Notes to stanzas 27 to 37

27.1 She goes:* ‘She says’—a slang reporting clause which betrays a certain lack of education on the part of the speaker. Perhaps the vocal distinction between the more sophisticated poetic persona and the ‘common’ coin-narrator is deliberately inconsistent. The environment of this poem is one in which no such logical distinctions can be allowed to hold; not even the structure of the narrative is immune from the encroachment of a debilitating ambiguity.

27.1 ”I wish…:* Tristram Shandy, Chapter 1:

27.1 took:* The use of the preterite form in place of the past participle ‘taken’ is intended to set up the ‘common’ voice of the coin mentioned in the previous note.

27.4 half-arsed cock-up of a woman’s gob:* The counterfeit queen is complaining that her mouth has been so poorly rendered by the die-casters that—in a very unfeminine way—it resembles a buttock with a distinct turn up (cock-up) at the end; or perhaps even a filleted (half-arsed) Indian fish: the Cockup (Lates calcarifer).

27.8 the right way round?:* The reversed layout of this stanza—the lines being justified to the right rather than the left margin—is a typical mimetic gimmick. It is genuinely important to the hermeneutics of this piece that the coin is mis-struck as a mirror image, though. Apart from the fact it makes the object seem less like a coin and more like a ‘plate’ for printing bank notes, this detail also allows the poet to include yet another encoded reference to the thematic importance of C17^th and C18^th coining.
    The direction in which the monarch’s portrait faces is traditionally consistent throughout the reign, and only alternates from one reign to the next. This pattern was first significantly interrupted in 1672, at the apex of Hearth-Tax counterfeiting, when the first ever regal copper coinage was issued by Charles II. Private copper tokens had circulated for some time—especially in the new metalworking areas; when the King introduced his own it was as another token currency not an intrinsically valuable one. The law at the time did not make copper tokens the monopoly of the Crown as they were not considered part of the nation’s wealth, not being re-exchangeable for gold and silver. Two decisions were taken, however, that are crucial to this poem: the first was to reverse the direction of the King’s profile, and the second was to show Britannia on the reverse (for the first time since the Roman era). Like the edge inscription decus et tutamen, introduced in the same period to deter clipping, these measures were deemed necessary because of the likelihood coiners would silver over ambiguous halfpennies to make them look like shillings.
    The next important reversal of direction took place in 1821 when Britannia was turned to face right (permanently as it turned out) in the first copper minting by the Crown since the ‘cartwheel’ coinage of Boulton and Watt’s Soho Manufactory had revolutionized the milling process with steam power. The first cartwheel set of 1797 is the only copper coinage in history to have had an equivalent intrinsic value. I think it no coincidence that the creation of this heroically valuable coinage was simultaneous with the suspension of bullion convertibility (see 6.4*). Boulton was attempting a practical intervention on the Bullionist side of the debate: one which involved him in an expensive and courageous private war against the coiners of the city in which he operated, whose machines and rings of distribution he paid personally to have broken.
    Perhaps the decision to make Britannia drop her olive branch and turn (as it were) away from the West (in which pose she had resembled the island of Great Britain itself), is significant of a hardening in the C19^th of the Empire’s attitude to America after the 1812 war, and a change of focus towards Asia.

28.2 oily:* Another diæresis. These broadly arcing slippages of vowel pitch make the mouth and mind seem as full of lubricating engine oil as the chambers of the machine-parts produced in the grimy city they derive from. The incessant pistons of this chugging Midland verse are driven inexorably in and out of them.

28.3 Sabbath gig:* Rather than a small horse-drawn carriage, I assume this ‘gig’ is a whirligig: either a small wind-driven wheel of feathers designed as a children’s toy (or as a trap with which to catch small birds), or else a different toy made from a hammered coin, or some other form of flat disc, through which is threaded a string or lace at four different points so that pulling the ends apart causes the disc to spin and create a whirring sound and a multi-coloured visual animation. Toys of this latter kind have been found at various archæological sites around the world and were used in primitive shamanic rituals to create hypnotic effects in the participants. This ‘gig’ for use in a demonic ‘Sabbath’ ceremony is likened to the poem itself whose ‘buzzing’, whirling, hypnotising octaves are to be resisted, encapsulating as they do its awful vision of the future, in which dire birdtrap a flighty, unsuspecting reader might otherwise find himself entangled.

