Richard II

Richard II, BBC2, June 30.

In olden days, English kings used to be yielded up by the sea. Any time you were at the seaside you could expect to see a lone rowing boat coming ashore in some quiet little cove and there would be a king in it.
We don't necessarily go to Shakespeare to try to find out exactly what happened in history, or BBC adaptations- in fact I've no idea where we do go- and so for all we know it could happen exactly like that, Richard II, Henry IV and all forming an orderly queue to kiss some wet sand.
This was also a great production for heads being chopped off if you like that sort of thing. Although as a general rule I don't, I had to admit that the Bushy and Green decapitations were some of the best I've seen recently. Bagot survived with Sir Stephen Scroop until they both had their heads rolled like bowling balls along the floor in front of the king along with a fine selection of suspect bishops and dukes that the new king wasn't keen on. However, Aumerle had a nightmare and couldn't get a thing right, finally blundering most catastrophically by presenting Henry with the new Richard of Bordeaux, all coffined up and ready to go.
Ben Whishaw was effete and petulant as the luxuriant spendthrift representative of God on earth (so, quite honestly, why shouldn't he be) while Rory Kinnear continues to annexe Shakespearean parts like a colonial power of an actor. Rory's great, leading his generation in Shakespeare, I would think, I just wish I didn't occasionally see his father in him, rolling his eyes and looking shifty.
The cameraman was a star of this tremendous show, too, finding angles in the scenes with the crown, two tiny images of Richard in the shattered mirror and any number of well-chosen shots.
This was a thorough success. Some of Shakespeare's best passages, the Christ-like Richard diminishing to that familiar loinclothed, shabby figure that can be Lear or Timon or any other broken man you can think of, the litany of human failings and evidence that the BBC still has some cash to do something worthwhile excellently well.
Enjoyed it immensely, thank you very much. 

Continental Shift

Continental Shift, Royal Festival Hall, June 29

It being a poetry event, the appeal to switch off mobile phones before the show was done in rhyme. But halfway through a poem by Wole Soyinka, a ringtone could be clearly heard throughout the auditorium. Soyinka stoically finished the poem before adding, 'I apologize for that', took out a mobile phone and switched it off. He had another one in his other pocket and so switched that off as well. Unfortunately, the performers had not been in attendance to hear the request.
This was the big event of Simon Armitage's 'Poetry Parnassus', a brave attempt to bring a poet from every competing Olympic country to London for a very international festival.  Nobel prize winners, Pulitzers and laureates from seven countries were brought together. Armitage himself was a Master of Ceremonies allowed a couple of poems but it was Jo Shapcott who represented Britain with some bee poems.
Soyinka, from Nigeria, came next, in a rather more benign mood than his political activist past would have led one to anticipate. A list provided of biographical notes on the whole cast of Parnassian poets demonstrated just how many writers are exiled, banned or pursued by regimes across the world and how political engagement is not really a choice in so many countries. We are spoilt in this country by having the opportunity to engage with anything else, without having the one, big over-riding issue to deal with all the time.
Kim Hyesoon, South Korea, read in Korean with translations to follow. It is possible to appreciate a small part of poetry in a foreign language and her poems had rhythm and structure that gave some idea of what was really going on before the English explained what had been said. However unsatisfactory the arrangement is, it was somehow effective here.
Togara Muzanenhamo, a graduate of Armitage's creative writing programme, from Zimbabwe, completed the first half with a quiet dignity, finishing with a powerful poem about returning to his old school.
Seamus Heaney (Ireland) opened the second half with some ancient Irish history, one piece in Irish and another translated by himself. In a long perspective, he went back also to his own origins with the familiar Digging, without which no proper consideration of his work would be complete. Heaney is like those footballers often described as 'having time on the ball'. Confident, unhurried, apparently letting the language do the work but it is easier said by him than done by others. A Peacock's Feather drew waves of appreciative sympathy from the audience having risked an undue amount of sentiment but apparently got away with it.
Bill Manhire represented New Zealand, another accomplished performer among so many, with poems surprisingly leaning towards the 'performance' genre. They worked and, in an unlikely way given the countries represented here, perhaps carried the most direct political import.
And Kay Ryan, an ex-United States laureate (where the job is handed round more regularly than here), ended proceedings with some humanely thoughtful short poems, a humour of some gentleness based on genuine rigour.
Each reader was impressive in their way, the Parnassus idea proving somewhat more successful than the original idea first sounded. There is a danger, especially with the Uzbek poet I heard beforehand of the syndrome associated with Ravi Shankar's appearance at the Concert for Bangladesh, "If you like our tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more.”  Of course, there were raptures to be overheard of how 'amazing' it all was - the whole festival - and, yes, it is, but exactly how much of the whole experience of an Uzbek recital an English person can get is open to question But, hats off- it seems like the whole thing has been a tremendous success and makes the achievement of my ambition to finally see Seamus Heaney look parochial indeed.

