Dietrich Buxtehude, Herr, wenn ich nur dich hab

The best new release CD I have bought so far this year was the string quartet version of Haydn's Seven Last Words from the Cross but this Naxos Buxtehude Vocal Music vol. 1 would be a contender had it not come out in 2007, re-packaged from 1997 and recorded in 1996.
Buxtehude has been a long time favourite, partly due to his relative obscurity but he is a genuine choice, too, as his clean, clear lines of austere North German Protestantism find precisely the required balance between discipline, rigour and elegance on the one hand and sublime emotion on the other. Not all the time, of course, and since he was primarily an organist and organ music wouldn't be my preferred genre then I can see that I'm not seeing the whole picture. But these acts of devotion, and especially the funeral piece, Fried - und frendenriche Hinfahrt, published after the death of his father, are immensely satisfying and as a precursor to Bach's more ambitious work, he is a seminal figure. I ordered the disc after one of its components was on the radio on Sunday morning early a couple of weeks ago. It really is better to wake up to things like that than Radio 5 revisiting all of Saturday's been and done sport.
None of which is to say that I've lost any respect for the Italian Catholic glamour of Monteverdi, whose Vespers shimmer and glow with an entirely different glory. But Buxtehude has an authority perhaps somewhat drier, leaner and, in German, a refusal to go for mere panache when a more sombre authority can be achieved.
I just checked how many further volumes of Buxtehude Vocal Music there are on Naxos. Only one, I'm afraid. But, of course, it will be on its way here soon.
Google Translate translates the above title as Lord, if I'm only you. I doubt if that really captures the intended meaning but although I'm keen to know and one day might take greater pains to find translations of these things - my study of the German language didn't really get very far- I don't really mind what it means. One assumes the sense of it is in the music and that Buxtehude was not a great ironist. Which doesn't necessarily mean he was sincere either. He was a professional musician. Just exceptionally good at it and, more than 300 years since he died, I'm glad of it.

Graham Swift - England and Other Stories

Graham Swift, England and Other Stories (Simon & Schuster)

I don't know if Graham Swift belongs in the top echelon of the generation of fine English fiction writers that includes Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Alan Hollinghurst. There is a way in which he is not so consciously 'literary' but that shouldn't disqualify him from similar recognition. At present that group of novelists- not that they are a group in any meaningful way- seem to me some way ahead of their contemporaries in poetry but such attempts at judgement are best left aside when enjoyment is the real object of reading and Swift's new book is very enjoyable.
Twenty-five pieces that end on page 274 means they are easily assimilated, often a few at a time, and they are never complicated. They cover themes of childhood, marriage, relationships and death from a personal perspective. Whether they add up as a whole to a 'state of the nation' diagnosis from these selected vignettes is unproven but Swift's natural writing, an art that conceals art rather than advertises it, is consummately well done.
The stories that perhaps work least well are those from historical periods- the civil war, memories of World War I or the early C19th. Swift is apparently more comfortable in contempoary settings and these few pieces from longer ago don't really add sufficient deeper perspective to the collection.
But there are several powerful pieces, like Remember This that moves from the overwhelming happiness of the newly married to the loss of it. The 'mindless joie de vivre' of fatherhood precedes a dramatic incident of a dog attacking another child in a park in Dog. The motif of exhilaration and loss recurs in Half a Loaf as a middle aged man can hardly believe his luck to be having an affair with the yonger Tanya even though he knows full well it cannot last.
But my attention was really drawn to Ajax, a story of social 'respectability' and the expectations of a neighbourhood (rather than a community) that begins,
When I was a small boy we had a neighbour called Mr. Wilkinson, who was a weirdo.
'Weirdo' means lives alone and is educated. Yes, he does exercises in his underpants outside in his garden but that isn't against the law. There is a kind of misunderstanding that happens in Atonement that results in Mr. Wilkinson leaving and there is a nice, happy ending for everyone else when a normal family move into his house. It is a superb piece of social observation, about orthodoxy and perception. We might think of the case of Christopher Jeffries a few years ago for its relevance to the condition of England and the sinister implications of what might be 'middle class values'.
Swift takes different perspectives in each story to twist the angles and interpretation of contemporary living - a kind of generic, formulaic existence that moments of great light and sorrow only sometimes break into.
The last story gives its title to the collection, in which a coastguard on his way to work early in the morning helps a journeyman comedian on tour from his stranded vehicle. He is a black comedian from Yorkshire, for anybody who remembers Charlie Williams, and his bad jokes are a seemingly endless, not very funny, play on words based on the fact. The entertainer's itinerary takes him up, down and across England throughout the summer season playing 'theatres, corn exchanges, seaside palaces and pavilions and indeterminate halls'. And here we glimpse the wider perspective, the brief suggestion of the broader England ongoing around and beyond them, where their miniature cross-culture encounter is vastly bigger and both more difficult and as friendly and co-operative.
The book is about the value of a life, perhaps, and the divisions in it and, it being Swift, grief. In First on the Scene, a widowed walker continues to go on the walks he did with his wife and finds a young woman dead in one of their old favourite beauty spots.
He looked at the woman in her red top and saw, almost with a longing, the absolute absence the dead have even as they are there.
and
What a terrible thing it can be just to be on this earth.

