An Evening with Rosemary Tonks

 An Evening with Rosemary Tonks, The Queen's Head, Soho, Feb 26

One of the benefits of doing this website over the years has been the number of people I've heard from through it regarding various content. And no theme has generated more correpondance than Rosemary Tonks. It was a special treat to upgrade e-mail exchanges to meeting in person with Kevin Harrison and Rafael Cruz who organized their Evening with Rosemary Tonks for a choice audience of 40 fellow interested parties.

Rafael was a charming and indefatigable anchor providing a biographical and critical commentary with Kevin and Helena Medina reading selected poems in amongst it. In the second half there was a song from Gabriel Moreno, a recording of Rosemary herself as well as the poem given vintage 1960's treatment in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a translation by Rafael into Spanish, a relevant poem from Kathryn Gray and a discussion.

Rafael and Kevin's script included the suggestion that Rosemary's leavetaking of her literary life is foreshadowed in a poem like Farewell to Kurdistan which is a more specific variation on the idea that all her work exudes a deep dissatisfaction into which we can interpolate the reasons for her subsequent abdication. 

The event was privileged to have mature versions of the bridesmaids and page boy from Rosemary's wedding photograph who brought authentic reportage of having been related to and known the poet who disappeared so totally from the literary world but not from their lives and top marks for them for protecting Rosemary's privacy when the search was on to establish her whereabouts.

Certainly that was of more value that one contribution from the audience. I hadn't for a moment seen the invitation to contribute my thoughts coming which might have been a good thing. I hope I got away with it. On behalf of the band I hope I passed the audition. If I provided little else of much significance it was at least an opportunity to express deep gratitude for the event. Rafael, Kevin and friends put on an erudite, well-researched and engaging show. Come December I will be weighing up the claims of candidates for my Event of the Year. The shortlist for that largely unsought-after accolade is now underway.  

 

C20th

 My winter 'project', which is what it became, is tied up as a pdf now, such as it is. And, as long as you're prepared to accept that it is unedited - which means likely to have unworthy things in it and be simply not good enough- you can have it for the asking.

It's 30 thousand words including a lot of quotes and the footnotes and so it isn't really the 'book' it set out to be. It will always be there to go back to but it feels as if it's reached a first base camp at which it can rest. I don't think I'm cut out to produce a proper book. You know, it ain't easy. You don't know how hard it can be. But, having found myself sending it to one person on the off chance they might find it of interest or, heaven knows, useful then 'come one, come all'.

In one way writing such a thing for oneself is okay, like riding a bike a long way entirely for one's own satisfaction once was, but there was the outside chance that one or two others might be interested in how far I could go on a bike in the 1990's and so maybe writing shouldn't be kept completely private if anybody else wants to have a look. So whistle and it will come to you.

Clickety Click

 Click, click, clickety click goes the spend, spend, spend button. It could be worse because books are the best value entertainment there is. All one has to do is read fast enough to keep up with the rate of buying them but one thing you won't be reading here for a while is that intermittent leitmotif that says I'm wondering what to read next. It comes at a time when I've not only booked a holiday ( !!! ) but also bought a new fridge I might not have needed just yet. The power point, it would now appear, is what needs replacing, not the old fridge but in the spirit of Harry Worth and Terry and June one can see the funny side of such a misunderstanding.

The Thom Gunn biography due in summer was already on order but now one finds his old mate, Kleinzahler, has poems due in the autumn. Advance orders for those are laid down like bottles of Pauillac. It isn't strictly necessary to order the re-issues of the Rosemary Tonks novels I broke my own record to achieve in old editions but I certainly am prompted to return to Samuel Beckett after half a lifetime or more for his Dream of Fair to Middling Women in search of Lucia Joyce.

It might have been that half-lifetime ago that I read Richard Ellman's biography of Joyce if I ever did. I don't know. I have others but now, needing to expand the Joyce section of the library, I need to own a copy or else I won't feel Joycean enough.

All these things tie up, however loosely. Rosemary's mad devotion to her religion doesn't compare with Lucia's dignosed 'madness'. Joyce was vehemently not religious, which seems eminently common sense to me and then in today's Times there's a review of Heresy by Catherine Nixey due shortly extending what A.N. Wilson's book on Jesus had in it about what really happened and what a colossal misadventure Christianity was.

