Oh, Babe, it's more Retirement Diary

I had thought that a retirement present that would last would be the Complete Bach Cantatas on 72 discs but instead I had an incinerator I don't think I can use because we're not supposed to have fires. I'm not listening to much music, though. Mendelssohn's Octet was a fine thing on the lunchtime concert today but I'm not habitually putting on records or leaving the wireless on.
The daytime quiet is a fine thing and much to be delighted in. Unlike the gathering going on a few doors down this evening. I dare say it's harmless enough, or is it, but I take my older generation turn in simply not understanding the awful racket that represents the pop music of people much younger than myself. My friend Richard's father famously didn't reckon much to The Sweet doing Wig Wam Bam on TOTP and mine asked how did I know whether Hawkwind were playing Silver Machine right but we knew they were masterpieces.
On the other hand, I recently heard Promises by Calvin Harris and Sam Smith and couldn't quite place where I'd heard that classic before until I realized it had been played more than once at a neighbour's party a couple of years ago. One has to live and let live and only hope that me reading essays on Elizabeth Bishop doesn't annoy them.
On the subject of which, Anne Stevenson drew my attention to something called In Prison today. I couldn't find it in the Complete Poems and thought, oh no, are the Complete Poems not complete but it's in the Collected Prose so that's something to look forward to going back to. What Anne quoted seemed to be like a poem I was very vaguely trying to find the words for - it's best if the words come first. I expect Elizabeth will have made a better job of it than I could and so I'll be able to stop worrying about that one.
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I went to Portsmouth Central Library today, on a mission related to a project in progress, but also for the walk. I had to fill in a form and tell them what I wanted. It looked like I was the only one who wanted to look at books. Everybody else in there was using the computers and, having looked at two books, I had to leave them on a table for de-contamination but they were the only two books there. Thanks very much to those staffing Portsmouth Central Library. I found what I wanted and if I'd ordered one of the books I'd have ordered the wrong one because what I wanted wasn't in the book I thought it was.

Forthcoming, beyond this mundane chat celebrating the first weeks of not having to get up until I feel like it (but, eventually, one does), it will be August tomorrow and then September, it says here, promises new titles from possibly my two favourite living poets, Sean O'Brien and August Kleinzahler, so there might be something new and worthwhile to talk about. And then, maybe one day, the project in progress might be something. It's unlikely anybody that reads it will enjoy reading it more than I'm enjoying writing it, though.

Retirement Diary

I have noticed other Retirement Diaries among 'poetry bloggers'- if that is such that I am here, but not that they are finishing the day job or packing up the blog job. Some are taking a summer break and one can't blame them. It's been some time since there was a new book or record to talk about, what poetry activity there is is virtual or online and my friends in Portsmouth Poetry Society wouldn't be meeting again until September anyway. However, there is something vaguely like being in touch with a certain community here, whoever you may be, and a Cartesian ontological point of knowing that one must exist because who else is it writing this Retirement Diary.
It's been great, not far off idyllic, so far but I know not to tempt fate. Going out to bat thirty years ago with a few good scores behind me, confidence veered dangerously into the illusion of invincibility and, needless to say, a sequence of low scores followed. Despite several successful years of turf investment, there is nothing like horse racing to make one aware that disaster is waiting for you at every turn and so, having been beaten a length and a quarter today, we tentatively begin Goodwood with Space Blues in the 2.45 tomorrow just hoping to recover the same minus position I've been stalled at for some weeks now.
I took a similarly defensive attitude towards my precious rating of 1898 in 10-minute chess games at Lichess. One more win would push me through the 1900 barrier, achieve a personal best ahead of the 5-minute game rating of 1903 and so I avoided rated games for a couple of days and bided my time, like Achilles in his tent refusing to fight. But it was not to be and I'm back down on a (highly respectable for me) 1870. But last night I tuned into some 'streaming' and found Gata Kamsky chatting casually while disposing of his opposition in 3+3 games. I had wondered who these top rated players were and thought, if Kamsky's not top - he was once no. 4 in the world- who can it be, this Dr. Nykerstein, who is over 100 points clear on the leaderboard.
Yes, according to various places on the internet, it is Magnus Carlsen. So it's interesting (for me if nobody else) to note, if it is in any way comparable, that my chess rating there compared to the world champion is roughly in the same proportion as my 12 hour rides on a bicycle were to the competition record. Having been listening to the sort of questions they ask statistician, Andy Salzman, on Test Match Special, all of which he seems to be able to answer, one can start to get a taste for this sort of abstruse number crunching. I can't believe that such numerology is the point of cricket, chess or cycling but some people clearly think it is.
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But, expanding slightly on the recent point that Anne Stevenson wanted to write about Elizabeth Bishop 'uncategorically', I perhaps ought to say something about poetry even if I don't think I am categorically a 'poetry blogger' even if I ever meant to be. The world simply doesn't work like that, or shouldn't be expected to, and neither do I. I don't devote that much time to poetry these days and most of that time is, I hope, devoted to other people's rather than my own. However, it presumably remains one of my main interests, probably ahead of other writing, music, pop music, The Times crossword (in which last Saturday NDJAMENA was the hardest answer to get I've yet seen), chess, horse racing or other sport.
Anne says, in her essay Living with the Animals, that,
Elizabeth Bishop thought of 'Roosters' as her war poem, though like her depression poem, 'A Miracle for Breakfast', it is hardly the kind of political writing we are used to today.
Presumably because it is so much more than a single-issue poem, as the best poetry needs to be.
If it only has one thing to say it is polemic rather than poetic and drags the idea of 'poetry' down to something less than it could be. I'm not saying such things are not poetry - anything can be if it wants to be- but the likes of Elizabeth and Anne are great because they know that any art worthy of our attention as art does more than one thing at a time.
As you can see, Anne's book is going down very well. There's nothing quite as satisfactory as being the converted that are being preached to.