28.6 Ribena he:* This is one of the least convincing rhymes in the poem; the enjambment is almost unspeakable. The trashy quality of the verse is no doubt intended to reflect the trashy quality of Sloggy’s work and language though. ‘Ironically, of course’ might therefore be read as appositive to the ensuing parenthesis, something like a stage direction or line reading in a theatre script:

29.3 blanks:* The plain, unstruck discs, also known as flans, that are milled or hammered in the striking process. The word has a number of other senses in both numismatics and printing however which might be informative here. Blanks are: ‘French 5-denier pieces of the early Renascence’, ‘the smallest subdivisions in the system of measurement of precious metals used in minting’, ‘unprinted pages in a proof’ (see missing stanza 180), ‘profane or potentially libellous words replaced with a dash in a published text’, and ‘the empty spaces inside individual letters of a typeface.’ The last of these are also called counters by typographers: the largest and best example being the ‘hole’ in the upper-case O (though the matrices for movable type are obviously made in relief, so it would actually be the opposite of a hole in production).
    I am quite certain the poet intends us to think of the printing process as much as coin-milling in this scene. The ‘gigantic, oily machinery’ could just as easily be a large printing press as a mint. The difference is not large. Gutenberg was a goldsmith and his invention of movable type was self-evidently an adaptation of techniques used in the production of dies for coins. We should remind ourselves that mass dissemination of the printed word in metal predates its mass dissemination on paper by some two thousand years.
    If they were minted as mirror images, coins themselves could act as ‘type’: coat a very fine example in ink, press it onto paper and you would get a pretty decent image. This is no surprise; the origin of numismatic stamps is probably to be found in the ‘seals’ on noblemen’s signet rings, which were specifically designed to make a recognisable impression in a soft medium like clay or wax.
    Coins, however, should carry more than significant value. The printed word (or the impression in a wax seal) is simply the trace of a ‘type’ which the reader cannot touch. In this system, the typographic counter is a strange zone of absence—an enclave of lost tangibility which seems to crave the impossible: to be filled with disambiguated meaning. On a sovereign coin of precious metal, on the other hand, the form, the value and the substance are not divorced. Its worth is both embodied and signified by its presence and its form.
    Obviously this is no longer true if coins are token or counterfeit. In this case, their form takes over from their content. They are reduced to the status of texts—hardly any more valuable than the mark they could make on a piece of paper—unstable, revolutionary texts which carry all the ambiguities of significance that Gutenberg’s counters seem to have introduced into the Bible.

29.6 int much cop:* Perhaps this means ‘is not very good’ from ‘is not much copper’ (an important word in this poem). This suggests an æsthetic judgement on the design expressed exclusively as a sardonic reference to the paucity of intrinsic value of the material in which it is struck. A typical bit of Brummagem nonsense.

29.8 I ask ye…:* Tristram Shandy Chapter 1:

30.7 mews:* This pun on muse is typically unamusing; the tawdry double-entendre designed to undermine both Parnassus and the royal stablery with its insidious suggestion of sexual impropriety amongst the Anglican clergy, does not deserve a second look.

30.8 yard:* See back-yard*

31.1 poets talking to the dead:*This is clearly an allusion to Yeats’ A Vision.

31.2 The other side:* The afterlife of Spiritualists; one from which the dead are supposed to be able to make contact. It is sometimes identified (by the most acutely unscientific of occultists) with the ‘dark side of the moon’. Consider this, from the most pretentiously harrowed of second-rate romantic poets, Charlotte Smith:

31.5 low-down:* Yet another sleazy hyphenated Americanism. British journalistic slang would render it ‘the dirty truth’. Here it carries connotations of the underworld: the spirits are perhaps to be understood as quite literally speaking from ‘low down’ (i.e. hell)… and/or with deep bass voices. At least they are being ‘conjured’ to do so. (It is a silly commonplace of Jacobean Tragedy for ghosts of the buried to speak in comically booming voices from beneath the stage: see Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, for example.) Instead, these particular spirits behave like effeminate troubadours.