View from the Boundary

The trials and tribulations of editorship aren't quite over but I hope the worst is behind me. Formats, pdf files, a variety of line lengths, I don't know, did Thomas Thorpe have all those to sort out when he published those 154 sonnets.
But it will be a good job. The sample copy I have already, with all its errata, looks very lovely and by all means pre-order Calliope, Portsmouth Poetry Society 2014 from here if you wish. Let's make it four pounds including p&p. It might be three pounds fify at the 'launch' on National Poetry Day.
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A bigger production job was the Monty Python pension benefit gig, a genuinely good, old-fashioned world television event. I didn't stick with it all the way through but it still had its moments and such a seminal act is certainly worthy of a valedictory show.
Of the several things one wonders, one that stayed with me longest was whether it had quite so much fourth-form obscenity and if it is really necessary from 70 year old men. If we think we can tell which Beatle wrote which bits of their songs then I think we also think we know who did what in Python. It's Eric Idle, isn't it. And I think all the stuff about philosophers is Palin and Cleese and those are the parts that have lasted best.
Another concern was the number of people from the audience interviewed before the show who had come dressed as the Spanish Inquisition or other celebrated characters. They had come from all over the world, apparently. Who are these people, I wondered. And then I guessed they might be the same people who wear fancy dress at test match cricket, obsess about Glastonbury, queue for days for the Harrods sale or even stand in by-elections.
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It has not been a great summer for British sport so far with Cav and Froome early departures from the Tout, Murray only just making week two of Wimbledon, the cricket in apparent disarray and Roy's young guns finishing bottom of a poor group in Brazil.
I don't remember the Commonwealth Games being such a big deal. I suppose the BBC think they can recreate Olympic fever all over again but Mo is injured, Jessica's had a baby, not all the cyclists are there and we are not so good at swimming. I never was, either. And it was only two years ago and things like that soon stop being special if you try to make them happen all the time.
But I was thrilled to see a Scot take it all the way in the final of the Squash. Not thrilled enough to stay long enough to see if he won but the impact on Scottish Squash should be enormous. New squash centres immediately opened up from Oban and Dingwall to Thurso and Kirkcaldy. Scotland was gripped by squash mania. Scottish squash will benefit from a golden generation in years to come and that is the legacy of having had the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
However, it was not great as a spectator sport. I played squash for one term at school when we were allowed to go to Gloucester Leisure Centre. I was hopeless at it. I only won once. When my opponent had a bad ankle. So not only did I not get much out of watching it, I didn't reckon much to playing it either.
And on the eve of the classic King George and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, one can only think that if Telescope can be 5/2 favourite then we are not expecting the sort of legendary race that Grundy and Bustino put on in 1975.
Apart from that, everything's fine.

The Classical 50

I did say a liitle while ago that I was working on lists of 100 Novels and 100 Classical Music pieces.

The novels were a hopeless cause very soon after embarking on the attempt but I made some headway with the music. I have however stopped at 50. Not for want of candidates- there are too many rather than not enough- but really because these 50 seem to represent some kind of favourite elite and to continue would begin to become a matter of listing more and more Bach cantatas, Sibelius symphonies, Mozart concertos or Handel operas.
My list is ridiculous in almost every respect. Precious few are genuinely 'classical' pieces. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik seems to me quintissentially classical but the term refers to the second half of the C18th and much of my list is baroque, renaissance and modern with not very much one might call late romantic.
It also contains very short pieces like those by Reynaldo Hahn or Howard Skempton alongside the 4 discs needed to contain The Well-Tempered Klavier, as well as the flagrant disregard of any ground rules whatsoever by including single arias alongside complete operas. It means nothing beyond allowing myself to determine a certain measure of 'taste' for myself. I could just list 'Everything by Bach' follwed by 'Everything by Handel' but that would be very unfair to Josquin, Pergolesi, Tallis and Monteverdi.
They are in the order they were put on the shortlist which does not reflect any preference.
But, unworthy as it may be, here it is,

