Valentina Seferinova and Catherine Lawlor

Valentina Seferinova and Catherine Lawlor, Portsmouth Cathedral, Sept 30th

Lunchtime Live! is underway again in Portsmouth which is some of the best news we've had for some time. A shrewd move to put the concert space up in the more intimate St. Thomas Chapel made for a warm, full acoustic which benefitted Valentina's piano and Catherine's violin.  It was encouraging to see such a good turnout for this event, too, which augurs well for the future but will mean arriving in plenty of time to ensure a good seat.

The programme was made up of pieces from the forthcoming disc, Myths and Legends, and provided some lesser known composers for those of us who enjoy such things. The American Romantic, Charles Wakefield Cadman, set us off with some aching, long lines in his Legend of the Canyon given smooth, unhurried treatment by Catherine. If Frank Bridge is better known, his Norse Legend is not, redolent of folk song perhaps and full of apparent regret rising to passion in the higher register. 

If Catherine is out front and seemingly the focus of most of our attention, Valentina is always contributing to the conversation eloquently behind her and they combine seamlessly and with great sympathy. The Delius Legende had some soaring violin with rippling piano generating considerable power before a delicate ending that came as some surprise.

The Belgian Joseph Jorgen's music hasn't been heard by my ears before and neither has his name. His Legende naive from Aquarelles, op. 59, no.1 had an autumnal feel as much of the programme thus far had. How much that was due to the music and how much was the collateral effect of summer having retreated is hard to say.

All the music thus far could almost have been written by the same composer, their dates not varying by much and the mood being sustained from one piece to the next. The Danish Otto Malling is from a generation or so earlier though and the finale, his Faust Suite, op. 55, extended into something bigger with four character portraits from the famous story.

Faust is restless but not as tormented as one might have expected. I wouldn't have recognized him from this but Mephistopheles was more demonic, giving Catherine the opportunity to do more than lyricism but she does both very convincingly. Siebel was lyrical and outgoing before the shadowy beginnings of Margarethe which reached an impressive crescendo with a big theme to finish a thoughtfully compiled set.

One asks for no more than such dedicated musicianship and the research Valentina and Catherine put into their esoteric interests. I had no idea what was going to be played beyond the billing that it was music from the new disc. I'm perfectly happy with Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart and the household names that line the shelves here but I'm also always glad of new names. I can't have been the only one who was grateful for their visit. The autumn is set fair with a number of choice Tuesdays in Chichester booked and plenty more Thursdays in Portsmouth to look forward to. This is what it was supposed to be like.

More Pictures of Shelves of Books

 Furthermore to the below, some 1970's issues of The Listener were among the discoveries, including the 50th anniversary edition of 1979 including some pluperfect looks further back through their archives then. It was much-loved and is still much-missed, not the least for the day the fourth form version of me had a letter published in it.

Earlier my magazine reading had been Rover & Wizard of which no copies survive so I might write my own. Neither are there any of my subscription to a cheap few sheets of hack guesswork called the Weekend Racing Blue. But there are a number of Beano's from the days when it was thought to be essential reading for students into their twenties rather than the kids it was ostensibly aimed at.

By far the worst find was the college magazine edited by me from university in 1979. It's a horror. However unsatisfactory one finds oneself now, I can't be as bad as I was then and the excuse for being quite that shambolic was that it was the punk fashion isn't good enough. The self one meets on the way back in these circumstances is not always someone you want to be reminded of.

--

But the next phase of the gradual, chronic, ongoing 'sorting out' was the decision to put the novels, fiction and associated books in better order. It was a more enjoyable and less arduous project than it might have been. If the poetry books number over 500, then fiction is about 400.

Complete enough collections of George Eliot, Murakami, Graham Swift and Julian Barnes are elsewhere. Taking up honourable amounts of shelf space on these shelves are the old Solzhenitsyn obesession, Hardy, Ian McEwan, the more recent Balzacs, Patrick Hamilton, Joyce, Camus, Salinger and Banana Yoshimoto. Also mentioned in despatches are Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, William Trevor, Alexei Sayle ( ? ) and Alan Bennett. Whereas  I have a fairly solid idea of a favourite poets list, I'm less sure about prose fiction once Dubliners is established as far and away the model of excellence.

