Adam Bede is another huge success in which Mary Ann delivers a finely-modulated ending, not all joyous but not tragic either. She also usefully includes a kind of manifesto for her fiction writing early in the text which could provide a good starting place for an essay on her novels. Although I'm sure that will already have been done. However, since it has been decreed that we must not begin sentences with words like 'however' and presumably 'although', well, I think I'm going to do it all the more.
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The success and unalloyed enjoyment of Wednesday's walk was only tempered by returning to some grim office bureaucracies on Thurs and Friday. Whole industries exist around utterly self-serving processes and assurances and when one compares it to the dangling of feet into cold rivers, one wonders why.
I know there have been privileged generations in history before but I wonder if the franchise was ever widened quite as far as it was for my generation and the immediate post-War generation before us in which liberal 'education', for its own sake, was the whole point, including university paid for by grant, not loan.
Now that university is another commodity, or career requirement, libraries are closing and all study and learning needs to have an end, be measured and made to fit, will those few decades that we were lucky enough to coincide with be the charmed age in which Greek Tragedy, contemporary poetry, The Blues or any other extra curricula arts subject be looked at for their own sake. Otherwise students will be fed Shakespeare, Shostakovich or Sham 69 only so that they can reproduce the required assessment of them in exchange for the grade they need to secure an administrative role in project management and I can't believe that is what they were intended for. The generations that I was at the younger end of have a great deal to be grateful for and I don't want anybody to think I'm not.
Today the second bookcase has been initially populated with a top shelf of poetry biography, a second shelf of Thom Gunn, third shelf still vacant and fourth shelf of Philip Larkin. This has served to demonstrate how much more there is on Larkin than Gunn. Without being obsessively completist about either of them, I do have most of the essential material on each. But where Larkin fills a shelf, Thom leaves a six inch gap. This is before the long-awaited Clive Wilmer edition of Gunn and I have begun to doubt that I'll see the once-rumoured Gunn biography. But Larkin now has three biographers to Gunn's none, two Collecteds to his one and a Complete, which even I don't feel the need of. However, my assiduous collecting has gathered that pile of yellowing pile of cuttings, papers and other Gunn archive material and, modestly (when there is so much to be modest about in it), the manuscript of my own abortive Gunn book isn't among them.But this ongoing re-organisation not only finds some long forgotten items that demand another look, it also raises worries about missing items. Where, for instance, is the CD of Matchbox Twenty's More Than You Think You Are. It must be somewhere, I've played it on You Tube to establish that I once had it and it is familiar enough to be sure of that. It is easily enough replaced but that is not the point.
But, we will see.
That empty middle shelf there can't be made any deeper and so large books won't fit on it. My Complete Ovid Loeb editions, the most scholarly-looking books I have, will look fine on there but will need some other small books for company; the Maggi Hambling and other art books can probably come downstairs to fill the bottom shelf. I don't think novels are going to make it onto these shelves beyond the George Eliots in the front room.
It's a thoroughly absorbing enterprise, this organizing, and not one to be hurried or taken lightly. However, one day it will be over and then I can get back to beginning sentences with 'however'.
Every Saturday, there's Oliver Kamm pedantically out-pedanting the pedants on grammar in The Times; at work one has semi-literate blogs from senior managers competing with those who think they know where apostrophes should or should not be placed and then the Oxford University English graduate, Michael Gove, decides that he is going to sort it all out. And yet still, somehow, those of us who benefitted from those glorious years of being shown we could enjoy language for its own sake, simply carry on doing so. Et in Arcadia we are.Meanwhile, my little dog, Jock, is lying on the one-off edition of a t-shirt featuring Lips & Bananas. At the price they will need to be and the quality of the picture produced, I'm not sure this long-considered project has much of a commercial future.