The problem will be in which order to read them. It's a good thing a couple of them aren't due here yet.

Friday Evening LitChat

The second half of the Occasional Joyce was as good if not better than the first. Being in chronological order that might be to be expected but it doesn't follow with the novels. It's not as if it should come as a surprise that he's a great essayist but you'd think he would be better known for them, as is George Orwell, and perhaps to the most thoroughgoing Joyceans he is.

His account of the poet Mangan, an early hero or role model, should really be a story in Dubliners,

He had become a mute wasted rag of a man, he ate barely enough to keep body and soul together until, one day he had a sudden bad fall.

and,

no other Irish song is as full as those of Mangan of nobly suffered misfortunes and such irreparable devastations of the soul. 

He makes Daniel Defoe the first 'English' writer on account of Chaucer, Shakespeare and the others before him being European and, whether it's 'realism' or just his tremendous intellect, I for one tend to take his word. I'm sure he's right about Dickens being good at what he does but 'hardly deserving a place among the highest' of writers and I'm glad of the account of Parnell, the political background to the novels never having been clear to me, a self-styled nationalist who brings about his own downfall.

From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer, from 1932, is fragments suddenly in the playful style of the Wake and one would gladly have more of all the things here.

I'm not sure how the shelves are going to be reorganised to bring Joyce out of the aphabetical classification of novelists to have his own section. Upstairs the likes of McEwan, Swift, Barnes, Murakami and Sebastian Faulks have theirs and downstairs the more elite group of mainly poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin, Edward Thomas, Auden, Gunn, Rosemary Tonks, Dr. Johnson and Shakespeare biographyhave theirs so somebody of one has biographies of their wife and daughter ought to qualify for that status.

A couple of days reading about Lucia has brought me to the brink of whatever it was that went wrong for her. It's not yet obvious why that should have happened unless it's linked to her giving up her dancing career but it's compelling stuff.

--

On Wednesday night I was late for Josh Brown talking about his new book, Unjudging Love: The Enigma of Dylan Thomas'. I've only lived in Portsmouth for 40 years and so can hardly be expected to find my way around yet. Four years in the making is not bad going for something fairly comprehensive but it's possible that devotion to such a figure makes one more sympathetic than is entirely good for one.

In establishing Dylan as a committed socialist, Josh mentioned in passing that the writers of the 30's and 40's were (Auden, Eliot). Well, yes, Auden but not Eliot. South Wales has long been a Labour stronghold so there's no big surprise that Dylan would be. However, don't believe everything you're told at events like these. At the 1997 Larkin Society conference a discussion panel reflected that all the writers were right wing - Lawrence, Eliot, Pound and ultimately Larkin - and turned a blind eye to Auden, Camus, Sartre, Orwell.

I think these terms retain some meaning but as tyrannies rise and, hopefully, fall, it's not obvious it matters what their professed ideologies are or if we allocate them to a wing.

The claim that Dylan was a precursor to rap and hip-hop sounded a bit dubious. I don't dispute that rap is 'poetry' or that it has been the big thing in pop music for a long time now but with a few notable exceptions it has passed me by, 'poetry' is not necessarily a good thing and I don't know how much credit Dylan would want for it. There has been incantatory verse performance with or without Dylan Thomas or Grandmaster Flash and we should be wary of claiming things for our causes that do them not as much credit as we might think.

--

Rather more on my wavelength, a few days before a trip to Soho for An Evening with Rosemary Tonks, I see that three more novels have been re-issued which must mean that The Bloater did okay at the checkout.

It's not something she'd have wanted but once you've published something, that's it, you can't unpublish it. If you think The Bloater and then The Halt During the Chase, Way Out of Berkeley Square and Businessmen as Lovers are savage and unforgiving I hope they'll get round to making Emir and Opium Fogs available too because they burn out of control.

It's not the first time I've been ahead of the wave, prompted by the first book of a revival and - I'd like to think - doing my little bit to help it along. I bought up all the Richard Yates novels well before Revolutionary Road was a film from wherever I could for whatever they cost and in due course, like Rosemary's, they were made available again. A couple of those of Rosemary's were the most I've paid for books and now they will be available for a tenner.

Not to worry. I wanted them then, not now, and there is no correlation between the price of an artefact, whether it be book, painting or recording of music and its worth. We don't concern ourselves with financial investment when it's simply the art that matters.

