The Saturday Nap - Week Eight

You wouldn't have got rich backing Dynaste at Newbury today but at 4/9 he was more of an investment opportunity than a gamble and he provided some small change to go to war with tomorrow.
First Lieutenant was announced a non-runner for the Hennessy Gold Cup two weeks ago and Paddy Power didn't have him in their ante post list whereas Blue Square kept him in and so were rewarded with a somewhat questioning e-mail from me (that they duly ignored). Now it looks as if the Irish-raider will raid and the 10/1 I took then will still at least get a run. If he runs, I'll owe Blue Square an apology but if he wins they'll owe me a few quid. And that's fair enough.
Pictured here with a big favourite of mine, Bobsworth, the two reoppose tomorrow with First Lieutenant in receipt of a pound for a two and a half length beating there. I'm reasonably happy enough to desert Bobsworth tomorrow even if it could be his real 'coming of age' day, not only because he has drifted in the last couple of days from 100/30 to 9/2 but because, even if First Lieutenant is a Cheltenham specialist, the 10/1 is better value and he looks very solid each way here for the faint-hearted. A.P. on Teaforthree for Rebecca Curtis at 16/1 is another that you could give a chance.
The Novice Hurdle at Newbury is interesting but tricky; the Fighting Fifth at Newcastle, so often an early Champion Hurdle trial, has cut up so badly that even if Newcastle goes ahead there won't be a fifth of any description in it this year although if you really can get 5/6 Cinders and Ashes, then, yes, one would have thought so.
And so although, on the face of it, it looks like yet another of those exciting Saturdays of autumn jump racing, there might not be quite as many options to choose from and I'm going to stick with First Lieutenant, officially each way for the purposes of judging the success of this project, but in real life I'm happy to forego the reduced returns of a placed each way bet if I can at other times collect better returns on outright winners.  

Bart Simpson on Poetry

I'm glad I found this the other night while looking for something else.
We might as well use it at the top of the page for a while.

London Chess Classic 2012 Preview

Judit Polgar is an eye-catching addition to the line-up for this year's London Chess Classic, Kensington Olympia, 1-10 December, http://www.londonchessclassic.com/ . She is living evidence that genius can be nurtured, if not quite created out of nothing, as the most successful of three Hungarian sisters brought up and developed to be chess grandmasters. Currently number 48 in the world on the constantly updated list, only Michael Adams among British players, at number 22, is ahead of her.

Ladbrokes are not usually a firm I applaud in the bookmaking industry but they do have odds to offer on this event. At 25/1, they don't seem to think Judit will win this immensely strong tournament but she is ahead of the three British players in their list.

Given the great success of last week's Saturday Nap feature here, which was not only one of the best pieces of horse racing journalism I've ever written but also one of the best I've ever read, and given that this website's record of tipping chess winners is even better than its record on horse racing, having suggested that Anand would retain his World Champion title against Boris Gelfand, why don't I offer some sundry reflections that might help us guess what might happen.

The scoring system of three points for a win and one for a draw, rather than the traditional one for a win and a half for draws, favours those players whose style encourages decisive results. This most obviously brings in Luke McShane, who will quite probably lose a game or two but might compensate by getting some well deserved rewards for his adventure, as he has previously. Ladbrokes don't believe that, though, and will let you have 33/1.

Magnus Carlsen usually comes good here, too, as well as nearly everywhere else and has apparently taken this event as seriously as any in its brief history. As World number one and suited to this sort of tournament, you will need to be confident and have your betting boots on to make any extra cash for Christmas out of him as he is odds on at 5/6.

Vishy Anand is hard to beat, which makes him a durable title holder but less likely to come first in an event like this and so he might look generously priced at 11/2 but the odds compiler has factored in our reservations and I don't think he's likely to win this. I wouldn't even take 10/1 even if he is my favourite chess player these days.

It's a shame that there doesn't appear to be an each way option on the first three places in a field of nine. One could have a sporting punt on McShane, or maybe Judit, if there were. But the sensible options in taking on the favourite in a win-only market would appear to be only Lev Aronian or Vladimir Kramnik. I like Kramnik a lot as a player and even more so of what I've seen of him as a person.