The Masked Man and other stories

It doesn't seem that long since the government were questioning the wearing of the burka and yet by Friday, if and when I go into a shop, I will look like this, by law. I'm not making any political point by saying as much, just reflecting on how times can change.

I am lucky in having a sister who makes masks for the people that need them. She not only gave me three of different designs but delivered them, too, along with a haircut. I enjoy being related to hairdressers, mask-makers, cake-makers, pharmacists and living next door to a versatile handyman among any number of other useful contacts. And what do I in return for anybody. Well, proof-reading, occasionally words for pop songs and help with Literature Studies from O level to undergraduate essays and theses.

 Meanwhile, life without the day job increasingly convinces that it is some sort of paradise. I don't like to count on such things because, as a devout pessimist, I'm always sure something will go wrong. But, as reading and writing progress most satisfactorily, the chess habit has put me at an all-time high at Lichess, now on a rating of 1898 for 10-minute games which puts me, unrealistically it seems to me, in the top 12% of players there in that discipline. The next game, as it always is in football, is the big one, with more points taking me over the 1900 threshold and possibly ahead of the 1903 rating for 5-minute games, which would mean saving the better rating and playing back in the other time limit.

The poems, Situation and Starý židovský Hřbitov are my declared runners in a two-pronged campaign in local poetry competitions that close shortly. Not that I particularly approve of competitions when I wish that poetry at least could avoid being a competitive sport but I won't mind if I get a little cup to look after for a year or am given a few quid in cash. I won't mind losing at all, either.

Reading List

Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Catching up with things I should have read 40 years ago, or having a better look, Dickens is a better writer than I gave him credit for, never having spent much time on him, being more a George Eliot admirer. Halfway through this, it's a thronging gallery of cartoon characters with unlikely names and I'm not sure quite where it's going but with plenty more Dickens, Balzac, Zola and maybe even Tolstoy unread, it will be sometime before I can say that I have nothing to read.

Anne Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Bloodaxe)
It's not as if I have a shortage of Elizabeth Bishop books but Anne Stevenson is such a pleasure to read. There's nothing quite as good as a fine commentator writing about a consummate poet.
In the preface she says,
My object has been to suggest ways of reading Bishop uncategorically,

i.e. not as a 'woman poet', 'lesbian poet', 'feminist poet', American, Modernist or anything else. That is surely something Anne inherits from Elizabeth in the first place, or knew already, but it's a shame it even needs saying.
There is such a thing as the 'Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry'. How absurd. How limiting is it for poetry, or anything else, to be categorized in such a way. Like Mozart was 'Classical'. No, he was Mozart. The artists that need labels like those are those that aren't anything more than the labels they need.
I'm looking forward to Anne's account of EB. She knows what she's talking about.