Yuuki Bouterey-Ishido & Tianyang Han in Chichester

Yuuki Bouterey-Ishido & Tianyang Han, Chichester Cathedral, Feb 20 

 One of my greatest discoveries in recent years of attending more lunchtime recitals has been the chamber music of Brahms. Others had discovered it already, of course, but education is an ongoing thing and happens in a different order from one person to the next. I have always spectacularly failed at synesthesia by which music suggests colours but I'm very tempted to go for rich, deep tones with Brahms, either emerald or maroon. Velvet, though. 

First up from Yuuki and Tianyang was Frank Bridge and his Four pieces for cello and piano. The opening Berceuse was uncomplicated and lovely as were the Serenade and Élégie with the former tranquil with just a ripple on its surface and the latter a shade darker and more melancholy. The Cradle Song then stepped up a couple of gears with Yuuki smooth and Tianyang qué simpático throughout. The chamber music of Frank Bridge looks like being another area for further investigation.

But the Brahms Sonata, op. 38, was altogether a more complex excursion. The first movement is a blend of passion and his extended melodic lines. While it is ostensibly a cello piece, the piano is given plenty to contribute. It wasn't the piece I was half expecting but it is not dissimilar to the Violin Sonatas and the same order that is placed for any Frank Bridge I find is likely to include their cello siblings to keep them company on the ever-expanding CD shelves. I can't help myself.

The Allegretto quasi Menuetto soon brought to mind the spirit of the famous Suites as found by Pablo Casals and flowed from its hesitant beginning before Yuuki was allowed to extend himself in the Allegro finale, much busier and technically demanding, which he did with panache.

So, if Brahms is velvet, maybe Handel is satin, Mozart is shot silk, Philip Glass is nylon and Elgar is tweed. I had thought that music was only the notes and the sound they made and poetry was the words and their sound, too, but there's plenty to work on in finding textures, and textiles, to correspond with composers. Luckily, it still falls within the remit of synesthesia so we won't have to think of a new word for it. I'm not sure I'm going to convince myself of it, though. I'm not sufficiently hyper-sensitive and I don't know enough different sorts of fabric.

Re: Joyce

I don't really have a favourite novelist. Maybe it's not necessary to have one. I get by okay without. Over the years here it's been said that Dubliners represents the finest prose fiction in the language and in spite of the recent discovery that The Dead is reckoned 'sentimental' in some high places, it remains so.

The short list of favourite novelists is long enough with George Eliot, Hardy, Julian Barnes, Camus, Murakami, Gide, Balzac, maybe Salinger and more taking up lots of shelf space but as well as the poems being nothing special, unless I've missed something, and Exiles being too heavy on ideas, I don't think I can claim as my favourite novelist anybody responsible for Finnegans Wake. I would feel as if I ought to have enjoyed it more without sherpa books to help me.

But there remains something compelling about Joyce that is unrivalled beyond Shakespeare. Finding that there is still more original Joyce than I knew about has been quite a happy accident. The Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (Oxford) has gathered momentum from the precocious undergraduate essay given the title Subjugation through his devotional tribute to Ibsen, some book reviews and aesthetics before I arrived this morning at Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages which is brilliant.

 

Of 288 pages of text, from 216 onwards are in Italian, from which others have been translated, so it's a smaller book than it looks if one is not a fluent reader of Italian but the footnotes are often of great value.

Ibsen's New Drama shows Joyce so enthralled of his first big literary love that much of it sets out When We Dead Awaken, heavily laden with quotes, for our benefit as if he can't help himself in his enthusiasm. Published in the Fortnightly Review, in 1900 when Joyce was 18, I shared some of his admiration at that age and it must have been far more exciting for him when it was so new.

It is also thrilling to find parallels with one's heroes and their preoccupations such as the extracts on aesthetics taken from Joyce's notebooks. Anybody who spends such a proportion of their time thinking about literature, poetry, art and all such undertakings must wonder what it is all about. 

I think some terms have shifted in nuance in the last 120 years. Joyce writes that,

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

That seems circular to me because I take Aesthetics to mean 'the philosophy of art' whereas for Joyce it is, as the first definition I find on the internet says, a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty. I would contend that not all art is beautiful. Satisfying, yes, if it's any good but we are not all Keats or Botticelli.

