David Green

David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.

Sunday 17 March 2024

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Friday evening's sports bulletins on Times Radio reported three stories. A rugby player was thinking of going to play in France or Japan which would mean he was inelegible to play for England; a tennis player had been stung by some bees and the manager of Chelsea Women was off to take charge of the USA's team even though between them the two opposing managers of her last match hadn't managed to ensure that the two teams wore different coloured socks.
What does a racehorse have to do to get on the news these days? Galopin des Champs had earlier retained the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the most prestigious prize in jump racing, which very few winners of it prove capable of doing.
Times Radio is a fine thing but its sports reporting is awful, as if written by someone with no knowledge of sport and certainly not proof read by anybody who does. Many of its presenters are very good at what they do and yet the other night a presenter who shall remain nameless here didn't know what monogamy and polygamy are. One might have thought 'O' level English Language would be a prerequisite of such a position in journalism and maybe he has it. Perhaps it's not his fault. Maybe such words are by now considered above and beyond the standards of such education but, dear me.
 
Education is, of course, never over and the lad now knows those words. And I now know Mosaic, not in terms of a picture made up of small tiles, but as in 'pertaining to Moses'. It occurs in Catherine Nixey's book, The Darkening Age, more of which in a few days' time and took me by surprise. A first look at the internet suggests that there is no connection between these identical words. It would not appear to be the case that Moses was an adept at the art form that looks as if it is named after him.

Friday 15 March 2024

Unintermittent and other stories

 Sometimes one word stands out in a sentence, in a paragraph or maybe poem. It's best if it doesn't do it so much that it distracts from  all the others too much but occasionally it works perfectly as part of the whole and one just thinks, wow.
One such word occurs in Stephen Hero when that main character is sitting in his Italian lesson, just before he sees Emma passing, out of the window, and makes his excuses to chase after her,
He followed his Italian lesson mechanically, feeling the unintermittent deadliness of the atmosphere of college in his throat and lungs, 
How well do I recall that feeling, most vividly from 'A' level History but other lessons, too. The negative construction is one of the things that Larkin took from Hardy and some of us lesser mortals have attempted since. It can work very well, the vividness of the thing that isn't there being made even more so by being heard even in its deleted condition. As in 1984, somehow 'doubleplusungood' it is mostly all good things but it is turned bad by the negative element. The 'deadliness' of the college atmosphere could have been descibed as constant but that's not as good as it not being intermittent.
 
It's hard to know how good a book Stephen Hero would be if it hadn't been modified into the Portrait. It would surely be very good but as 'art' it isn't quite as good as the final version. It's similarly hard to say how good second-rate songs by The Beatles, Stephin Merritt, Carole King, the Motown Hit Factory and all are because they are overshadowed by their better siblings but second-rate Beatles would be Tremeloes or Dave Clark Five and there's a term for second-rate Motown - Northern Soul and that is well worth having. If Stephen Hero wasn't the first draft of a James Joyce masterpiece it could have served as a very fine novel by some other inheritor of the tradition of George Moore and Turgenev.
--
While it is customary to preview Cheltenham here, I don't usually review it.
There are always good stories and there are always many of the best horses but with Mr. Henderson's horses not well and either absent or uncompetitive, a few too many odds-on chances in sometimes relatively small fields it hasn't felt completely Cheltenham throughout. It seems churlish to sound a downbeat note but only 46000 there on Wednesday suggests it might not be quite what it once was.
Tuesday could hardly have gone better for me but while it is possible to enjoy sport for its own sake - like a good test match in cricket or that distant memory of Emma Raducanu during lockdown- horse racing is a balance sheet, it's accountancy and it's the stock market. One takes part entirely to what extent one wants to and your plus or minus is your scorecard and your reason to feel good or feel bad alone. 
However, the stone cold solid Galopin Des Champs retains the Gold Cup which precious few have been able to do - the loose horse was my main concern - and so we got in and got out in one piece, possibly the price of a pint to the good. And although I have a small interest in the next two races, that hardly matters. They'd amount to one more pint and eventually one can have seen enough horse flesh for one week.

