More Gurney, Balzac, Hamnet et Al

I hope the review of Kate Kennedy's biography of Ivor Gurney, below, wasn't overly dismissive of the poet. It wasn't an easy read. Today I found time to listen to her R3 Sunday Feature, from 20/6, that benefitted from some music and Andrew Motion's sympathy and Ivor came out of it better. I'm never going to spearhead any movement to enhance his reputation beyond where it currently stands but some of the music persuades one of his talent more than some of the less elegant poetry does.

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With the chess rating back on the road to recovery after a disastrous run and the turf account now only showing half the profit for the year that it had been a couple of weeks ago, I took some comfort from a remarkable success in my game of 'guess the next word' in which regular readers might remember I try to anticipate the next word in a novel when turning a page. I think it is an indicator of how much one is involved in a book, or in tune with it, if one can anticipate the next word.

Turning from page 69 to 70 of the Penguin Classics paperback of Balzac's Ursule Mirouet, I was presented with,

To the left the wall is densely covered with creepers - virginia creeper and yellow....

 

So, whaddaya reckon. Place your bets. I'm no horticulturalist. It's as much of a horror to me when a crossword clue seems to want you to think of a plant as it is when a quiz expects you to think of a film. But I thought, 'jasmine', and got it right. I wouldn't have minded having a tenner on that but maybe all jasmine is yellow and it was obvious. But not all that is yellow is jasmine.

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A copy of Maggie O'Farrell's best-selling re-working of our favourite bit of Shakespeare biography came unwontedly into my possession last week. I had had no intention of reading it but gift horses are better thanked than dismissed. I began to give it a go and was a third of the way through and then left it in Wiltshire.

It can wait. Maybe I'll review it in August.

It is fiction based on characters that certainly did exist and thus no worse than the Bible but 'historical fiction' brings with it its own difficulties. It is real people put into unreal situations. Maggie distorts those late C16th Stratford people into characters they were highly unlikely to have been but it was looking like being a better novel than I imagined it and I can see why readers would like it. As a contribution to Shakespeare biography, though, it scores about minus 3 out of 10. Why it even needs to pretend to be about Shakespeare isn't clear although it does save the author the trouble of inventing their own characters. 

I did it myself a couple of weeks ago in a short story I amused myself with that won't see print but at least I had the good grace to make my story the very opposite, the negative print, of the life widely attributed to Shakespeare.  

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God only knows why anybody missed Glastonbury. Notwithstanding that its original counter-culture significance with Tyrannosauras Rex in 1970 has been commodified to make it look like a part of IKEA, with its product and resultant customers so bewilderingly normal, I can't see how any musical performance can be appreciated from a distance that even Ed Moses would have struggled to cover in less than a minute.

I'm halfway through Al Green's 1999 performance. I'm well aware of Aretha, Gladys, Otis, Sam Cooke and, just to show I'm not racist, Dusty and Rod but Al's records from the early 1970's made him the best singer. Except that Glastonbury somehow reduces every act to something similar and, some 25 years after the fact, he was still good but had reduced to certain mannerisms and had to replace some gorgeous tones with some new growling in places. 

Heritage pop might be all that's left, might have been even in 1999, but pop music exists in its own moment and nobody, not even those who first did it, can get it back.