Notes to stanzas 38 to 44

38.6 winking:* Achieves a distant internal rhyme with chinking. The word brings up all the usual ambiguities of vision, reversals of gaze and communications of the eyes that pepper the coin’s view of things. The wink is obviously the most important of these. It is the conventional indicator of secret collusion, the expression of clandestine intimacy, the indicator of encoded or ironic speech, the signal by which those ‘in the know’ are differentiated from the credulous. (See, for example, esp. 147.2, but also 118.7, 126.7, 204.6 and 222.6). It is also, in French critical parlance (clin d’œil), used to mean ‘a comic allusion’. The significance of all this is patent.
    Alongside literal nictitation, there is perhaps also an obscure reference to tiddlywinks: a bar-room game whose name probably derives from slang for ‘a little drink’; players attempt to propel four small wooden or plastic discs into a tiddle-cup by pressing down on the edges with a larger disc, causing them to skip. Like many of the more idiotic bar-games designed for gambling purposes, the tokens used were no doubt originally coins, the cup being a beer glass. I cannot imagine the paralytic state of indolence necessary for the mindless drinker to focus the entirety of his thought on winking his last few farthings into a tiddle-cup.

38.6 mass:* The play on ‘substance’ and ‘Eucharist’ is acutely venal. The coin is offering an interpretation of her creation as a sub-Einstinian progress from energy to mass in terms of the word made flesh. There are layers and layers of irony here, almost too many to contain with any sanity. A coin is obviously not mass derived from energy—however disruptive such radical scientific ideas might be of the metaphysics implied in the Mass—but an extant chunk of metal which is simply reshaped. If the form it receives means that it now carries more value than it otherwise would as mass, then this moment of reshaping might be interpreted as supernaturally transformative. Sloggy is therefore compared to a priest who, with Fat Bob as his bumbling altar boy, transforms the (circular) communion wafer into the body of Christ.
    The fact that this pun posits a connection between transubstantiation—to this day the touchiest subject of Anglican theology—and the minting of a token coinage bearing the image of the head of the Anglican church, the Defender of the Faith, makes it one of the most important tropes (for all its throwaway flippancy) in the entire piece. I am only scratching the surface of its implications when I say there might be a thesis here of a direct causal link (rather than a coincidental or analogous one) between puritan theology and the deregulated monetarism of Birmingham / America.
    One can imagine cabals of these budding, calvin/capitalists literally winking as they shook one another’s hands during the ceremonies they despised, as if they had their sooty fingers crossed.

38.8 cheesy Quaver:* I hesitate to gloss this as ‘malodorous pudendum’, but I think it is correct to do so. Quaver and quiver are onomatopœic words prototypically represented by the sound of a ‘thrill’ through a spear or arrow shaft. I find it hard to believe there is no etymological connection between this quaver/quiver and the homonym meaning the receptacle that holds arrows. It is not hard to believe the latter could be used as a crude vaginal image however, especially when one considers the figure of Cupid and the possibility of the arousal his evidently phallic arrows are supposed to instigate in previously still womanhood: the quavering quaint is the quiver of his arrows. I hardly need to point out that this poem turns out later to be quite literally picaresque, in that it concerns a darts match; the implications of sexual deviance cannot be overstressed.
    The diabolical mixture of desire and disgust with which Sloggy is seen to grab the coin/queen is therefore representative of its satanic fall from grace: from the body of the King of Heaven (communion wafer) to the stinking genitals (cheesy Quaver) of a prostitute quean. This demonising transformation can also be quasi-philologically mapped: king… cunning…quaint… cunt.

39.1 righd-o:* It is noticeable how the letter O, appearing on its own like this, looks like a coin. There is also a hint that we are actually to see the shape of Sloggy’s lips as he sighs (such is, after all, the probable derivation of the character O: your mouth should look like it in order to create the sound it signifies). The prurience of the surrounding metaphoric environment suggests his mouth might also be envisaged as an anus, and the sigh a ‘silent’ fart. Thus, after the Quaver immediately preceding it, the counter (that gaping absence in the middle of the character) becomes even more disturbingly associated with the other hole, the back-side, the uncanny and infertile orifice of sodomy.