31.5 villanelles:* I can not for the life of me find any Villanelle for which the poet claims a ghostly agency. The most recent I have read however—‘Do not Go Gentle into that Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas (from In Country Sleep, New York, James Laughlin 1952)—does deal directly with the subject of death. Mr Thomas is himself a somewhat dense and dark poet with a penchant for both the public house and the depiction in his poetry of certain less wholesome sections of society. I would not put it past him to be acquainted (if not actually in contact) with the author of the present work.

31.6 Ouija:* This proprietary brand name for the ‘supernatural’ board-game (registered as a US trademark from July 1^st 1890 by the Kennard Novelty Company, Baltimore) is formed from the French and German affirmatives: ‘oui’ and ‘ja’: the implication being that when the séance-leader intones ‘is there anybody… out there?’ the answer is invariably ‘yes’. There must have been an element of irony at play. It is a surprising act of restraint that the poet declined to use ‘ouija’ as a feminine rhyme in this couplet; it would be in keeping with the general flippancy, ambiguity and laxity of articulation to round the stanza off with something like: ‘There’s no point trying to contact ghosts by ouija: / You try to talk to them, they’ll never heed ya.’
    I find it disquieting that I have succumbed so quickly to an internalisation of this dreadful persona’s style that I should already be producing more of it. This weird allure is testament to the poem’s satirical prowess.

32.2 Derivative:* Of Dryden’s translation of the Ænied: ‘Of arms and of the man, I sing…’ Arma virumque canō). It is from Virgil that poets seem to get this habit of beginning in a measured tone with ‘of’, and then the topic. Homer starts with much more gusto, immediately and emotionally invoking the muse. Milton opens with: ‘Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit/Of that Forbidden Tree’; Ariosto has a rather rambling list to match his rambling tome: ‘Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori,/Le cortesie, l’audaci impresi, io canto’.

32.4 sham:* (See 26.5 shame.*) Macaulay says it was during the 1680s that ‘sham’ and ‘mob’ entered the language; as did both ‘Birmingham’ meaning a fake (a ‘sham’) and a Whig exclusionist and ‘anti-Birmingham’ meaning a Tory (as did the words ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ themselves. Paradoxically, ‘Whig’ came from the nickname of a radical Scottish Presbyterian group defeated at the battle of Bothwell Bridge by the Duke of Monmouth, who the Whigs definitively supported.) (History of England, Vol I., ch. II.)

32.4-5 give a damn:* It was the censors who insisted on Clark Gable’s infamous anapæstic rendering of ‘give a damn’ in Gone With the Wind. I recall being bored to distraction by the grimacing American melodrama and wishing the film-reels had been destroyed in the climactic fire.

32.6 karaoke div:* ‘Karaoke’ appears twice in this poem. The second instance in stanza 130 is in the phrase ‘TV karaoke bar’. ‘Bar’ is in the American sense of ‘public house’, which suggests that ‘karaoke’ is a kind of intoxicating drink which one can imbibe at such an establishment, presumably whilst watching Television. ‘Karaoke’ might therefore be a narcotic made from ‘karaya’, a gum extracted from the Indian tree Sterculia urens and used, like gum tragacanth, (see note to ‘gum’*) as the basis for liquid medicinal preparations. There are certain cough medicines which use this gum as a viscous medium and contain opiates like codine and morphine. (Oke was a unit of measurement in the Ottoman Empire, roughly equivalent to the metric litre.) Perhaps, in this bleak future, we are to understand that ‘karaoke’ is a product like this, served in large quantities as a stupefying drink in sleazy ‘television bars’.
    As for concerns of prosody, the other occurrence of this word (at 133.7) suggests it to be a tetrasyllable rather than ka-ra-yoke or kar-yoke. This line is therefore another Birmingham Alexandrine. Perhaps this has to do with the gormless Americanism worming its way into our urban dialects: ‘okey-dokey’. (see 13.7 okay.*)

div, (to follow the thread of Asian/Islamic influence) is an ancient Persian demon or evil spirit, so named because of a negative transformation in that culture’s early religions of the Indian gods into devils (Sanskrit dēva, ‘god’, from which root both Italian and therefore English get their diva: ‘goddess’ or ‘prima donna’). A ‘karaoke div’ is therefore a karaya-drug demon: an addict of this gum-based narcotic.