Similarly, Joyce's distinction between poetry and literature accords poetry a rarer status than it might have by now. It is a great shame that Joyce and anybody else could only read what had been written up to their time. In Crow, for example, Ted Hughes set out to write something less beautiful.

I'm not completely sold on 'realism', either, because art isn't 'real'. It is at best selective and only represents those 'real' things it selects to serve its purposes. Ibsen, George Moore and Turgenev came before Joyce and told it a bit more like it was but Harold Pinter, Alan Sillitoe and various episodes of Play for Today came after. I'm not sure that any attempt at showing life as it is lived by some are ever quite the point. I did once but I don't now.

But as a critic, Joyce is not easily impressed and gladly, not afraid to say so. He is not impressed by Shakespeare Studied in Eight Plays by Hon A.S. Canning which was clearly not only as vacuous as Prof. Sir Stanley Wells can be nowadays at his most pompous but,

even the pages are wrongly numbered.

The literary life is full of petty rivalries and even vendettas and Joyce is keen to dismiss Borlase and Son by T. Baron Russell, ending with,

the binding of the book is as ugly as one could reasonably expect

but the footnote is invaluable here, explaining that,

This comment appears to be a jibe at Longworth, the editor of the 'Daily Express'...At any rate it was to be Joyce's last book review and the story goes that Longworth threatened to kick Joyce downstairs if he ever came to the newspaper's offices again.

But Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages is the most complete item yet, a concise survey of the cultural history of his homeland, its receptiveness to religion, how it suffered from English and Scandinavian insurgence but provided talent to the rest of Europe. He might not these days have escaped censure for his narrow view of 'Nipponese dwarfs' but, having been drenched in Catholicism throughout his upbringing, he considers a future in which Ireland may or may not be able to throw off its backwardness and,

proclaim aloud the end of the coherent absurdity that is Catholicism, and the beginning of the incoherent absurdity that is Protestantism.

This, from a set of three lectures given in 1907 in Trieste, comes during the writing of Dubliners which was first submitted in 1905 but not published in its fuller form until 1916.

I'm sure there's plenty more to come before the arrival of Stephen Hero but already here and looking sumptuous is Lucia Joyce, To Dance in the Wake by Carol Loeb Shloss.

One could feel uneasy about the biography of someone who spent her last 30 years in a mental health institution and it might well be flippant to ask what else one could expect of the daughter of the author, and muse behind, the Wake. We are intrusive, and prurient, but perhaps sometimes those that live on the outskirts of sanity or beyond them bring back things from such places that our more ordinary lives don't allow us to appreciate.

Clarinet Quintet in Chichester

Clarinet Quintet, Chichester Cathedral, Feb 13

The Clarinet is a bubbly thing, isn't it. It is a character actor like the bassoon or trombone. Clarinet Quintet aren't five of them, though. They are Keir Rowe with a string quartet, a West Sussex Chamber Ensemble possibly in search of a better name. Hopefully one even better than the West Sussex Chamber Ensemble.

Mozart's Quintet K. 581 begins on a summer's day, one can't help but think, with smooth clarinet and strings. The Larghetto then equally brings to mind the famous Concerto, creamy with Bogdan Vacarescu's (pictured) gorgeous interpolations. There is all the dancefloor etiquette of the Minuet's genteel sashay before the Allegretto finale did then bubble and tripped through its variazoni of tempi and theme.

String Quartets are something we don't get enough of round these parts. Either that or I'm not going to the right places. The Mozart Divertimento K. 136 had Bogdan leading a light breeze in the Allegro and the Andante was all grace and consolation with Phyllida Maude-Roxby, vla, and Nigel McNestrie, clo, having neat contributions to make and Michael Sullivan more than 'second fiddle' and the order and sanity that Mozart brings into the chaos of how the world is now and maybe always has been was completed with precision that the quartet made look easy in a happy Presto. 

After three hours of music and music talk only last night I had wondered how much more I needed so soon but of course one wants such things, short of being addicted to it. We are routinely spolit by Chichester Cathedral's lunchtime concerts but I, for one, can't see any harm in it. 