And seeing the class act, Aronian, who I've not seen in the flesh, as well as Judit, would be the main reasons for getting myself a ticket and going to watch. But the internet coverage is so good that the bone idle option is to stay here by the gas fire rather than traipse up to Kensington via train or coach and tube.

Kramnik's rating has been on the rise again recently but I don't see him winning this. The most likely bet is Aronian, at 3/1, if you want to oppose the perfectly justifiable hot favourite that is Carlsen.

Of the others, the H-Bomb, American number one, Hikaru Nakamura, will wear a nice hat, play his first 10 moves in almost no time at all but his opponents will usually find the time to neutralize the time pressure he tries to create. He is not an attractive gamble at 8/1; Michael Adams perhaps is a 28/1 shot and English Champion Gawain Jones similarly realistically priced at 40/1 but I'm sure they will stand up for themselves well. But it will be no surprise if somehow the results eventually make Magnus Carlsen the overall winner once more.                                     

 

The 99th Anniversary of the Crossword

I saw that it was the 100th anniversary of the crossword and so thought I'd compose one to mark the occasion. Now that I've done it and I look up the story, it seems the first crossword was published in December 1913. And so it's only the 99th.

Across 

1.   Larkin book ceded these evils differently (3,4,8)

9.   Edited Reid poems established again (9)

10. View six with half of stable (5)

11. Skint Ross includes openings (6)

12. Roman poet sounded direct (8)

13. Not meant to be satirical (6)

15. Detected, O’Connor wept (8)

18. Boris’s hair in limousine appetizers (8)

19. Dawn’s language (6)

21. Witches touchdown in city (8)

23. Hound deaf Ghanaian has (6)

26. A payment for islands (5)

27. Novice driver with dog in vehicle (4,5)

28. Shins cad refined, refined and lost the vote (15) 

Down 

1. Violinist coach changed in first half of ties (7)

2. Poet in deli others use (5)

3. Brass for economic group to ring pointlessly before one hesitation (9)

4. Ribbon Lisa shabbily conceals (4)

5. Arcade we destroyed with Wulf’s rival in poetry (8)

6. The King the Spanish only half visits (5)

7. Emperor’s scooter ran over Welsh girl (9)

8. Slowly intoned impasse was ahead (7)

14. Clear about 6 unaware (9)

16. Approx. one fleet onward to station for Brief Encounter (9)
17. Great jumper in the early spring, a fiework all year round (8).

18. Ford or Cliff (7)
20. Old Administrative division C (7)

22. Filipino language includes singing sisters’ name (5)

24. Rash for bees (5)

25. Plan on including unsigned work (4) 

The Saturday Nap -Week Seven

This time last year Oscar Whisky was the tip and he came to win the race only to trip over the last hurdle (going just a bit too fast if you ask me -who has never sat on a horse), which spoiled my day more than somewhat.
Old favourite Get Me Out of Here is in opposition tomorrow, who I'm glad has been putting some well-deserved 1's against his name recently after some very worthy 2's.
Long Run is one that I'm happy to oppose and so, even given the Henderson stable's treble today, I'll be giving Silviniaco Conti every consideration at Haydock; another of Henderson's several stable stars, Finian's Rainbow, has interesting opposition at Ascot in For Non Stop and Captain Chris, who returns after a troubled season last year still capable of proving to be the top class horse I thought he was on his way to being at the start of 2011/12.
Oscar Whisky would be the selection but it's such an obvious thing to do that 8/11 is all we can have now and 4/7 would be no surprise tomorrow. Similar things apply to Balder Succes and Baltimoar at Haydock.
Katkeau could be one for the Pipe stable in a race they have made their own in recent years, Haydock, 2.30, where we will get a price worth having.
But, the nap on a Saturday of many and various options, will be Easter Day, Ascot 12.35.

Maybe tomorrow might be the day that one can tiptoe through the alternatives and put some kind of combination together with the nap, plus Katkeau, Oscar Whisky and Silviniaco Conti.

But, as we know after the very expensive defeat of Grand Crus last week, nine out of ten of us account holders has the footnote 'Mug Punter' added at the bottom of our bookmaker's file on us and we spend whatever fraction we choose to of what we get from our week at work to pay for their fat cigars.
You flirt with ruin every time you look at a horse race and wonder what might win it. And that, for me, is the highest form of glamour.