The catalogue of what should be there is in my head. Looking at the new arrangement and adjusting it here and there, I wondered where Mansfield Park was, not that I was that
bothered, or The Counterfeiters in English but they were soon found and put in their rightful places. But where were the Hardy stories. Oh, no, that's right. I gave them to Pauline when I bought the Collected. I still think there are one or two Hermann Hesse's missing from circa 1977. It's not that I want them this minute but there always seem to be a couple of items that evade one's finding and they suddenly become the ones you most want to look at, or hear, again.

But, it was a highly satisfactory exercise, the feeling of having however vaguely put one's lands in order and one stands there for a few moments to survey it well aware that, no, the profession of librarianship didn't miss much when it missed out on me. The first half goes from Ackroyd and, I'd just like to say, Akutagawa, to Kundera and the second from Doris Lessing to Zola.

While I'm ever reluctant to dispose of books and rarely pass them elsewhere, it is surely an offence to destroy them. In all conscience, I did the best I could with On Hunting by Roger Scruton. I thought I'd safely disposed of it as humanely as possible years ago but there it still was. I didn't buy it. It came in a box of others I was once donated.

I put it in the re-cycling, un-read.

--

Lost Illusions, to the right of the section of black books on the top row of the first picture, was one of Balzac's best despite its later stages being predominantly about legal and finanicial transactions, failure or skullduggery. But Lucien is diverted from the suicide he seemed destined for, the precocious talent having been found unable to join itself to the discipline required to be successful in the hard-nosed world. And so the last line refers us forward to another book, which is A Harlot High and Low, and so that comes next while in the meantime I do a crash course in the history of Philosophy by means of a series of booklets that came with The Independent many years ago. Thomas Hobbes, for one, was as good as he was said to be and why he was probably made the main thing on our first year Phiolosophy course. I should have read Leviathan then but The Clash were on and I was editing a terrible poetry magazine and then making a bad job of the college magazine.

There's no point regretting all that now. I'm making up for lost time and will eventually make myself worthy of the degree they somehow were still gracious enough to award me.

--

I'm sure the new disc of Arcangelo's recording of the Opus 2 Buxtehude Trio Sonatas will be ordered soon and if one gets that then one can hardly not have the Opus 1 disc as well. How many recordings of such music should one have when one realizes there are String Quartets by Mozart, Haydn and Schubert unrepresented on the shelves. Well, we'll see. Hooper winning the Novice Chase at Newton Abbot in a few minutes' time should decide me.

Personal Archaeology

Home improvements are a rare thing at this house and not what anybody expects to read about here but needs must after 23 years. I can't make UPVC interesting but the upheval had the knock-on effect of causing further sorting out, like the emptying of a drawer of old papers upstairs. Some of it I knew about but some discoveries from the 1970's re-write the detail of my own history for me.

There in the Gloucester Citizen on a Friday night in April are the Sunday League teams and tables. FC Spartak are bottom, I knew that, but I didn't realize there was another division below. Further thought has made me realize that after relegation, we were bottom of the lowest division then before finishing top half in 76/77 and being promoted in the necessary shiftabout.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although I have very clear memories of the 69/70 season with Dinglewell Junior School, I hadn't realized out 6-2 defeat at Moat in the first round of the cup had been recorded for posterity in quite such depth. Moat was always a tough gig and they knew what it was about. We were much better in 70/71.

--

 

 

 

My first review was published in 1977, of the school Choral Society's Messiah. As one can see, not much has changed in the last 44 years about the way I concatenate a string of vaguely fine-sounding phrases to give the impression of knowing about something. 

--

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, in 1979, I sent in this hoax of a letter to the Sunday Express, making it as inane as the sort of letter they used to publish and presumably still do. They printed it alright.   

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

Illusions Perdues, etc

It comes as no surprise when it all falls apart for Lucien in Lost Illusions. One had a feeling that was what was coming and it happens almost routinely. With a title like that and some knowledge of other Balzac, it's like watching the inevitable unfold, which is not to say it's not a great novel. 

