having developed, in the last years of his life, a distaste for writing, because "each word was 'an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness'." Clever piece...best thing I've read for a long time.

The Swiss banking giant, UBS, may have helped Iran develop its nuclear program, may have held an account for Al Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden, and could find itself investigated as part of Congress's ongoing inquiry into the United Nations oil-for-food scandal, The New York Sun reported yesterday."

"During an intense grilling on Capitol Hill, the bank was also accused of engaging in a pattern of resistance to congressional inquiries, as lawmakers cited years of non-cooperation with congressional probes into improper transactions between the bank and terrorist regimes."

The Island of Pitcairn seems to have had one foot in a fairytale since it was settled. The fact that the Brits have sent a New Zealand wealth-building expert in as commissioner, to help them repair a limping economy, doesn't in any way break the mold. The New Zealand Herald comments: "For years Pitcairn's primary source of revenue was from philately (stamp collecting) which enabled substantial surpluses to be built up. But that has declined progressively in the last decade partly because the internet has significantly reduced the number of letters being written and stamp collectors are a dying breed.

"'Pitcairn didn't see this coming, didn't adapt, didn't prepare, and its income was reduced by over 80 per cent in 10 years,' Mr Jaques said."

Interesting story, and I thank Brenda for pointing it out. Not sure about that business about stamp collectors being a dying breed, though...any takers?

Theodore Dalrymple swings his boot, in best old geezer style, at those youthful protestors in France. Writing in the London Times, he says: "The sight of millions of Frenchmen, predominantly young, demonstrating in deep sympathy and solidarity with themselves, is one that will cause amusement and satisfaction on the English side of the Channel. Everyone enjoys the troubles of his neighbours. And at least our public service strikers just stay away from work, and spend the day peacefully performing the rites of their religion, DIY, and not making a terrible nuisance of themselves. In fact, many of them are probably less of a public nuisance if they stay at home than if they go to work.

"Of course, demonstrating in huge numbers is what the French do from time to time. We should never forget that to break a shop window for the good of humanity is one of the greatest pleasures known to Man. Trying to topple governments by shouting insults is also great fun."

Instinct tell me that this LA Times story, about the fate of Rolling Stone in China, has something to do with what Dalrymple's fulminating about.

Michael Ledeen of the National Review provides a detailed mise en scene for the world's current difficulties with Iran, and concludes that "It's time to take action against Iran and its half-brother Syria, for the carnage they have unleashed against us and the Iraqis. We know in detail the location of terrorist training camps run by the Iranian and Syrian terror masters; we should strike at them, and at the bases run by Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards as staging points for terrorist sorties into Iraq. No doubt the Iraqi armed forces would be delighted to participate, instead of constantly playing defense in their own half of the battlefield. And there are potent democratic forces among the Syrian people as well, as worthy of our support as the Iranians.

"Once the mullahs and their terrorist allies see that we have understood the nature of this war, that we are determined to promote regime change in Tehran and Damascus, and will not give them a pass on their murderous activities in Iraq, then it might make sense to talk to Khamenei's representatives. We could even expand the agenda from Iraqi matters to the real issue: we could negotiate their departure, and then turn to the organization of national referenda on the form of free governments, and elections to empower the former victims of a murderous and fanatical tyranny that has deluded itself into believing that it is invincible."

The New Yorker's Financial Page (who knew?) is carrying a clever little piece about the future of the newspaper industry, which most people accept is pretty dim in this on-line age. "But McClatchy's gamble (in buying the Knight Ridder chain) depends on a simple, if often overlooked, fact: newspapers remain a surprisingly robust business and generate tremendous amounts of cash every year. Most of them have profit margins that dwarf those of the average company; McClatchy's operating margin last year was twenty-eight per cent, while ExxonMobil's was around sixteen per cent, and the typical supermarket's is around four per cent.