Best Poem and Best Collection 2012

As explained in the announcement of the shortlist for my website awards for 2012, these personal choices depend entirely on me having read them and, thus, having been aware of them and made the decision to read them in the first place. Last year would have been made even more competitive had I read the John Burnside book before the decision but, as it was, the result wouldn't have been any different.
This year has been quieter but that takes nothing away from the decision that The World's Two Smallest Humans by Julia Copus, the only collection on the shortlist, is well worth its place alongside the previous winners of the Best Collection prize.
And when I say 'prize', there isn't one.

Kate Bingham's poem, Open, has been a big favourite since the publication of the Forward anthology and I've read it most nights and love it. It has given the winner everything to think about in a tight finish but the award of this most obscure of honours goes to Julia Copus for Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden from the winning collection. And so congratulations go to her on the first double in the short history of this feature. 

World Of Its Own

World Of Its Own

A team of Scientists at the University of Montreal research facility in conjunction with European colleagues and data provided by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope  and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope has discovered a rogue planet in the Milky Way Galaxy.


 

http://guardianlv.com/2012/11/scientists-discover-new-planet-that-has-no-sun/
 

It turns and turns in search of a sunrise,

something it’s dreamed of but has never seen.

The landscapes are dark and extravagant 
 

but, like a lover who’s now bored with love,

they go to waste ashamed of what they think

and also what they think they might have been. 
 

There are no memories of orbits, moons,

although everything came from somewhere once

and so there might have been a life to write 
 

if ever any evidence were found

of seasons, apogees or sibling worlds.

But, for the time being (if time occurs 
 

where there’s no other thing to fix it by),

it is perfect, ripping through the painless

wild, lost but not the least bit concerned.

The Saturday Nap - Week Six

If we lose this week the project goes into deficit and we can't have that.
Tipping the favourite in the big race is a very obvious thing to do but Grand Crus would appear to be that sometimes dubious thing, 'a handicap good thing'.
There's every chance that the 5/2 currently available in places will prove good value, the most convincing reason for that being the current good form of the stable with Dynaste going in today and The Package winning at Wincanton last Saturday.
Under David Pipe they nowadays pull off their share of big race wins in races they target rather than racking up the four-timers and a regular litany of winners in novice hurdles that Martin used to. Their sole winner at the Cheltenham festival, Salut Flo, had been announced as their best chance and it duly obliged.
The Paddy Power Chase is of course a competitive event with Walkon apparently fancied for the King/Thornton partnership and Nadiya de la Vega at 14/1 a bit eye-catching after wiining very nicely first time out this season. But the selection could prove to have been put well in at these weights and sometimes one has to believe in what appears to be straightforward.
Another old-fashioned point in his favour is the fact that Ladbrokes are shorter than other bookmakers on this. That used to be a broad hint when I studied such things rather more obsessively.

Shortlists for Best Poem and Best Collection

I am delighted to be now in a position to announce the shortlists for this website's Best Poem and Best Collection awards for 2012.

Since their inception, these awards have found their own very obscure place in the poetry community. Untainted by prize-money, they bring with them for the winners only the knowledge and satisfaction that their work was appreciated by me. And anybody who has been following The Saturday Nap feature here will understand why there isn't likely to be anything as tawdry as a cash prize any time soon.
It is a particularly difficult honour to achieve because first of all the work needs to have been read by me, which means it has to have been noticed by me and subsequently considered worthy of my attention. Only then can it be compared with the other candidates and prove its ultimate worth.

The winners will be announced in a couple of weeks' time. The shortlists under consideration for the time being are,

Best Poem

Kate Bingham, Open, from the Forward anthology
Julia Copus, Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden, from The World's Two Smallest Humans
James Fenton, Cosmology, from Yellow Tulips
Chris Preddle, Sharpnosed Fish, from South 45
Jane Yeh, The Body in the Library, from The Ninjas

Best Collection

Julia Copus, The World's Two Smallest Humans.