Thursday 14 March 2024

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 While it is a fine thing to have a variety of interests one can't do everything at once and so progress on the bookpile slows dramatically during Cheltenham. Concerts, too, have to move down the priorities. It's a shame that Chichester Cathedral always seem to have a good one this week but it would have to be exceptional to be more important than the Champion Hurdle, the Arkle Chase, the Supreme Novices and the day on which all still seems possible.
Tuesday did nearly all that was expected of it for me so I'll still be a going concern by the weekend. Then, once we get past the National meeting and Cheltenham in April, my main attention with unusually be on football as an idle few bets from last summer on the English leagues comes to push and shove with me sitting pretty at present on Arsenal, Top 4, and Leicester, Derby and Wrexham for promotion. Mr. Coral would buy me off for a perfectly reasonable profit but I'm sticking with it for the time being.
Something that can be missed, though, is orders that don't turn up. One supplier, I noticed, hadn't fulfilled a request from some W.F. Bach keyboard music and now haven't reacted to my choivce of some Busoni as a replacement. Edna O'Brien's book on James Joyce is delayed beyond reasonable doubt, too. But a favourite pastime, having piled up a number of options, is deciding what to read next. Some weighty volumes, mostly Joyce-related, will take me much of the way to the Gunn biography in the summer but rabid and radicalized as I've become as an ardent naysayer to the Christian church, the arrival of Catherine Nixey's first book means that might jump in front of them.
--
Before that I'll be very thrilled to have my Rosemary Tonks- Philip Larkin essay in the Larkin Society journal and feel part of the gang of Rosemary followers. The Larkin Society conference is underway in Hull right now but it's a mighty long way whether in Cheltenham week or not. Then perhaps the dog days of summer might inculde some time spent improving upon another essay intended for them.
It's been a good, productive period recently with also a well-received evening at Portsmouth Poetry Society introducing the work of Michael Donaghy. But things move on. Dick Francis had an annual schedule by which he produced his stream of cliff-hanging, turf-based thrillers and I assume that Ian McEwan, Sebastian Faulks and all of them don't take long between seeing one book through the presses before embarking on the next. One ought to look forward more than back and I was intending to finish by reporting on a success with the much-vaunted Brighterdaysahead at Prestbury Park but, as can happen with these reputations that consist more of talk than proven achievement, it was not to be so I'll return to the form in the book with Galopin des Champs in the Gold Cup tomorrow and, either way, finish not much ahead of or behind where I started the week. The Saturday after Cheltenham is not usually a day to be glued to the racing. One has seen enough by then. It would be a really good day for Chichester Cathedral to move its Tuseday concert to, if only they knew.

Tuesday 12 March 2024

Stephen Heroic

I waited about 47 years to read this book. I simply didn't get round to it until now. Stephen Hero is less a novel than an inventory of young James Joyce's ideas, mainly on aesthetics. Portrait of the Artist is the work of art that came out of it but this is a different thing. I could see it being heavy going for anyone not interested in Joyce's ideas about writing, poetry and art but luckily that's not me.
Like Stephen Daedalus, the book is a bit too obsessed with itself. Joyce was nothing if not precocious but he's self aware enough to present his alter ego here as such. It's not easy being told you're a bright teenager because at that age one tends to believe it and there are pitfalls involved for anyone who believes their own hype. Joyce is in on the joke, though, and ironic distance is an essential part of his art.
Ever since being lucky enough to have Portrait as an 'A' level set text, Joyce has occupied a special place among prose writers for me and he has lasted the distance. Why, only a couple of weeks ago I was maundering on at a choice literary event about 'Classical' and 'Romantic' but here it is,
The romantic temper...is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures...
The classical temper on the other hand, ever mindful of limitations, chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered.
Hallelujah. That's not bad for a kid.
And, on taking part in life itself, Stephen replies to his mother's insistence that his father had hoped he would take up a sensible, worthy occupation with,
- No, no, no. But it may not be my ambition. That kind of life I often loathe: I find it ugly and cowardly.
 