Don Paterson - Shakespeare's Sonnets

Don Paterson, Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets (Faber)

Published in 2010, I didn't think I needed another book on Shakespeare's sonnets. I was happy with Katherine Duncan-Jones and didn't know what more there was to say. Then I heard Wendy Cope on Poetry Please mention Paterson's reading of Sonnet 57 and thought I'd better investigate further. I'm glad I did.
Don Paterson's approach is a combination of high lit. crit., identifying for our benefit in Sonnet 10 a 'metaleptic double metaphor', and a contemporary demotic tone.
He has read closely and is never shy of finding fault either with the poems or previous commentators. In fact one has to remind oneself that from the outset he has said that all his verdicts are in the context of 'for Shakespeare', whose most ordinary work is well ahead of most other people's very best. Not only could one come away from this book thinking that the sonnets contained a lot of dud poems but it would be entirely possible to not want to see another line of iambic pentameter for quite some time.
In a useful appendix, Paterson has explained much about the attractions of the 14 line form as well as the five iambic feet. In one of many observations that betray a knowledge of or interest in neurological science, he points out that the three seconds it takes to read are a unit of 'what we can hold in our minds in an indivisible instant'.
However, most of his psychology is saved for what the poems are about, which is the progress of two difficult love affairs. We have been told in the introduction that there isn't any doubt about what's going on,
The question 'was Shakespeare gay?' is so stupid as to be barely worth answering but, for the record: of course he was.
He might have had a heterosexual side but 'his heart wasn't in it'. So, the story unfolds with Paterson interpreting, clearing up difficulties, explaining the obsession with numerology and comparing previous critics as the relationship goes from infatuation, through declarations of love, difficulties with jealousy and rival lovers until it goes bad and by Sonnet 124, love is an end in itself, severed from the young man. There are several convincing attempts at dating pieces when evidence allows, not only the suggestion of reference to contemporary events but textual affinites with plays that have established dates.
An interesting game can be played in which you read the sonnet before trying to anticipate Paterson's verdict. I improved at this as I went on but could never be confident of getting it right. But while his judgements are interesting, his interpretations trustworthy and his notes useful it is the way in which the sonnets are used as a basis from which to make broader observations on poetry that I found the most satisfying.
At various times he digresses to talk about the overly serious nature of so much literary criticism ('the extent to which the Scientific research model has infected the Humanities'), poetry in translation ('while a language's words might have rough synonyms in another tongue, its vast network of idiomatic collocation is wholly unique') or the old question of whether there could be such a thing as a 'good fascist novel'. Paterson calls the question 'whether one's reaction to a poem can be separated from its content'. And although you'd think that theoretically it might be, in fact it probably can't,
Who reads like that anyway, and would you want them round for dinner?
And it is good for Don Paterson, and makes me feel better, too, that I agree with him nearly all of the time.   
Shakespeare as a person doesn't come out of it too well but that is the fault of generations of idolators who thought that a talent for writing embued the whole person with a saint-like virtue. I'm afraid all it does is allow one to write well and no further assumptions can be made. But surely one would need to have been human, with all the concomitant failings, to be able to write about them and so it shouldn't be a surprise that he was a moody, jealous, self-regarding queen full of self-disgust, good at nurturing hurt and agony.
Don Paterson has brought our understanding of these poems up to date most astutely and accessibly. He has added himself to the tradition of their interpreters, and emerged from the debt he began by saying that he owed them.

