…of reading Thurston Clarke’s book ‘The Last Campaign – Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America’ is the introduction it provides to RFK’s fierce moral rhetoric. How about this, from a speech he gave to twenty thousand students at the University of Kansas, right at the beginning of his fight to secure the Democratic nomination in ’68:

 ”Our gross national product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but the GNP – if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead….and the television programmes which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for  the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It  does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage…it measures everything, in short, except that which  makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

He had me at “gross national product”.

…festival season is upon us, and as I stare at the line-ups in newspapers and magazines, it occurs to me that they are very like opticians’ eye-charts. I (usually) recognise the names in big writing at the very top, but as I get older, I am mystified by the smaller ones, and I draw a complete blank with the bottom row. Here’s the bill for Morrissey’s forthcoming concert in Hyde Park:

I don’t know about you, but I’m very hazy on the fourth tier, and utterly baffled by the last. And even corrective surgery won’t help me.

….photograph of Nick Hornby and Nick Hornby, taken at our discussion last week. You can see a slide of one of Nick Hornby’s sculptures on the screen. Nick Hornby is on the left. And on the right.

…these football tournament summers. But the narratives of the tournaments themselves, the twists  and turns and sub-plots, tend to disappear from my memory almost as soon as the final kick in the last penalty-shoot out has sailed over the bar. Here’s a piece I wrote for the New Yorker about the 2002 World Cup. Who remembers the President of Perugia now? But what joy he provided at the time.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/07/15/020715fa_fact

…I have just finished reading is serious and intelligent. It also has the most peculiar flaw I’ve come across: its characters become wildly over-animated in conversational exchanges. The following reactions are drawn from a random sample of about a hundred pages, approximately a fifth of the novel, so there are loads more where these came from – and remember, these is no physical violence involved, despite all appearances to the contrary. “He grabbed the crown of his head”; “She fisted her skirt hem”; “He narrowed his eyes and pressed his cap” ; “M stumbled, his face twisted…M snorted and waved her off…She stood gaping…”; “Her neck jerked back, defensively”; “He thumbed his beard from underneath”; “She caught her hair. Her face flamed. She pulled at her shirt collar. She gathered her spray of hair and tied it up like a hank of rope” ; “The face yanked back, snorting”; “K palmed her own temples”; “he grimaced as if she’d kneed him” ;”She squinted at the possibility”; “His mouth hooked sideways”. After five hundred pages of this, I could see the characters only as sufferers from Tourette’s taking part in an Olympic boxing tournament; they flinch, snort and wince, their eyebrows shooting towards the heavens, at every available opportunity. I  am not the fittest talker in Britain, admittedly, but if I had to do all that every time I wanted to chat to someone, I would end up in hospital on a ventilator.

…people in their 60s at the James Brown tribute, some of them sitting directly in front of a couple in their twenties who danced manically (and, it has to be said, annoyingly) right from the opening bars.  Those who grew up with funk are more or less of pensionable age now: if you were twenty-one when James Brown released ‘Cold Sweat’, often cited as the first funk record, then you celebrated your sixtieth birthday a couple of years ago. I was glad to see the older people at the gig, because by being there, they were demonstrating a lifelong commitment to something that has meant a lot to them – after all these years, they want to drag themselves out on a Saturday night to see Fred Wesley and Pee-Wee Ellis in the flesh. Meanwhile, there is every chance that the ostentatiously exuberant young couple will not be listening to music much, if at all, in ten years’ time. I know from my own experience that people who seemed consumed by music and literature at college let it all slip with scarcely a backward glance once they reach their thirties. Maybe it is time to turn conventional wisdom – or at least, the conventional broadsheet columnist’s gripe – on its head and demand that only old people should be allowed to go to concerts. They are, after all, the only people who have been able to demonstrate that their love for music is not just a passing fad, a response to boredom and peer-group pressure.