We are always likely to prefer those sort of books that we think, or would like to think, we find ourselves reflected back to ourselves in and, even with Stephen's obvious self-regard factored in, there are few characters in literature I'd like to identify with more.
Joyce's essay differentiating the lyric, epic and dramatic is rehearsed  here in among his disdain for nationalism and catholicism and so one can't expect much more than that.
Monitoring the progress of my modest investments at Prestbury Park, Cheltenham, is preventing me from scorching through it in quite such rapid time but one can't do everything at once. I'm glad I caught up with this essential text eventually.

Sunday 10 March 2024

Catherine Nixey - Heresy

Catherine Nixey, Heresy (Picador)

People believe what they want to believe, don't they? In what remains a liberal democracy in the UK today, we'd like to think,  even here there must be some people who believe what they believe because they have to, or perhaps because they can't see beyond what they've been told and some of them might not want to. It's already more complicated than I thought and I'm no better than any of them. There might be any number of contributory reasons why I, like Bertrand Russell wasn't, am not a Christian. And then a book like Heresy comes along and preaches to such a heretic. I must try not to uncritically accept it at its word as if it were gospel but that's difficult because it is exactly what I wanted it to be and it's brilliant.

For many years I've taken A.N. Wilson's biography of Jesus as my text. He says there that there were any number of prophets, preachers and teachers at the time and Jesus was simply the most successful but now Catherine Nixey provides the detail from those obscure times. There wasn't just 'the Word', there were many words, much of Christianity is replicated in other traditions but Emperor Constantine's conversion in the C4th brings the Roman Empire in on Christianity's side and that is a powerful weapon with which to suppress all opposition.
Asclepius and Apollonius were comparable figures. Raising the dead, curing the incurable and turning water into wine were regular party pieces performed by such men and the difference between magicians and the divinely gifted is not clear. Hocus pocus itself may, or may not, come from 'hoc est... corpus meum' and in those early centuries there was no shortage of those ready to question such articles of faith as the Creation. God's omniscience is immediately suspect when he apparently doesn't know where Adam is. Being the son of  a god is hardly an innovation because the likes of Hercules had been as much.
While saying that she takes no sides in these issues, Catherine's sardonic observations and the fact that her previous book was a similar demolition job on Christianity would indicate that she's not a devout Catholic, or not any more because she was brought up as one. Perhaps there's nobody as zealous as a convert but she has seen it from both sides now.
It is best not to be overly passionate in dismantling the case of one's adversaries. Being cross rarely wins a debate. Of resurrection stories, like those of St. Peter, she quotes M. R. James who finds them 'implausible' rather than perfectly understandably condemning them as absurd or ludicrous. Gentle understatement is a more effective strategy than bombast when undermining such blatantly silly 'miracles' and Catherine has a consistent line of gentle but firm scepticism that provides at least entertainment and often genuine laughs. But at the same time she is scholarly and has read the ancient, arcane texts she refers to because Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are very much the party apparatchiks, a fixed jury, as those selected to give evidence in The Bible. We knew that, of course, but one result of Christianity being on the winning side of history is that the many alternative accounts are much harder to find.
John Chrysotom, the 'fiery' believer, is against the ideas of curiosity and investigation because,
'where there is faith, there is no need for investigation'
which is a fragile approach to research and an unsound basis for education. It is redolent of all such tyrannies afraid of what their critics might find, from Julius Caesar through Henry VIII to Marxism, Trump, Putin and the more comedic, brief premiership of Boris Johnson but the Soviet Union, Hitler and such enterprises came and went in short order compared to Christianity which has so far been a reich that has lasted over 2000 years.
Like any of them, it presents to the world a credo of goodness and fine principles but a good proportion of ordinary people do good because that is in their nature. These powermongers achieve and maintain their positions not by goodwill but by whatever brutality and bloodshed it takes. Christians were undoubtedly persecuted in the first place but, as Catherine cites de Ste. Croix, 
it had been 'Too little, too late'. Christianity persecuted, too - but it was far, far more effective. 
And, reading Augustine, she can only conclude that,
the Church persecuted less from a love of righteousness than a love of real estate. 
 
