On the twelfth day of christmas . . .

Family. I'll be untypically emotive. Years ago now, I remember reading someone who, when asked which was more important, health or wealth, said: neither, it's family, because when you're sick or broke at least there is support around you. 

I'd add friends but, basically, it's true, isn't it. Few of us prosper without family and friends. In a meaningful sense, that is – which does include financially. Unhappiness is not just a product of not making your way in the world, it's also a reason. Unfair, I know, but . . .

I've been blessed, I guess. I have family and I have friends. Quite a few people occupy both categories. So . . . Xmas and its twelve days?

Well, over the break I read a piece by Ian Jack in the The Guardian in which he pointed out that London over Xmas has now become the kind of family place it used to be. Leaving aside the fact that in my area the exodus to second houses is so notable that you could have a half hour kip in the middle of the road, that is certainly true. Further, he added that the break has become a kind of retreat where families get to spend time with each other, across the generation. Some use the opportunity to fight and relive old wounds, I guess. But not everyone.

In which light, I can report that, over the break, my time-spent included . . .

* family outing to Billy Elliot matinee (young cousin is in the cast)

* Xmas dinner (cooked with my daughter) for a baker's dozen — on Boxing Day, it's a family tradition, leaving Xmas Day itself free for, well, nothing

* dinner with a couple of friends in Cornwall, one of whom I probably won't see for a while as she's heading off east to interior design junks (honestly)

* not one but two football matches with my younger son

* takeaway curry round our table for a dozen family or so

* a formal sit-down meal at a cousin's which I missed because of a bad cold - but got to eat takeaway the next morning

* a nuclear family meal on Xmas Eve

* giving phone cooking advice to a friend when the leg of lamb (an odd Xmas dinner choice, I know, but tradition isn't what it was, clearly) got left in the freezer by mistake and dinner was due in four hours - they say it was the best lamb they ever ate so maybe I stumbled on a new recipe

* brunch with cousins at their house in the far reaches of the known world (Bury St Edmunds)

* a friend's birthday party in his brother's pub

* a New Year's Day party at a friend's

* a completely private New Year's Eve – another family tradition

* picking up my elder son and dropping him at the airport - and, because of Luton's parsimony, having to pay a pound each time for the privilege

* more, probably, that I've forgotten about

And so that's your lot, folks. 

Tomorrow (or perhaps the day after), I'll post the sleevenotes for my Xmas music selection.

Freud and the case for the prosecution, part one*

So, in the words of my old school pal, what do I think about the old boy now? Do Freud's thoughts and writings still have anything to offer me or anyone else? Having spent two years reading and discussing an enormous pile of his writings, what do I reckon? What have I learned?

My pal put the counter-case to me about Freud, organising it under headings, all of them starting with a D, the first of which was . . .

Distance

My pal wrote, of Freudian thought and practice: 'It can make people think too much of what happened long ago in childhood, and especially in their relationship with parents. Unfortunately, the events are fixed, and it's easy to spend too long blaming one's family and one's upbringing.'

My answer Yes, but.** There are two questions here, I guess. One, do our early years and relationships have long-term, central impact on our adult life? Two, if they do, can we do anything helpful with that knowledge?

One There is, quite clearly, ample evidence of various kinds about the impact of early experience. (Not that I'm excluding genetic factors, of course. There is ample evidence for them, too.)

The clearest, simplest evidence is probably from attachment theory - not Freud, I know, but he didn't quote it, I think, mostly because it wasn't around in his day. There's a thing called the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI).


It's twenty questions and lasts about an hour. Get a pregnant woman to answer it and you can predict with astonishing accuracy the emotional tenor and psychological make-up of her unborn child - as a toddler, anyway. If you want to guess how the child will fare as a teenager, you do the AAI on the prospective father.

Two Yes, but, again. Events are rarely 'fixed' - certainly not in the realms of our inner life. Our memories are many layered things - as experiments of all kinds show. We create and construct our past in much the same way as we create what we think of as our vision - out of the same rag bag of bits of sequential realities, memories, general knowledge, our innate drive to find patterns, our predictions and, of course, our desires. Which is why optical illusions work. They screw not with our eyes but with our perceptual organisational system. Our eyes' eyes, perhaps.

As eyes are not movie cameras, so our past is not a movie. Our pasts have a relationship to reality but it's a complex, tangential one. Freud had a word for this: Nachträglichkeit***. There's no accepted English translation for it. Mine is: afterwardsness****. The past is not so much a foreign country as a collation of reality and layers of memories and constructions - some of which will be based on memories which are themselves constructions.

Confused? We all are. That's the point.

Freud didn't think of analysis as blaming the parents. He wrote something like: neurotics (ie all of us - though more you than me, of course) suffer from memories. Not events, that is, but memories. To him, analysis was a kind of reality-testing endeavour - a matter of challenging the fantasies (and hence symptoms) by which we lead our lives.