Osvaldo Golijov- Oceana

Osvaldo Golijov, Oceana (Deutsche Grammaphon)

My friend is wiser than me. That goes without saying. When we heard the Brodskys playing Golijov's Tenebrae last Friday we both hurried home but I'm fairly sure I'd ordered a recording of it before he had. And yet then I wondered if he hadn't bought the better CD.
I still can't find the disc he's ordered with the piece on it by the Brodksys but I'd ordered this already anyway and I'm a fretful, disappointed sort of person who is always accusing himself of doing the wrong thing. And that happens quite a lot if you like horse racing.
So, despite its beautifuilly forlorn cover picture, I embarked upon this disc with some trepidation. Oh, Jesus, what have I done this time. I don't like slagging things off for the sake of it but this Oceana piece isn't anything I'm going to try to find excuses for. I got nowhere near the end of it and don't even wanna talk about it. But I can't throw it away because it has the Couperin-based Tenebrae in it which is so wonderful. Exactly what Golijov did apart from deconstruct the Couperin third Lecon and then rebuild it is hard for me to say but at least he did it. In some post-modern way, this is absolutely wonderful. It isn't at all better than Francois Couperin but it has done something with it and got its map references right.
So, then, the last three tracks on the CD are listed as Three Songs. You might not be expecting much but you'd be entirely the more wrong if you weren't. Here is Dawn Upshaw, previously perhaps most famous for singing on the best selling CD of Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,and here, equally movingly.
This is music by an Argentinian composer and I wonder if I should be made to think of the doomed passion of the Portugese fado songs that I never did quite find the time to fall in love with, or an echo of Jewish kletzmer music. Whatever it is, it is also of its own and I played these three songs three times over rather than the cod baroque I'd bought the disc for. Very deep and very dark if you like that sort of thing. I'll be going back to this many more times. My friend is wiser than me and his adventures have no doubt taken him further than I have ever been. But not on this occasion.

