Coming at the same time as the announcement that The Independant was ceasing its printed edition and all that that portends for the future of print, it was a glimpse of a dire future of internet journalism. I spend too much time in front of this screen already and prefer to be laid out with the paper in the same way that I don't want a characterless gadget like a kindle to read books on, I want books. I want the crossword, the book reviews, the quizzes, the chess, the obituaries, the racing page, the columnists and to glance despairingly at Oliver Kamm's latest diatribe against grammar pedants as he defends some usage that has been adjudged erroneous by one less liberal than him.
I went out again later and saved the day by finding a copy in the shop that once told me I'm the only person who buys The Times there and if I don't buy it they send their one copy back. But progress on the crossword stopped with only a quarter of it done. Never mind, there's no point fighting a losing battle. But I looked again later and made some more progress and in the evening, by dint of gutsy determination and 'never say die' got down to one clue remaining, G-S-O-N. But I could think of no such word that might fit so fell back on a helpful website and found GOSSOON, which is a servant, and fitted the clue. But that is a problem with such crosswords. One may have no chance of completing it on your own if it contains a word you've never heard of, but how would you know.--
Anthony Trollope scored another hit with The Warden, admirable for its brevity comapred to many of his books, as well as its observation of its own times, which reflect on our own as any old classic is wont to do.
It is a kind of morality tale in which the conscience of the warden, who only wants to make the world a better place, persuades him to resign his post in the face of a campaign against his position (rather than him personally) even when the case is dropped. And everybody ends up the worse off for it.
In a particularly memorable passage, considering the downgrading of scholarly work to a more facile mode in which,
ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true sorrows, and monthly novels convince, when learned quartos fail to do so. If the world is to be set right, the work will be done by shilling numbers.
Perhaps the difference now is that not so many of us think the world will be set right but I dare say there are young people and Corbyn supporters who genuinely think it can be.
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But the time is creeping up on me, one of those cycles that define the turning of the year, when I will need to think of a subject for my contribution to next year's Portsmouth Poetry Society programme. Having delivered Rosemary Tonks, quite successfully, I thought (and Bloodaxe will be pleased to know it resulted in at least two more books being bought), it soon becomes time to decide what to do next year, to write the brief introduction over Christmas and do it in the New Year.My 35 year old undergraduate dissertation on Andrew Marvell has been safely, and unregardedly, hidden away ever since the typist I took it to in Lancaster was kind enough to provide a carbon copy. All such work, like the exams, were destroyed once evaluated and 15000 words would have gone into the flames without such foresight and I've always been grateful.
It's not that bad, actually. My 21 year old self surprises me. I can summarize the main points, replace some of the naivety with a more knowing savoir faire and there it is, some work usefully recycled.
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Which I'm suddenly aware works in the opposite direction with poems.
There haven't been many new poems posted here recently but that doesn't mean I haven't written any. But since I won't be appearing in South this year as it looks as though I will be selecting the poems for the Autumn edition, I wonder if I ought to try sending some to another magazine. Therre aren't usually enough of them to cast before more than one set of editors at a time and, reading the small print, it increasingly seems that poems that have appeared elsewhere, specifically not required by many publications, includes such small-time websites as this. So my frugal output is stretched further by deciding whether I should casually post them here or offer them up for the chance to appear in print.But, whether or not, progress towards The Perfect Book, with this cover picture to illustrate the poem, Cygnus, is still on schedule to appear on 17/10/2019.
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But if it doesn't yet seem time to surrender the printed word to digitalisation, it might be time to accept that biography is as much an imaginative form as a factual one. Shakespeare biography has always been more a thing of shreds and patches, made from fantasy and folklore, and Julian Barnes' recent account of Shostakovich is an imaginative recreation and yet still brilliant. So, let's surrender to the enjoyment of reading a good book while remembering that biography is written by biographers. While waiting for Hunter Davies' account of Wordsworth, which was ordered to fill a gap, it is likely to be overtaken by Daisy Dunn's Catullus' Bedspread, a life of perhaps the most colourful in a competitive field of candidates among the Roman poets. I will tell you about it as soon as I've read it.