What one wasn't in a position to know was that he might not have been quite the great poet that he, and we, were led to believe. Some examples of his sonnets are provided but, at a distance of 180 years and put through the filter of translation, how are we supposed to know they were bad. Nearly all poems of that period look bad by now to us post-modern ironists or ludic conspirators against sentiment and Romanticism and so we make allowances for that but one can't tell how much leeway to give them.

An obvious problem for a novelist writing about a genius poet and providing examples of their work would be having to write genius poems and they could only do that if they were a genius poet themselves. James Joyce gives us some lines by Stephen in the Portrait but surely a similar thing is going on there.

--

There has been plenty to admire to be found in Search Party, the collected William Matthews and he has been worth the time spent with him. It comes with many of the doubts one could have about 'free verse' but my main concerns are with his continuing flagging up that he is writing a poem and a recurring tendency to think it's good enough to tell us that he 'loves' this or 'hates' that. We ought to be trusted to be able to intuit such things, if they mattered. And I'm not quite as devoted to jazz as he is but I don't blame him for navigating by his own reference points.

What his poems would benefit from is a kind of distillation process that would burn off his habits and leave something sparer, possibly more 'objective'. Perhaps it's a shame he didn't have Ezra Pound to edit him but one can take a lot from him before finding him a suitable place on the shelves and quite possibly never return to him again. He won't be the only one like that.

--

Living by numbers, or 'managing by spreadsheet' as I used to call it in work, is how governments work rather than how we should run our lives. I understand that only Tibet (is it) gauges their performance by a happiness index rather than the dreary, hard facts of economic indicators. Other people, of course, measure their satisfaction entirely by means of sports results which seems vicarious to me.

But if numbers are the only way we have of understanding how we feel, then, that's fine. The increasing number of numbers by which my health is monitored as the years go by are all 'fine', I'm told. And my choice of indices, the chess ratings and the position of the turf account, are okay, too.

So, the Autumn with its programme of local concerts and jump racing is set fair and all I have to do is enjoy it. There will always be the residual doubt that I ought to be achieving more. Good Lord, the hangover from the old Grammar School indoctrination never leaves you. One thinks one should be doing something, like maybe writing the book one will be remembered by,  the 'legacy'. But what good would that do me. How much does it mean to Mozart that we love him so much now.

The Collected Poems are in a pdf. I've even gathered some prose pieces into a folder for what they're worth. The concert and theatre programmes have been sorted. I've put some old cricket records together. The bike riding was recorded in fine detail. Sadly, not much of the football career was written down but a couple of newspaper reports of goals scored in the lower divisions of the Gloucester Sunday League are somewhere.

I'm not thinking of dying yet - I'm ostensibly in good condition - but I like to think I'm putting my lands in order. And thus resonating back through Eliot, Dante and the book of Isaiah. I'd like to think I haven't lost faith in poetry because on Private Passions this week Francesca Stavrakopoulou, author of God, an anatomy was the latest to say that art is what we have instead of God. So, God (as it were) help us if we lose faith in that.

You could tune into Something Understood or Thought for the Day if you had a taste for inconsequential, meandering contemplation that leaves you none the wiser. I'm glad you came here instead.

Balzac on Poetry

 It's always amusing to see the way poetry's role is portrayed beyond the confines of the poetry world in fiction. Not so much the sort of thing you'd get in Hermann Hesse where the poet would be a precious thing prized for their profound outpourings but the sardonic view of it as an outsider activity of neither use nor ornament to anybody much.

Balzac's Lost Illusions is one of his more memorable efforts with Lucien, the young provincial poet trying to make his way in Paris. Published from 1837-1843, it was still possible for Tennyson, Byron or Victor Hugo to make a living from poetry but they had other income streams, too. However, Lucien is told by one publisher,

'You have the stuff of three poets in you; but, if you reckon to live on what your poetry brings in, you have time to die half a dozen deaths before you make your name.'

Publishers are wary of accepting 'nightingales', books that sit on high shelves in dark places in bookshops and are never seen. One berates his assistant for taking a poetry manuscript to read and tells him the first question you always ask is whether it's poetry or fiction and if it's poetry, you simply don't.