32.8 ten past eight:* The hands form a straight oblique line (at an angle of about 40º from the horizontal) across the face of a clock at ten past eight. This has the effect of ‘crossing it out’. The clock has not only stopped, to recall Sterne’s joke about the pause of narrative time at Tristram Shandy’s conception, but is also sous rature.

33.3 portable TV:* One of the fantastic contraptions typical of (and perhaps ultimately definitive of) so-called Science Fiction; presumably we are to understand this to be a miniature, battery operated version of a television set one can hold in one’s hand: being, to the mains television set, what the torch is to the standard lamp. There are other, seemingly, portable gadgets in this vision of the future, most prominently the telephone. Both of these fictional inventions are fundamentally illogical and, worse, extremely disturbing. Why anyone would want to watch television whilst on the move, ignoring their native environment in preference for the mind numbing propaganda of American commerce, or use a telephone whilst out of the house, I cannot imagine. The ludicrous image suggests itself of two men sitting with their backs to one another on a park bench discussing the inveigling television programme they are both watching on their personal, hand-held televisions by speaking into their personal, hand-held telephones. Something akin to this nonsensical tableau happens (in 229-230) when Sloggy—whilst still in the same bar-room—attempts to telephone Perry pretending to be someone else, in order to cheat on a wager: a fundamentally deceitful act which seems to encapsulate the distorted morality carried by the distorted logic of such an ‘innovation’.

33.5 Everest:* The ever-(r)est mountain (for) ever. [Poet’s note]
    These short interjections are very useful as a demonstration of the poem’s thematic drive. This one clearly demonstrates the dystopian concern with time. Everest is the highest mountain in the world. At the time the poem was written, it was yet to be successfully climbed. This scribbled note equates a symbol (therefore) of geographical insurmountability with the concept of temporal permanence by suggesting a folk-etymology based upon an illogically hypersuperlative transcendence of time and history: rather like the infantile solecism, ‘bestest’.
    In fact the mountain was named after Sir George Everest (1790-1866), Surveyor General of India, whose name is one of the variations of ‘Everard’—derived from the Mercian Saxon Eoforheard (‘sturdy boar’)—of which ‘Everett’ is the most common alternative. The parenthetical insertions serve a morbid desire to evert this sense of ultimate unconquerability by implying ‘Everest’ could also be synonymous with requiescat in perpetuitatem. The Earth’s highest mountain is also one of its most lasting monuments to death; it is quite literally the tomb of dead climbers, clinging petrified to the permafrost on its slopes like the leopard on Hemingway’s Kilimanjaro, whose frozen grimaces serve (like the gargoyles on Christminster Cathedral) as warning to all who aspire to conquer the seemingly unconquerable. The man named here (as obscure as Hardy’s Jude in the poet’s vision), Edmund Hillary, is predicted to become one of its sepulchral statuettes.
    In this sense, the mountain is not dissimilar to the gorgon in the poem’s symbolic stratum.