"The reach of newspapers remains huge. Daily circulation is around fifty-five million (not including online readers), giving the industry more customers than any other traditional media outlet. And those customers have the kind of demographics that advertisers like; even as circulation has dropped, revenue from print ads has stayed healthy, to the tune of more than forty-seven billion dollars last year. Newspapers are classic cash cows: solidly profitable businesses in a stagnant industry."

People's Daily is running something a little different, and worth looking at on a midweek morning. It's a photo feature about nine "mysterious and fascinating lakes in Tibet"...a description that doesn't catch how utterly beautiful they are. I was particularly taken with Lake Mapangyong, of which PD says: "Tibetan Buddhists hold that Lake Mapangyong, the holiest and purest lake on the earth is the sweet dew bestowed by Shengle Dazun. The holy water can purify human body and mind. It is said that the lake is the most ancient and the holiest palace in Buddhism and Hinduism. It is the perfect lake, a genuine heaven in the universe, a Shangri-la for all immortals and a Land of Ultimate Bliss."

It seems the little political crisis that threatened the ability of bloggers to criticise politicians on the internet is over. The Washington Times says: "The truth is that the FEC never wanted to touch the Internet to begin with, but was forced by a Clinton-appointed judge, who said the Internet was not exempt from the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform act. Her decision elicited harsh and deserved outrage from both the left and right wings of the blogosphere - two realms of society that rarely agree.

"The FEC responded with a 96-page proposal that 'recognizes the Internet as a unique and evolving mode of mass communication and political speech that is distinct from other media in a manner that warrants a restrained regulatory approach.' In layman's terms what this means is that bloggers and other online political sites are given the 'media exemption' that allows newspapers like this one to criticize politicians with no strings attached."

Three million people, it's claimed, were on the streets of France yesterday, protesting a new law that takes a tiny step towards freeing the country from the kind of state coddling of the population that, unchecked, will bankrupt it. The Independent says these might have been the largest protests for almost half a century. Under this new law, companies can hire people under the age of 26 for a two-year trial period. During that time, they can be fired without explanation (but with compensation).

The Independent says: "Student unions say that the law treats the young as a 'disposable' commodity. Unions complain that it drives a wedge in to decades of accumulated legal protections of employment. The law has also become a symbol of what many on the French left see - or like to see - as wicked, anti-social, 'ultra-capitalist' influences from the US and Britain."

If you want to read how they explain themselves, start with this piece in the Guardian, written by Agnes Catherine Poirier, a journalist on the French daily newspaper Liberation. If you find a shred of reason in this childish, contempt-ridden rant, please point it out for the less discerning.

But at least Ms Poirier's rant was conceived by someone with a little sophistication. MEMRI is running an interview conducted by telephone with Saddam Hussein in prison. It's a bit like an interview with the leader of a gang of street hoodlums.

Saddam Hussein: "I know that people who listen to me might think that Saddam Hussein has become apathetic in prison and stopped supporting terrorism. No. I'm not ashamed to tell you that Iraq without Saddam Hussein isn't worth two bits. Therefore, it will make me happy if Iraq turns into dust."

Interviewer: "This reminds me that in one of your speeches, you said that you would leave Iraq a country without a people."

Saddam Hussein: "What is the people worth without Saddam Hussein?! What is it worth? Iraq is entirely Saddam Hussein. 'Long live Iraq' means 'long live Saddam Hussein.' What is Iraq worth without Saddam Hussein?"

Interviewer: "You keep on with those slogans? You still cling to them..."

Saddam Hussein: "I was brought up on it. How do you want me to go back on this? Iraqis hear these things about me as soon as they come out of their mothers' wombs...I repeat: Iraq without Saddam Hussein isn't worth two bits. Therefore, it will make me happy if Iraq turns into ashes."

Here's a cautionary tale for Bermuda's Castro-mad government - The Nassau Guardian reports that the "...leader of the new Bahamian National Party, Dexter Johnson, said the Bahamas' relationship with the United States has been tarnished because the government has become too cosy with Cuba and Venezuela.