Tallis                Spem in alium

Beethoven       Symphony no. 6

J.S. Bach         The Well-Tempered Klavier

Josquin Des Prez         Le Deploration de la Mort de Johannes Ockeghem

Biber   Mystery Sonatas

Buxtehude      Trio Sonatas Op. 1

Monteverdi     Vespers 1610

J.S. Bach         Cello Suites

Mozart              The Magic Flute

Handel                         Messiah

F. Couperin     Lecons de Tenebres

James MacMillan        Seven Last Words from the Cross

Sibelius            Symphony no. 5

Purcell             Dido and Aeneas

Gluck              Orfeo and Eurydice

Wylkynson      Jesu Autem Transiens

Pergolesi          Stabat Mater

J.S. Bach         Double Violin Concerto

Schubert          Symphony no.8 Unfinished

Reynaldo Hahn           A Chloris

Shostakovich   24 Preludes and Fugues

Handel            Rinaldo

Mendelssohn   Symphony no.4

James MacMillan        Veni, Veni, Emmanuel

Tchaikovsky    Violin Concerto

Mozart Piano Concerto no.20

J.S. Bach         Solo Violin Partitas

Vivaldi                        The Four Seasons

Puccini                        La Boheme

Puccini                        Madame Butterfly

Charpentier     Lecons de Tenebres

Mozart             Soave s'il vento

Satie                Gnoisiennes

Faure               Requiem

Robert Morton              Le Souvenir de vous me tue

Allegri             Miserere

J. S. Bach        Cantata no. 170

Telemann         Trumpet Concerto

Elgar    Cello Concerto

Mendelssohn   Violin Concerto

Bartok             Solo Violin Sonata

Palestrina         Missa Papae Marcelli

Gorecki           Symphony no. 3 Sorrowful Songs

Sibelius            Symphony no.2

Rachmanninov            Vespers 

Sibelius            Karelia Suite

Tallis                Salvator Mundi

Mozart             Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

Krumpholtz     Harp Concerto no.6

Howard Skempton      Song no.2 from 'Images'

What Cameron Talks About When He Talks About Gove

With all due respect, which is precious little, I think what David Cameron meant when he issued his ludicrous eulogy to the four years he has had of Michael Gove as Education Minister, was more like,

Michael Gove is toxic. There is no way I can have this weirdo in a high profile job as we approach the next General Election. Where can I put such a twisted character without having to admit I'm sidelining him. Oh, I know, Chief Whip. He is exactly the sort of malevolent little sod I need to bully, blackmail and harrass the backbenchers. What a fine thing an Oxford University education is.

I wonder if Mr. Cameron would like to employ me as a speechwriter.

Mirror Poem

This week's meeting of the Portsmouth Poetry Society was the last of the current programme before we reconvene in September with a booklet of new poems to promote and a reading on National Poetry Day to promote it at.
The theme this week was Mirror Poems, which more or less meant that form widely attributed to Julia Copus. We had some tremendous technical efforts, some of which were palindromic rather than 'mirror' if one had to be pedantic but, luckily, we didn't have to be.
I had been aware of this meeting looming at the end of the programme, a meeting I could hardly duck out of in the circumstances, and had thought about and failed to write a mirror poem a few times. Until at almost the last minute, I thought, sod it, let's do this, then. A poem about not being able to write a poem. The only thing to do and, I'm sure, not the first time it's been done.
I'm not proud of it. I certainly didn't put my name on it but here it is-

Mirror Poem 

There’s no way I could write a mirror poem,

I’m not Julia Copus after all.

There are so many things that I can’t do.

Wasting evenings, week after forlorn week,

I would have tried harder but there’s no point.

There must be tricks involved that I can’t grasp

and Julia did say that you’d lose sleep

as you struggle to make all the lines fit.

I simply don’t think I am up to it. 

I simply don’t think I am up to it.

As you struggle to make all the lines fit

- and Julia did say that you’d lose sleep-

there must be tricks involved that I can’t grasp.

I would have tried harder but there’s no point

wasting evenings, week after forlorn week.

There are so many things that I can’t do;

I’m not Julia Copus after all.

There’s no way I could write a mirror poem.

Idiom and Linguistic Nuance in Surprising Places

The latest three novels I have been reading are Donna Tartt's The Little Friend, Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson and, now, A Laodicean by Thomas Hardy.
I wonder quite how Zuleika gets onto any list of the Top 100 Novels, as suggested by Robert McCrum in The Observer but I share the affliction of list-making and understand how such things can happen. It was good enough fun while it lasted.
But in all three novels, and possibly some before them, I did stop a few times and wonder at certain phrases or figures of speech at how surprised I was to find them used by those authors. Some usage I found in Donna Tartt I thought were specifically English and I didn't expect to see them in an American book; some things in Beerbohm seemed to me quite recent and I didn't think they would have been current in 1911 but whenever one looks up the first coining of a word it usually turns out to be at least 50 years before one thought, if not a few hundred.
But in the first section of A Laodicean- and heaven knows what a joy it is to be reading Hardy again- the young architect, Somerset, somewhat besotted by his new employer, Paula, is invited to her forthcoming garden party,
'It is on the nineteenth. Don't forget the day'
He met her eyes in such a way that, if she were a woman, she must have seen the meaning as plainly as words: 'Do I look as if I could forget anything you say!'
Every reader surely knows what Hardy means by this, the supreme value that the besotted puts on every hint or utterance of their beloved. It is also another of any number of reminders of why I really should abandon all hope of writing anything called a novel when such a disregarded item in Hardy's work can include such insights as a throwaway in so few lines.
But mostly, it is this 'Do I look as if..' construction that I thought might be incongruous in something written in 1880. Of course, it isn't - because Hardy did it. But I associate it now with the chippy, challenging, attitudinal response of a post-punk rock generation, a teenager taking exception to criticism from another circa 2005, like something from The Catherine Tate Show,
Am I bovvered. Do I look as if I'm bovvered.