Sherpa Thingummy: ‘Sherpa’ is a job-title given to the Tibetan mountain porters in Nepal and India. Thingummy is a typically vague algebraic formula used to stand for an abstruse oriental name. It is amusing to note that I was initially taken in by it, not being able to recall the correct name of Tenzing Norgay; there is a certain phonetic proximity of the word to a name one might expect from an inhabitant of the area. This is black comedy, however; we should not forget that the porter’s own frozen body is envisaged in this bleak prediction to be the only monument left to mark his grave, and anonymity would make his death in the service of a tragic adventurer all the more poignant when one considers the numerous unmarked graves of soldiers in the recent war—many of them Gurkhas.
    Of course, what the poet could not possibly have known as he wrote this dire premonition was that the ‘news of Edmund Hillary’ was in fact not of tragic failure, but of a transcendent success. The event actually predated the Coronation by several days but the news was only released in London on June 2^nd after a sturdy young reporter for the Times, James Morris, who had manfully gone more than half way up with Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing, had, trudged back down from Camp IV at 20,000 feet through extremely inclement conditions and concocted a sophisticated plan involving a relay of local message-runners in order to bring the news back home.
    In order to avoid the theft of this scoop by reporters lacking Morris’s undoubted spunk, the decision was taken to relay the message in code: Snow conditions bad was to mean ‘Everest climbed’ and the climbers were given code names—Sherpa Tenzing was awaiting improvement, and advanced base abandoned referred to Edmund Hillary. So when, on May 31^st, Morris sent the message: Snow condition bad hence expedition abandoned advance base on 29th and awaiting improvement being all well, the newsdesk understood it to mean ‘Everest climbed on 29^th of May by Hillary and Tenzing; both are well.’
    The news was more than good: not a foreboding shadow of mortal failure looming over the crowning of the new defender of the empire and faith, as this poet warns, but as much a beacon of hope in dreary times for the commonwealth as was the ceremony with which it coincided.
    This serious error of judgement on the poet’s part proves the poem to have been written very recently indeed: lately enough to have heard of the mission but not of its success. One can only hope that more of the dire predictions it contains turn out to be similarly false.

33.6 dovetailed:* No appearance of a bird in this charged environment is ever purely innocent. It is the dove who first returns with news of land after the flood: the source of its identification with peace (with the olive branch as evidence) and with the Holy Spirit. It is for this reason that Columbus is such an apt name for the discoverer of America—he is the bird sent from the European ark who returns with the olive branch of the ‘West Indies’, a little like Æneas with the golden bough. (All the more reason to suggest a rejection of America might lie behind Britannia’s turn from West to East, discarding her totemic sprig of olives).
    This stanza is (wrongly) concerned, however, with the reportage of glowering bad news sent back from the top of the world via television. Where the dove is traditionally the bringer of good tidings and blue skies after the storm, this poet has transformed its active principle of combination, in the (Christian) carpentry term dovetail, into an insidious harbinger of doom: from pure white dove to sooty storm-crow. In Russian, I believe, the words for ‘dove’ and ‘sky-blue’ are cognate: golub and goluboy and an alternative name for ‘television’ (supposedly more patriotic than one derived from English) is goluboy ekran (the azure screen). loth to leave their houses…
    Imagine a dove killed instantly, impacting on a television screen, fooled by a depiction of the sky. burned their wings and fell

34.1 license fees:* The means by which BBC television is funded. It is surely much more desirable to run the system this way than to succumb to American style commercial television. At this point, though, we are directly inside the anti-royal, capitalist propaganda voice of BTV. This mask slips a little over the next few stanzas however. This is not, I think, a weakness. It may be slightly illogical that the voice of BTV would inveigh against television itself (rather than simply the state television of a constitutional monarchy, as here) but a little respite from the otherwise relentless adoption of the voice of the enemy is very welcome. This way we catch a glimpse of what the poet really thinks.

34.5 Bertolt Brecht:* A Marxist German playwright famous for opposing realism in the theatre. Brecht’s stylistics appears to be based entirely upon a rejection of the credulous, pleasurable response to drama in preference for one in which the audience is never allowed to forget that performances are artificial; they should therefore respond to them as artistic constructs whose import is to be intellectually extrapolated. He is also (consequently) famous for encouraging the use of harsh lighting effects that are physically unpleasant to endure, and also for refusing to allow the house-lights to be dimmed during performance. His version of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, called The Threepenny Opera, therefore considerably weakens the original, failing to recognize the dramatic necessity of balancing these ‘alienation effects’ with the lulled, pleasurable responses he tries entirely to disallow: typical of his dour socialist piety, not to mention his non-existent German sense of humour. Hopefully, this kind of pretentious nonsense will never seep into the English theatre. The idea that an obscure Joycean like Samuel Beckett, whose apparently plotless ‘pièce de theatre’ En Attendant Godot is currently showing in Paris, might decide to produce something similar in his mother tongue is truly horrifying. If Cromwell had tolerated theatre, perhaps it would have been like this.