So Larkin was wrong. It's not that your mum and dad fucked you up - though they may have. It's your memory of your mum and dad that fucked you up. Johnny Thunders was right, though: you can't put your arms round a memory. Well, best not to. That way, you can change your past*****.

Next up Determination - is there any free will in Freud?

Some light entertainment From an old pied noir 88er.

* There will be at least four parts, maybe more

** Still my default answer to too many things, I know. I try hard to remind myself to say 'Yes, and' instead but I often fail.

*** It sounds like a 50 Crown word but it isn't. It's quite standard German. They just like their words long. It's the way their language works.

**** The fashionable one in London Freudian circles is 'après coup' - borrowed from the French psychoanalysts who have been making a big noise about it since the 1960s. It's a rotten, inaccurate translation even in French, though. Whatever Freud meant it to be, it wasn't 'after shock'.

***** Time travel movies are, to my puckish mind, essentially populist Oedipal wish fulfilments. As action movies allow us to murder and mutilate (in fantasy) so movies like Back To The Future allow our secret inner world to vicariously flirt with the idea of . . . fucking (up) mum and dad.

The writing of it

And so to desk. I did finally write my dissertation, about which I was surprisingly anxious - which might be a hint as to why it's taken even longer to write this blog about it.

I . . . well, I did all the usual things I'm sure everyone does when they have a dissertation to write.

* They sit reading and reading and reading their way through a pile of stuff, most of which looked like a good idea when they first looked it up/printed it/downloaded it but which now starts to seem increasingly irrelevant/tedious/marginal.

* They write an intro which starts to seem tendentious/over-written/unclear/boring.

* They go away to another part of the country, lie on another sofa, reading more books and papers - between going for walks and making phone calls.

* They feel bored.

* They keep going.

* They come back to London and start writing - in between doing all those other things in life that suddenly seem so urgent.

* They finally have something on paper - which seems . . . fantastic/boring/axiomatic/irrelevant/second-hand.

* They go away again, read some more - walk some more, go out to lunch some more, worry some more.

* They finish it. Well close enough to finish it that they think they better show it to someone - particularly because they worry that they perhaps took the tutor's encouraging them to be brave maybe too far. But the supervisor is now long gone.

* The tutor who encouraged them recommends someone else to read it, a former student who (to their relief and gratitude) tells them it's not complete rubbish.

* They do the final tweaks and polishes. They print it and get it bound the way they have to - something that, of course, takes longer than they anticipate.

* They arrive to hand it in with three minutes to spare. They are told by the administrator: 'You will be disappointed to know, Pete, that you are not quite the last . . . Best title so far, though.**'

* They wait what seems like months but is no more than six weeks or so. They get a Saturday morning phone call (or was it Friday) telling them they've passed.

Next up So was it all worth putting myself through all that studying? What did I get out of it?

** Which was . . . 'Love and work. Love. Work. And. Sex, ambition and hate, too, of course. Oh, and desire, sublimation and play. And and. And the spaces in between.' I'll send you a copy if you're interested.

School’s out

It’s over. In the words of Alice Cooper (and the playground rhyme that inspired him), no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks.

That’s it. It’s all over bar the mark. I’ve done the seminars, the essays, the exams, the dissertations. Somewhere down the line, I'll get the piece of paper to prove it.

Meantime . . . I took an extended summer break from this blog — even longer than I intended, frankly. I will now, though, be posting fairly regularly. In particular, I’ll be writing about the course and stuff I learned on it — about psychoanalysis, yes, but also about people (in which category, I include myself, at least some of the time).

So . . . forthcoming attractions include:

Dissertation writing — as viewed from a lifetime of writing

Exams — what’s a grown man sitting at a desk scribbling furiously with a pen

Drugs — should I have taken neuro-enhancers?

Chance encounters of a psychoanalytic kind — a barbecue of analysts (where? in north west London, of course)

Sunny Goodge Street — what I’ll miss about the course

Then and now — a (brief) return to south east London and finishing with academia for the second time

Typography — me and IKEA

Lacan and le con — what the French psychoanalyst kept in his cupboard

See you soon.

Group theory

People were always asking me the same question about my course. It was the one I’d have asked me, too, if I weren’t me. It was this: ‘Theoretical?’ As in, why Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies? Does that mean they’re not real studies, only theoretical ones? Some put it less politely.

I’ve always given the same answer — there or thereabouts, anyway. I tell them that it’s theoretical as opposed to clinical. That is, it’s not training to become an analyst or a therapist etc. It’s the study of psychoanalytic theory. Its practice, too, as it happens. But not how to practise it.

Last week, I came up with another answer: a less abstract, more concrete one. It comes in two parts.