"Mr Johnson suggested that the US was giving the Bahamas the 'cold shoulder' regarding the setting up of a military base in Inagua because of the Bahamas' close ties with those countries which continue to express strong anti-American sentiments."

US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice thinks Americans are going to learn some "interesting and surprising" things from those captured Iraqi documents. The Weekly Standard says that in doing so, she's contradicting John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, who has been so furiously downplaying their importance that he apparently had to be ordered to release them by his boss.

Even the New York Times seems at last to have learned about the documents, although the Grey Lady is billing them as some kind of game for armchair detectives.

The Standard says "Rice also addressed revelations, important but not surprising, that former Russian ambassador to Iraq, Vladimir Teterenko, passed the US war plan to Iraq shortly before the war began. The charges, based largely on two Iraqi documents captured in postwar Iraq, came in a report issued by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, and released by the Pentagon late last week. Rice said she is not in a position to confirm or deny the claims but vowed to take 'a hard look at the reports' of Russian betrayal. The revelations about the Russians will be the subject of discussions this week between Bush administration officials and their Russian counterparts."

Meantime, National Review writer Michael Ledeen (the Standard owns this story, so the Review is playing catch-up) contacted famed CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton on his souped-up, broadband ouija board. He asked Angleton what he thought of the story about the Russians passing information to Saddam. "Well, how did they get that information," he snapped. "It seems whenever we go to war in the Middle East one of our allies is passing on our military secrets to our enemy. Remember how the French were giving information to Saddam during the first Gulf War? That stuff seems to have come out of NATO. This stuff seems to have come out of Centcom. I mean, why don't the Joint Chiefs just publish it and save the foreign spies the time and trouble?"

Gary Giddins, probably the best jazz critic in the US, writes a column about music in the New York Sun. Today, he's enthusiastic about a newly-released DVD collection of Busby Berkeley films, the choreographer whose kaleidoscopic arrangements caused more jaws to drop in an hour than Mae West managed in a lifetime. Giddins says "Warner Brothers DVDs are justly renowned for treating studio archives with the care that Criterion puts into its international collection of classic films. The Busby Berkeley Collection is exceptional, even so: cause for spelunkers of obscure popular cultural to cheer. It includes smashing prints of 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade, Dames, Gold Diggers of 1935, and a 21-number anthology, originally prepared for laser disc, which isolates celebrated numbers and adds excerpts from four other 1930s Berkeley pictures, including Wonder Bar - though not the infamous blackface fantasy, Goin' to Heaven on a Mule, which is now considered too insensitive even for history. But that's just the main course."

London's Mayor Ken Livingstone, darling of the British left, likened the US Ambassador to Britain yesterday to a "chiselling little crook". The Guardian doesn't mention it, but some in Britain are wondering if Livingstone and George Galloway might not be in some kind of struggle to see who wins the Silly Asshole of the Year Award.

What set the mayor off was the US embassy's insistence that its diplomatic staff should not pay London's congestion charge because it is a tax. Embassies are exempt from all local tax under the 1961 Vienna convention.

For me, this morning, pulling stuff in off the Internet is about as easy as sucking molasses through a long straw. This time, I don't think it's bandwidth - I've tested it three times this morning. The figures indicated once that it was normal, and twice that it was slowish, but acceptable. The problem could be with my ISP, Logic, or with the internet itself. I'll try to figure that out during the course of the morning, of course, but in the meantime, I won't be posting.

The Sunday Times, like its sister daily paper thinks it's time for Tony Blair to go. "Each man kills the thing he loves. Mr Blair is slowly killing new Labour along with his own good name...

"Most in our poll who declared a view think Mr Blair should go before the end of the year and that in doing so he would strengthen the Labour party. That is fast becoming the conventional wisdom...The prime minister is not willing to go yet. His search for a moment when he can leave on a high note is becoming desperate. But the longer he postpones his departure the greater will be the discredit. The opposition, his own backbenchers and Gordon Brown cannot shift him. But what of his friends? Is there no honest man or woman among them with the guts to tell him the game is up?"

