BAROQUE IN HACKNEY - THE MEMORANDUM

During the first moments of looking at Ms Baroque in Hackney, I had an experience reminiscent of finding John Milton in Paradise or - allowing for the great differences in climate and topography - like sighting Dante in Hell. Hackney is fashionable and blissed out precisely because it's ugly, miserable and poor - and her blog is a chiaroscuro shading and realistic rendering of the contrasting elements! A reflection of the era in which she lives, and, presumably, of every wonder and predicament it ever attracted.

Last year in Hackney, police recorded a 10% rise in crimes to 2,715, including 580 violent assaults, 112 muggings and seven rapes.


The reality of the statistics can not be denied, but Ms Baroque’s own view - drawn up in terms no less haughty than misleading - is that there is no need for any heavy-handed reminder. That all situations involve adaptation, and sharing a toothbrush is no big deal. To some, admiration of politically correct multiculturalism is almost religious dogma. And while it is possible to disagree with the rationale there is no arguing with her courage. Indeed, you can always ignore a problem by pretending it doesn’t exist. But because crime does not fit into her model of Hackney, she denies its reality as a social obstruction:


‘I'm afraid the Home Secretary is reminding me of a man I once knew in Canton, CT, who would only let his teenage daughter drive into Hartford if she locked all the car doors - "and don't talk to anybody.”’


So, is this pygmy-minded giant-slaying or the honest, heart-rending truth? An irresistible, if equally irresponsible, agenda to win back control of the streets? Or the promptings of a mind inebriated with an unedited torrent of opinions, impressions and images. It seems neither! Baroque in Hackney is an encoded autobiography of the most potently unadorned kind, its focus small-scale and almost haphazard. Hackney is everything that Baroque isn’t: hooded, mean, flashy, trite, über-trendy and chemically blissed out. And in this dismal, idyllic setting, Ms Baroque converses about matters more trivial than profound...


“...about doing admin and paying bills and buying the right kinds of light bulbs and generally trying to become a more practical person around the home”


And this is apparent to anyone who looks at it in detail. The range of vision is very introspective. But it is also of considerably greater penetration, disclosing, at its most inward recession, a universe constituted not of massive proportions and vast dimension, but of inverse magnitudes. A universe which is functional rather than delusional, the world of minute scales, of the micro-cosmos in which everything is balanced by its opposite, is held together by tension rather than harmony.


“I’ve always loved printers... they can do anything. I also love the smell of ink”


Ms Baroque, I waited until the last, hoping that you might have a little passion and a little presumption. You are a poet, critic, copywriter, editor, conversationalist, style consultant, personal shopper, siren, and - I have no doubt - a socially aspirational and sexually famished housemaid. But I am reluctant to rank you among history's most humdrum literary bloggers.

For this hardly concludes the matter.

Your pleading for life and poetry is a very intense and real entreaty. It is reserved and restrained, with barely a rhetorical flourish. Nor does it come bitterly or with torture from the heart. I was looking for someone trembling with a terrible nostalgia, for the ruins of an Italian Baroque palazzo, for traces of a turbulent storm, for the inner discontent which finds no phrasing in your calm and untouched prose. But I never expected to find a woman so unprepossessed by spiritual grandeur. At the same time I found myself deeply offended by this proof that small things can bring happiness. Hackney neatly encapsulates the Baroque persona - political and irreproachably correct, but far from being lavishly proportioned.


It is not so much what she says, or how she says it, but what she conveys through some personal distinction of her own that sets her apart from her rivals. Ask me what makes a lousy blogger and I can give you chapter and verse, but I am powerless to form an opinion on her dramatic motivation. There is no room for argument as to the efficacy of her allure, though. The logical, unemotional part of her blog is performed excellently. She seems less concerned with contributing to a manufactured image than capturing a real person.

Count her in as one who cares!

I find this profoundly heartening. Her scope is not broad. Yet, she never grows exasperating, even in irksome Hackney, no doubt, because unlike the majority of bloggers, she gets her effect from herself. There are vestiges of Ms Baroque’s confidential persona scattered throughout. Mixing brocade and velvet, poetry and T. S. Eliot with an ornate and heartfelt venom, she has personality and intelligence, as well as feminine exquisiteness.


Dreamy