Oh Babe, What Would You Say

Here's an American racing result from yesterday,

Del Mar 12.40
The Bing Crosby Stakes

1. Wild Dude 113/10
2. Masochistic 2/5 Fav
3. Kobe's Back 41/10

So, Masochistic got beaten.
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Lord Sewel enters the running for Greatest Living Englishperson as he emerges from obscurity to national notoriety. If you're going to do such things in your spare time, you might as well be in charge of a committee that sits in moral judgement of them.
I recall, sometime in a bygone age, being given the impression that 'establishment' figures were worthy and highly respected. The House of Lords, the Commons, priests, vicars, the Police (including Stewart Copeland), the Royal Family, sportspeople like Hanse Kronje and cyclists, the BBC, teachers, the banks and successful business people. But increasingly if it's not one sort of corruption they are up to, it's one of the others. If you took them out of the News, there'd be not much news left.
Of course, they are only human. If only they were poets, their perceived misdemeanours would be a part of their job description and a routine part of any biography.
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It might be time for a break from George Eliot as I reach the end of Silas Marner. I know where copies of those books I still have to read can be obtained, thanks to my small but well-chosen network of literati. One day, not too far off, I can attend to those and then put together a thousand or two words on the subject to find out what I've taken from this project apart from the immense enjoyment.
But, as one looks for the next reading option to put a space between the Eliot books, one becomes aware of the gaps still yawning wide open in the 40 years supposedly spent reading literature, including a desultory three years dedicated to it doing Eng Lit. What a privilege that was, to be given three years to read books at the taxpayer's expense. More gratitude should have been demonstrated at the time rather than scrape a 2:1 while playing pool and darts and going to pop concerts.
Some of these gaps are C18th Literature, any novel before Vanity Fair, Tolstoy, many C20th classic titles, Cervantes, Edmund Spenser and Jeffrey Archer. I might have officially 'done' Homer, Virgil, Dickens, Proust and many other essential authors but much has been forgotten, having been looked at in cursory fashion or they were abandoned. I know, in the case of Dryden, Pope and Milton, that I've tried but don't like the look of them but surely one must try harder. It was a summer project a couple of years ago to read C18th poetry 'if nothing better turned up' but inevitably something better did.
I had stopped worrying about any self-improving programme of reading the things one ought to have read and decided to read anything that came to my attention that looked worthwhile but those major works from the canon are presumably regarded as such for a reason and so one reverts to worrying about finding out why. After all, it would have been a great shame to pass off George Eliot with a comment like, yes, I read Middlemarch at university like I did a couple of years ago. I am very glad I went back to have another look.
I see The Times on Saturday reviewed Nigel Williams' R.I.P  with the same sort of unconditional endorsement that led me to Richard Yates several years ago and I've ever since liked to think that I was in the vanguard of the revival of interest in his novels and stories. Maybe that's a possibiilty.
On Sunday, The Observer reviewed Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History by Francis O'Gorman. At 192 pages, this might be an insubstantial thread to satisfy an academic's need to publish something but the review draws attention to some telling passages, beginning,
Brooding in their cells, medieval monks identified a malaise they called accidie - not acid indigestion of the soul, but an apathetic and self-disgusted inertia.
And,
A monastic worrier in the fourth century, Evagrius the Solitary, said that accidie's symptoms included 'a hatred of manual labour'.
So at least now I know that I am part of a long tradition every Saturday when I know I ought to be involved in some DIY, bashing in nails or applying paint in some forlorn attempt to maintain the house rather than seeing if I can get a start in the Times crossword or augmenting the day's investments with a little yankee on some of the handicaps at Redcar or Fakenham.
But, the review of that book will suffice. If you read too much, you don't write much. My inertia spreads, tautologically, like wildfire and The Singing Typewriter, below, is the first poem I've written that I like for ages. It's a shame that such things have to be artificially induced. As with The Lepidopterist's Wife, that I liked so much it got into the last booklet, I just thought of a title and then wrote the poem.
While writing it, I could feel it starting to imitate Sean O'Brien's The Beautiful Librarians. It can happen that you finish a poem, consider it a fine thing and later realize that you were re-writing something else that you really like. I hope I saved it from that but I'm not sure.
Meanwhile, back to the horse racing. I saw another 'One Cool' horse, after One Cool Cookie, One Cool Shabra, etc, ran third in Ireland a few days ago. Maybe it will come on for the run and win next time out. I'll keep an eye out for One Cool Poet. The least I can do is have a pound on it.