…are trying to guess who might be given the job of Poet Laureate, but I am yet to read an article explaining why on earth any poet would want the job in the first place. A few weeks ago, Andrew Motion, the current Laureate, confessed that he’d felt blocked and unable to write for a while. But if, as many writers think, a block comes from a lack of confidence, then it’s no wonder he’s been unable to produce very much: one of the chief drawbacks of the job is that every poem written to mark royal occasions is roundly and gleefully mocked. Motion was obliged to write a poem celebrating Prince William’s twenty-first birthday (perhaps unwisely, he chose to do it as a rap), and the Queen’s diamond wedding anniversary; many of his peers were terribly unkind about the results. Ted Hughes, his predecessor, produced one commemorating the marriage of Prince Andrew and Fergie  (’A helicopter snatched you up/The pilot, it was me.’) and another one about the Queen’s corgis.  The next Laureate may well have to produce lines commemorating the marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton, or even, God help him or her, the wedding of Prince Harry and Chelsy (sic) Davey. How could any ego, let alone one of the delicate literary variety, survive the kicking that such verses will inevitably receive? The list in the Times yesterday included some of my favourite contemporary poets – Wendy Cope, Carol-Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage –  and I fervently hope that they all turn the post down.

…I watch with fascination as a local author rearranges the shop in order to optimise his chances of sales. He is not happy with the container that has been clipped to the section of the bookshelf displaying his book; the container holds flyers advertising a related product but it partially obscures the book’s cover, so while nobody is looking (apart from me) the author unclips it and sticks it somewhere else, where it will partially obscure the cover of somebody else’s work. He then spots someone picking up and leafing through a competing hardback, so he grabs his own and thrusts it into the bewildered shopper’s hands. I suppose this is what we have to do during a depression, but I’m not sure I have the stomach for it.

…the two passages below on consecutive days. The first is a piece of dialogue from an embittered woman novelist called Elaine who appears in Meg Wolitzer’s razor-sharp novel about literary sexual politics, ‘The Wife’; the second is from a Norman Mailer letter to Don DeLillo in 1988.

 “But the men with their big canvases, their big books that try to include everything in them, their big suits, their big voices, are always rewarded more. They’re the important ones. And you want to know why?…..Because they say so.”

“I think you’re fulfilling the task we’ve just about all forgotten, which is that we’re here to change the American obsessions—those black holes in space—into mantras that we can live with.”

Good luck with that, Don and Norman.

…victory speech, Barack Obama told the crowd that “It’s been a long time coming…..”, he was, of course, alluding to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”, and who doesn’t love an election where you need to know a little about old R&B to understand the references in the rhetoric? Now we have the benefit of hindsight, it seems as though the line “It’s been a long time coming…” has itself been a long time coming, given the number of times Barack has used the word “change” over the last few months.

 What would Cooke himself have thought, if he’d been told in 1963, when he recorded the song (it was only released after his death in 1964), that it would one day be quoted by an African-American president?  He wrote it soon after he and his band had been arrested after trying to check in to a whites-only hotel in Louisiana; it seems incredible today to think that this kind of moronic incivility happened routinely in Obama’s lifetime.
 It’s not surprising, then, that even the grammar of the song is weary and mournful. Usually the construction “It’s been a long time coming, but…” is followed by another clause containing a verb in the present or present perfect tenses: “but the bus is here”, “but the baby has been born”. After the “but” in Cooke’s song, however, he is forced to sing about the future. In other words, it’s been a long time coming, but nothing’s happened yet. November 5th, 2008 was the day that a black man was finally able to use the phrase in the way that a white man might.

 PS. England’s front page headlines today.

Mr President (The Independent)

Yanks Very Much (The Star)

Gobama (The Mirror)

One Giant Leap For Mankind (The Sun)

America’s Historic Verdict (The Guardian)

A New World Dawns (The Express)

Home Loans: A Slap in the Face (The Mail)

Yep, yesterday will be remembered for the home-loan face-slapping.