While many poets bemoan such a situation, which hasn't diminished at all in the last 180 years, and look for strategies to promote poetry and improve its marginal status in the highly competitive book market, I embrace the underdog, maverick, amateur standing. That's presumably why I support Fulham, nominate Dietrich Buxtehude as a favourite composer and have never ever voted for any party, or referendum campaign that won a national vote. I really thought I could end that losing run a few years ago and my confidence cost me a respectable wad of cash but, like Andrew Marvell, I've managed to spend my whole life in opposition.

My devotion to the avoidance of any sort of commercial success with poetry has extended to hardly writing any. 11 poems in the recent Collected pdf represent the last three and a half years, none of which went to magazines. The two I supported minor competitions with came out with an honourable local win and some sort of runner-up consolation but I hope that does constitute trying to make a name for myself at this late stage of my desultory career.

--

I was taken by surprise by a book delivery today. If the time lapse between ordering something and its arrival is more than a week or so, I've forgotten all about it.

Oh, what a lovely surprise. I wonder what it is.

This time it was Search Party, Collected Poems by William Matthews (1942-1997), prompted by the good impression made by John Burnside's mentions of him in The Music of Time. Firstly, it makes the same point as my own Collected by reducing the oeuvre to more like a Selected, much more so in this case which collects 165 out of more than 800 available.

I couldn't quite remember what it was about Matthews that made me think I needed this and so could treat a first look at it as an enquiry into why it had been recommended. Recommended by me, in effect, more than John Burnside. In such circumstances, the first poem (usually the earliest) is where to start because that must be where the editor thought the poet became the poet they subsequently became, after the juvenilia and any abortive efforts that had set off in the wrong direction. And especially with Matthews because the first poem here gives its title to the book. It has all the appearance of a statement of intent, maybe a little bit too conscious of its self-proclaimed status as 'poetry',

I'm just a journalist

who can't believe in objectivity.

He might yet provide examples, maybe both good and bad, when the time comes to finalize some thoughts on 'free verse', which is the subject I've put forward and thus will present my annual little essay on for this year's Portsmouth Poetry Society programme. Get there if you can on 2/2/22.

I've already found things to like, like,

To say "one" is in love

means to me, hero of all these poems, 

in love as in a well

I am the water of.

('Old Girlfriends', which probably means his 'ex' girlfriends rather than that he had a penchant for older women)

That mixes what looks like some linguistic ingenuity with more self-regard than was necessary. Would it have been any the worse without  ', hero of all these poems,'. That might become the problem I have with Matthews but it's early days with him and it could go either way. He's no Elizabeth Bishop, it's possible he's a bit Frank O'Hara without being so dispirtingly and deliberately throwaway, like the last line of the threnody to Coleman Hawkins,

I hate it that he's dead.

That can't be ironic so I'd like to know why that shouldn't be on the short list of worst lines of poetry I've ever read.

The jury's out.

Ben Socrates in Chichester

 Ben Socrates, piano, Chichester Cathedral, Sept 14

There were a few concerts in Chichester in the summer but today was the day we had been waiting for with the return of regular Tuesday lunchtimes after 18 months of hiatus. If many of the audience are regulars, so is Ben who was making his fifth appearance there.

His programme was made up of six composers form six different countries from the C18th to the C20th, some of them not always sounding as one might think of them and sometimes reminding one of somebody else. 

Beginning subdued with Chopin's Ballade no. 3, the gift for melody was as readily apparent as usual in the pre-Rachmanninov style, the left hand never as ominous as it could have been and the music emerged from an unobtrusive opening to achieve brightness. Ben can do the firmness of a forte when required but this piece, and the overall effect of the set, was most memorable for his lightness of touch.

Even lighter, and more expressionist than inpressionist, was Oiseaux Tristes from Ravel's Miroirs. This sort of Ravel is almost too 'poetic' for me, being the sort of poet who doesn't like poetry that tries too hard. Spare, though, and atmospheric, the piece cast a spell with the crossed-hands repetition of a E flat (I think he said) on which note it finished. I was glad to have a seat with a view of the keyboard which always adds some extra interest.