34.8 sofa-cades:* A fanciful neologism of the persona’s, made by analogy with the American portmanteau of ‘motor-car’ and ‘cavalcade’: the motorcade. Virginia Woolf would never have used a word as crass as this, but perhaps the first appearance of such a thing in literature might be the moment in Mrs Dalloway where the laborious and ludicrous Viceroy’s cavalcade scene in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses is elegantly pastiched as a very English stir of various reactions caused when the prime-minister’s car backfires on Bond Street. Sofa-cades is self-consciously silly. It is a surreal comic image of all the viewers sitting down in their living room furniture to watch the procession to the Abbey for the Coronation, being somehow transported into Westminster to glide down Horse Guards’ Parade on their sofas. Unlike most of the other jargon in the piece it is therefore to be understood as a sneering invention of the persona’s rather than a piece of current newspeak.

35.1 electroplated:*Unsurprisingly, electroplating was invented in 1840 by a Birmingham doctor called John Wright (a follower of the city’s pre-eminent republican scientist, Joseph Priestley, no doubt) who used Potassium Cyanide as an electrolyte for suspensions of gold and silver. He sold his invention to local jewellers Henry and George Richard Elkington who used their monopoly on the technology (which was much less costly to use in terms of materials, time and effort than traditional plating methods) to turn out cheap gilt rubbish at enormous profits. The legal protection given by the Crown to such insincere processes is, in my opinion, tantamount to a license to print money. The idea that royal ‘wealth’ can be ‘electroplated’ on the faces of the common people by the radiation of the television or the glow of a cigarette is obviously sarcastic.

35.3 Tarantino:* I imagine this to be the name of a supposedly exotic conjurer who makes use of a luminous box or ‘case’ of some sort in his televized performances. The name suggests a connection to the Tarantula spider, and therefore also the dance, The Tarantella and the archaic illness, Tarantism: both of which are characterized by jerky, erratic movement thought to be the (phrenetic) result of a bite from this arachnid. Perhaps the magician uses spiders in his act, or else behaves like a tarantato.
    Another possible connection is to the word taratantara: which is an (originally Italian) echoic imitation of a brassy fanfare: a sound made when introducing something trashily impressive (like a magic trick) within the suggested idiom of showbusiness. An equivalent in more regular English usage might be ta-daa! This would certainly suit the connotations of cheap showiness here, not to mention those (passim) of ‘brass’ and ‘brazen’.
    A strange usage of this word in Italian identifies it with a winnowing tray or a sieve used in gold-prospecting. This reminds me of a theory I once heard mooted around the peripheries of a conference by an eccentric young Strabo scholar that ‘the golden fleece’ brought back to Greece by Jason, in the first great story of foreign trade in the Classical tradition, was actually a technology (of placer mining) using sheepskin to filter the silt of gold-rich rivers in Colchis. I seem to remember the argument went that the golden fleece was therefore simply a synecdochic representation of the legendary wealth of the place and not a magical object at all. This might be persuasive if it were less self-contradictory: a place of great wealth would surely not need to go to the desperate lengths of slopping about in mud with the soggy pelt of a sheep looking for one or two grains of precious metal. This would turn a story of great heroism into one in which a pastoral scene of unambitious and contented shepherds was transformed, by alien greed, into one full of filthy, desperate forty-niners.

35.6 ‘upgraded’:* This is a veiled barb directed at the Grade brothers, Lew and Leslie, who are the ‘theatrical agents’ behind the Independent Television Company seeking a franchise to bring American commercial Television to Great Britain. (See 0.1 Next up on BTV:*) The inverted commas clearly make an irony of the prepositional prefix (another of the typical reversals of direction in the poem). The prefix that best captures the projected effect on the nation’s hearth and home of the Grades is not up but down-Graded, and ultimately de-Graded.