Portsmouth Music Festival

 Portsmouth Music Festival, Adult Piano, Portsmouth Menuhin Room, Feb 12

It's like Narnia, a whole world of categories and divisions within them and a collection of trophies as if Captain Pugwash had come back from a rare successful pirating expedition. Portsmouth Music Festival extends over a number of weeks, covering brass to pop music, strings to speech and drama but I thought I'd try an evening of piano.

By accident rather than design perhaps, the pieces formed a coherent programme beginning with some bright, shiny Scarlatti by Miriam Sampson, then two plates of Bach done in different ways before a Romantic blend of Chopin and Brahms. Michael George won that with the roaring fortes of his Chopin Nocturne.

Senior Citizens playing pieces written since 1900 asked the adjudicator to pick between Angela Cheverall's Woman with a Parasol by P. Wedgwood which was completely charming, Christine Limb's Coleridge-Taylor that was open and generous and Miriam's Messaien, necessarily much more challenging. Richard Deering's assessments were thorough and enlightening, and he'd been doing it since 9 a.m. He is qualified to compare apples with pears. I couldn't have picked between such different pieces and performances but I was quite probably the only person in the room who can't play the piano.

Angela then had two categories to herself which effectively provided a jazzy interlude in a three hour session that flew by much quicker than a Wagner opera and then the Adult Recital section was a natural climax. 

In many ways a highlight was Christine Limb's Schumann, Brahms, Schubert selection that had innate musicality and caught the substantial depth of the Brahms and the exquisite Schubert but it seemed to me not long into Jack Adams's Ravel that he was a class apart technically and his Liszt Paraphrase de Concert, which was not Liszt at his most diabolic but at his most Tchaikovsky, already sounded like a lap of honour.

I often wish that music, poetry and the like were not made into competitive sports but it's ostensibly true that some people are better at playing the piano than others. Martha Argerich is better than me, for instance. However, music is its own reward and everybody who played tonight contributed to a remarkable concert. There was a strange feel of the examination room about it but that diminished as Richard's amiable but highly informed and judicious assessments brought some warmth to proceedings.

Sadly, another thing that diminished was the audience as those that had played did their own impromptu version of Haydn's Farewell Symphony. I'm sure they had somewhere to get to but at local poetry readings readers also perform to a reasonably-sized audience because they are each other's audience and in my experience those on early stay to hear those reading later. It's not so much part of the deal as out of politeness, maybe even interest. As it happened, those that left missed what were the bits most worth hearing.

The winners proceed to the Gala Concert at Crookhorn College on Sunday, 24 March at 3pm (retiring collection). On the evidence of this qualifying heat, that will be worth attending and I'll see you there.

Cheltenham Preview with Racetrack Wiseguy

Lossiemouth wins the Mares Hurdle on the Tuesday. Bung the National Debt on it now at 8/13 and it's job done for the week. Rich Ritchie will be all accommodating and magnanimous but not in an understated suit, the nap will be landed and the accumulators underway.

There's a few like that but stringing 4 of them together means them all between them covering maybe 10 miles over 40 or 50 obstacles with other very good horses attempting to end up ahead of them so only one such plunge, at most, is advised.

 

I like to get in early before everybody else's previews. I don't want to be put off by what they think. It's easy to get confused.

But we shouldn't be confused. There are some absolute stand-out horses in several divisions at present and Cheltenham is where they have been aiming at.

We could easily be already underway with Ballyburn in the Supreme who couldn't be faulted at Leopardstown and we leave out the Champion Hurdle because Constitution Hill and State Man are the two most gloriously boring horses in training.

On Wednesday, El Fabiolo is another rock solid investment at the 4/6 I had him in a treble. Jonbon is no machine up against him, a box of tricks but a big talent. He will need everything to go right and something to go wrong for the obvious good thing, maybe even at 2/5.

But I'll only feel the benefit of the 4/6 if it goes in with Lossiemouth and Stay Away Fay at 5/1 in the Brown Advisory. The Nicholls horse is an act of faith on my part after his heroics at Sandown in December and then not being disgraced against his seniors at Cheltenham but stay is what he does, grimly if necessary and what Fact to File achieved at Leopardstown is difficult to say because Gaelic Warrior wasn't right that day.