While I've seen poets read from a tablet or other such gadget before, I've never seen a musician use one until today and from the Ravel onwards, that's how it was. It's not the least bit relevant to the performance but was a minor landmark in my concert-going history. The musical kindle must be able to hold any amount of music and save yards of shelf space once taken up by sheet music so it's not for me to say there's something about paper I like and something about technology I don't quite trust.

Domenico Scarlatti can't be accused of sounding like Mozart because he came first and if anything it must be Mozart who sounded like the Sonata in E major, K. 380. I remember in the 1970's Radio 3 often filling in a few minutes between programmes with these brilliantly inventive  miniatures. I think there are lots of them and today made me aware of the gap in my record collection caused by not having them so there's a shopping session to look forward to. It was very pretty what the right hand did. It's possible to think that Ben included a baroque piece among later work for variety but it's always laudible, and convincing, when a pianist who plays mostly 'Romantic' repertoire extends into the likes of Bach. This was possibly my favourite piece in a programme that made it hard to pick an outright 'best', becoming more compelling as either Ben warmed up, the music got deeper or, more likely, I was drawn in.

Schubert's Impromptu no.2, D. 899 went from sweetness through danger to a diabolical dance and back to sweetness as Ben said it would. It drove unrestingly from its lively start all the way to its end, the driving passing into the lower register in the middle before going back to the higher end. It was probably the piece that showed off Ben's talent to best advantage, the darkness not being that dark and the light that illuminates all of his playing always in evidence. It is Schubert's hard luck that, however great he is, he's never quite Beethoven but the question remains if he would have been the same Schubert without that influence. 

In another echo of somebody else, the Liszt Consolation no.3, in memory of Chopin, sounded to me to have traces of the Beethoven Moonlight Sonata in it. So much so that that once I thought so, more references showed up. There's nothing wrong with that. All art depends on the art that went before it and if not, well maybe it ought to. More likely, though, in the circumstances, is Ben's suggestion afterwards that it reminds him of a particular Chopin Ballade. But it's more gorgeous and restrained than one often gets from Liszt.

Ben's own favourite from his personal selection presented here was the first movement of the Prokofiev Sonata no.9, Op. 103, which took us further than the Ravel into the C20th and audible C20th doubt. Mostly subdued and thoughtful, we found ourselves taken elsewhere from the relative certainty of the earlier work and then left, rather than abandoned, there. Things have broken down further and our uncertainty has increased since the passing of Prokofiev but that was a fitting place to finish.

The hush of respectful listening was partly due to the reduced audience numbers with spacing and sensible precautions still wisely being observed but it was also due, I'm sure, to simply being glad to be back and nobody would have gone away anything but the gladder for it.

With Wincanton races lined up for October and a fine selection of Chichester Tuesday lunchtimes lined up, these days might finally being taking the shape imagined for them. As ever, thanks very much to Chichester and the artists involved for being there.

Diary

Back to Balzac, then, and Lost Illusions. My memory being what it is these days, all the Balzacs I've read merge into one generic story of money, usually lost, social hierarchies and eventual ruin. They would hardly be stories otherwise. You might think that if you've read one you've read all 90-odd of them but he's a reliable source of good reading and never less than enjoyable, making Proust look like a minimalist in comparison.

What one forgets until getting back to him is that the Comedie Humaine is funny as well as usually tragic and it is his observation of character that often makes him so readable,

This noble gentleman [Monsieur de Bargeton] had a small mind comfortably poised between an inoffensive vanity which has some glimmer of comprehension and an arrogant stupidity which refuses either to give or take.

And poetry is always fertile material for humour, with Lucien fancying himself as a young talent. We'll have to wait and see how his career develops. Meanwhile,

'I hope Nais won't often give us poetry recitals in the evening', said Francis. 'When I listen to reading after dinner, the attention I have to pay to it upsets my indigestion'.

I've arrived at page 100 out of 671 in no time. I'm not sure how much longer it will take in the temporary domestic upheval. After all this time I've submitted to the bourgeois horrors of some home improvements, not that it doesn't take improving. The house very much has the look about it of being owned by one whose mind is on other things. And so I'm writing this from the unfamilar surroundings of the kitchen. That has its advantages, one of which is being nearer to the fridge.