It is, of course, a selective account. All history is that. It is not a history of Christianity, it is a survey of the 'heresies' that were swept aside by the orthodoxy of mainly Catholicism. As a devout non-believer, I'm not very interested in the schisms that occurred right from the beginning and I readily concede that good work has been done in among all the horrors by some sects more than others. But it is astonishing what we were told as children and sang about in school every morning about 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', the reverence that such an institution as the papacy, with its hideous back story, is accorded and the extent to which all our lives - not just in the West, because we are just a branch line of it - have been so rooted in this surreal unlikeliness. 
One should never sink to the level of one's adversaries, though. We are better than them and are grateful for the magnificent cathedrals and fine music. Eusebius saw Christians as,
'benighted fools', guilty of 'superficiality and gullibility'
for believing in a 'magician' like Jesus but even if that's what we might think we can choose to be polite enough not to say so. If it hadn't been him it would have been somebody else because we are our own worst enemies and are deeply anxious to be provided with,
Someone to claim us, someone to follow
Someone to shame us, some brave Apollo
Someone to fool us, someone like you.   
(footnote)
 
This is unlikely to be made required reading in The Vatican but it's going to take an almighty book to prevent it being my Best Book of this year. I devoured it like a lion that walks abroad seeking what it might. Ms. Nixey's previous book, The Darkening Age, on the similar theme of Christian monoculture and the vandalism it wrought on Classical culture, has been duly ordered.
 
Footnote. David Bowie, Big Brother from Diamond Dogs, 1974.

Saturday 9 March 2024

Recent Poetry Books - Kathryn Gray and Sue Hubbard

Kathryn Gray, Hollywood or Home; Sue Hubbard, God's Little Artist (both Seren) 

Not as much new poetry arrives here as it once did. Not much at all, really. There must be some worth having being published but maybe I'm not looking in the right places. I'm not looking very hard, it must be said. But, one thing leading to another, here's some I found. 

Kathryn Gray read Bournemouth at the Evening with Rosemary Tonks in Soho a couple of weeks ago, imagining meeting the recluse on the seafront. Any friend of Rosemary's is a friend of mine and Kathryn's poem is an evocative tribute, its slow rhythms not like Rosemary's world-weary, often bleary-eyed confessions but after conjuring Dover Beach becomes both intimate and infinite admitting that she is,
           afraid of my own mind.

'Exploring celebrity culture', as the back cover says the book does, wouldn't be a theme I'd expect to be taken with myself so the selection of celebrities comes with some pleasant surprises - the poets, at least - in Dorothy Parker, Roddy Lumsden and Michael Donaghy. One can tell by its reference points that this is one's sort of book.
The Portable Dorothy Parker works a bit like a loose sestina, each stanza using the words 'blood' and 'shot' and most using 'cabinet' and 'gun' but Kathryn's poems are smart casual more than formal, as disciplined as they feel like being rather than insisting on strict adherence to rhyme or metre. Dorothy Parker is, like its heroine, a less deceived tour de force,
                                            When I love someone, I love them more
than they want to be loved. If they weren't already dead they'd sleep with a gun.
There is a Rosemary-like dissatisfaction in these poems, often attended to with a Dorothy-like attitude. For all their knowing worldliness they are most often in search of lost innocence but once lost innocence is not something that can be regained.
The problem with Donald is like the problem with Donald. Trying to speak of the unspeakable is a hiding to nothing and yet one can hardly not say anything. The Trump poem reduces itself to simplistic statements, repeats itself, is chronically angry at its own pitiful limitations and makes empty claims for itself and as such gets somewhere near its subject but more depth could be achieved if its subject was a more engaging character, like Donald Duck, because Trump's complexities are only manifested in his one-dimensional hideousness so the poem is a creditable attempt at an impossible job. Poems from the pamphlet, Flowers, including the title poem about a singer called Brandon whose work has almost entirely passed me by, are included here and I'm surprised to find I have all the Kathryn Gray there is in print. I thought there'd be more but it's a good idea to publish fewer books and make sure they are good ones. 