Part one. We are sitting in the seminar room. The seminar leader is outlining the work, life and theories of Wilfred Bion, an analyst who helped set up the Tavistock. His notion of ‘containment’ has seeped out into the wider world. Roughly, it’s the idea that the analyst can take a patient’s messy, unhappy emotions, hold them ‘inside’ himself for a bit of processing and return them in slightly better shape. It can sound hippy-dippy but Bion didn’t mean it that way. He was looking to explain how patients could and did get ‘better’.

Bion also did a lot of work on group dynamics. In some accounts, he is the major influence in the early development of studies on how groups function — and dysfunction. This was raised in the seminar. There was, though, only the briefest reference to the fact that we, in the room, were a group — and no attempt to discuss or dissect its dynamics. That’s theoretical for you — a discussion of the practice rather than the practice itself.

Part two. After class one Saturday, I’m having lunch with the other students who, like me, had chosen to do the course over two years. We are discussing this year’s students — the way you do, the way anyone would. We talk about them as individuals and as a group.

Interestingly, we each have quite different views of them — as individuals and as a group. For some of us, they are far more intellectual than the previous year. For others, they like to talk more. For some of us, they are more engaged in the subject. For others, they are less worldly. For some of us, there is a feeling that the course directors thought the previous year’s lot — ie us — were a bit flaky. Others of us thought: whatever.

What we all agreed on, in an unspoken way, was that there was a group, that this year’s intake were a group and that we were a different group — still essentially linked to last year’s students who have now left. How easily and inevitably are groups formed, I thought. And how we look for and mark the things which make our group distinctive. And how small a step it can be from there to marking the things which make our group better — or, at least, we imagine they do. And from there to the eternal tragedy of Freud’s narcissism of small differences.

My new favourite lesbian

Some time before Christmas, I got a Facebook request to become friends with a Jill Sobule. Usually, I decline such offers from people whose names I don’t recognise but she came recommended from a good source, a woman film director.

So I became friends with Jill Sobule. Then I noticed she was a songwriter and performer and I somehow found my way to her version of Merry Christmas From The Family — I’d put the one by its writer, Robert Earl Keen, on my Xmas playlist. Hers is the one that’s best known in the US. There’s a sweet, neat video of it.

I learned a little more about her. That she’d done a few other Christmas songs. That she’d had a small hit of sorts with a song called I Kissed A Girl — quite different from the Kate Perry song. There’s a sweet, neat video of that, too.

Then I got a note from her. Nothing personal — I guess all her other 1925 Facebook friends got it, too. It was an invite to a show, in London, a Tuesday night at the Cobden Club.

There were about twenty of us in the audience. She played an odd-looking guitar, mostly like she was a folk-singer but sometimes like she thought she could be Jimi Hendrix. She sang a song about wishing she could get around on a jet pack. She sang one about searching for Bobbie Gentry — with a whole new twist on what got thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

(I was down that way once. A post-office counter worker I met at Robert Johnson’s grave — one of them, anyway — offered to show me the bridge and maybe buy me a drink after. I declined his kind offer.)

She was quite wonderful that night — six songs, all odd, all so original I almost felt a fool for not having heard of her before. So I googled her etc and discovered I was a fool.

Others are not so foolish. Unable to get a deal, she asked her fans to raise the cash for her to record a new album by advance-buying a copy of it. She raised it, no problem, all 75,000 George Washingtons of it.

I downloaded some tracks, from her website and from emusic. Among other things, I heard her crack a great gag that I’d not heard before: my bush would make a better president. I learned, too, that once she wasn’t a lesbian but now she is — she has songs about this. That one about kissing a girl, for example. (I maybe should have got a hint there, no?)

What I did on my holidays
Part two: a musical

A long time ago, I knew Ian Dury quite well. I wasn’t a friend or anything but, as a music journalist, I spent enough time on tour with him and the Blockheads to learn at least five things about him.

One, he was one of the world’s great lyricists. A phrase-maker who gifted the language with ‘sex and drugs and rock and roll’ and ‘reasons to be cheerful’. A list-maker pretty much the equal of Mozart in Don Giovanni, Cole Porter in Let’s Do It, Noel Coward in Las Vegas and John Coltrane in My Favourite Things.

Two, his songs and rhythms were dream expressions of the dancer inside him. As a raspberry — his word, not mine — he could barely move, let alone dance. His songs were imaginative projections of his impossible dreams: if he could have danced, this is how he would have danced. As dreams rather than reality, his dances could be perfect in a way reality never can. The Dury dance is not just in the music and rhythms but the lyrics themselves.

Hit me with your rhythm stick.
Hit me! Hit me!
Das ist gut! C’est fantastique!
Hit me! hit me! hit me!
Hit me with your rhythm stick.

Three, his whole Essex Cockney shtick was just that, a shtick. The closest he’d got to Upminster in any meaningful sense was Walthamstow Art College. Like most successful English pop stars of that generation, he was a grammar school boy. (Me, too, of course.)

