View from the Boundary

Like a Mastermind question master, once I'd started a book, I always used to finish it. Nearly every time. Not in the case of My Childhood by Maxim Gorky that we were given to read at school and not, much later, when I abandoned Proust after about 1300 pages. But mostly I wasn't a quitter.
But I'm afraid I am now, increasingly. I packed in Martin Amis a few months ago as regular readers will remember, I didn't finish Edward Thomas's novel The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans a few years ago and the list is steadily getting longer. Sometimes they're simply no good, or too hard work or I realize that now it's up to me, it's just for my entertainment. There's no course to pass, nothing I really have to know. And so why labour with a book you're not enjoying.
I was really enjoying A.L. Kennedy's The Blue Book, an enterprising and almost ground-breaking fiction writer, especially one sunny Saturday afternoon when I spent a couple of hours with it in the garden. I had made half a page of notes on it towards a review that was going to say, I thought, what a great writer she is. But I came back from a weekend of high excitement somewhere, returned to it and found that I had, literally, lost the plot. I'm sorry, Alison, I think of myself as an admirer, but once that happens, it's too hard to carry on. Maybe next time.
But here are a couple of notes I made,
p. 86, ocean's great grey thought
an essay on contingency and need
p.156, eyes full of sea and want
streams of associative.....

But, if nothing else, I'll make a note to myself to stop using 'contingent' for a while. It's a tremendous word and it sounds great but ever since first coming across it in studying Sartre, I've been well aware that I don't really know what it means.

Elsewhere, as we approach the 'review of the year' season, I can name only one pop music record that came out this year. And it came out this week, I think. Cliff Richard and Freda Payne, Saving a Life. It's introduced here by that renowned musicologist and novelist, Alan Titchmarsh http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXuetVC1Qv8&feature=related&noredirect=1 .
It's so easy to pick fault with Cliff that I choose not to, and I do genuinely like this record. For sure, it will drive me insane the next time I hear a pop song in which the singer claims to be 'driven insane'. But I'm sure I've written lyrics like that more than once. Heaven knows what Cliff is wearing, my sister wouldn't risk her great reputation as shirt buyer to me with a chancey outfit like that. And Cliff, duetting on his latest album with legends like Freda, Candi Staton, The Temptations, Roberta Flack and Percy Sledge, risks being the second best voice on every track. But Candi Staton's a wonderful singer and you'd never turn her down. Previews of the album suggest it's more MOTR than the 'soul' of the title, though. The phrase 'return to form' needs to be outlawed, only suggesting that the artist in question has been terrible recently but this isn't one, it's just Cliff providing the only pop record I could actually name from 2011. But it's one I will remember.
But, returning to performance, if not to 'form', it was an enjoyable gig (did I really say 'gig') on National Poetry Day in Southsea last week. An audience of 17 with one or two more that came or went is not to be derided when one considers the readings in The Poetry Bookshop, related in the recent Edward Thomas biography, at which Rupert Brooke and W.B.Yeats read to small groups. But you'll have to catch me when you can. I'm not thinking of making a habit of it or trolling round the festival circuit. I'll leave that to Harsent, O'Brien and Muldoon, who I hope all turn up and give us the reading of their lives in Cheltenham on Friday. Professional poetry. It must be the hardest game in the world. Or not.