39.2 flans:* A synonym for blanks (See 29.3*); the word derives from flawns ‘round custard pies.’

39.6 palm em off:* In Britain ‘palm’ is used alone (without the preposition) in the sense: ‘to pass off fraudulently’. The metaphor is from the literal prestidigitative manipulations of gambling cheats who use the palm as an arena of exchange and concealment in order to switch cards or dice. Counterfeiters traditionally employ precisely the same techniques to show legitimate coin and then pass a Birmingham. The phrasal usage here is another of the encroachments of copulative American English into the poet’s future dialect. We are constantly having these Americanisms palmed (off) on us.

39.6 Villa fans:* Supporters of Aston Villa Football Club, founded in 1874 by members of the Bible Class of Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel in the Lozells area of the Borough of Aston in Birmingham. It was the director of this club, William McGregor, who organized the foundation of the Football League in 1888, a competition they won in 1894, 1896 and 1897; their biggest success, however, has been in the FA Cup, which they have won more often than any other club (six times: in 1887, 1895, 1897, 1899, 1900 and 1910). The decline of the club’s fortunes since the First World War has matched the decline of the city in which it is based: from the world’s leading centre of technological manufacture at the turn of the century (at which time the club also had a strong claim to the title of best in the world) to the bombscarred wasteland we know today, swarming with immigrants from the countries to which it once exported its mechanical prowess. (See 2.3*)
    Perhaps they could have seen this coming though. The club’s history is marred by such invasions and disturbances. As well as the Football League, Aston Villa was also infamously the club responsible for the creation of the ‘pitch invasion’ when, during an FA Cup match against Preston North End, the supporters occupied the playing area on two separate occasions when displeased with how the match was progressing.
    Ultimately, one can not help but relate this back to the eponymous ‘Villa’ of the club’s name. This is a familiar way of referring to Aston Hall, the Jacobean mansion built by Sir Thomas Holte between 1618 and 1635, which was (of course) the site of one of the most ruthless and spiteful sieges of the English Civil War, in which a minuscule garrison of Royalist soldiers to whom the Baronet was good enough to provide shelter were massacred by invading Parliamentarians who had been tipped off by vengeful local smiths.

40.8 cast:* This is a highly polysemous word. The pun here makes a rather nice distinction—when one considers the antithetical senses which thrive in this linguistic environment—between ‘given a role or part to play’ and ‘cast from molten metal’. The underlying deterministic idiom is ‘the die is cast’ which actually derives not from the sense suggested by the situation of the narrator’s own creation (a falsely cast ‘die’ which cannot be remade), but from the sense of a (single) ‘dice’ which has already been thrown, the result of which can therefore not be altered. This sense of cast—basically ‘to throw’ or ‘to throw away’—is in fact the oldest, and is the predicative suffix of another word crucial to this poem: ‘broadcast’. The verb might therefore be employed almost paradoxically here to remind us of precisely what Sloggy fails to do: discard the counterfeit which will bring about his downfall.
    So we can see how another eversion is achieved: rather than vice-versa, it is obviously the coin who has been ‘cast’ to carry out Sloggy’s destiny.

41.3 nail-file:* The consecutive diæreses here, whilst not unique (see 138.3 steer clear), are very unusual and therefore serve to emphasize the oddity of the item. A nail file seems a rather effeminate grooming tool for Sloggy to be carrying. The idea of him checking his manicure and absent-mindedly filing away the odd rough edge is not at all in keeping with his hard-man image. Perhaps the poet is insinuating something about Sloggy’s overt machismo. In any event, the grooming tool chosen combines this effeminate symbolism with two linguistic components that both in fact sound very hard and masculine: ‘nail’ and ‘file.’ The overtones of metalworking and jailbreaks actually make me think of this, not as an emery board, but a small pointed steel implement: the kind of thing that doubles as the lever on a pair of nail clippers, (or a weapon… at a snip).