Four, he could be a complete and utter arsehole — even by the standards of pop stars. He drank. He chain-smoked dope. He could be selfish to the point of malice.

Five, everyone around him forgave him his trespasses. Until they didn’t. When did that happen? I guess when the hits stopped coming. It’s a rare eye that doesn’t turn away from a falling pop star. Also, frankly, I gradually formed the view that Ian destroyed his own career. It’s what people do. Fear of success is probably as common as fear of failure, maybe more.

When he died, I got myself a commission to write a life-and-emotional-crimes of Ian Dury piece. It could have been a really good story. I never finished it. Maybe that was my fear of success. Like I said, fear of success is common as . . . muck.

All of which is by way of making the point that when I went to see Hit Me! The Life & Rhymes of Ian Dury, I had some previous on the matter. It was at the Leicester Square Theatre. The last time I’d been there, it was a pop venue, the Notre Dame Hall. My date for the night had even played there.

The show? Well, it’s more a tell than a show, to be honest. But the story it tells is similar to the one I would have told: that Ian was a horrid, glorious, unstable mixture of genius and arsehole.

It’s a two-hander — Ian and his long-time minder, Fred ‘Spider’ Rowe, a former criminal whose life was transformed by his partnership with Ian. It was a marriage of sorts, of course, and one that, given Ian’s capacity for arseholeness, ended in divorce. I found myself thinking of Steptoe And Son. And wishing that it had been less shouty. And that it had found a way to give voice to the inner life of Spider. And that it had had something interesting to say about the mechanics and meaning of Ian’s lyricism — both words and music.

The audience loved it, though. Particularly, this joke:

Ian: If they held a c*** contest, you’d come second, Spider. (I censor myself only to prevent my blog being torn down by external authorities.)

Spider: Why’s that, then?

Ian: Because you’re a c***.

A wonderful joke, so good that I’m going to put it in the book I’m writing about swearing. (Filthy English, Portobello, October 2009.)

And, I suspect, a joke written by the man I saw talking to the playwright at half-time and again at the end — Chris Langham, the actor who went to jail for downloading child porn. He had been brought in to help fine-tune the show for its West End debut. I only learned that later, though. ‘Row over disgraced star's involvement in musical’ was the Independent’s take on it.

Next blog: What Do You Do With A Convicted Paedophile? (Particularly now that Ian Dury is no longer around to make rhyme and reason of the question.)

Double body

In my last posting, I put a link in where it said 'my wife'. I thought you might like to be reassured (or disappointed) that it wasn't actually my wife in the picture. They just share a name. The clue was the initials on that woman's badge. For more details, look here.

The me-me meme

Often, though not always, I get my wife to read my postings before I upload them. Our offices are next to each other in the house. I email them to her. She emails back. Such is the modern work-home balance. Such is modern marriage.

My email wasn’t working properly when she sent her response to my last posting. So we had a face-to-face conversation, before breakfast. Such, too, is the modern work-home balance.

She: You know I always really like your blog.* But . . .** I wondered if that posting doesn’t come across a bit self-concerned.

Me: I know what you mean.*** But I’m torn. Some people tell me they like my blog best when it’s personal. Others that they’re more interested in it when it reaches out into the world.

She: That posting, though. Isn’t it a bit too much like those columns in the paper where someone writes about their own life, self-obsessively. It’s all so me-me-me.

Me: But those are the columns you read. I don’t. But you do.

She: Mmmmm.

And so to breakfast.

* A note for anyone ever having a conversation with any writer about their writing. Begin any and every conversation with something like this. Even if it’s a complete lie. Particularly if it’s a complete lie. If you don’t first tell them they’re wonderful, they won’t hear anything you say after that. Particularly if you’re about to tell them it’s rubbish.

If it is rubbish, tell them it needs a little work. Then start on your list of suggested changes. No matter how extensive the list, the writer will still be basking in the glow of that initial praise. Think of it as tickling a dog’s tummy. It works. Every time. I’ve written and I’ve edited. As an editor, I learned all about writers’ vanities. Mine included, of course.

** There’s always a ‘but’ after a sentence which begins ‘You know I always really . . .’

*** Defence is the last resort of offence.

Primrose Hill: drugs and polymorphous perversity

I live just down the road from where Freud first lived when he fled to London. He landed at Dover on the morning of June 6, 1938, took the train to Victoria Station, then a taxi to 39 Elsworthy Road, via the tourist sights of London which he requested to see — Buckingham Palace, Houses of Parliament etc.

Six years later, to the day, British and Allied troops landed on the beaches of Omaha, Gold, Sword etc. (I don’t think the identicality of date was deliberate, or significant even.)

On the ferry, Freud slept and dreamed that he would land not at Dover but at Pevensey — ie where William the Bastard disembarked and, after a battle up the road, recreated himself as William The Conqueror. Freud claimed that all dreams were, at heart, fantasy wish-fulfilments. This dream is the best example I’ve found so far.