A bigger and better unforeseen bonus, though, came with a very slight delay to the delivery of the materials which has freed up tomorrow and, luckily, tickets are still available for the return of Chichester lunchtime concerts. So, come back soon for that long-anticipated resumption of the old normal and some thoughts on the recital by Ben Socrates.

--

I was even more taken aback by a recent quote from Donald Trump that Joe Biden had 'looked a fool' than I had been when Boris dismissed his rivals' bids for the Conservative Party leadership as 'vanity projects'. Good Grief. Has any sort of self-awareness ever occured to these strangest of creatures. Apparently not. Trump has never looked anything other than the morbid exaggeration of what a fool is and all Biden was doing was following through on Trump's initiative.

As previously, even I have in time tired of even noticing the Johnsonian penchant for vanity and chaos and, given the number of broken promises, ad hoc policy and outright subterfuge that constitutes his very successful political acumen, he was statistically bound to say something right eventually, such as the pandemic not having been in the manifesto. We are naive if we think manifesto promises will be kept and by now we must be wilfully in denial if we ever give any credence to anything he ever says.

However, having blundered his way through what might have been the worst (with still numbers in the hundreds dying every day of the virus he didn't want to engage with as a threat which very soon then nearly killed him), he is now reportedly seeing the same sort of mirages that Thatcher and Blair did, of three terms, a decade and being majorly significant with a legacy. And, with the electoral system such as it is, the opposition not amounting to much and enough ongoing gullibility in the electorate that can't see him for the rudderless navigator that he is, it is looking more ominous that it was when Dominic, having put him in place, immediately started to try to remove him.

As Dominic said, a system that offers a binary choice between Johnson and Corbyn is a broken one.

Given the uber-cool skill, clarity of vision and tactical nous displayed by a Romanian-Chinese-Canadian 18 year old girl from Bromley in America on Sunday night, it should surely be her. Emma Raducanu looks for all the world like someone who'd get at least a 98% approval rating and be good at whatever she put her mind to so she should be Prime Minister. Sadly, the millions she can earn from a couple of weeks work by very expertly knocking a ball back over a net make it not worth her while but so far she is one of the precious very few whose only flaw is to be ostensibly flawless.

I haven't watched much tennis since the school holidays when Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert were on but I can appreciate how good that was and Channel4 were rewarded with 9 million viewers. I had pencilled in Mark Cavendish as my Sports Personality of the Year but now odds of 1/10 make Emma look like the soundest investment of all the collateral you can raise, beg, steal or borrow that the financial pages could advise.

If money is what you like. Indian cricketers certainly do. Covid came in very useful as a flimsy reason to pull out of the fifth test match so that, none of the players having tested positive before a proper match, they still decided not to play in case it endangered their chances of cashing in on some meaningless baseball hybrid back on the sub continent. It was a dark day for cricket, it seemed to those of us brought up thinking that something else was more important. But things move on, all things must pass, and one lives long enough to see the world as you were told it was become obsolete.

The irony for me is that, in the low grade of cricket I played, I was a T20 all-rounder, slogging anything I could and learning to become an economical bowler.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves is one of Oscar's.

I was complicit. In the same way that I buy lots of books but hardly ever buy them from bookshops and then wonder why there are so few bookshops, largely disregarded on some provincial sports ground in the south of England 20-30 years ago, I was hinting at a future for cricket and then didn't reckon much to it when it arrived.

Sorry.  

A Book a Day

 One can hardly complain that Virgil doesn't warn us,

 

Arma virumque cano

 

Of arms and of a man, I sing. 

While the exile, the ill-fated love in Carthage and the journeyings were fine, The Aeneid does become a succession of battles after that. Something there is in men that loves a war. I personally don't and very much prefer the sort of film, often French, in which characters gaze out of windows and contemplate their amour fou to those that are predicated on car chases, shooting and fighting. 