41.4 shield:* On the surface, this suggests the reverse of this pound-coin literally depicts a shield: not at all unusual. There were many gold sovereigns minted between 1825 and 1874 with a heraldic shield, rather than St. George, on the reverse. This was done specifically to cater to those parts of the Empire (principally India) with large Muslim populations who objected to the supposedly idolatrous depiction of religious figures in any medium, but especially in gold. Mercifully the more assertive late Victorian Empire, The Pax Britannica, put a stop to such superstitious nonsense.
    Another reading, however, might interpret the shield as the coin itself. This reading relies upon extrapolating from the missing motto the connection between the coin and the shield of Æneas. This is a relatively complex connection. decus et tutamen, ‘an ornament and a safeguard’ was first introduced on the edges of the milled re-coinage of Charles II, specifically to deter the clippers. It was included at the suggestion of John Evelyn and is taken from the Æneid, Book V where it refers not to the famous shield on which the future glories of Rome were depicted, but to a suit of golden armour, taken by Æneas from Demoleus in battle and presented as a gift to Mnestheus as a demonstration of the hero’s generosity. Two things are obvious: firstly, this is meant as an imitation of the armour of Achilles in the Iliad, itself explicitly associated with the Ægis of Athene (in turn associated with the severed head of the Gorgon, Medusa); secondly, it prefigures (and perhaps justifies) Venus’s gift to Æneas of the shield which carries (as tableau) the future history of Rome up to triumph of Augustus at the Battle of Actium: an object which might therefore completely independently echo the armour of Achilles and the Ægis of Minerva and so on. Moreover, crucial to this reading is the identification, always present in both Roman and British thinking, of Britannia as a version (an avatar if you like) of Minerva (just as she is a version of Athena).
    So we come full circle: this counterfeit is not just a travesty of the sovereign coin, but also of the shield of Britannia, the armour of Achilles, the Ægis of Athena, and the shield of Æneas. Instead of carrying a glorious Augustan future engraved into its golden surface, it speaks a dreadful future of a degenerative Britain in its cheap alloy of a Birmingham accent.

41.5 chubb:* The OED has:

42.2 cameras:* era 5

42.2 Closed-circuit cameras:* If closed circuit is not some abstruse electrical jargon, it might mean ‘unbroadcast’, ‘for private viewing only’. If so, the fact that we are privy to the pictures is obviously ironic. Unlike the authoritarian dystopia of Orwell—in which the state carries out perpetual surveillance on its citizens—we can imagine something closer to Zamyatin’s universally transparent environment in which everybody is capable of watching what everybody else is doing, the right to use technology to spy on neighbours being entirely deregulated and condoned by a prurient anarcho-capitalist ideology completely devoid of any inclination to protect privacy, or indeed to institute decorum.

42.3 tracksuit:* Another characteristically dystopian invention. It is presumably a suit designed to allow the wearer to be ‘tracked’ or his position identified at any time. In an Orwellian vision this might have been a technological innovation introduced to the uniforms of party members to allow Big Brother even greater knowledge of their movements. Here though, one assumes the garment to have been willingly bought by the wearer specifically to make a spectacle of himself: a logical extension beyond the visual spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation of the wearing of ostentatious colours. Again, this tends to feminize Sloggy and make a nonsense of his dialectic opposition to Britannia.