James Joyce, Ulysses
Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book (Routledge)
I sat in front of Ulysses, dutifully rather than diligently, 40-odd years ago. At University, we were offered a lecture on Joyce if we wanted it and we (gratifyingly) very much did but were warned not to attempt to write about Ulysses, never mind Finnegans Wake, at under-graduate level so I did an essay on Dubliners. Prof. Sherry seemed to think it was called The Dubliners but I don't think it is.
Now, apparently with world enough and time, I'll have a better look and see how much further I can get with Joyce whose easier stuff is The. Best. Prose. Fiction. In the language.
Looking at the helpful guide provided by Harry Blamires many years ago, the shortcut seems to be just to read that but that, obviously, wouldn't be the point.

Retirement Diary

I was walking along Southsea seafront just now, as retired people are supposed to, with a young person on a motorised skateboard coming towards me. One disapproves of such behaviour, of course, but he had music on and, as he passed me, it turned out to be Get It On so he was immediately forgiven. 49 summers old and still the high water mark of British pop music. Along with I'm Still Waiting, it sounds like summer to me. Summer 1971, to be specific.
Further along I had an ice-cream with Eton Mess flavour on top of Mixed Berry Sundae. That was gorgeous, too, and my £3.50 single-handedly re-booted the economy.
One has to get out and about for exercise, you see, rather than lying on the settee reading books and listening to the test match. 3 hours in this heat is as much as I'm up to but I wanted to investigate a new book shop run by a poet in Albert Road. I'd like to have bought something or ordered something except I have every book I'm aware of needing but I wish Pigeon Books all the best and hope they do well.
My last purchase was 4 cans of Carlsberg Export. It's not really cold enough and I'm not sure 4 will be enough but I'll sleep well, and soon.

Better Late Than Never

I haven't so far made it explicit here, mainly because it's of no concern to anybody, but I have taken retirement from the day job. I feel a bit like a swindler, like some sort of crook, being in a position to take an income without doing anything for it but the small print seems to say that was implicit in the years that I attended while I did. It doesn't seem real, or even possible, but it had to happen some time and a poet that I met last year said, 'I don't know how much longer I've got'.
The days aren't too long. I'd been 'working from home' since the start of lockdown anyway and so the transition was gradual. I'm not short of things to do and even before the prospects of local lunchtime concerts kick up again, there are plenty of books that need catching up on either for the first time or re-reading. The progress I've made in recent months making my house look like a place that could be lived in by somebody organized, like Keir Starmer, rather than a manifestation of the inside of Boris's chaotic mind, has impressed me even if visitors still wouldn't call it 'tidy'.
Before adding to the pile of not-necessarily-necessary titles of available books, it is better to be filling some of the gaps that one missed on the way to a degree in Eng Lit 40 years ago.
With the moumental Proust put back on the shelf, I'm well into Bleak House. It was something like Week 4 of the Victorian Lit course that was allocated to Charles Dickens while one had four other courses to be looking at made one realize that BA (Hons) was a matter of doing enough rather than all of it which for me meant mainly poetry. But one can hardly be an Eng Lit graduate only having read Great Expectations at school, so now I'm filling in the bits that justify the 2:1 I fooled Lancaster into giving me.
Dickens is a better writer than I thought. I was always much more of a George Eliot admirer. But he is also a cartoonist. It's enjoyable, it's not hard work. I can see why people like him. You don't need me to tell you about Dickens.
One will never be short of something to do because literature is inexhaustible but I don't know where to go to fulfil John Peel's old maxim that he was more interested in the music he hadn't heard than that which he had. Are there really writers as yet unknown to, or unread by, me that I'll want to put ahead of my list of favourites. One's taste might change so that the 16 year old Roger McGough admirer feels more at home with Elizabeth Bishop by the time they're 60 but there must come a time when one no longer believes in the 'next big thing'.
I've sought advice from one who knows and a guide to Ulysses, that by Harry Blamires, is on its way to accompany my intrepid return to that once I've put Dickens back upstairs. I can't believe it's better than Dubliners or the Portrait but I need to give it every chance. Being happy enough wiith what Joyce I know, it's hard to imagine I have the scope to ever lie back and reflect that, yes, Finnegans Wake was the best book I ever read. 

Intrepid

Lockdown can't go on forever. It seems somehow regrettable despite the terrible things that have happened these last few months. I was good at it, I thought, but even I have been meeting people from beyond the concentrated archive of books, records and memorabilia that has grown up around me here over the last 22 years.
I hope it's not too soon. I'm not in the vanguard of those charging out to pubs, raves or gatherings in order to release pent-up energy or re-boot the economy. The chaos that any government led by Boris Johnson was always going to cause has only been multiplied by the Covid co-efficient but there is the spectre of bankruptcy lurking somewhere behind continued lockdown, or a second spike in the virus. It's a fine line. He's taking a chance on a 6/1 shot. He seems to be the sort of bloke that, despite incorrigible incompetence, sometimes gets lucky. Let's hope he does. It's already looking as if he might not be a candidate at the next General Election. Let's hope he's not. He's sat in the chair, swivelled round in it and got his photo on the wall. That's all he ever wanted. Perhaps he will go away of his own accord.

