Diary

It doesn't seem that long since horse racing wasn't possible because the ground was too hard but Fontwell's already heavy going plus a night of rain meant it was too soft yesterday. Like cricket, like ski-ing and other sports, I'm sure, it does require its proper conditions and climate change isn't helping. If I were more litigious I'd be suing for loss of earnings, not to mention for the time spent doing my homework on that meeting and potentially turning what looked like very ordinary sport into a pay day.

But never mind, Hereford was on Sky Racing and if my three winners were not all tied together in the same treble then at least a gutsy performance by Missed Tee, fighting back after the last to regain the lead, landed the proper bet and we are belatedly off to a start for 2023. It's only money, it doesn't matter but it is a participation sport in a vicarious way and the point of taking part is to gain satisfaction by winning. That's fine, you can only play with what opportunities present themselves. I can't go on strike in protest at the racing results but, then again, I have no reason to.

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Biographies of arts people can vary in detail, scholarship and the balance between the art and the life. Also in the balance between primary sources and the biographer filling in the blanks with their imagination as happens with Shakespeare, Vermeer, Chaucer and the like. With more recent figures, with more extant letters and material to hand, there can be more detail than the 'general reader' really needs. Jerrold Northrop Moore's Elgar won't be anything like 800 pages for me because it includes synopses of works and extracts from the scores illustrating leitmotifs and themes from Caractacus and such but, much as I like gazing at notes on staves and wondering what they sound like, I am illiterate at that and so can move on.  

The elements of such books that I read them for are the detailed structure of the C19th class system in which Elgar, not only coming from a family who were 'in trade' but was also an aspiring creative artist, was looked down upon by 'money'. He loses points in my view for being devoted to Wagner's music and playing golf but he gets plenty back for his dedication to his art and, not being an instant commercial success, subsidizing the publication and concerts of his work, if necessary, from money earned by giving lessons which he didn't seem to enjoy much. Sometimes you feel like doing that if you want to put your art 'out there'. Unlike horse racing, it's not about the money and it's a shame it has to be involved at all.

The line about Elgar that condenses him into the fewest words is,

So the Sursum Corda sounded for the first time an ensemble that would haunt the centre of Edward's maturest music - aspiration ennobled within darkening nostalgia.

Yes. I don't think you could get the Enigma Variations and the Cello Concerto any better than in those last five words. I've got a certain amount of time for Elgar but whether I've got enough to venture much further into his music than I do already with so many other competing claims, I'm not sure.

Bob Harris, standing in for Johnnie Walker on Sunday afternoon, outdid all expectations by playing Ann Peebles,

 

Wow. I didn't know that one. How completely there is she the female Al Green. And if Al was the greatest male pop singer ever, then why isn't Ann ahead of Gladys Knight, Dusty, Candi Station, Ronnie Spector and the vast field of tremendous candidates to be greatest female. Maybe she is and the Essential will be on its way soon to put alongside Brenda Holloway, The Marvelettes and the first Supremes album and I'll Come See About That. I understand CDs are very out of fashion now. I seem to be buying them up again as much as I ever did so I'll be well placed for the CD revival when they become retro chic.

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My efforts to re-ignite an enthusiasm for poetry continued with buying Scenes from Life on Earth by Kathryn Simmonds (Salt). Everything she's done before had plenty to admire in it and I was glad to find out about this recent title.

At first I thought, no, this isn't much more than local writing workshop stuff and,

 

             why do                 the words sometimes

have to be       spaced out like that, surely

   some poets thought it looked        arty

              in the 70's     or some time

    way back when         but what's the bloody point

 

I'm quite prepared to accept that my disenchantment with almost the very idea of poetry is my problem. I'm like one of those horses you back sometimes that has form in the book, must have a good chance but you can see before halfway the jockey isn't happy. Cajoling doesn't conjure enough of the necessary response and you know you're out of it before the second last. I'm not, as they say, 'completely in love with the game'.

But Kathryn and Salt have taken the trouble to produce this book and she's not down among the 'vanity' class of poets. I have kept looking at it and although it suffers from a 'sequence' ( ! ) of aphorisms, short poems that aren't haiku called The Death of Want, it provides more than adequate compensation in Yet Even Now which has music, makes the words add up to more than their constituent parts, justifies the use of lists, obviously speaks from experience but describes it imaginatively and thus 'ticks most of the boxes', if that could ever be a way of deciding if a poem is any good, which it isn't. But you know you've been in aa poem by the end of it and quite possibly read it again straightaway.

I don't know what would have prompted Ambition, apart from the common sense that it's best not to have much, but,

What little worlds revolve inside

our little worlds? Who are those people

we think we want to be?

and the book won't be filed away just yet. There might be more good things to find. Good poems worth spending some time with are still possible, then, and I'm happy to have found a few. It ain't over til it's over.