Brodsky Quartet

The Brodsky Quartet, Portsmouth Cathedral, June 22

That the Portsmouth Festivities can only provide an act like the Brodskys with an audience of about 60 is to be regretted. But if quality is any recompense for a paucity of paying listeners, there was enough appreciation in the ovation to make it very worth their visit.
The programme they offer is their Wheel of 4tunes, a disc divided into four concentric circles representing the four pieces they will play and each of them divided into ten equal sections for the pieces available. A guest spins the wheel for each selection and the schedule is thus produced.
Piazzola is something I can usually take or leave but as a lively opener Four for Tango served a purpose. It uses more than bowing techniques in getting sound out of the instruments. As in the picture here, the violins and viola stand and that certainly seems to help with Daniel Rowland, who had the better of the lead violin parts on this occasion at least, being expressively mobile at times throughout.
The Britten  Quartet no.3, a late piece and something of a swansong, seemed to benefit from the slightly echoing acoustic of the Cathedral with its harmonics sustained. The third movement kept Rowland high up on his fretboard to glorious effect and this would have been a perfectly acceptable highlight worthy of turning up for had the second half not, luckily for us, begun with the wheel landing on Tenebrae by Osvaldo Golijov. You don't necessarily go to a string quartet concert expecting to find that half the featured composers are Argentinian.
Another passsage of spare modern passionate desolation was sandwiched between two in imitation of Couperin. I thought first they meant Louis but was extravagantly thrilled to find it was Francois as the ending quoted from the troisieme of the three Lecons de Tenebres which, in the recording by James Bowman and Michael Chance, is officially my favourite record of all time.
Golijov's piece concerns terrorism in Jerusalem, at least in part, and the very high point of the Couperin invokes Jerusalem to 'turn to the Lord thy God'. It was that very part it quoted. I say 'quoted'. 'Lifted' might be a better word for it. Golijov's CD including Tenebrae was ordered from Amazon even before I started knocking out this foolish piece of commentary.
Although, having been able to make out the titles on the outer ring of the wheel (those being in the largest writing), and hoped for Bartok or Shostakovich, it was going to be difficult for anything to impress more than that. Perhaps the Shostakovich Quartet no.3 might have been the safer option because I know that quite well. But it was Bartok who had to take responsibility.
The Quartet no. 1 is 'lyrical and romantic' (for Bartok) and so was interesting to hear. There is, of course, darkness in it but he can manage brief spells of lush as well. It seemed episodic, and was at times rhythmic and dramatic, but no musical idea was sustained for very long. Thus, it appeared inconclusive which might quite rightly be exactly what was meant. None of which is to say there wasn't brilliant playing throughout this piece and the whole concert by all four of the quartet. I've only mentioned one musician by name but that's only because he got the flashiest things to do.
I arrived with the criticism I read recently still not gone away, that the Brodsky's were somehow suspect because they credited their tailor as their fifth member. They weren't overdressed or in any way apparently victims of a style makeover. They were exceptionally well-judged in everything they did, said and wore and produced a superbly resonant sound. I can only apologize to them that Portsmouth didn't have more people who wanted to see and hear them but it was clear that each and every one that did was glad to have done.
Thank you very much for coming.

The Glory Days

To mark the historic occasion, the first time a British rider has started favourite for the Tour de France, I return to an old masterpiece of a photograph, almost certainly used here before, of me in my glory days as a 12 Hour rider.
This is coming back into Lechlade in the 1995 WTTA '12', around about lunchtime, with approx. 110 miles done, looking okay and on my way to 217.888 miles by tea-time.
You really don't know what you had until you miss it.
It's not quite fair to say that I was 20 years ahead of my time and I'd have cashed in on the current boom in British cycling had it occured two decades earlier. I wasn't brilliant but I enjoyed it more than anything else. It brought the rewards that knowing that you've done some bloody hard work, and enjoyed it, can do.
One can take part in minority pursuits, like cycling, poetry or chess and the vast majority of people assume you must be good at them because they are not in a position to know otherwise. Let's keep that our little secret.
But, best of luck to Bradley Wiggins. Although the betting makes him a short-priced favourite apparently in the absence of opposition with obvious form in the book, it's not easy and it will actually still be an achievement to finish in the top three.
In these 12 Hour events, there were far better riders than me to bet on but they didn't complete the course. For me, having done one very full day's riding, the idea of getting out of bed to do another would have been out of the question. But Tour de France riders are getting well paid for their efforts and so they are welcome to it.
The continental journalists will not like it one bit if a Brit wins the Tour and there will be allegations. I believe there already have been. But, so far, it is Lance that is spending his retirement paying lawyers to defend him. Wiggins isn't. And my performances never aroused the slightest suspicion.

A Somewhere Violin

I was reading Hart Crane and came across the phrase, 'a somewhere violin' in a poem called National Winter Garden. Immediately, on these rare occasions, one knows that has to be the next poem.
It has to be about solo violin music, then it is the one thing between us and eternity. It brings to mind not only my CD of Rachel Podger but Nigel Kennedy at last year's Proms, Maxim Vengerov's recent return at the Wigmore Hall and, mostly, for me, Tasmin Little in Portsmouth last summer.
It becomes a secular prayer, a conflation of time and space, light years are a measure of distance, of course.
I'm not convined I will be quite presumptuous enough to send it to Tasmin.
Poems should perhaps ideally be written the other way round.