It’s a nice, big house, 39 Elsworthy Road. Red-brick, quoined, with a stone portico and the slightly anthropomorphised front elevation that’s usual on most houses of its age, shape and kind — ie it looks like a face, deliberately, welcomingly so. Please step in through my mouth, madam.

It’s quite grand actually by modern standards. I should imagine there’s more than one servant’s room. It was probably quite new when Freud moved in. A home for a society doctor or a well-connected barrister perhaps. It would now cost you, oh, £4.5 million, say — more if it had been renovated to today’s local standards. Cyril Burt, the great proponent of IQ tests, lived a dozen or so doors away — though I’m not sure if he was there in Freud’s time.

Freud’s office was on the ground floor at the rear, giving on to a garden which leads, through a private gate, on to the football fields part of Primrose Hill. When he was looking out of the window, there would have been a café on the lee of the hill. But that’s long gone, swept aside during the war, I should imagine, when the whole of the hill was turned into an anti-aircraft gun battery. You can still see where the concrete emplacements were — their boundaries and shape are often marked out by carpets of daisies.

I’ve no idea who lives there now. There’s no blue plaque on it as Freud and his family moved on within months, up the hill towards Hampstead, to 20 Maresfield Gardens. (My wife’s great aunt, who drove a sports car into her eighties, lived over the road at number 45 Maresfield. She told me she saw Anna Freud quite regularly but never quite got round to talking to her.)

Every time I pass the Elsworthy Road house, I think about one of two things.

1. Freud being paid a visit there by Salvador Dali. It went very badly. Dali saw himself as an equal. Freud’s taste in art stopped several centuries before impressionism, let alone Dada and surrealism. Still, two men of the unconscious sitting there miscommunicating: surely one of history’s great meetings.

2. It’s just over the road and down a bit from where Liam Gallagher lived. I find myself thinking about Freud and the Primrose Hill set of recent years. What would he and they have found to say to each other?

Despite having written Three Essays on Sexuality (by general agreement, one of the least sexy books ever), Freud would not have wanted to have anything to do with their wife-swapping and nanny-jumping. It’s true he came up with the concept of polymorphous perversity but he thought that was a thing of childhood and to be put away with childish things rather than used as a way to ensure regular appearances in Grazia or OK! (Though he did allow the press in and was photographed by his desk, I don’t think he sold the exclusive rights.)

Anyway, I think I’m right in saying that he hadn’t had sex for more than forty years — since his last daughter, Anna was born, in 1895. Anna herself, she hadn’t had sex at all. Freud worried about this in his letters. He knew it was wrong. He knew it was because of her intense relationship with him. He analysed her himself, something that would now have him drummed out of the trade. Yet he — and she — couldn’t — or wouldn’t — change. Therapeutic resistance. The two Viennese lightbulbs that didn’t want to change.

As far as anyone knows, Anna never had sex at all — she had a lifelong relationship with an American woman Dorothy Burlingham but it’s said to have been platonic. It’s odd, isn’t it, that something that is popularly (if not correctly) seen as being all about sex should have been created by someone who stopped having sex the year he created it. And carried forward by someone who never had sex at all, who went to her grave a virgin.

So what about that other Primrose Hill set hobby, drug-taking? How would Freud have kept his end up in that matter? Well, by 1938, he tried to avoid taking drugs, even though he was in serious pain from the oral cancer which would kill him the following year.

But in his younger years . . . I don’t share my cousin’s view that he was a coke-head whose addictive personality caused him to come up with a coke-warped set of theories. But I do agree he had his moments.

Here’s what he wrote, on June 2, 1884, to the woman who would become his wife two years later: ‘Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. In my last severe depression I took coca again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.’

Now, if Freud had pitched up in Primrose Hill with that kind of attitude . . .

Interpreting Dreams, Themes & Schemes

I've had a small involvement in the production of a compilation of songs from Bob Dylan's radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour. It's on the American satellite channel XM . It's also on BBC Radio 2 — where it is somewhat behind the times, 43 weeks last time I looked. And on BBC Radio 6 — where it is a mere 30 weeks behind. You can also download it here, at Night time in the big city.

It was the album of the week in The Sunday Times and the lead review in Mojo magazine, with five stars.

I helped with the words for the gorgeous-looking booklet. This is something I wrote about the collection for a bulletin which goes out to everyone on Ace Records mailing list.

What, I wonder, do we dream of when we dream of Bob Dylan? And, more intriguingly, what does Bob Dylan dream of when he dreams of us?

This is what I think: he dreams of a small boy called Robert who lives in a small city, an industrial centre in a rural landscape. It’s a nowhere town that was once called Alice but had its name changed when an enormous hole was dug where its new name used to be. That giant hole was — and still is — the biggest of its kind in the world, an open-cast iron mine.