I'm not quite such a Sue Hubbard completist. I think it's her first books I have but I lost track of her writing on art somewhere along the line.
God's Little Artist is a verse biography of Gwen John, not so long ago the subject of a major exhibition in Pallant House, Chichester. It's not an easy thing to do but four pages of prose biography by way of introduction provide the story and then the poems are as vignettes to follow.
In Attic, it is as visual as the series of gorgeuosly quiet, pale paintings of that room in Paris, a print of one of which is on the wall over to my left but on that one the window is closed, but at its best poetry is music if it's anything at all and these poems have a gentle music that complements the paintings as well as touch, smell and all the senses that accumulate to evoke the limited but powerful palette of them, too. Again, like all poems worth having, they are better appreciated on subsequent readings than on the first. The phrase 'subtle tonalities' used by Sue to describe the paintings applies equally to her poems. 
Perhaps the highlight of the whole book, though, entirely satisfying as it is, is the quote from Georges Simenon,
'Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness'.
Yes, I dare say gloriously happy people don't stop to brood on their lives in poems, music or painting but it is just as true to say that those things at their best can bring more than adequate consolation which is something the unconsidered life lacks.

Seren has never been less than a highly likeable imprint and these two books only enhance that idea.
 

Thursday 7 March 2024

Ivory Duo ft. Adrian Green at Lunchtime Live !

Ivory Duo ft. Adrian Green, Portsmouth Cathedral, March 7

It's remarkable how many people one has come to know through doing this little website over the years, whether literary or musical. It's a collateral benefit. My very good friends the Ivory Duo are always welcome at Portsmouth and were rewarded with a good-sized audience today.
Lola Perrin's Homage to Debussy was a gentle awakening that lead into some actual Debussy, the Petite Suite which is a happy, playful set of four pieces involving impresssive integrated teamwork from Natalie and Panayotis as they negotiated some mid-keyboard congestion involving at least three of their four hands.
It was a 'game of two halves', changing mood when Adrian Green performed his own setting of Christina Rossetti's When I am Dead, my dearest, a nice piece of work for a 16 year old which wasn't as long ago for him as it was for some of us. The piano provided lilting accompaniment for the sixteen lines of forlorn Victorian weepiness taken from the whacking great tome of Collected Christina but one was entirely convinced by it. While Adrian and, say, Pavarotti are both tenors, that's almost like saying that a gentle fortepiano and a vast cathedral organ are both keyboard instruments. One wouldn't want to be without either.
But the main feature was the Songs of Travel by Vaughan-Williams. We might not think that's 1960's icon, Cilla Black and the man from Down Ampney have much in common but, as Cilla once -oooh -surrounded herself in sorrow, Vaughan-Williams for the most part takes on a yet more melancholy air than she did. Panayotis and Natalie shared the songs between them, presumably astonished to have the whole keyboard to themselves, Panayotis for the opening onward march, the rippling Let Beauty Awake and the plaintive Youth and Love before turning the pages for Natalie on the sepulchral In Dreams, the spacious, wistful Whither Must I Wander and the brief bonus track found in the composer's desk some time later. 
We might have gone home somewhat more pensive than if it had been something more bombastic but the jollity had been in the first half and maybe that's what life is like. 
I probably usually say we look forward to the Ivory Duo returning to Portsmouth and then they do, so my song remains the same.