The Aeneid, and The Iliad for that matter, suddenly make me think of Science Fiction with its staple diet of continuing war between ludicrous, all powerful figures and the litany of savagery, blood-letting and carnage they inflict on each other. You may say I know little about Science Fiction if I think that and you'd be right but that's what it looks like to me. It doesn't matter that much of it takes places in galaxies millions of light years away, possibly millions of millenia into the future between monsters half-human and half-dinosaur that can obliterate their enemies with laser beams shot from their eyes. Those are cosmetic effects to appeal to the sort of retarded teenage boys that are the target market. There is nothing imaginative, futuristic or exotic about it. How can there be. It has been made up from within the limits of human imagining and so is really just another saga about conflict, machismo and destruction with 'destiny' as its theme. Not much has changed in this blueprint for gratuitous excitement. I don't take issue with Virgil as a poet but hope to find his talents put to more peaceful use in his other poems rather than, in the end, tiring of pages and pages of lines like,

And then Anfraxius, mad with rage, raised his mighty axe and cleaved in half the head of brave Arbiducius and the blood and gore spread on the verdant battleground and stained the ever-flowing river. 

Virgil didn't finish writing The Aeneid and so, not all that reluctantly, I decided not to finish reading it. I can save Books X - XII for another time if need be but I flicked to the end to see how far he got.

--

Instead, I moved to the diminishing pile of store books and went back to John Burnside, with The Devil's Footprints. If not quite literally 'in one sitting', I didn't do much else between late morning and tea-time today apart from read it. It is compelling if not in the end an entirely satisfactory novel but one is grateful for such a book that keeps one so avidly tuned into to it with no thought of doing anything else. It was raining for much of the time anyway. Not for the first time, I had written a poem about what happened with regards to this absorption in fiction - in The Perfect Book. The real world can be elsewhere doing whatever it likes as a day passes unnoticed while wrapped in the spell of someone else's words.

I'm not even recommending The Devil's Footprints as John's beest work but it had plenty of highly memorable, acutely well-documented 'apercus' and it finds itself on that select list of books read in a day that the likes of Perfume, In Search of J.D. Salinger, possibly Catcher in the Rye and some Julian Barnes and Mothering Sunday already inhabit. When I re-read Middlemarch in a day I'll let you know.

--

My own ongoing malaise is not 'writer's block', it is nore realistically knowing that it's not worth writing something that will turn out not to have been worth being written. By now, one knows that to begin any project that requires more investment than a poem, one needs to be sure it's going to be worth the collateral one puts up. All kinds of vague ideas present themselves, not least when reading something good but one soon realizes one has done that before or it simply won't work. My latest mad idea was a novel based on Jackie magazine, full of 1970's teenage anxieties, Donny Osmond and disappointing exam results but irony is best done so gently that much of it isn't even noticed. I'm not sure I could do that. 

It seems like a disapponting retirn on John Burnside's effort that I read that book in about 5 hours when it quite possibly took him a year or maybe more to write. Great value, and quality, entertainment for me and many others but then I have the nerve to say it might not have been that good. And how would Virgil be feeling if he knew his action-packed blockbuster had been laid aside. It's easy to see why one would think twice about setting out on any new, big writing project when reading good books is more satisfactory than writing bad ones.   

The Reading Diary

For all the world it seems like this place has become a reading diary. There's worse things to be and I keep finding things I want to say and even I eventually tired of finding fault with the Prime Minister. Sisyphus himself would have had no complaint with his lot if he'd ben offered that job as an alternative.

It's not in all such places, though, that one would find the autobiography of David Essex followed by The Aeneid. There is variety to be had as well as idiosyncracy.

I know I didn't spend much time with Virgil in first year Classical Studies in 1978/79 but now it seems I didn't even look at it. I'm well aware I went through university without doing any more than necessary but that first year was particularly undemanding. Only now am I filling in some of the bits I missed out of what might have been called 'an education' but it is mostly very enjoyable and makes use of the library upstairs rather than making the postlady deliver more packages. It might also be thought that 'education, such as it was, was wasted on 18 year olds anyway and many of these books are better appreciated later.