And, yes, that is a shortlist of one so the announcement of the winner of that category isn't going to be very exciting. I could have made a game of it by including the Fenton and Yeh books but I like to think that anything shortlisted is a serious candidate for the prize and in this case the conclusion is foregone.
Those observers who remain keen on monitoring the gender balance of those successful in the poetry world will be able to note that 60% of the Best Poem shortlist are female as well as 100% of the Best Collection. I don't think this indicates a crisis in the state of poetry written by men. In fact, it is of no relevance whatsoever.

I have collated a list of previous winners, for my own benefit as much as anything.

Best Poem

2011 Martin Mooney, Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
2010 Paul Muldoon, The Fish Ladder
2009 Don Paterson, The Day

Best Collection

2011 David Harsent, Night
2010 Lachlan MacKinnon, Small Hours

Jane Yeh - The Ninjas

Jane Yeh, The Ninjas (Carcanet)

I never thought I'd buy a book called The Ninjas. I doubt if I ever will again but, in the meantime, the title does befit one of the themes of this collection, which draws a cartoon parallel world, a skewed displacement and conspiracy that both threatens and protects our own.
The poems overlap and link together in a way that makes it very much more a 'book' than a set of poems.
There are a number of groups of poems spread throughout the running order, not only the android, ninja and robot poems but some on wildlife, poems on paintings of siblings (by Sargent and Van Dyck) and then Last Summer, , Five Years Ago, , Last Spring, and This Morning, that somewhat unexpectedly ends the book not on its customary uneasy tone but with a rising feeling of fulfilment.
The Body in the Library is a fine piece of knowing angst and suspicion. We live precariously not very far from a hidden underworld of strange motives and supernatural forces, or is it just a child's baroque imagination.
In Sequel to The Witches,
They restore bassoons as a front for their larceny.

It is impressively imagined, clever, mildly disturbed and discomfiting because it might be more real than the indulgent fantasy it purports to be but where it fits on a scale between superficial trivia and profound is hard to say except that since it is undoubtedly postmodern, the question perhaps should not be put.  

Danny Baker - Going to Sea in a Sieve

Danny Baker, Going to Sea in a Sieve (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

The Greatest Living Englishman has delivered a first volume of memoirs that, in spite of the highest of expectations and overdue wait, refuses point blank to disappoint and, if anything, exceeds its remit.

Although it might look like another celebrity book from a well-known personality, it differs from the vast majority of the rest of those in that the author actually has a personality and it is written by the person whose name appears on the front. And this book covers the years to 1982, the period of his progress towards being and then being a pop music industry ‘insider’ rather than only a broadcaster in a league of his own in an age when his 6.06 radio phone-in on Radio 5 was taken over by David Mellor and only then received awards. If that is the required level of mediocrity then it’s not so surprising that Danny Baker has been removed from jobs at regular intervals. One can’t imagine Mellor throwing away such remarks as when Alan Dicks, a desperate appointment by Fulham FC at their lowest ebb, was inevitably sacked, ‘and with him went the best chant in the football league’. 

However, before I roll out the requisite paragraphs that establish that I revere the wunderkind on this side of idolatry, it is worth noting that some of his charmed career was spent at the NME and some of it passing judgement on pop records. And I’m not enamoured enough to be persuaded by his choice of Steely Dan as his second favourite act after the Beatles. I’m a big fan of Al Green but there’s more to liking him than the fact that some of my name is in his. But it is, I’m told less often these days, a free country, and so we can let Steely Dan be. Somewhat less convincing is his insistence on a devotion to British progressive rock. What Baker doesn’t seem to realize is that you are supposed to actually listen to your stated favourite music from time to time and not just pretend to like it so that people think you are outré and of a different stamp. That claim is surely an affectation based in nostalgia for bygone days. Whereas his choice of Cliff’s The Next Time on Desert Island Discs as ‘a last hurrah for a lost innocence’ in pop music was by no means a contrary statement but a beautiful observation. But he rates Queen very lowly indeed and so you lose some but you win enough to end up in credit. And this is no sort of dull survey of pop history, anyway, but an avalanche of anecdote and adventure by one who’s naturally outgoing disposition continued to get its rewards by forever landing him on his feet, in the right place at the right time, to make the most of it.