42.4 logo:* Notwithstanding the riddling tendency of this poem (a perfectly respectable form in English poetry if we are to take the Essex Book as the matriarch to Beowulf’s patriarch), I doubt this is short for logogriph: a kind of lexicographic puzzle in verse. Much more likely are logograph—a letter-word or single word-character such as hieroglyphs and currency symbols like £ for pound—or else it could be short for logotype: a combination of letters into a single character in typography, such as Æ and Œ. Perhaps we are therefore to understand the logo to be the symbol of the brand (Sergio Tacchini) designed to act as an abbreviation of the name. In this case it might be both a logograph and a logotype.
Something like:
This is curiously similar to the dollar sign: which itself certainly began life as a logo(graph-type). Whilst the possibility exists that this may simply have been a representation of the initials of the new nation: I think it much more likely that the inspiration was the logograph of the infamous Renascence Italian tyrant, Sigismondo Malatesta: which appears on the façade and the interior design of the temple of San Francesco in Rimini: a purportedly Christian church designed by Leon Battista Alberti, at the behest of this petty dictator (who fancifully considered himself to be in direct competition with the Vatican), as a pagan shrine to his own Imperial pretensions and the very earthly love of his mistress, Isotta degli Atti. Malatesta was probably the most important early patron of so-called ‘Humanism’ in Renascence Italy. It is widely suspected that he was actually a Satanist, and murdered his first two wives. The logograph on his personal seal was, on the surface, a simple logotype in which his own initial (Sigismondo) winds lasciviously around that of his mistress (Isotta). There is a deeper, more troubling, reading of this symbol however—one entangled in the implications of original sin self-evidently present in the thing: the image of an S spiralling around the upright stem of an upper-case I quite deliberately, I think, insinuates a vision of the serpent (Sàtana) coiled around the tree of forbidden knowledge in Eden. What is quite undeniable is the influence Malatesta’s hubristic legacy had upon the Borgias, the Medici and Machiavelli. And it is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that there is a direct line of descent through influential esoteric groups analogous to the Freemasons and Rosecrucians which could have carried Malatesta’s ideology to lead directly to the revolutions of the C18^th in America and France. One need only examine the reverse of the ‘Great Seal’ of the United States to discover how occultist were the nation’s founders. It is a thirteen stepped pyramid with the eye of providence in a triangle at its zenith; the motto is novus ordo seclorum ‘A New Order of the Ages’. Or perhaps that should be ‘a new order of the secular oligarchy’: the Masonic epigraph par excellence; it is an allusion to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue:

42.7 sooty brick:* Despite being famous for its red brick (hence the epithet used for the new C19^th universities of which Birmingham’s was a prototype) virtually all buildings in the city are black with layers of soot deposited like palimpsests of mechanical reproduction on the surface of their frontages. This is how ‘The Black Country’ gets its name (the area that spreads like eczema out of west Birmingham over Worcestershire, Staffordshire and Shropshire). It is curious to note, however, that the Commonwealth immigrants currently flooding into the country on the Government’s behest seem therefore to have identified the Birmingham area as the place set aside for Blacks.
    Sometimes Birmingham buildings appear to be as heavily made-up as Olivier playing Othello. One can almost imagine St Martin’s in the Bull Ring tap-dancing on its foundations and singing ‘Mammy’. No wonder the duskier inhabitants of the Empire find the city so inviting.
    More seriously though, we should bear in mind Birmingham’s history as the capital of non-conformism. Many of the West Indians are Evangelicals, Methodists and Baptists and consequently feel more at home in Birmingham and Manchester than the shire towns or the Episcopal seats. That Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Janists, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and so on, from the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East (equally as intent on thumbing their noses at the established church and English tradition) should find these cities just as tempting comes as no surprise to an historically informed commentator.
    What the effect on evolution might be one shudders to think. There is already a local moth—previously brown and speckled as camouflage against tree-bark—which has mutated to become almost entirely black so that it can disguise itself on the filthy surfaces of the industrial midlands.

42.8 gum-marks on the kerb:* Where soot might be a palimpsestal trace of industry, this ‘gum’ covering the pavement is more like the dirt agglomerated on a coin: the trace of human physicality. If we are to understand this particular gum (amongst the other sorts: karaya, laser, viscum etc.) to be American ‘chewing gum’, spat directly onto the paving stones by the uncouth, then we can see this ‘trace’ as both the orally deposited genetic material (‘DNA’ as we are now to call it; see 143.3) and the masticatory impression of the spitter’s teeth. These misshapen discs of hardened gum, which we first began to see encrusting our pavements (‘sidewalks’ they called them) when American ‘GI’s were stationed here, bear an eerie resemblance to ancient coins (Offa’s Pennies perhaps), the impressions of overdeveloped molars in the viscous medium mimicking the coiner’s stamp.
    I believe the poet sees chewing gum as one of a cluster of reverse-colonising American products in his anarcho-capitalist dystopia. The rash of ‘gum-marks’ is spreading across the city streets like sores on the skin of a syphilitic prostitute, and this is just the surface symptom of a much deeper infection intent on taking over the entire body politic. Many of the putative technological innovations are given distinctly Americanized names (like tracksuit and so on) but the extant products in this cluster that spring immediately to mind are lager, television and cigarettes. The last is obviously important. Tobacco is the iconic product bought back to the Old World from the New by Walter Raleigh. It is an obvious choice as the symbolic thin end of a wedge of reverse-colonialism. As mentioned above, the cigarette is characteristically a feminine, foreign or American way with tobacco; an Englishman prefers a pipe. The most American thing to do with tobacco, though, is to chew it. It is no coincidence that chewing-gum acts basically as a substitute for chewing-tobacco. Nor is it a mere coincidence that a single pinch of tobacco deemed an ample sufficiency is called a quid. This derives not, as in the English slang for a pound, from the Latin for ‘something’, but from the word ‘cud’. The implication being that the quid pro quo of American involvement in the war has been to turn these future British people into a herd of ruminating cattle, hypnotized by their television sets and the drone of washing machines to such an extent they are no longer capable of seeing the decay their perpetually unnourishing pseudo-consumption is causing.

