It's my birthday...

... and in previous years, I have celebrated midsummer's eve on wild and windy beaches (the one above was in west Wales). This year, however, after the most turbulent of times, I shall be at home, eating cake and drinking champagne. But what should I be reading in bed tonight?

The Closet Thinker...

... is thinking of sequinned jackets this week.

Bibliotherapy: what to read when you’re lost for words

If Sappho has come to be seen as one of the great poets of female desire, then she is also the embodiment of silence; for all but a few tantalising fragments remain of the writer described by Plato as ‘the tenth Muse’. There is only one complete poem (the ‘Ode to Aphrodite’), as much of her work was lost in the ninth century, with just the occasional scrap of papyrus subsequently unearthed to supplement the surviving texts quoted by other ancient authors. The most famous is Fragment 31, a poem that gives word to the wordlessness of love, and shape to a state of speechless incoherence.

Sappho’s inability to speak in the presence of her beloved has been translated in a number of different ways from the original Greek text – “I have no longer power to speak”; “no speaking is left in me”; “my tongue keeps silence” – and there are numerous interpretations of who, and how, Sappho loved. Inevitably, her gender and sexuality has absorbed critics, despite the attempts of Victorian classicists to explain away her relationships with other women as that of the sensible headmistress of a girls’ school (although Queen Victoria’s sketch of Sappho poised to leap from a cliff top is an intriguing expression of passion and loss, particularly as the face in the drawing looks rather like Her Majesty). But perhaps it is Sappho’s mysteriousness – the manner in which she has become emblematic of the unknown -- that continues to speak to us, because, like love, she defies understanding.

The final line of Fragment 31 is not the last line – it breaks off, and is lost, just as the speaker in the poem disintegrates, as if she is losing her self. This is both tormenting and enticing for the reader; emotions that are integral to the subject of the poem, and to the human capacity to yearn for what we cannot have, to possess that which eludes us.

In an era when we are bombarded with speech – it buzzes around us, filling our ears and eyes – and constant instructions that it is ‘good to talk’, Sappho’s poetry survives as evidence, however fragmentary, that silence is powerful, even if it feels unbearable, nor should it be feared in a quest to find the right words.

PS... more good shoes

Just been emailed a picture of these shoes by my friend Julietta, who is going to wear them for her 40th birthday party. They're by Rupert Sanderson, and I feel they should be shared. They seem to me to be an intriguing mix of Miss Jean Brodie, Mayfair dominatrix, and the first Mrs de Winter.
As you may have noticed, my shoe obsession is mounting, as my book deadline nears. Doubtless Herr Doktor Freud would have something to say on the subject of heightening anxiety and precipitous heels. Or maybe that's a scene from an unmade Hitchcock movie? (Almost certainly based on a Du Maurier story...)
Actually, Freud was quite interested in buttons; undone, of course...

Future imperfect

This week's Closet Thinker from the Telegraph (posted late, for which I apologise); shoes from Alexander McQueen (sadly sold out at net-a-porter, but please tell if you find anything similar on the High Street -- black roses, silver heels and perspex -- v. clever):



A century ago the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched his Manifesto of Futurism, a startling document published on the front page of Le Figaro in February 1909. The Futurists, he declared, would celebrate ‘a new beauty, the beauty of speed’; the movement’s artists would ‘glorify war – the world’s only hygiene’, and sweep away the art forms of previous generation, in a triumphant uprising of youth: ‘For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We will free Italy from her innumerable museums which cover her like countless cemeteries.’

An early member of the Italian Fascist Party, Marinetti went on to support Mussolini; but his politics seem not to have deterred a number of contemporary fashion designers from citing Futurism in their current collections. Who knows whether they’ve embarked upon an in-depth study of the Manifesto – a document that will presumably be available at the Tate Modern when its Futurism exhibition opens next week – but it does provide a context for several leading designers’ work this season. Missoni’s spring/summer collection includes prints inspired by Italian Futurist art (in particular Dottori’s ‘aero-paintings’); and the hi-tech futurism displayed at Calvin Klein, Yves St Laurent, Gareth Pugh and Alexander McQueen seems of a piece with Marinetti’s advocacy of technological innovation and slick urban industry. “We want no part of it, the past,” he wrote in his Manifesto, “we the young and strong Futurists!”

Of course, however passionate the commitment to a vision of the future, it can still have a distinct whiff of the past. Gareth Pugh’s version of futurism is a sci-fi fantasy with dresses that hover somewhere between costume designs for ‘Predator’ and historical drama, encompassing medieval armour and Elizabeth ruffs, mixed up with extra-terrestrial reptilian scales. As for Francisco Costa’s current collection for Calvin Klein: he uses the silvery semi-sheer fabrics of an eroticised Hollywood space-age movie, the kind where beautiful heroines display a flash of nipple alongside the blaze of their laser-guns.