It's not possible to enjoy Virgil as a poet in any meaningful way at this distance, not in the same way that we might connect with a contemporary poet in our own language, but I'm tempted to accept all the great claims made forr him by W.F. Jackson Knight in the introduction to my 1977 Penguin Classic (95p). One is not accustomed to quite so more war, heroism and divine intervention in downbeat suburban meditations these days but the glow of whatever Virgil's poetry was like is still evident through the veils of this translation and moe often than one thought was likely one is struck by some metaphor or verbal invention.,

he was like a man who, as he puts his weight to the ground, finds that he has trodden on a snake lying unseen amid wild branches, and recoils as it angily raises the swelling metal-blue of its neck.

Snakes and routine human barbarism are more familar in this poetry than we expect to find in the dailiness of our lives in provincial England now but poetry wouldn't be poetry if it didn't do hyperbole and the agonies of Dido as Aeneas leaves her in Carthage under the direction of even greater imperatives than mere love are as heartbreaking as you'd want them to be.

I hadn't known what to expect or how far I'd stick with The Aeneid but it's been a great pleasure so far and is inlikely to let me down now. I would have thought the Eclogues and Georgics will be on their way here in due course. Maybe The Iliad might be worth another go after the desultory efforts I made with it all those years ago but I suspect The Odyssey is the preferred option.

Poor old Balzac, whose Lost Illusions, has been waiting up there on the top shelf for a few months now but he's had a fair go in the past. There is another John Burnside up there with it. One is tempted by the new Bob Mortimer memoir but I don't want to be the victim of the blatant advertising of the interview with Caitlin Moran last week. And then I see, looking beyond the duteous acquisitions of more Listener-style crossword clues from Paul Muldoon in the Autumn, there is an Oxford novel due from Daisy Dunn next year, which is bound to be enormous fun.

At the end of the month, a fine-looking programme of Autumn concerts in Chichester and Portsmouth cathedrals might finally establish the rhythm of what retirement was imagined to be and so I'll go back to stretching my limited resources of music reviewing vocabulary to beyond breaking point in the effort to express how completely great it is when the whole point of one's life is to get up and make one's way to such an event and then come back and make some sense out of the notes one's made. Maybe I'd be better off just listening but, as with reading books or what Socrates said about the unconsidered life being not worth living, I wouldn't see the point of doing any such thing without having to think of what to say about it.

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I didn't send The Times crossword in this week. While I'm not ashamed of using my OED, an internet word finder or even, at a push, Dan Word, I'm not going to try to get the book token prize when ACOEMETI was one of the answers. I would never have got that and, if they take the trouble, they might take the hint that the lack of an e-mail from me last week was a protest against that being too hard. 

 

Gently does it

This must be the gentlest album I've ever heard. The Castle of Fair Welcome by Gothic Voices all those years ago was calm but this is more so. It was bought for the four minutes and a bit of an arrangement of Josquin's Deploration, the gorgeous lament on the death of Ockeghem, for two voices and vihuelas, which makes for a slightly different impression but doesn't take any undue liberties.

The rest of the album is in much the same mood with counter-tenor, John Potter and soprano Anna Maria Friman augmented by vihuelas and viol. It might pass you by as harmless background music for relaxation purposes if not given full attention.

ECM are known for their often contemporary output of minimalist music but this is minimal in a different way. It's great to find something so apparently unobtrusive and yet not undemanding. It demands listening to.

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John Burnside's The Music of Time found its way to a coherent conclusion that brought all John's thinking about poetry to a convincing denouement. Quite honestly, you can say almost anything you like about poetry and then back it up with your evidence and, as in school work, it will be the quality of your argument that counts more than the truism you try to justify. Although he seems to concede that 'poetry makes nothing happen', John brings immense knowledge and wide reading to lots of poems that probably don't and then, idealistically, one might think, argues for a 'world culture' of a liberal, woke kind that may or may not seem achieveable in English or Creative Writing Departments across the world but doesn't seem to be having much impact on the tyrannies that are more intent on achieving one sort of Armageddon or another.

But, with deeply thought-out reasons in favour of poetry in translation, a thorough-going examination of the pitfalls of marriage and always aware of the 'dailiness' of life in poetry, a phrase from Randell Jarrell, among many other wise chapters, one would expect no less of John Burnside and more of his books will be summoned to these premises after I made inroads into what remains of the pile I had waiting.