It’s a place that seems to doze on the periphery but is, in fact, also surprisingly at the heart of things. When Robert was growing up, it had the most lavishly appointed high school auditorium in the whole country. He played there, in a rock and roll band.

It’s the head point for the drainages to three great seas, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. Swim up any of the great rivers of the eastern United States (Canada, too) and it’s where you’ll end up, like a salmon returning to spawn.

It’s where the Greyhound Bus company was founded and headquartered for many years. It sits between the two great spinal cords of the continent — to the west, the eternal geographical one, the Mississippi River, to the east, the old national one, Highway 61.

Here, young Robert took in all the musics that swam to him up all those rivers, that spilled out of all those long-haul buses, that drifted up the great natural wonder that the Cheyenne called Big Greasy River — and the first European to see it called the River of the Holy Ghost.

Blues and folk and country and R&B, that’s what Robert’s dreams were made of. And I think he had a dream of a radio dee-jay out there somewhere, distant enough to be mythic, close enough to be real. This dee-jay would play records for Robert and his imaginary friends. He’d link song with song, mixing and matching and combining and recombining them. It’d be a bridal outfit of a radio show: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And the dee-jay would tell stories to go with the songs: about them, inspired by them, around them.

In dreams begin responsibilities, wrote Delmore Schwartz, poet, drunk, Lou Reed’s teacher. And so Robert eventually became his own dream, hosting Theme Time Radio Hour, week in, week out. Last time, I looked there had been 69 shows. I’ve got them all in my iTunes and so, whenever I shuffle-play, I’ll always hear Bob Dylan’s voice, reading me a Robert Frost poem or making one of those wry digs he makes every time he plays a Beatles track. It’s strange: one of the most elusive of performers now shares his thoughts with me on an almost daily basis.

Theme Time Radio Hour is the mix-tapes collection we’ve all dreamed of making. It’s both a taxonomy and a topography of 20th century popular musics. Not all of them, it’s true. There’s no Charles Trenet, say. No Abba, either. But Grandpa Jones is there. Jack Teagarden, Charles Mingus, the Donays and the White Stripes, too. The show is always as happy to let songs collide and divorce as it is following them up the aisle or encouraging them to cuddle up in bed together.

Dylan (and his collaborators, I guess) approach 20th century pop the way 18th century naturalists figured out how tomatoes are related to tobacco and where swallows go to in the winter. Making sense of things nearly always involves categorising them somehow.

As these things do, it started with life’s basics, things like Weather, Mother, Father. And it’s pretty much stuck with the everyday: School, Sleep, Food, Tears. It’s addressed life’s two great certainties, Death and Taxes — though not yet the third, Nurses. It’s travelled a bit: Tennessee, New York. It’s even found space for a little product placement: Cadillac.

Roger Armstrong (and his collaborators, I should imagine) have taken this great, ongoing taxonomic and topographic project and refined it down into an elegant precis of the original. A taxonomy of a taxonomy, a topography of a topography. I found myself thinking about something I was told only recently: that any chip of any diamond will always be a mini-version of the whole diamond, a microcosm of all its glories.

So this double CD, too, takes and shakes the everyday world, raising all kinds of new questions and notions along the way. Listen — carefully or lightly, or both — and you find new thoughts on something as old and universal as the Heart (show 41, Billie Holiday’s Good Morning Heartache) or the potential erotogenic symbolism of Musical Instruments (show 37, Dinah Washington’s Big Long Slidin’ Thing) or the bibbity-bobbity relationship between family life, heredity and alcoholic Drink (show 3, Mary Gauthier’s I Drink).

Then there’s the two versions — one black, one white — of Pistol Packin’ Mama (show 25, Guns). They got me thinking afresh about what really is one of pop’s oddest megahits. It had a 15-year run as a scene-maker, from around the time the time the world went to war to the time Elvis went into the army. Maybe there’s another song recorded by both Bing Crosby (plus Andrews Sisters) and Gene Vincent (plus Blue Caps). I never heard it.

If it weren’t for the jauntiness and accordion of Al Dexter’s original, I’d have realised long ago that it’s a pop musical parallel to the same period’s film noir, with the same anxieties about women’s new place in a new world (and the bedroom). Personally, I see Joan Crawford in the lead, reprising her role in Mildred Pierce, only with a blam-blam-blam in every hand, as Dylan put it in John Wesley Harding.

A fast dance tune about sex and violence, drink, guns and girls that ends with the singer’s murder. If you can’t find your own dreams, schemes and themes in there somewhere, I doubt you’re human.

The narcissism of small differences

From A Child’s Dictionary Of Psychoanalysis

The other evening, I took the younger princess to the football, Arsenal vs Newcastle. She can be a bit girlie about the game. She still doesn’t grasp the difference between a cup match and a league match — this was a league match.