The Ryanair Chase looks a bit below par without Allaho and is doing its best to undermine my usual argument that a proper Grade 1 chase over 2 and a half miles is just as much a championship as a Champion Chase over 2 or a Gold Cup over 3 and a quarter. My reason for looking forward to it is getting my Allaho money back which is in William Hill's account until then. Thursday could be a day off from investments and just be loose change for entertainment's sake.

But the way Sir Gino bolted away and put the highly-thought of Burdett Road in his place over course and distance last time puts him firmly into the blue chip category and Mr. Henderson will be wanting the security of him in the bank before the Gold Cup. 

9/1 is fair enough about Shishkin but all the doubts about Galopin des Champs never being the same horse again after last year have been blown away since his first time out debacle this season. Shishkin has been unfairly derided, not least by me, but in among his 22 runs, of which he's won 15, are F, P, U and R and one wonders if he's looking for a B, D or S because he's really playing Scrabble. We know not to put anything beyond Mr. Henderson's handling capabilities but even he looks mystified sometimes.

 

I prefer winning to be as dull as possible and as predictable as pay day. 'Having a run for your money' is the sort of nonsense put about by bookmakers in the hope of convincing you you've had a good time while they concentrate on making your money theirs. I fail to see the fun in that. It's a result-based industry, some dour-faced football pundit will tell you, as if some industries weren't and then they'll add in some extra wisdom like it's goals that count  or a win would be a good result for them tonight. The telly pays ex-players good money to tell you things like that.

Nobody pays me to write these self-evident platitudes. 

Ballyburn, Lossiemouth, El Fabiolo, Sir Gino and Galopin des Champs add up to 14.5/1 at the moment and Mr. Hill has enhanced that to 15.9/1 with one of his prmotional bonuses but I'll cover that with all my faith in Lossiemouth at odds on. And that is the plan.

Hopefully, like today, I'll have Fun, Fun, Fun. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say on Sunday

Having established chess ratings of over 2000 in two disciplines, I was taking Classical towards 1900 before the gas ran out and I fell back alarmingly. Yesterday's racing was no better on a good day for Mr. Henderson but not for me, who took 22/1 about Doddiethegreat only to see him held up off the pace and put in a good finish far too late. I'll hope to be having Fun, Fun, Fun at Exeter shortly but it wouldn't be fun- or at least not of interest- to win all the time.

As ever, a variety of interests provides worthwhile things in other spheres. The wireless played W.F. Bach this morning,

 and so that was added to a spending spree that might not be over yet.

95% or more of the Bach we hear is by J.S. and the several others are possibly overlooked by being lesser Bachs and they might have bigger reputations of their own without the family associations but Wilhelm Freidemann can have some shelf space alongside C.P.E. and J.C., just nowhere near as much as J.S.

--

Bookwise, next up could be some Joyce I don't have. Only because I didn't know it existed. It gets in ahead of Keats's letters which come with glowing reports but reports possibly from Keats admirers and I don't know if I am sufficiently such a thing to need several hundred pages. Being favourite among the Romantic poets doesn't put him very high among favourites overall.

The Kundera festival is set to come to an end anytime. Unbearable Lightness is confirmed as the choice, not least for the lines just lifted and inserted into C20th,

History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.   

 

It turned up just at the moment when, reflecting on war poets, the vast weight of events and the seeming inevitability that all things, including the literature produced by them, could not have been otherwise, they aren't at all, are they. 

Seen from the opposite direction, it all hangs by a thread, doesn't it. But how are we to know, either way. 'Contingency' is the theme that recurs throughout Kundera and I'm very tempted by it. Like the 'travelling coincidence' in The Whitsun Weddings, it might appear that's what we are all a part of and literature is our futile attempt to make sense of it, however satisfying it can sometimes be. 

I don't know if that's consistent with my non-belief in coincidence, that they are mathematical certainties and not in the least supernatural. The main thing is that it all gives us reason to expend words in the general direction of thought and if enjoyment comes of that then we can expect no more than that.

I come from Sherwood, Nottingham

I was once advised it was no bad thing to write poems even if they weren't much good, as if to 'keep one's hand in'. I don't know about that. 

'I come from' was the theme of Portsmouth Poetry Society's meeting this week and so I wrote this to be sociable but I can't see it making The Collected Poems. 

 

I come from Sherwood, Nottingham,
But not where Robin Hood did.
The forest was some miles from
Where I was first a schoolkid.

