David Green

David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.

Sunday 3 November 2024

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Part 1 of Don Quixote ends as if it was meant to end there. The only book that Dr. Johnson said he wished had been longer and that, presumably, includes Part 2 which is praise indeed.
The comparison with Hamlet begins with a comparison of their respective states of 'madness'. Hamlet's was an adopted disposition that may or may not have become the real thing while he was pretending but I tend to doubt it now having got some mileage out of the idea for 'A' level essays; Harold Bloom contends that Don Quixote is aware of his own delusions, which makes his story more layered than it would otherwise be.
One can choose between any number of interpretations in meta-fictions that become cubist with all the choices of ways into them. Satire brings with it different 'levels' of meaning. For me, we wonder 'what is the point' of the Don's quest to become a knight errant and we might decide it is the same as any of us trying to become what we'd like to be.
Perhaps what we are lies in what we aspire to be, however absurd that aspiration might be. Perhaps we are defined by the gap between that aspiration and how much of it we achieve of it. We are absurd to the extent that we still believe in such dreams despite all the evidence that we aren't achieving them.
At various times I've imagined myself as footballer, cricketer, cyclist, pool player and a variety of sorts of writer with only the most modest levels of success in any of them. I was absurd when I thought I was destined for any sort of greatness, even locally, in any of them but found some happiness in the involvement.
I don't particularly think we go to literature to learn lessons about life to make us wiser but prefer to think we enjoy well-made work. Happiness or enjoyment, however it comes about, can be the only point and that can be provided by literature and how it reflects us back at ourselves.
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Bob Harris takes over Sounds of the 70's this afternoon. He was in grave danger of losing this listener early doors with his emphasis on Americana, West Coast, rock and grisly old Whistle Test sessions but then put Al Green on. I think he'll need monitoring for his percentage of soul, Motown and disco but John Lennon's Stand By Me, on now, is perfectly alright.
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The success of my excursion to Newcastle, mainly for the purposes of Durham Cathedral, in the summer has led me to wonder about further such travel. I'm not in favour of travel in principle, mostly due to the vagaries of the available transport systems. Like Philip Larkin, I wouldn't mind going to China if I could come back the same day.
However, as with Durham, once a plan solidifies it becomes a sine qua non, a must-have and an imperative that demands doing. Nottingham is where I come from, still feel some attachment to - not having been since the early 1980's- and, like the Bee Gees in Massachuchets, 'something's telling me I must go home'. Such imagined significance in where one came from, some sort of worship of the past taken from fragments of memory, might be more authentic versions of 'who we are' than those Quixotic aspirations to what we want to be. And, having hardly even thought about writing a poem for most of this year, that sketchy archive of early memories served one up. 
It goes with Move Over Darling and Nativity that are from similar sources and I'd love to put it here but it might be saved for print in due course. I was identifying as a 'poet who doesn't write poems' but it ain't over til it's over and, not having been successful in finding any other identity, I'm denied even that. So, at the risk of dangerous levels of introspection, it is the expression of that nothingness that provides some either Sartrean or Derridian 'enjoyment' and that, if there is one, seems to be the point.  

Friday 1 November 2024

More Cardenio, etc.

I will reach the end of Part 1 of Don Quixote shortly. That might be enough. It's all that Cervantes originally did but then he added Part 2 when somebody else took it upon themselves to continue it.
Perhaps the big news is that Cardenio's story could be Love's Labour's Won in Shakespeare's lost play because he does have a happy outcome.
More than that, though, Cervantes is 'modern' and deals in 'meta-fiction' in his pastiche of chivalric novels by referring back to his hack models, not least when the canon pronounces,
I have never been able to read any from beginning to end, because it seems to me they are all essentially the same, and one is no different from another.
Not all readers of westerns, thrillers, Mills & Boon or devotees of science fiction films will think that all the books they read or things they like are the same and they might even think that the sort of 'literary fiction' that I sometimes read could be accused of similar failings in as far as it's for it's own sake, nobody gets shot, there are no green monsters from other universes or the lonely spinster that lives in the Old Rectory doesn't end up marrying the dashingly glamorous man who arrives in the picturesque village. 
But Don Quixote does resort to routine cartoon violence on a regular basis. It is jokey, like that in Tom and Jerry, and one very soon doesn't take it seriously and so maybe it wouldn't satisfy those who want gun crime and murder as the staple diet of their entertainment. And yet they might. 'Realism' is not an easy idea in things that are accepted as fictional and so perhaps token violence is violence enough.
I don't think I need Part 2, though. I've got the main idea of it. It's probably better than I give it credit for. I've been reading it dutifully, not entirely against my will but I'd prefer to be looking forward to getting back to my book a bit more than I have been in recent weeks.