At 266 pages, it is all too short. I was expecting at least 900 pages of such exuberance but he is a professional and enjoys himself for money so why would he want to do more than deliver anything thicker than the approximately just acceptable length of this discourse. But it is LOL at regular intervals and rarely less than absorbingly entertaining in between. And well-written enough to make a few passages demand re-reading immediately.

 

His time at the coolest record shop in London brought him into contact with the biggest names in pop at an early age. Marc Bolan, Elton John and all were regular visitors to the shop. Bolan gets as good a report as any, famously giving Danny the very t-shirt that he was wearing only for that story to end tragically soon after. Queen and Mick Jagger come out of it badly. After buying a record with the help of his minder, Mick,

fixed me with a huge knowing smile that seemed to dare me to find him preposterous.

 

As he says, it is remarkable to reflect now that it was only seven years from Woodstock to the Sex Pistols (whereas now all that happens in seven years is that it progresses from series 5 of the X Factor to series 12). From involvement with punk in 1976/77, through Blondie and Paul Weller, we climax with the trip to America to encounter Michael Jackson but all these famous names are not the stars of the piece or even really the main point of it.

The most memorable character in the story is surely Baker's father, Fred, a docker with an uncomplicated way with words, money and life itself. When eventually Danny's sister's boyfriend has occasion to come to their house rather than entertain at his place, Mr. Baker answers the door, takes one look at the lad, unsuitably attired in his view, and says,

Well, you can fuck off for a start.

 

And the other star turn is Blackie, the genius dog who answers the door in more hospitable style.

 

It is over all too soon, this unplanned stumbling forward, living on his wits, from one piece of miraculous good fortune to the next but apparently always retrieving from adversity further gratefully received good times beyond imagining. It is further evidence, if it were needed, that talent is no use to one at all unless you have the right attitude to tie it to and make of one's allotment a fertile patch of good humour with so little side to it that nobody can see it if it stands sideways on.
It is one of the best books I've ever read.

The Saturday Nap - Week Five

Wincanton tomorrow is all set up to be a typical Paul Nicholls benefit and the fact that I've just looked through it and talked myself out of Zarkandar, Poungach and Michel Le Bon makes that a virtually cast iron 36/1 treble.
I'll take Stagecoach Pearl, Kelso 2.40, to go and do again what he did there this time last year.
I don't share the widespread superstition or partiality towards grey horses but have nothing against them either. If we want a genuinely mug reason to back him, the jockey is called Ryan Mania and one can't help but like that.

Signed Poetry Books - Kate Bingham

This was a bonus.
Having been suitably impressed with the Kate Bingham poem in the Forward anthology, I ordered her two books of poems from Amazon New & Used.
And this one turned out to be signed.

Top 100 Pop Records

I've admitted before, and will continue to admit, that the list making compulsion is a dreary and wrong sideline that one should have grown out of as one became adult.
But it remains possibly the unattainable purpose of an interest in any art form to decide what is best, and perhaps more importantly, why.
I've never been happy with the Top 100 Pop Records I posted here a few years ago. It's never right.
And so, how can one improve the process to make a better list.
What I have embarked upon is a project of adding one more certainty for a Top 100 place to my list last thing every night. I've been doing it for just over a week and it's easy so far and should remain easy for at least another month. There are Motown classics and works of such perfection that, I hope, still don't need questioning. Not even Baby Washington's That's How Heartaches Are Made is on the list yet, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuPpUMwJlY8 but I'm hoping I'll get to it before too long.
It is starting to look very different now and I would hope that the long view might filter out passing fancies and leave me with just the ultimate classics but I know there's a danger that some things that were old favourites and very worthy might be overshadowed by some late emerging predilection to present myself as if I was always a Northern Soul fan at heart, or some other mantle I might like to try on even now. I'm hoping that nominating one record at a time prevents that from happening.
Do tune in sometime around next February to see the final list.

View from the Boundary

The deadline for submissions to South is at the end of the month. I sometimes wonder if I should send poems to other magazines like I used to in olden days but, quite honestly, there aren't enough of them. Poems, I mean. There are still plenty of magazines. Last night I went through my very business-like attache case of poems to see what I had to offer.Within the case are two files. One is for poems that are likely candidates for my next booklet, which we could call file A, and the other is for those that might not even make it as 'fillers'. Not that I'd ever admit to including any fillers, of course.