 

The wallpaper in my bedroom
Had pictures of the Beatles where
Others might have had flowers in bloom.
I liked Ringo best, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.

 

From the back garden we could see
Constellations like the Plough,
My subject was astronomy
Although it isn’t so much now.

 

School seemed quite a walk away, 

Past the prison’s high brick wall.
And, passing it every day,
I was never naughty at all.

 

It seemed like we’d just won the war
And then we won the World Cup,
I hadn’t seen what came before
And thought the only way was up.

 

We left there when I was 8
And moved to Gloucester which had fields
And other things to contemplate,
Many of which quite appealed-

 

Concorde’s test flights served to convince
The future seemed to be Gloucester
But there and where else I’ve lived since
I’ve felt like an imposter.

Caroline Tyler in Chichester

 Caroline Tyler, Chichester Cathedral, Feb 6

On Caroline Tyler's website it's possible to have your own bespoke composition based on your name at what looks a very fair price. It's called Composify. Would that creativity came quite so easily to some of the rest of us but music poured out of the likes of Telemann, Vivaldi and Haydn as if it were on tap so you've maybe either got it or you haven't.

With Schubert and Chopin on her programme alongside her own compositions we might have thought we knew what to expect but we'd have been wrong, at least as regards her opening Sky Prelude. That was Bach-like, or Bach-lite, with its walking left hand on terra firma while the right hand explored skywards. That was followed by Star Prelude by Poul Ruders that was hypnotic and akin to Steve Reich or Philip Glass, the busy right hand like motorway traffic over off-beat left hand rhythms.

In some way, Schubert's Impromptu op. 90, no.2 did a similar thing and wasted no time in the process before in no. 3 the hands changed roles.

If that was familiar then Chopin's Nocturne, op. 9 no.2, was more so and elegantly paced by way of arriving at Caroline's Fantasy on it which was as if an elasticated version taking it further and beyond and her own Nocturne in B minor maintained the prevailing mood.

Less mellow in its grander gestures was her arrangement of the Finale from Brahms Symphony no. 4. It might have been the big centrepiece of the set but it didn't entirely convince. Perhaps it lacked the orchestral sweep or coherence of the original in its imposing architecture but a return to the Berliners with Rattle should provide what was missing. Not that the Tyler arrangement or performance was any hardship but it possibly didn't quite fit.

The Tyler Lullaby was a starlit night completed by the onrush of sleep's lava - to borrow a vivid phrase from an old Roger McGough poem- and then to finish the very brief Grade 1 exam piece, Little Whale Explores the Calm Sea, showed a group of young pianists from the Prebendal School how it should be played because the composer must be the best person to show them.

It was a gorgeous and well-organized set played with delicacy and 'poetry' that covered a range of music. I'm left wondering about the glorious unfolding of the first movement of Brahms 4 and how that would work on piano. Poetry can be that which is 'lost in translation' but I'm never sure that poetry is a better thing than prose. They are both 'writing' and there's a lot of misguidance to be found about what the difference is.

For the sake of £29, I'd be interested to find out what my name sounds like arr. Tyler but I'll give some thought to buying such a piece for someone else.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say on a Sunday

 One of the most golden of rules in horse racing is not to chase one's losses. It isn't necessarily part of the recipe for success over the last several years but it certainly was part of the recipe for disaster forty years ago. However, everybody has to sometime break the rules, as Status Quo so cogently argued, and today was my third time of successfully doing so. 

At Sandown in December I piled into Stay Away Fay after the double went astray, yesterday the stake money on the ill-fated Hermes Allen was retrieved by lumping on Galopin des Champs and now the obvious Grade 1 4-timer at Leopardstown going amiss at the first opportunity is put right by diverting to Musselburgh for Liari.

I know I shouldn't do it and I've got away with non-textbook practice. I'd prefer it if Plan A went right and not be led into temptation.

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David Kalstone's posthumously published, and unfinished, Becoming a Poet adds to the thrilling shelf of excellent books on Elizabeth Bishop, a great poet but one that it could be easy to write badly about.

This book is half and half about her relationships with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. The first remained on good terms even if Elizabeth insisted on going her own way and they were less of a kind that some would make out. Lowell, though, is more difficult. Like Eliot he is forever on the verge of, or having, a breakdown. For some reason he seems to think that Elizabeth might marry him and he puts a private letter from her almost verbatim into a poem. 