35.7 filtertips:* Futuristic slang for cigarettes with a filter mouthpiece designed to reduce the tar content of the smoke. These already exist of course, and are more popular in the United States than Britain. The first brand to be introduced were, however, British, and heavily marketed as such: Benson and Hedges Parliaments. This brand are sold in gold-coloured packs which carry the coat of arms of the British Sovereign; the firm being "tobacconists by appointment" to the monarch. They turn up passim (B&H in 35.2 is an abbreviation), presumably because of their royal connection and the gold appearance of the pack.
    I do not think the poet (who has begun to speak directly at this point) is actually attacking the filter technology, however. It seems quite a sensible invention. There is a new version on the market in America, the Lorillard Kent brand, which has a patented filter made from a substance called ‘Micronite’. This is in fact a tightly textured fibre derived from amiantus: a fire-resistant mineral whose other name, ‘asbestos’, is paradoxically misapplied, meaning as it does unquenchable rather than undefilable. (A similar folk-etymology is spreading like wild-fire which derives from the increasingly common solecism of using ‘inflammable’ as an antonym, rather than a synonym, of ‘flammable’.) According to their advertising "Kent and only Kent has the Micronite filter, made of a pure, dust-free, completely harmless material that is not only effective but so safe that it actually is used to help filter the air in operating rooms of leading hospitals." This does not seem like the sort of thing the poet would disapprove of, rather he is probably satirising cigarette smoking in general (as opposed to the more genteel and considered English habit of the pipe) with all its attendant notions of packaged, prefabricated convenience so characteristic of US culture.
    Crucially, the poet seems particularly scathing of the advertising jargon involved in selling these ‘convenience items’, particularly on commercial television. The most successful programme in America is, I am told, a supposedly ‘comic’ everyday drama series called ‘I Love Lucy.’ This series is sponsored by the tobacconist Philip Morris, who has recently taken over Benson and Hedges, and each broadcast begins with an advertisement for this brand of cigarettes. dare pondus idonea fumo

35.7 sitcoms:* These invented compound terms are the stock-in-trade of the science fiction writer. Infuriatingly, however, (though infuriation is a perfectly justified intention in the circumstances) this poet often fails to explain, or even make illustrative reference to, the technological innovations he names. I can only hazard a guess, though knowing the clichés of the oeuvre I am fairly confident of my guess, that the items in question are communication devices. Just as ‘telegenic’ in the previous stanza has recently been newly fangled from ‘television’ and ‘photogenic’, this word seems most likely to be an alloy of ‘sitting’ and ‘intercom’, and therefore used to denote some contrivance which allows the user to communicate with others over long distances without getting up from his seat. Like the filter-tip, this seems on the surface to be something beneficial rather than unpleasant. No doubt it is the laziness implied in the need for such a thing that is the subject of the poet’s ire.

35.8 Positive economics:* A book, and an ultra-capitalist theory, published this year by American economist, Milton Friedman. It argues, or so I am led to believe, for absolute deregulation of international currency markets, and the abandonment of material wealth standards for an absolute assertion of relative exchange values. It is the cornerstone of my politics that this should be identified as the thin end of the wedge of revolutionary Marxism. His name would be almost laughable if it were not quite so apt.

36.1 stand-in for the British sun:* ‘Stand-in’ is another of the hyphenated alloys—a current slang term meaning an actor or actress engaged literally to stand in the place of a principal player of a film during the preparations for shooting so that the ‘star’ can avoid all the tedious business of arranging the lighting and camera angles. In the circumstances, all the connotations of illumination, ‘stardom’ and the manipulation of the moving image are heavily ironic.
    It is curious to note that the moon might be seen as the perfect object to carry this epithet. For the Lunar Society of Birmingham (Boulton, Watt, Wedgewood, Darwin, Priestley et al.: the self-styled great figures of the ‘English Enlightenment’), the moon stood quite literally in the place of the sun as the means to light their journeys home after their clandestine meetings. The revolutionary implications of this should not go unnoticed. Many of the group, (the ironically named) Priestley in particular, were more than sympathetic to the anti-royalist revolutions in America and France. Moreover, to continue the discussion of the total solar eclipse as the model for the Ring of Gyges (see 31.2*), we should recall that it was Newton’s fascination with this event in his childhood which inspired him to the work on optics without which the television would probably never have been invented. The television, as ‘a stand-in for the British sun’, could therefore easily be seen to have the revolutionary (ecliptic) aspirations of a Cromwell or Napoleon.
    There is a reference, which I take to be an ecliptic image, in Shakespeare to the theft (to paraphrase) of the moon’s ‘dusky fame’ at the hands of the Sun’s ‘gilt orb’, but I cannot find it for the life of me.