 

A Somewhere Violin 

for Tasmin Little 

Protect us now from permanent silence

and come with us while we explore the dark,

a talisman lit alone in shadows

between cigars on Leipzig afternoons.  

One last tornado, one last avalanche,

the light years that dragged by in the meantime

between us and the vast, star-strewn midnight

are this seismic, torrential partita.

Chris Preddle - Cattle Console Him

Chris Preddle, Cattle Console Him (Waywiser Press)

Chris Preddle's poem in the recent issue of South stood out as something quite apart from the rest of the poems there, it seemed to me. I thought I'd better investigate, as I often do on such occasions. What I found was this collection published in 2010.
Since I know I'm not going to be able to avoid some comparison with Paul Muldoon, I might as well make it now. There is, in the word play, rhymes and intellectual games playing, something Muldonian going on here but it is distinctive and personal, a method of Preddlesque style that differentiates it from anything derivative. Poetry like this takes chances and can't afford to miss very often or, missing too many stepping stones, it gets drenched. These poems are sure-footed and confident, inevitably the result of some working as well as using a free imagination, but bring the rewards that work deserves.
One might also add a classical and informed historical range of references that bring to mind Geoffrey's Hill's austerely learned verse but Chris Preddle does not have a bleak outlook or grieve at the condition of the world. There is a genuine sense of continuity with history, a feeling of belonging with other people and places and an expression of some well-being, the 'console' in the title phrase taken from a poem offering a clue, that is on the observe side of any disillusion or alienation.
Holme is the final long poem in several parts set around Preddle's West Yorkshire environment and his wife and some family and -presumably- friends make regular appearances. There are 31 Variations on Sappho 95 which, I think, are exciting in their untamed free association. It would do them a disservice to attempt any sort of precis or analysis of anything as mundane as 'meaning', which I hope excuses me from any such forlorn project. There is 'love' among their shifting themes, as well as flowers, death, Gods and everything that can be insinuated from Sappho 95.
Most importantly, it is poetry to be enjoyed, a remarkable fairground ride through allusions and intricate echoes. If it's not an easy thing to do, I think it must be much harder to know when enough is enough and not go too far. The point about idiosyncratic, even 'experimental', writing is that if it doesn't work, failed experiments need not be published. Many soi-disant avant-gardistes don't seem to know that, publish and are thus damned. I'm not even sure Chris Preddle should be called 'avant-garde' in this decade as poetry assimilates this manner into its wide stream of legitimacy.
Two poems under the title Not Catullus eventually made themselves my favourite. The first is about a 'ruined villa' that wouldn't have belonged to the outre Latinist. It is very much predicated on the 'not', which allows any amount of association, the arches standing on,
a promontory, as he might have put it, poking into the bottom
of  Lake Garda like Silenus' penis

I'm afraid that, for better or worse, lines like those stay in the imagination for a long time. Many of the less Catullus-like things in the book will do, too. This is a hugely impressive collection. Following up one promising poem from a magazine can pay worthwhile dividends. I'm glad I took the trouble. 

The Griffin Prize

Congratulations to David Harsent on winning the Griffin Prize. http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/ A wonderful book. as I noted at the time. And comiserations to me, top pundit in two very different genres who gets it exactly right but on the wrong day.
I made Harsent's book, Night, my favourite poetry book of last year and backed it to win the Forward Prize. I mentioned it to him at the Cheltenham (Literature) Festival but he didn't seem to realize my comiserations were real until I told him I'd put money on him. But now he has 65 thousand Canadian dollars to ease his pain and I remain out of pocket.
Anyone, if there was anyone, who followed my series of horse racing tips through the autumn and early winter might remember that I advised we should finesse a modestly successful campaign with Rock On Ruby in the Christmas Hurdle. And there I was, on Boxing Day, in front of the telly, over the last hurdle just in front shouting, 'Go on, Ruby', with admirable economy encouraging both horse and jockey with an Empsonian eighth type of ambiguity, only to see him touched off by that old enemy, Binocular. And then, in March, Rock on Ruby won the Champion Hurdle at the Cheltenham (Horse Racing) Festival with Noel Fehily on board because Ruby Walsh is trailing in third with my cash on Hurricane Fly.
Sometimes, you can be so right and still somehow end up being proved wrong. But, c'est la vie, or, as they say in France - but, ah no, I wouldn't do such an old joke here- they'd also say, 'c'est la vie'.