Marinetti never went as fast as he had hoped – in fact, he wrote his Futurist manifesto after crashing his car into a ditch to avoid two cyclists – and his poems and plays have mostly lapsed into obscurity. It remains to be seen whether fashion’s latest take on Futurism will survive beyond this summer, or sink, deflated, into a morass of discarded clothes. Right now, I’m more intrigued by the report that three astronauts in the International Space Station have been watching the remake of ‘Star Trek’ on a laptop, thereby proving that the past is always present in the future.

Bibliotherapy:what to read when life seems unfair

When cataclysm strikes – death, divorce, disaster, despair, of which I have had my fair share – there is a question that can hover in the air. ‘Why me?’ The answer, of course, is ‘why not me…’ But if one forgets this – and I do forget, as most of us do – then a reminder of the random harshness of life can be found in Shirley Jackson’s story, ‘The Lottery’. First published by the New Yorker on June 26th 1948 (and anthologised many times since), it opens on the morning of June 27th, a sunny summer’s day in rural America, as village people gather for their annual lottery.

What follows next is an account of how a scapegoat is chosen by lottery to be stoned to death by the rest of the community, a sacrificial victim to ensure a good harvest. Such is the vividness of contemporary detail that the tale seems less gothic fantasy than nightmarish reality: ‘The lottery was conducted – as were the square dances, the teenage club, the Halloween program – by Mr Summers, who had time and energy to devote to civic activities. He was a round-faced jovial man and he ran the coal business.’

The story was met with widespread horror; the following month, Jackson wrote of the difficulty in explaining a work of fiction, which had been seen by some readers as fact. “I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.” Jackson lived in Bennington, Vermont – the epitome of civilized American life – and her readers responded with unusual venom. In the avalanche of hate mail she received, “I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even my mother scolded me: ‘Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker,’ she wrote sternly; ‘it does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?’”

If not cheering, ‘The Lottery’ is nevertheless unexpectedly bracing, in its clear-sighted acknowledgement that little in life is fair, and of that much we can be certain.

Pale and interesting...

Hope everyone is outside in the sunshine -- if the sun is shining wherever you are, which it is here. Two summer dresses (above) from Christopher Kane at net-a-porter; as pale as the rose petals on the lawn in my back garden, and ivory clouds in the sky...

Here's today's Closet Thinker:

If black is the strongest of colours in the palette of fashion, then nudes are altogether more muted, yet strangely difficult to wear. Actually, I feel slightly uneasy with the label itself – it’s shorthand for a spectrum of flesh-tones that span the palest of pink, apricot, beige and ivory, as if skin colour never varies from that. But in fact, these are shades that tend to look better against darker skins, for they can make white faces seem pallid and washed-out.

Still, designers have decided that pale flesh-coloured clothes are a good idea this summer, as is evident at Chloe, Lanvin, Christopher Kane, and Marios Schwab, amongst others. I like the look of them on the pages of a magazine – at best, they’re evocative of a gentle 1930s Englishness, as sweet as a young girl’s blush – but experience has taught me to avoid them, because they turn my skin liverish or tiredly yellow. And even if you do manage to find a flattering shade, it demands an element of rigorous high-maintenance, the self-control of Victoria Beckham in her flounced nude Alaia dress, worn as if to prove the polished sheen of her skin and tautness of her body, the tightly fitted bodice an indication of her sculpted torso beneath.

A more forgiving way to wear nudes requires the use of black by way of contrast, to separate and define, so that skin and material don’t merge into a frumpy lumpish mass. This is a trick that Kate Moss is good at (not that she would ever look lumpy herself), both in her collections for Topshop and her party frock of choice several years ago, a much-copied Dior dress that featured a black lace bodice over nude chiffon.

Christopher Kane has taken a similar approach in his autumn 2009 collection, which uses graphic black ribbon appliqués to intersect sheer nude organza skirts and dresses. Nevertheless, that a great many customers are happy to wear all-over nude tones is clear from the fact that Kane’s summer range of cream and blush-coloured silk dresses has already sold out several times over on net-a-porter.

These are frocks that cost in excess of £2500 each – thereby representing a naked exhibition of wealth, and possibly providing a frisson to the apparently innocent allure of pale chiffon – but there are less expensive alternatives available. My favourite in a British summer is a short cream trench coat from Banana Republic: lined and waterproof, of course, in case of dark rain-clouds or an overcast sky that chills flesh from hues of peachiness to blue.