Except it isn't. It is from the lost world of Thomas Hardy's Dorset in the late C19th.

So, by all means, if you have teenage children and you ask them to tidy their bedroom and they say, 'Do I look as if I want to tidy my bedroom' (which is probably what I would have said when I was 14 if the idiom had been in vogue in 1974), then you need not concern yourself that they are recalcitrant, taciturn and unmanageable. They are using inter-textual modes of expression and, for once, not lazily insisting on referring back to the old stand-bys of Shakespeare, Wilde, Shaw, Horace, Dante or Chaucer but have diversified into Thomas Hardy. Applaud them and be glad of it.     

Thom Thom Club

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b041y11p

I was glad to find this recent discussion on Thom Gunn recently. I don't know how long it will remain available.
Paul Farley, Fiona Sampson and Clive Wilmer discuss the life and work in the last third of the programme. It's a strange feeling to hear two of these luminaries saying they came to Gunn much later than I did but that, of course, is because they are younger than me. Clive Wilmer is a major authority on Gunn and was in from the beginning.
It's a shame that they choose Street Song to enthuse about because surely it is not one of his finest poems but it does rather obviously illustrate how Gunn was both a contemporary poet and one who saw himself in a long tradition of English poetry, as the John Donne or George Herbert of the C20th.
The other choices of poems, from The Man with Night Sweats as well as Tamer and Hawk and The Gas Poker, are much more apposite. Some of the observations are useful, too, in how the 1992 volume saw a return to critical acceptance after a period when he had been somehow unfashionable.
Gunn's impersonality, taken more specifically from Elizabethan models and with precious little reference to Eliot, is also worthy of note, particularly in the way that although he does write about his life he is not interested in writing about it per se but as raw material for his poems, which is exactly what Confessions of the Life Artist said.
Fiona recommends new readers begin at Moly, which accords with what August Kleinzahler says in his introductory essay. It is also suggested that the poems are not best read chronologically.
I wouldn't say that. I think there is a story that unfolds and that is one of the most significant features of the oeuvre. However, it is a discussion worth hearing and I'm glad of it, and that Gunn might not be 'the subject of many academic conferences' (as if that were a mark of artistic achievement) but he warrants at least this much air time still.
Clive Wilmer is working on an annotated Collected edition but there is no sign of it on Amazon yet.

View from the Boundary

And here is the view from the boundary at the Rose Bowl at about 2.45 this afternoon. Ecstatic scenes of sporting endeavour and derring do and surely a rival to anything Yorkshire can put on for the Tour de France.
To be fair, we did okay until 2.30 but after that it was a bit grim. But the result was the Telegraph crossword was completed but The Times less than half done.
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But Calliope 2014, the booklet of poems from Portsmouth Poetry Society, is nearing readiness and is set to go to the printers perhaps at the end of the month. It will be available in the Autumn, specifically at a reading held on National Poetry Day, October 2nd. The venue is now less likely to be at the University and more likely to be in Old Commercial Road, opposite Charles Dickens' birthplace, at the St. John's Ambulance premises.
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Almost in anticipation of the recent news item about which books are regularly left unfinished by their readers, I have at least temporarily abandoned Donna Tartt's The Little Friend. I am beyond halfway through it but it was increasingly becoming a chore. I had thought I needed to relish and savour every page because it will be a long time before there is another Donna Tartt novel to read but it began to drag somewhat and was not as compulsive as The Secret History or The Goldfinch.
And so I took up with Max Beerbohm's Wildean satire, Zuleika Dobson, which is good fun and then I have Thomas Hardy's A Laodicean lined up.
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And what a joy was the Motown Top 20 on telly on Sunday night. Yes, I Heard it Through the Grapevine was a worthy number 1 and it is a measure of the Motown Hit Factory's strength in depth that it doesn't feature in my Top 6 which picks itself as I couldn't possibly leave out any of, The Tracks of My Tears, Walk Away Renee, Stop! in the Name of Love, Just My Imagination, I Want You Back or I'm Still Waiting and then some.