43.4 rewind:* Another portmanteau, I think, short for reverse-wind (‘reel backwards’ rather than ‘headwind’, I think, though the ambiguity of the homonym persists). The effect that follows is as if a film-reel is fed through the projector upside down and backwards so that the action appears to take place in reverse: an absurdly literal countering effect which nevertheless suggests two very important things. Firstly, the action of the plot is to be understood as extant and ‘recorded’ (i.e. not happening ‘live’). This is actually very unusual on television, where even fictional dramas are ‘repeated’ by means of a literal repeat performance. It does exist however, and—alongside the fact this renders the empirical ‘liveness’ of all ‘live’ broadcasts dubious (see 13.7 okay*)—it also suggests a fundamental distortion of the geography of time. Just as film-characters often take impossible routes through towns and cities in order to prejudice the æsthetics of locations over geographical accuracy, a recorded drama on television (a predominantly ‘live’ medium) can pass off all the anachronisms of fiction as genuinely temporally possible. Secondly, the insidious influence of the persona/film-editor is made all the more acute. Not only is he capable of cogently disturbing the order of temporal events, he can also change the very direction of time, the logic of cause and effect, and therefore, ultimately, morality itself. Hence a scene climaxing in a brutal act of wife-beating can be described as ‘a therapeutic tryst’.

43.5 foxtrots:* The Foxtrot is a dance invented in America by vaudeville performer Harry Fox. It was created during World War I as an adaptation of the two-step to the new Negro-inspired syncopations of ragtime. (The extent of this dusky, loose-rhythmed and loose-moraled influence can be seen very clearly in the latest of these ‘foxtrots’ to have swept across the Atlantic leaving all musical refinement in its wake: ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Sunny Dæ and the Knights.)
    Almost definitively, the leading partner in the couple never goes backwards. Now that the direction of our interpretations are to be reversed, it is difficult to say whether this is meant to enforce the latent effeminacy of Sloggy’s portrait (with the nail-file and the colourful clothing) or to deny it. One might argue either. Perhaps his perpetually front-facing machismo has been ‘translated’ into quintessentially feminine behaviour by this reversal of direction; all his overtly masculine gestures becoming mincing ones, and so on. If so, this would prefigure his emasculation at the hands of the demonic drag-queen rather more subtly than it does the fox scene immediately following it.

43.6 Harold Lloyd:* An acrobatic American slapstick star. Unlike Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, who explored much greater depths of pathos and complexity, Harold Lloyd’s shorts invariably conclude with complete (and completely unlikely) romantic success and victory over the ‘bad guys’. The inevitable success implied in the formula is obviously employed ironically here and, considering the reversal of logic, tends to inculcate a feeling of impending doom rather than a sure and certain hope in the fragile ‘little guy’ triumphing over the looming threat of a powerful criminal underworld or a terrifying patriarch. We should not forget, in this temporally subversive moment, that the most famous stunt of Harold Lloyd’s involved him hanging from the clock-face of a skyscraper above the teeming streets of the American metropolis.