While Bishop is admirable in almost every way, Lowell is not and so with some cross-pollination in their poems it is tempting to have a better look at Lowell. Some 45 years ago I thought he might have been 'the business' but, try as I might, I couldn't convince myself then and so, with some prejudice against him, he might have even less chance now.

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And so I arrive at the bottom of those books that have been waiting their turn and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, bought to complete the run of Kundera  novels. I think it was the first I ever read and that which brought him to our attention. And that's possibly because it's the best of them. It does those things that Kundera does most convincingly.

Whether it was life in Prague under Soviet rule that made life seem so precarious I don't know but, as ever, it is for him a 'contingent' affair - 'affair' often being the operative word - fragile and insecure but potentially luminous. 

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The end of the writing of C20th is probably in sight. At 30000 words, it won't be what it set out to be but one doesn't realize how hard doing the actual work on such a thing will be. Even to produce such a paltry thing of that is a big enough undertaking for me and at least I didn't abandon it. It's been enyoyable enough to do without straining myself and I've found out plenty in the process while recycling many of the set piece things I've said at least once elsewhere before.

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In the end I didn't abandon The Decline of the English Novel, the latest attempt at a novel, either. It just became The Decline of English Fiction, as a 3400 word story. The title comes from Orwell, of course, as well as being self-deprecating and making reference to its theme of 'fictions'. 

I will put that title on it next job and make it into a pdf just in case anybody wants to see it. By all means I'll e-mail it if you'd like to see it. I won't be troubling the likes of The New Yorker but some of the lesser outlets for short stories I've found look a bit naff. I'd like to think I can get poems into print if I see fit but fiction is another matter.

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So, I'll soon be at the end of another stage of 'works in progress' and on the lookout for the next things to read and write. Anything's possible, one might hope, but it has to be the right thing. There is a glimpse of Existential angst in the prospect of the freedom that suggests when the corollary is the despair at the thought that there might be the nothingness and alienation of finding no such thing to do.

I'd better think of something, then. One doesn't live by routinely rotating the available adjectives to report on musical events alone. It's too late now to undo the fragments of Sartre that counted towards a minor subject of Philosophy 43 years ago. It all seemed very convincing but sometimes it's better not to know and be happier living vicariously by the horse racing results.

Fiction report

 I've long thought that novelist, or fiction writer, was a proper job and poet less so. It's much harder for a start. That I can have some modest success with poems shows how easy that is but prose fiction is a different matter.

Time After Time, a few years ago now, was a very basic effort completed only so that I could say I'd done it- 50 thousand words in a 'blizzard of errata' that I never looked at again. But the urge to do something better persisted until the abandonment of the next big idea came with a pledge to never, ever waste time on anything so ambitious again.

I have, though, now produced the short story version of it - 3400 words which is 7 pages of a Word doc. To say that it is my best effort at fiction isn't saying much for it. A Brief Lapse of Confidence appeared in a magazine called Fisheye in the 1980's but I'm not sure this will see print. However, it is the satisfaction of having done it that is of value.

It doesn't have a title yet. It was called The Decline of the English Novel, partly referring to George Orwell and partly deprecating itself but it isn't a novel now. It won't need a title if it's not going anywhere but it isn't really finished without one.

How It Happened

 

 

The mood here is still vibrant after this morning's achievement of a rating of 2000 at Rapid chess, 10 minute games, at Lichess. This feels like my biggest sporting moment for a long time. Possibly since 1995 but at least since achieving 2000 at Blitz.

I was actually gifted it by my higher-rated opponent but at this level, that's what happens. The analysis by Stockfish shows that at move 49, white should not have played Qb1, the pawn to g4 is best. But I still had to notice that Bxh3 for black means he can't take it with the pawn and taking it with the king lets my queen zip back down to h5 for checkmate. White could have survived with Rg1 but he didn't do that either.

Stockfish says he made 5 blunders in 50 moves whereas I only made 1 with my accuracy at 82% and his at 74 but that'll do for me. I got lucky but at least took the chance when it was offered. The Rapid rating of 2005 puts me in the top 7.5% at Lichess and that's where it will stay as I undertake the long haul of doing something similar in Classical, 30 minute, games. Geeting to 1850 will be the first target.