But she’s always loved the spectacle and drama of a full football stadium — particularly the view as you emerge from the vomitorium on a floodlit night. She’s come to the occasional game with me since she was old enough to insist I put in place an equal opportunities policy vis-à-vis her older brother. Her enthusiasm even survived an attack on us by a baseball-bat wielding, coke-dealing (I guess), parking-spot-raged, Range Rover-driving ‘fan’.

Her grasp of the subtleties of football culture is, accordingly, finely calibrated. So on the way to the match, discussing possible outfits with me, she told me she’d thought of wearing an ironic comment on north-eastern evening dress. ‘A very short mini-skirt, bare legs and a Northern Rock t-shirt’ I told her there wouldn’t have been time to put the weight on.

So she’d settled for a different kind of irony. She was wearing a sheepskin coat, presumably a considered comment on what was more or less a uniform for a generation of football managers and commentators. Only hers wasn’t so much a car coat as a steppes warrior’s one.

As we approached the ground, she developed her thoughts, composing a chant, a new variation on the traditional metropolitan slur directed at northern football fans, to the tune of Guantanamera:
‘One cashmere jumper
You’ve only got one cashmere jumper
[repeat]
And I bet it’s from M&S.’

As she sang, very quietly, we spotted a young woman in her traditional north-eastern evening dress. And, at our feet, we saw a rabbit . . .

[see blog below]

The transitional object (as roadkill)

From A Child’s Dictionary Of Psychoanalysis

Winnicott famously said there is no such thing as a baby, only a mother and a baby. He developed the idea of the transitional object — not just the teddy etc itself but the way the teddy etc stands for something beyond its physical self, not so much the physical mother as the relationship with the mother. I saw this in the gutter at the junction of Annette Rd and Lowman Rd, N7, right opposite El Commandante. I thought: there is no such thing as a transitional object, only a transitional object and an infant. When the transitional object is lost, it’s really the infant that is lost.

On sexuality and handguns

South of the river on Friday, to the Brixton Academy, with my younger son, for the Sex Pistols. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen them, not even the tenth. As some of you will know, I have some previous in this matter.

They took the stage to Vera Lynn’s There’ll Always Be An England — two of them live in California. Johnny sang, feelingly, of having no feelings. They did No Fun — all around me, shaven-headed men greeted it joyously and had fantastic fun singing along. We all shouted that we wanted anarchy in the UK and probably meant something of the kind — though perhaps not till the mortgage is paid off.

They did an entertainingly energetic I’m A Lazy Sod. They sang Bodies, with its horror-struck retreat from the physical: it’s about abortion. We danced. When Bodies finished, John Rotten challenged us with deliberated ambiguity, saying something like: ‘If there’d been abortion back when I was born, I wouldn’t be here. What do you think to that? Eh?’

The last time I was at the Academy was for the Gotan Project — slightly abstract, slinky Parisian reimaginings of a Buenos Aires of the senses. The audience was all over the place, distracted, involved with themselves and each other rather than the show, falling down drunk, picking arguments, bumping into each other, blocking each other’s views — my view. It felt like being in the middle of a giant pinball table.

The Pistols’ audience was engaged, not uncritical but still open, happy to be in the moment, collectively. They, we, were able to play with the idea of being pretty vacant.

As I left, I thought of Fawlty Towers, episode eight, in which Dr Abbott, a psychiatrist, having observed Basil for an evening, says: ‘There’s enough material here for an entire conference.’

Louise Bourgeois’ unfeasibly large testicles. Her father’s too

After an entire few weeks of study and reading, I thought it was time to take some of it out into the world, see what I’d learned.

The other evening I went to Seduced at the Barbican, a show about sex. It was a members-only evening. True, but I only mention that fact for the joke, of course — and because no-one there made the joke. It wasn’t that kind of evening. We weren’t that kind of people.

It was busy, really busy, almost as busy as it had been a couple of years ago, for a show about the 1960s Brazilian art movement, Tropicalia. Lots and lots of well-behaved, thoughtful men and women — in fairly equal numbers — examining lots and lots of images of other people having sex. They — we — examined the images calmly and with apparent dispassion, denying the actual pornographic urge that gave meaning to most of them in the first place. In a sense, it was less honest than a lap-dancing club, though the floor was cleaner. I couldn’t help thinking we were like Victorian gentlemen claiming they’d bought an Alma-Tadema to further their knowledge of classical plumbing technology.

It wasn’t, as the Guardian had said, the most intelligent show of the year. But it was interesting. The usual British Museum and National Gallery crew were rounded up: Greek pottery, Roman frescos, Japanese prints, Fragonard paintings — though no Alma-Tademas. A grand, historical parade of *****s and *****s and ****ing and ****ing.

(I use asterisks, by the way, not out of any prudishness but because those kind of words still retain the power to shock network server firewalls — as I know to my cost. I’m writing a book about swearing and if I don’t astericise or euphemise, emails to major companies regularly get bounced back to me or sent to Reading gaol or wherever it is electronic sexual transgressions get punished and incarcerated.)