Among the many priceless artefacts found in my ongoing tidying process is this ticket to see Rod Clements in a street corner pub in Portsmouth. The author of the first pop single I ever bought, Meet Me on the Corner by Lindisfarne, it was at least like meeting John the Baptist if not Christ or God themselves.
Proust is back on the shelves, now augmented by several old envelopes filled with page references, and it's time for the next big job. No job will be quite as big. I brought down Ulysses and dug out my 40 year old notes on it but decided to save that for a bit later and this afternoon began doing what I ought to have found time for on the Victorian Literature course at University, some Dickens. Bleak House. It is only in later life one can begin to fill in some of the gaps one didn't find time for when doing a degree in Eng Lit, like Charles Dickens ( ! ).

Anne Stevenson - About Poems

Anne Stevenson, About Poems (Bloodaxe)

This is not a new book but is worth a slightly belated look. It is seven lectures or talks given in Newcastle, Durham and Ledbury before being brought together in this volume in 2017. Anne begins with a poem called How Poems Arrive that exemplifies much of what she goes on to say about the process of poetry, a brilliant poem the only problem with it being that it is a poem only about poetry whereas something like The Thought-Fox is also about the fox.
The recurring theme is how poems are sound, ahead of meaning - 'how poems are not about', and form and content somehow merge. She cites Elizabeth Bishop among others as an exemplar of how poems are best done. She is preaching to the converted when I read her saying so although I wouldn't sign up to any such manifesto and would prefer to stress that any poem can succeed on whatever terms it chooses. Or fail. Poets that write about poetry inevitably tend to make their way of doing it the prescribed way of doing it and tend to close off all areas of the endeavour that don't comply with theirs.
Anne's agenda, in as far as it can be called such, is very close to what I'd like to think is mine, though, and these pieces are as much of a pleasure to see expressed those things I'd like to say but are best left to those who are better qualified to say them, as in the interviews that Norman MacCaig gave elsewhere.
She is more of an admirer of Robert Frost than I am but one comes away more persuaded by someone who you recognize as wise counsel and I was grateful of her insights into Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens, which is a way into his poetry even if it is an early poem not typical of his later, more opaque style. She also explains how certain contemporary poetry, for her and others among us, lost its way,
To my old, bound-to-be-disapproving eyes it looks as if our youth culture, happy with its gunge-level clothes, punk music and junk food, has been pleased to spawn a kind of throwaway poetry that everyone is encouraged to enjoy (as at a poetry slam) but no one much cares to remember.

If, on the one hand, modernism took a high-church, difficult line, it is not to say that any counter-revolution should dispense with rigour completely.
American poets are the focus of much of her discussion, as well as Auden, both as paragon examples and those whose practice she doesn't always approve of. The final piece is a talk re-assessing her biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame, which is no less sympathetic to the role Ted Hughes played in her tragedy but shifts what blame can be allocated more towards the psychiatric treatments of the 1950's.
Anne was one of the first to publish commentary on Elizabeth Bishop's poems and although I have a fair collection of books on Ms. Bishop, I don't have hers. Writing as lucid and intelligent as hers is valuable and not to be missed so I'll soon be having a look at that and whatever else there is, including more of the poems that I don't have enough of.

Times Radio

The Times, quite modestly I thought, last week only made mention of their new digital-only radio station in the regular radio preview slot. I don't know if it was heralded elsewhere in a place where I wouldn't have seen it but I consider myself lucky to have found out and only wonder why they didn't make more effort to make sure I knew.
It seems fine, pitched halfway between the better bits of R4 and R5, which means the current affairs chat without the do-gooding, middle-class self-improving agenda of R4 that gets us nowhere and the football on R5 which is designed to last forever and doesn't intend to get anywhere. It does have Michael Portillo on it. I haven't heard Giles Coren yet. Ben McIntyre is good.
There are times when none of Rs 3, 4, 5, 4Extra or World Service are are providing quite the aural background that is acceptable to try to drift off to or is interesting enough to stay awake for.
I can't imagine why The Times thought they needed to do that, or why there isn't a phone-in about the crossword.
I wish I could have a radio station, not just a website. You simply wouldn't know whether to expect an hour of Northern Soul, a poetry reading, a Bach cantata, somebody talking about Mott the Hoople or Pliny the Elder, the moons of Jupiter or tomorrow's horse racing. As it is, this is all we have. But, when all else fails, it looks like Times Radio might help. I don't suspect it of being any more sinister than The Times itself.