…sports column in today’s Evening Standard, former Tory politician David Mellor reckons that “with Croatia and Turkey through to the quarter-finals, it is even more blindingly obvious what a great chance England would have had, if they had qualified. Frustrating, isn’t it?” I had to read this twice, just to make sure that I wasn’t missing some elegantly-disguised irony, but I’m pretty sure it’s not there. Perhaps he has forgotten that the main reason Croatia are playing in Euro 2008 at all is that they beat England twice, home and away, in the qualifying group.

Conversely, the main reason England are not playing at Euro 2008 is because they lost twice, home and away, to the team whose progression to the last eight apparently demonstrates why England might have won the competition.(One can only presume, on recent form, that Croatia would have been quite happy to play England for a third time, in the tournament proper.) 

 Croatia probably won’t win the tournament, but the “blindingly obvious” conclusion to be drawn from this is that England would have had no chance – not least because England’s  qualification would have resulted in the hopeless Steve McLaren still being in charge. Perhaps what Mr Mellor means is that England would have had a much better chance of winning if all the teams superior to them had been banned from entering? This, of course, is a much more robust argument.

I spent a very happy Saturday evening at the Barbican, listening to ‘Still Black, Still Proud’, a James Brown tribute show that gave some of Brown’s old side-kicks – the horn-players Pee-Wee Ellis and Fred Wesley – the chance to team up with some of Africa’s finest musicians – Cheikh Lo, the drummer Tony Allen – and find the points where African and black American music strike sparks off each other. At some point during the show I started to wonder how I would defend the concept of the extended funk jam to those oblivious to its charms, and decided that I could only explain in terms that invoked a vague and intellectually dubious notion of mysticism. People always describe funk as “hypnotic”, a hypnosis that invariably invokes some sort of trance-like state; and of course once you start using language like that, you’re off with the fairies. On the way home, I remembered a book I dipped into last year, a biography of the West Coast artist Robert Irwin, who described his late line paintings, which consist of several straight lines on an orange background, thus: “When you look…at them perceptually, you find that your eye ends up suspended in midair, midspace or even midstride: time and space seem to blend in the continuum of your presence. You lose your bearings for a moment. You end up in a totally meditative state.” I can remember feeling a little bit snooty about the sheer hopefulness of this at the time; it’s perfectly possible to look at straight lines on an orange background and feel nothing at all, apart from a momentary tedium. But what he is asking me to see in abstract expressionism is really no different to what I want people to hear in funk music; it’s just that funk is down and dirty, and Irwin’s art is, well, lofty and spotlessly clean, almost by definition. In other words, I’d caught myself being a snob, and not for the first time.
            And then, the very next day, I read a wonderful piece in the Guardian by my friend Nick Laird about where poetry comes from. “To believe, in the polyphonic era, that words in a certain order induce sensation, which is another way of saying that they cast a spell, must be classed as a strange, atavistic faith, but this is exactly what poetry affirms,” he says. So there we have it. Abstract expressionists, poets, funk musicians…. they’re all at it: asking for our faith and a suspension of our disbelief. And in return, they promise the equivalent of a great night out. It’s called art because it’s really not a science.

Nick Laird’s piece is here:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2285433,00.html

…been away for the best part of a month, mostly in Italy – Milan, Rome and Florence for work, the Amalfi Coast on holiday. In Rome, Joseph O’Connor and I read to a couple of thousand people, outdoors, and wondered why things couldn’t be like that in our home countries. There’s the weather, of course; but people from these islands are much more reluctant to listen to writers than readers in mainland Europe, or even the US: it’s difficult to imagine what it would take to get a couple of thousand English people out to a reading. If I sound regretful, it’s because walking out onto a stage and seeing all those faces provides the kind of buzz that a writing life doesn’t provide very often. And yet I’m English, too, and I’m a reader, and I very rarely venture out to a half-empty Waterstones to listen to any of my colleagues.

 In Germany, there are complaints if readings last less than an hour – I had to do an encore at a recent reading in Berlin, because the audience felt short-changed. If a German author attempted to read for ninety minutes in his native tongue in England, I fear there’d be the kind of violent protest more typically associated with a G8 Summit than with, say, the Hay Festival. And though I wouldn’t condone this violence, I would at least understand the violent impulse. Fifteen minutes always seems plenty – unless, of course, it’s me doing the reading.