Journeys to the Interior

Sean O'Brien, Journeys to the Interior (Bloodaxe)

This is a shorter book than I was expecting but is compact enough to contain enough ideas to fill a longer one. By way of three lectures, Prof. O'Brien surveys C20th English poetry, with flashbacks to earlier reference points, through the theme of England and Englishness.
It is a fugitive subject and for the most part reflects the England that O'Brien readers have become accustomed to, a landscape of stopped clocks, endless afternoons in waiting rooms, a loss of purpose and a conspiracy against ourselves. It is to his credit that we are not unduly delayed by the idea of a lost Golden Age, most famously described in John of Gaunt's speech in Richard II. By now it has been recognised that there wasn't one and it has always been thus.
From the mainstays of Eliot, Auden and Larkin, we are taken through Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, most enlighteningly visiting Jeffrey Wainwright, then Peters Didsbury and Porter, Mss. Duffy and Shapcott, Simon Armitage (who is regarded as the poet most likely), to a surprisingly optimistic finish on the newness of experience found in Dalgit Nagra.
It is, of course, full of sound judgements and has dark, recriminatory reflections on the effect of the right wing press and politicians. Sean is never less than trustworthy if you enjoy a dose of caustic wit and his most impressive savaging is saved for the 'fury of incompetence by some blogospheric eunuch-defying Malcolm', which had me feeling a bit uneasy until it is made clear that this character is ' variously called experimental, neo-modernist, innovatory and "real" '. So it doesn't mean me.
Alienation is the diagnosis for much of the perceived discontent but engagement with such a chronically evasive idea is always going to be difficult to achieve. One remedy might be simply not to buy into such an identity in the first place. Although it might be the case that England suffers more than most countries from this complex, it can't be the only one.
O'Brien accepts that much has to be left out in fitting his material into the dimensions of these lectures but he gives us plenty of signposts to follow in our own time and, as has happened before, it is difficult for a commentator who has also contributed some of the significant poems on the subject to include their own work. As such, these pieces might be best approached with Ghost Train and his other volumes alongside, as an extension of those themes into the work of fellow travellers and into the wider history of C20th English poetry. There is a bigger book waiting to come out of this brief survey but one gets the idea and is grateful for it and the twist in the ending is well done. 

Sartre vs. Camus

Andy Martin, The Boxer and the Goalkeeper (Simon & Schuster)