Saddam Hussein planned to use 'camels of mass destruction' as weapons to defend Iraq, loading them with bombs and directing them towards invading forces. You know that has to be a story from an English paper, don't you? It's from the Telegraph , which has cottoned on to the release of some of thousands of documents seized in Iraq. "The animals were part of a plan to arm and equip foreign insurgents drawn up by the dictator shortly before the American-led invasion three years ago, reveals a 37-page report, captured after the fall of Baghdad and just released by the Pentagon. It is part of a cache of thousands of documents that the United States Department of Defence says it does not have the resources to translate."

With each additional release of those documents we learn more about the extent of Saddam's villainy. "The Weekly Standard says: "Saddam's ultra-loyal Fedayeen martyrs were ordered to carry out bombings and assassinations in London, Iran, and 'self ruled areas' of Iraq in May, 1999, according to a newly released Iraqi intelligence document. One such operation, codenamed 'Tamooz Mubarak' or 'Blessed July', was apparently intended to hunt down Iraqi dissidents and bomb other unspecified locations."

Another Standard article adds a telling insight: "It is early, but the emerging picture suggests that the US intelligence community underestimated Saddam Hussein's interest in terrorism. One US intelligence official, identified only as an 'IC analyst' in the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on Iraq, summarized the intelligence community's view on Iraq and terrorism with disarming candor: 'I don't think we were really focused on the CT [counterterrorism] side, because we weren't concerned about the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] going out and proactively conducting terrorist attacks. It wasn't until we realized that there was the possibility of going to war that we had to get a handle on that.'"

I don't know...maybe I'm getting a touch too cynical, but this Hugo Williams I'm reading about in The Observer this morning is about as close as self-invented as you can get. The explanatory second deck says he is "a bohemian Old Etonian descended from a family of famous actors. Add in a colourfully unconventional marriage, a pair of penetrating blue eyes and a battered typewriter, and you have all the raw ingredients of a prize-winning poet."

Interviewer Rachel Cooke, who is really very good at this sort of thing, gets it, I think. She writes: "Hugo Williams is exactly how you want a poet to be, almost as if 'poet' was a part he landed in an extremely long-running play. He lives in a tiny house in Islington - famously unmodernised, famously run-down - without central heating, or a computer screen, or a mobile phone to bulge in his pocket when he ventures out. His hall is the colour of nicotine. On the day I visit, his bath is full of water, though whether this is dirty or merely awaiting a new bather, I can't quite tell...in the middle of all this sits the man himself: cheekbones like geometry, eyes like glassy pools into which every woman who meets him surely longs to jump - and to hell with it if he is old enough to be her father.

"I tell him that, in his honour, I have brought... 'Some croissants?' he asks, his voice pathetically hopeful. Er, no. Some new Dictaphone tapes. 'Oh, dear,' he says. 'I do wish you had brought some croissants.'"

The only thing that saves him from being a contrived wanker is that he really is a poet. Set aside the fact that all of the selection on this page are about his women (which is a way of writing about yourself), and it's really quite masterful.

Bar Italia is a good example:

How beautiful it would be to wait for you again
in the usual place,
not looking at the door,
keeping a lookout in the long mirror,
knowing that if you are late
it will not be too late,
knowing that all I have to do
is wait a little longer
and you will be pushing through the other customers,
out of breath, apologetic.
Where have you been, for God's sake?
I was starting to worry.

How long did we say we would wait
if one of us was held up?
It's been so long and still no sign of you.
As time goes by, I search other faces in the bar,
rearranging their features
until they are monstrous versions of you,
their heads wobbling from side to side
like heads on sticks.
Your absence inches forward
until it is standing next to me.
Now it has taken a seat I was saving.
Now we are face to face in the long mirror.