Two of the A set have already appeared in print. Two got relegated to file B on the latest reading, and that left me with five from which to pick three to sent to South. We will see about that. I feel I ought to maintain the vaguest of presences as an obscure figure on the outskirts of the literary world, like one of those low magnitude stars that doesn't even get joined up into the recognized shape of the constellation that it is in. In the meantime, two poems were relegated from file B to oblivion. And so although I generally have in mind a booklet of about 14 poems every four years, it is now three years since the last one and I have only seven likely candidates for the next. But when one has nothing to say it is best to say nothing and the frugality of 'less is more' is an approach I approve of.

Two things are required to produce a good poem. Something to write about and a way of writing about it, not necessarily in that order. It doesn't sound that difficult until you don't have either.

--

I have been enjoying the first chapters of the biography of Chagall, above, with the sensitive young artist moving from the Jewish quarter of provincial Vitebsk to sophisticated, tough St.Petersburg. But I'm taking it slowly while reading other books alongside. Last winter my attempt on a biography of Walter Sickert began with the best of intentions but was eventually abandoned at about halfway, stalled in a quagmire of dense detail.

John Francome's Stone Cold was reasonably thrilling but heavy-handed in its stereotypical baddies and overcooked sex and violence. I'll read anything with a horse race in it from time to time but, as in my previous encounter with Francome as novelist, I wondered how much of it he wrote himself (possibly quite a bit of it) and thought of Dick Francis as being from an age when thrills were more cliff-hanging, page turning and less gratuitous.

Soon to arrive are Danny Baker's first volume of autobiography and Jane Yeh's new book of poems.

--

Once the Yeh book has been considered, it will be nearly time to think about the annual website awards of Best Poem and Best Poetry Collection and the shortlists will be put up here a week or two before the winners are given the satisfaction of this minor honour along with no cash prize whatsoever. 

In the meantime, it is possible to announce that Ian McEwen's Sweet Tooth was convincingly the best novel I read this year but that the best event I attended is a wide-open heat.

Out of the three superb Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra concerts, the Beethoven 'Pastoral' Symphony might just have been the favourite but not by much; The Magnetic Fields in the Royal Festival Hall in April was inevitably great; The Brodsky Quartet in Portsmouth Cathedral in June has to be a candidate on account of the Golijov Tenebrae; that was quickly followed by the Poetry Parnassus reading back in RFH with Heaney, Soyinka et al; and two readings at Cheltenham deserve at least places on the shortlist.

I don't know. Let's give it to the Brodskys.
The best CD I bought this year was the Charpentier Lecons de Tenebres, exactly what I was looking for as 'something like' the best disc ever which was, of course, James Bowman and Michael Chance doing Francois Couperin's setting of the same thing. But that disc wasn't released this year. And so, the best CD of the year, and certainly the most played (certain bits of it) was the Music from the Eton Choirbook.
But the gala nights of the poetry shortlists and prize-giving are still to come. You will be required to be suitably attired and be within reach of an appropriate glass with which to toast the winners when you tune in for those. 



The Saturday Nap - Week Four

We were the victim of a bit of a price collapse last week. It is not the intention to tip odds-on shots here but with the winners of several races in opposition, it was reasonable to think we might get even money or a fraction more at Chepstow. However, the word had clearly got out and he won convincingly enough having looked for a few heart-stopping moments as if he wasn't going to quicken up.
This weekend is another full of interest with Smad Place in the long distance hurdle at Wetherby probably the best advice in the racing taking place on this side of the Atlantic.
The Breeders' Cup can be a graveyard for European hopes. The travelling involved, the end of a long season, the significance of the draw on American tracks and the fact that one doesn't really have proper form lines to be sure about make taking short prices about raids by our best potentially trappy. It is something of an act of faith but faith is something I do have in Excelebration (Santa Anita, 11.40 pm our time), highly consistent, genuinely top class and a complete professional in the best sense of the word who put up his best performance yet (above) last time at Ascot.
According to Aiden O'Brien, the only worry is that the QEII, pictured, was only two weeks ago.
I've taken the 11/8 already and am happy with it.