The Sartre that we read at Lancaster in 1980-81 for the Existentialism course was no more than an excerpt from Being and Nothingness. Such was undergraduate study that only some early pages from the major work was enough to justify a degree in it. Similarly, in Eng Lit., a lecture on Ulysses was provided due to the interest and demand for it but students were advised not to attempt to write about it.
And so, Sartre is one of the few philosophers that I have read in anything like a primary source (that is, of course, in translation). He is one of the most accessible and enjoyable philosophers as a writer whereas, to a non-philosopher, most of the rest are best approached via commentaries.
Camus probably wasn't a philosopher at all. Many years ago, in a biography of him, I was surprised to read that he didn't regard even his novels (exemplary and brilliant as they are) to be his main work, which he saw as his theatre and political writing.
Andy Martin successfully escapes the temptation of writing his own personal story of hagiography for these once very fashionable thinkers to provide a commentary on an alliance that became enmity. He does a good job of describing the early traumas that formed Sartre's epoch-making philiosophy. Having had adorable, flowing blond hair as a child, it is cut short to make more of a man of him and it is suddenly revealed that he doesn't actually look like an angel. More publicly, both Sartre and Camus lived under Nazi occupation which made any consideration of the value of being alive somewhat more pressing.
They were at first admirers of each other and friends but they were very different. Sartre's pursuit of women was hard work undertaken with great effort whereas it was easy for Camus and it rarely helps a friendship if your friend becomes intimate with your girlfriend. Their differences were both personal, philosophical and political. For Sartre, it was a pugilistic engagement with evil whereas for Camus it was an encounter with absurdity, and, more transcendentally,
If the rebel becomes a revolutionary he can no longer be a true rebel; he has to conform to some political orthodoxy.
I wasn't sure if I was going to take sides. Sartre is clearly the more 'intelligent' writer but also maybe the more flawed human being. There is no substitute for being good-looking and Sartre never gets beyond some jealousy of Camus on that very basic point. On the other hand, Camus's thought is somewhat more 'hazy' and the Nobel Prize, among other things, overwhelm his capacity to produce useful work. Of course, in purely revolutionary terms, if you're not with them you are against them and Camus became anti-communist but whether that was entirely a bad thing remains unproven.
Gradually, I was feeling more sympathy for Camus and the argument was settled not only by Sartre seeming to be the more ad hominem in his attacks on Camus, but Camus's eventual confidence to his notebook that says one can make the world a better place,
'By giving, when you can. And by not hating, when you can.'
That might be nice work if you can get it and Sartre isn't entirely wrong in his resistance to compromise and insistence on the need to fight. It's just that he seems to want to fight anyway. And we all tend to think what it suits us to think. But, meeting his fellow icon, Che Guevara, it turned out that real 'men of action' questioned the need for philosopers of revolution and so Sartre's position advocationg violence but only writing in favour of it was somewhat undermined.
It seems that both had run out of new ideas and vitality before they died, Camus perhaps too young and Sartre, it says here, arguably too old.
Andy Martin mentions the car that Camus died in, the death-trap Facel Vega, often enough to suggest he is is a little bit fixated on the glamour of a 180 mph car, however unreliably designed. His biographical details tell that he lectures at Cambridge University, likes surfing and is a roadie for his sons and there's also a book on Bardot, so 'cool' is apparently high on his agenda. That's okay if you do it well enough and this is an enjoyable book.
My main reservation is how he treats himself to imagining what was said in private conversations between Sartre, Camus and Beauvoir. We get enough of biographers imaging the detail for us in the Shakespeare biography industry and commentary on extant primary sources is surely more authentic. Andy even gives us three pages of imaginary dialogue at one point. If he really wanted to write a play that's what he should have done.
But then I notice that his profile on Cambridge University's website says the book in preparation was to be called Loser wins: Sartre vs. Camus and I wonder who did win, or who was going to be adjudged the winner in the original synopsis. I'm guessing that the title was changed because it was found that neither did win in the end.   