43.6 jape:* This is one of those words that seems almost definitive of the poem itself. The OED suggests it derives from Old French japer ‘to yelp’ (like a small dog), though there may also have been influence from gaber ‘to mock’: the noun forms being jap, jape, japerie and gab, gabe, gaberie. It is, I surmise, the figure of the fox which combines these forms; its characteristic yelping bark can sometimes sound so much like mocking laughter that one can imagine our streets and gardens to contain nocturnal hyena. The fox is obviously the iconic trickster, and from this connection we might get the meaning ‘trick’ or ‘deception’. Usage in this sense died out in the C16^th when the word became vulgarly associated with sexual intercourse (though its use by Walter Scott suggests it persisted untainted in Scotland). The modern sense of ‘joke’, ‘shaggy dog story’, or ‘burlesque’ was revived in literary usage by Charles Lamb. The other, obsolete, sense was ‘trinket’ or ‘toy’. The capacity of the word to summarize this piece is therefore multiple. It is a cheap Brummagem trinket, a burlesque, an act of frivolous sexuality and a deception, in a broken whining voice like the yelp of a coupling fox.

44.2 Green Cross Code:* Green Cross was the name (from the denotative symbol they carried) of the phosgene gas shells and canisters used by the Germans in the First World War. Obviously, in the context, it is much more likely to have something to do with ‘crossing’ the road. Perhaps there is a convoluted system of cryptography which allows people to know when and where to cross in this future of competitive technology. There may be tolls charged for the use of more or less effective, privately-owned pedestrian crossing points, recognized by codes of coloured shapes. Sloggy is presumably defying the code he has been given: analogous to jumping a queue, perhaps, or riding a bus or tram beyond the value of one’s ticket. The threat of the subliminal ‘gas’ metaphor suggests that the exhaust fumes created by the use of futuristic fuels designed to increase performance might be so poisonous as to be like actual chemical weapons.

44.4 road:* The previous stanza contains the rhyme triplet strode, episode, road. Here we have: code, road, slowed. The phonetic repetition emphasizes the reversal of movement by focusing attention on the rhythmic tread of Sloggy’s soles on the tarmac. We are not allowed to lose sight of his physical movement (strode and slowed), nor of the cryptic temporality of the passage (episode and code), nor of the strange direction he is taking (road and road). The fact that the street-crossing has previously been associated with fording a swollen river of rapid currents (the flow of a river itself being a standard metaphor for time), suggests to me a deeper homophonic repetition not of road but of ‘rowed’. One rows backwards, of course, and Sloggy has ‘rowed, rowed, rowed his boat’ not ‘gently down the stream’ of time so much as forcefully across it.

44.5 soft-top:* Presumably a ‘convertible’: a type of car so named (in the United States, where the climate makes this most ostentatious of designs a possibility) because of its retractable leather roof: another amphibology.

44.6 Mercedes:* An old German car company, now defunct after being taken into state ownership by the Nazis. It is the explicit intention of the Marshall Money to revitalize Germany’s industries by instigating American business models. The Mercedes car mentioned here is presumably the projected result: a much more American car (with its soft top) than a German one. Perhaps, by this time, the German ‘federal states’, which are already overrun with US troops, have actually become states of the Union.
    In philological terms, the choice of manufacturer is telling. Despite looking like an Ancient Greek hero, Mercedes comes from Maria de las Mercedes ‘Mary of the Mercies’ in Spanish: precisely the kind of name you might expect a car manufacturer in a town like ‘Los Angeles’ or ‘San Diego’ to have. This is a far remove from the overtly Germanic Volkswagen or the brands of Britain’s foremost manufacturing city—through whose streets the vehicle is driving like a gilded Roman chariot through a village of Britannic Celts—Morris, Austin, Lucas et al.
    There is also a kind of logogriph here. Mercedes contains a ‘visual rhyme’ with the first word in the last line of the stanza: recedes, which itself ‘recedes from view’ simultaneously with the car. The past, traditionally, is understood to recede from view as we move further away from it—hence the need for history—but here we are talking about the future, not the past. The effect is therefore one of feeling ourselves receding, as our vision becomes blurred and history moves off away from us carried by a reversing apparition of the merciful Virgin as a gaudy American automobile with its leather veil rolled back.