Summarize Proust

I finished Proust on Thursday. It took 13 weeks.

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In A la Recherche du Temps Perdu Proust has his character, Marcel, reconstruct from memory the world of the aristocracy in Paris that he moved in from his fin de siecle childhood, through the early C20th, WW1 and into old age. It is a comedy of manners, an analysis of 'love', a document of its historical moment and an aesthetic masnifesto.
As a boy, Marcel is fascinated by Swann's infatuation with Odette, described in rapturous longuers of infatuation, that is wracked by jealousy and later echoed in his own affair with Albertine. The social world that Swann is a star of is an endless round of gatherings, both in Paris and the resort of Balbec, with the hosts and guests all very conscious of the significance of who is or isn't invited and how it reflects on their social standing.
Marcel is a great admirer of the actress, Berma, the novelist, Bergotte, and the music of the composer, Vinteuil. The novel progresses towards Marcel becoming a writer himself, the aesthetics he develops to do so and the book is the book he eventually writes.
The main political issue is that of Dreyfuss and the anti-semitism revealed by it in many of the nationalist aristocrats.
Marcel's dissatisfactions with life are addressed, if not solved, by making art from it. The web of lies, infidelities and anxieties he is witness to in life lead to a de-humanizing analysis of love, an unsatisfactory promiscuity but possible redemption through art.
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In the Monty Python sketch, contestants are given 15 seconds to 'Summarize Proust'. I don't think it's possible to recite the above in under 45 seconds or summarize it much more succinctly. Which is, of course, the joke. I could leave out Berma, Bergotte and Vinteuil and bring it nearer to 30 seconds but I've left out his other infatuations, like the Duchess de Guermantes, the unpalatable character of the Baron de Charlus and many other friends and society people.
But it surely is the greatest novel. I understand that Tolstoy is long-winded on account of him spending several pages ruminating on the action and that is also true of Proust, extrapolating abstract philosophies from his experience, often with use of extended metaphors. But it is highly readable in the brilliant Kilmartin translation and, having done it in a very respectable 13 weeks, will miss it. Given a period of reading a few shorter books that demand less of a 'programme' to make sure one keeps up the good work, I'll maybe go back and see about Ulysses, 40-odd years since first being intrepid enough to try.

The Immaculate Quiet

There is a noiselessness available sometimes that needs to be enjoyed.
I noticed it this morning again, within 50 pages of finishing Proust. On rare occasions, one stops and thinks, 'surely this is the paradise we were always promised'. Those occasions are various. I can't remember if I felt it at the Thom Gunn reading in Cambridge in 1979,  but maybe I should have. Having 4 winners out of 5 bets at Cheltenham a few years ago made me feel one step away from omnipotence. The horse that got beat was Might Bite that went on to win the Gold Cup. There was also a harpsichord recital in Handel's House to mark the 300th anniversary of the death of Buxtehude.
It's those sort of things that made me feel I was in the right place at the right time. But more often now it can be attributed to the quality of the silence and actually not trying to do two things at once, like listening to Stephen Kovacevich playing Beethoven Sonatas or the Fitzwilliams doing the Shostakovich Quartets while reading but just reading. It can depend on not having the neighbours' kids playing outside but they seem to be harmless enough.
It is worth having because it is somehow imaginably outside of time, beyond the world that includes Boris, Trump, plague and all the other insurmountable ills of the world. One can put the records back on, the lute music of Sylvain Weiss or the Harp Concerto by Krumpholz or anything like that, to look at the book of Times crosswords and maybe put a few more in.
Those of us who are not front-line workers don't deserve it. For the first time in history, bus drivers are recognized as more heroic than poets, pop singers or sportspersons. I feel guilty keeping myself in business by having a winner on the first day that jump racing came back. I feel guilty anyway but there is no point in me feeling bad when I've no other reason to. I'm not volunteering for misery if I can avoid it.
Once Proust is one of those enormous jobs one never thought one would achieve - and it was brilliant- is achieved, I will try to concentrate on something else. The immaculate quiet, when it is available, could be a great help.