Jubilee

My contribution to the Silver Jubilee in 1977 was to wear a 'Stuff the Jubilee' badge from the Socialist Workers Party and play my Sex Pistols records.
I don't know if the monarchy has changed much in the 35 years in between so it must have been me. I haven't decked the house out in bunting or bought anything with a Union Jack on it but I haven't been 'anti' either. The Republican case seems to be in retreat, similar to the anti-Stratfordian case in Shakespeare Studies. It seemed to have a case but gradually that case seems to have evaporated and its adherents now are apparently those die-hard stalwarts who never give up and would play chess for 30 more moves in an obvously lost position just for the sake of it.
I haven't become a cavalier and many of my objections to so-called leftist thought are on the grounds that I find myself too 'left' for them, that I find them mean-spirited, envious and grasping. As was explained in the recent TV series on the 1970's, Dominic Sandbrook saw Arthur Scargill as 'Thatcherite', simply out for what he could get. So many things that said they wanted equality- be they feminism or Black Power- really believed in the superiority of their 'minority'. This really came to a head for me when my now monk friend tried to tell me that the Catholic Church was a persecuted minority. I know, I know, it's a complicated game.
But, for me, being left wing was supposed to be about making the world a nicer place. I know there's no such thing as 'fair'. But despising people for what you perceive them to have that you don't is materialistic and I'm not sure that having stuff is ever going to be the point. The point is that if you have enough, you should give to others, not try to get more. And many of those descrying the privileged position of the Queen are also those striking to preserve their privileged pension rights in the hope that they can retire early to a life of leisure while the Queen has to endure the underwhelming prospect of standing to watch a long procession of very ordinary boatage float past her in the rain at the age of 86.
David Mitchell in The Observer gets as close to being right as possible by being engaged to Vicky Coren. No, not that. My mind was wandering for a moment. By asking what the Republicans would replace the monarchy with,
Personally, I don't mind the monarchy. I know a lot of people do, but I just don't. I know it's old-fashioned, illogical, pantomimic and unjust. But it's also unimportant, entertaining and, crucially, already there. Not liking the institution is not a good enough reason for getting rid of it. You've got to have a reasonable expectation that the republican alternative – probably some sort of presidency cooked up by contemporary politicians (and you know who they are) – would be an improvement. I say better the devil you know. Particularly when it isn't a devil but a smiling old woman, albeit with a colossal sense of entitlement.
If the human race has decided beyond all possible going back on the decision to divide itself along national, racial and religious lines, many of them with built-in motivations to go to war, then the country seems to need a titular chairperson. The recent examples that our democracy has offered us, in Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron have not been quite as terrifying as the C20th provided other countries with but they do still look a bit cheap and nasty compared to Elizabeth II.
It might seem a good thing that she lives and works at her appointment for as long as she can to keep the heir to the throne out of the job for as long as possible but there's an in-built flaw in that plan whereby Charles the Next has every right to expect to live as long as his parents did and so it's only a delaying tactic.
But, all that besides, you get a free pop concert- the likes of which the likes of Hawkwind used to champion in the long-haired early 70's, one in which Elizabeth reportedly asked that Cliff be involved in so that she might feel only middle-aged rather than old compared to many of the performers; no Republican I know ever objects to an extra Bank Holiday; she likes horse racing and gin; she doesn't regard her position as a privilege but as a duty and you couldn't do it.
Yesterday's pageant of boats was a long-drawn-out damp squib as far as I could see (partly but not entirely the weather's fault) and no amount of professional commentary could disguise that. My biggest concern was Kate Middleton's waistline. I don't know if we are so used to seeing fat people these days that a healthy figure is starting to look unusual but I think she could use a nice bag of chips once or twice a week. We've seen thin princesses before and it didn't end happily that time.
But the Republican argument, like the anti-Shakespeare argument and the variety of leftist political groups in 1977 that I went to, and at University, seem to have their own little private discontent to themselves. When the left in the late 70's was divided into the Tribune Group, the SWP, Vanessa's Worker's Revolutionary Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain and all, they preferred to argue among themselves rather than attack Thatcherism together. Let's see what they've got if they can agree that they have anything.
The recent BBC programme on Cavaliers and Roundheads had so many themes to it that it was hard to find one's place in it but I'm still a Roundhead as far as I can tell. Those who remember me batting will think I was cavalier but not really. I find myself on balance to be darkly moralistic, especially on behalf of others, and potentially Cromwellian with Cavalier tendencies on the distaff side (a taste for Handel, mainly).
I think I might have things in common with the Queen. I think she might secretly be a bit of a Roundhead, too. I think it's the Republican cause, so pumped up own its righteousness, that needs to consider whether it isn't becoming a bit too cavalier.