The sheer repetition of all that historical material had the comforting, familiar feel of any collection. There’s a certain eroticism, isn’t there, about any collection — paintings, stamps, antiquities — if only for the collector. Looking at the same thing again and again and again: it’s like children reading the same book over and over. To become bored is to grow up. Repetition is the neurosis, its enactment, its embodiment: that’s what Freud wrote, I think.

There was a Nan Goldin slide show, of ordinary couples having sex while Bjork sang. It was tender and honestly mundane — quite unlike nearly all other sexual images, deliberately so, obviously. It caused a family dispute. My wife thought that including pictures of the ****ing couples’ young children was exploitative: a child can’t give informed consent. I said: there’s no intention to exploit, it’s what was there, it wasn’t set up or created by the photographer. Not my finest logic, I know. Hmm, she said, they still make me uncomfortable. I agreed.

There were Robert Mapplethorpe’s portraits and self-portraits of extreme homosexual sado-masochism. When I first saw them, at the ICA in the early 1980s, they were shocking. Then AIDS made them tragic. Now, well, they’re historical documents, almost as quaint as Belloq’s photographs of pre-first world war New Orleans prostitutes. A little more uncomfortable, though. How can you get a whole fist up there? asked my wife. Relaxation techniques? I suggested.

There was the artist filming themselves in slow motion. There always is. This time the artist was having sex, naturally. You could only see her face. I found myself thinking: good haircut. It was, at least partly, a female riposte to Andy Warhol’s Blow Job, which was showing on a wall opposite. An art world equivalent to, say, the call-and-response coupling of Hank Ballard’s Work With Me, Annie and Etta James’ answer record Roll With Me, Henry. The artist’s name was all lower case: kr buxey. I can’t be the only one who saw a joke there, too: ee cummings.

And then there were the Louis Bourgeoises, Couples. Two giant, lumpy couples coupling, made of cloth and overstuffed like a child’s soft toys, imprisoned in vitrines. Like all Bourgeois’ work, they are erotic and overripe in their grossness and plasticity. Dreams, not reportage.

Both couples are missionary-positioning. One of the women’s arms, clasped tight around the Mr Blobby-like male, is metal and leather — part prosthesis, part fetish. Between one man-toy’s legs are an oversized pair of testicles. Bourgeois’ father’s testicles, quite clearly. At 96, her relationship with her long dead father has lost none of its perversity and fixedness. Her heart — maybe more of her — still belongs to dada. And to her abiding fury at both his affair with her governess and her mother’s disinclination to admit its existence.

Then you notice that the heads are missing. All four figures are decapitated. This is Bourgeois’ long-simmered act of revenge, the most wonderful, vicious imagining of the primal scene, as Freudians call it. Adults having sex. Not as the child might actually have glimpsed it, accidentally or not, through a keyhole or from the cot, but, as I’ve learned, in its dreams and imaginings. Here is adult sex in the way a small child’s inner world might conceive it — two big, big stuffed toys, face to face. Then, to take it an emotional step further — the small child’s dreams again — you cut the heads off. Daddy’s, mummy’s, the governess’s.

I’m not over-interpreting this stuff, by the way. Bourgeois is quite clear and open about the work’s intentions: parents, sex, the primal scene, revenge. The figures’ cuddliness is not ironic but in itself a further act of violence: that which we can’t physically destroy we attack with jokes. Good old Freudian, bad little Bourgeois.

There’s a common point, regularly made by Freud and other Freudians about Oedipus’s complexity. It’s this: if that sexually and violently resonant mother-father-child dramatic triangle didn’t find an echo in us all, Oedipus Rex wouldn’t still be playing in (subsidised) theatres two and a half millennia later. These ****ing Bourgeois Couples made me think the same about the notion of the primal scene. If they didn’t have some general resonance or touch something embedded in us all, then they wouldn’t chill the way they do.

Later, I read — yes, I did do some half-term, sorry, reading week, reading — something by DW Winnicott. He’s the English psychoanalyst who — among other things, admittedly — was primarily responsible for the erection of a statue of Freud. Now, it sits outside the Tavistock but, originally it stood down the road outside Swiss Cottage swimming baths — to which the erection party repaired for celebratory tea and biscuits. Yes, I know it sounds like I’m making it up or confusing it with a Joe Orton play. But it really did happen like that. And, with one of his life’s major ambitions fulfilled, Winnicott died within months.

This is what he wrote in The Theory Of The Parent-Infant Relationship: ‘Death has no meaning until the arrival of hate and of the concept of the whole human person. When a whole human person can be hated, death has meaning, and close on this follows that which can be called maiming: the whole hated and loved person is kept alive by being castrated or otherwise maimed instead of killed.’

Sex and violence: I suspect they’re here to stay.


Sound & vision

‘Mon coeur est a papa’