36.2 bronze our features:* This is an extension of the idea of ‘electroplating’ in the previous stanza. Bronze is also used in this narcissistic age to mean ‘deliberately get a sun-tan’. Why anybody should want to make themselves look like an Arab or an Irish navvy heaven only knows, but more and more of us seem to be obsessed with doing precisely that. I cannot help but think it has something to do with Technicolor images of Americans. Clearly the radiation emitted by a television set is not sufficient to brown the skin (see next note*) but the connection between atomic technology (which self-evidently mimics the sun) and the technology of television is not illogical. To look into the faces of those transfixed by television is very similar to watching people ‘sunbathing’; their skin changes colour and seems to wither and age before your eyes. At some level, all the implications of Æneas and the ‘brazen’, must suggest this poem hints that television is somehow taking us back in time; it is not just ‘burnishing’ our faces, but also ‘taking us back to the bronze age.’

36.2 beta rays:*Despite the perfectly justifiable paranoia expressed here, I am assured that the beta radiation in the cathode ray oscilloscope (television set) actually impacts on the opposite surface of the screen, rather than literally radiating from the objective side. This is another of the poet’s reversal (counter) effects. In order to conflate the television with the nuclear bomb he turns its scientific properties inside out and makes the viewer’s face into the ‘screen.’
    Screen is another crucial linguistic counter: as a verb and as a noun it can both obscure and/or display. The basic point made here about the television set being a source of (electromagnetic) radiation is nonetheless entirely valid. The poet finds complex analogues of colonisation in the difference between the reflected light of the cinema screen and the radiated light of the television which turns our faces into screens.

36.5 Our skin anneals:* In minting, the annealing process involves re-heating and slowly cooling cast coins in order to eradicate tiny fissures and flaws in the metal. The word derives from Old English ǽlan ‘to burn’ (transitively, i.e. ‘to set on fire’). It is also used in reference to ‘glazing’ ceramics.

36.7 saddos:* presumably a putative dialectal form of saddhus—ascetic Indian holy men who eschew modern technology and society and profess a transcendental gnostic ideology with a number of relevant similarities to that of Plato. Though the poet could just be spelling it like this to make it rhyme with ‘shadows’.

37.1 Reticulating:* Forming a web. I am not sure the poet actually means to use this word. Perhaps he means ‘articulating’ as in ‘moving strangely’. Whether or not he intends it though, the word suggests something rather more uncanny than the flickering or dancing fire-light evoked in Plato’s cave: if we remember ‘the light in Tarantino’s case’ perhaps there is some sense in which the poet means to combine the radiation emitted by the television with image of a monstrous spider’s web in which we have been trapped.

37.3 signature:* Rather than a handwritten name, this word originally referred to the impression of a signet ring on the wax seal of a document. It is therefore very closely related to the authenticating stamp of a coin and carries many of the same connotations—both literal and metaphorical—of the word ‘impression.’ I think, in fact, the poet is employing the same analogies of coinage and utterance that Bacon uses to capture the chimerical notion of imaginative reproduction in The Advancement of Learning:

37.5 redoing:* There is a combination here of the senses: ‘doing again’ or ‘making over’ and (more colloquially) ‘redecorating’. The two senses can sit logically beside each other only if the poet is offering what you might call a ‘doll’s house version’ of Plato’s cave (from the Republic, see next note*) as an analogy for his imaginary mise-en-scène in the reader’s living room. This is obviously meant to deflate the philosopher’s original metaphor to a derisive degree and (just as the society the poet is attempting to represent has done to Byron’s Don Juan, as his counterfeiter has to the sovereign coin, and his heroine to womankind) to show how the world he is predicting undermines all stable values of truth, replacing them with flimsy caricatures of even the most profound intellectual concepts.

37.5 Plato’s cave in miniature:*Against my better judgement perhaps, I am going to assume the education in the English speaking world at the time this work is eventually deemed publishable to contain sufficient remnants of the Classics that I need not explicitly refer the reader to the pertinent passage in The Republic.

37.6 other way:* Again, you’ll notice this is a ‘flip-side of the coin’ effect: another counter.