This and That

I never really wanted to be a blogger. I don't want to be anything that involves being a word that hadn't been coined when I was at school. It all seems so recent and far too new-fangled.
I wanted to be someone who had a website, not minding quite so much having something that hadn't been invented before the 1970's. But blogger it is that I seem to be, however reluctantly. And so here's some blogging, various and disparate though its themes might seem.

I came back home on New Year's Eve reading the obituary of Bobby Farrell, one of the essential ingredients of the great Boney M. There was much to admire in his spectacular career, not least of which was that after legal rulings over the ownership of the Boney M name, there were at one time five different acts using it. But that is of only the most arcane interest when the real point is the performances, one of the more notable being when they gave their Rasputin thus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWDgZ52XYX4&feature=fvst

Radio 3 have begun the year by broadcasting every note of the music of Mozart, which they have already done for Bach and, I think, Beethoven. It is a great undertaking and to be applauded, not least the excuse to repeat the original cast of Amadeus with Felicity Kendal as a coquettish Constanza. It suggests the impossibly desirable state of affairs in which we might have separate Radios Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. so that there is never the danger of tuning in to Radio 3 to find that it is Jazz Record Requests. But there is a downside to listening to too much of the same thing for slightly too long. For example, you start to think in terms of Mozart's little idioms and phrasings, not only the heavenly moments but the habitual stylings of the 1780's. You really can have too much of a good thing and surfeit on such luxury. And you realize that Mozart did what he did, as we all surely do, within the constraints of his contemporary fashion, and that it was only expressed in symphonies, concerti, quartets, sonatas and opera because that's what people expected then. And you feel a little bit sorry for the apparently equally talented sister, Nannerl, whose playing in the wonderful parlour pieces has been less revered by posterity as quite so 'beloved of God', or perhaps the hothouse education of their father.

And if any of that makes us wonder about 'perfection' in art, then as an addition to my premature review of Christmas television, I've got to say I don't remember ever seeing a part played quite to the verisimilitude as Daniel Rigby did as the early Eric Morecambe in the wonderful Eric and Ernie (pictured), in which the tremendous Victoria Wood and Vic Reeves were big enough to play supporting roles.

But, it wasn't Eric Morecambe, it was somebody pretending to be him, convincingly. The latest issue of PN Review had arrived in the meantime, in time to remind me what utter sophistry can be written about poetry. Not, of course, Neil Powell praising the art of criticism in the work of William Empson and the like, but the unsubstantiated claims and blurry 'analysis' offered by some of the reviewers. One claims to establish the fact that Fiona Sampson's Rough Music proves her to be a 'major poet' without saying if that means equal to Chaucer, or maybe Shelley, or just Betjeman or if it just puts her into the top twenty of living poets in the English language or not even that. As a general rule, most reviews of poetry published these days need putting through the kind of bullshit detector that is available on the interweb before seeing what they really say and then just read the poems instead. The very vagueness of unsupported assertions like this one demean not only Fiona's poems but poetry, the art of criticism and anybody who reads it all at the same time.

So, I just read the poems. And the best poems in PNR were those by the late Romanian dissident poet, Liviu Campanu, the notes on contributors even giving us his dates. They were translated by Patrick McGuinness, and if no more seemed to be available in English than those in his recent collection then that would have been where I'd have run through the well rehearsed issues about poetry in translation, how it doesn't translate and can't be expected to and how poetry thus can never really hope to become international. Except that it turns out that Campanu is an imaginary poet like the Indian poet in the recent Derek Mahon book, Christopher Reid's Katerina Brac and all those other invented poets. And, yes, although they didn't claim to be translations, both Detroit Jackson and Jason Craddock, in the unlikely event that you saw their poems, were actually me. I'm sorry about that.

I did find the complicity of PN Review, such a highly respected organ, in this subterfuge just a fraction undermining but, never mind, I wasn't thinking of renewing my subscription to this overly erudite and complacently intellectual magazine anyway. I'll be off to Magma if anywhere, with the prospect of a higher percentage of pages I can get to the end of while still wanting to turn over.

Or perhaps I'll stay with Boney M. At least it was obvious from the start that they had nothing to do with how good their records were.