View from the Boundary

It was with an elegant disregard for the happy ending that a handful of fundamentalist paralympians put the final full stop to the British sporting glories of 2012 with some ungracious reflections on the honours list. It is a sorry tale of hubris and expectation when one bemoans the inadequacy of the honour awarded by suggesting that a higher honour was deserved.
But I'm afraid they are not the first to be so ungrateful. The revelations a couple of years ago of who had declined such awards in the past brought to our attention Philip Larkin's refusal of one of those 'British Empire' appendices to his name and he went up further in my estimation all too briefly until it further transpired that he wanted something better, which he did eventually get.
But, really, such attitudes simply will not do and not for the first time it is Ken Livingston that exhibits some common decency, although possibly offering a diluted reason for doing so.
Following on from my own summer's Olympic triumph in our family bag boggling tournament, the Christmas events in Swindon had one major star in my neice, Laura, who established herself in a class of her own at Scrabble, including the remarkable game pictured in which she produced three 50 point bonus words. I am sometimes suspected of being good at Scrabble, or I ought to be, but I'm not. Laura has found her talent for the game and from now on we are all merely Joey Bartons playing in the shadow of her Lionel Messi.
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So, we are now in a position to audit the second season of the Saturday Nap feature here and find that we improved on the marginal profit our selections showed in 2011. Those that stuck with it and didn't take the profit after 10 weeks were rewarded with two further winners (at short prices) that left the £10 level stake profit at starting prices at £28.45 and a 23.7% return over 12 weeks which was enhanced to £37.60 (31.33%) if you had taken the mostly better prices that I did. That is a healthy enough return, with 6 of the 12 selections being successful, and next year- who knows- I might have to make it a subscription-only feature and charge for such gilt-edged information.
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The highlight of the Christmas television was surely Restless, the William Boyd novel brought to the small screen. Not because of any older woman glamour provided by Charlotte Rampling but for an all-round good job well done. Celebrity Mastermind continued to downgrade the brand by asking some apparently well-known people (and I realize that they are well-known to some if not to me) questions that didn't really belong in the Mastermind quiz book. In fact, with some knowledge of the specialist subjects- like David Bowie- even they crossed over into the General Knowledge area at times.
But I got done those things I had saved up to do in the midwinter break, which was to write the introductions to two forthcoming Portsmouth Poetry Society meetings for 2013- one on e.e.cummings and one on Is there a difference between poetry written by women and men, which I notice we have been beaten to by Pascale Petit's piece in the winter issue of Poetry Review. I'll be able to use these to fill a gap when ideas are running short here in the new year and when Portsmouth Library have made available their copy of Sean O'Brien's Collected Poems, I will try to find something I haven't said before to say about that major career retrospective.
And 2013 might be the date of a new booklet of poems by me. It's possible that the file of poems for inclusion will stretch to the requisite number of pages by October and at present the working title in progress is The Perfect Murder, so if I could just reserve that title for the time being, I'd be grateful if nobody else used it in the meantime.
But if I find myself still here doing the same thing this time next year then we will count 2013 as successful as 2012 was. I don't ask for much.

HNY, Best, D.

The Saturday Nap - Week Eleven, and Christmas Nap

I was quite apologetic a few weeks ago when tipping an odds-on winner here and so felt considerably worse than that last week when the selection went off at odds-on and then got beat.
However, to a £10 level stake at starting prices over the ten weeks so far we are still £12.30 ahead, a 12.3% return on the investment in ten weeks which is better than you'll get from a building society. And so I suggest that the project can end there for anyone who has lost confidence in my guaranteed profit-making scheme. Take the money and, by all means, run.
For those determined to see out the full stint until Boxing Day, though, there is only one horse tomorrow that looks anything like an investment. Ulck du Lin, Ascot 3.40, would be one to keep on  the right side of and 7/4 would be fine. Keep it simple and stick it all on that.
Looking towards Boxing Day and an end to this little adventure, the Christmas Nap will be Dynaste, Kempton, 2.00.

And Best Wishes to Everyone who is good enough to look in here from time to time.

Wiggo played guitar

....jiving us that we were voodoo,
the kids were just crass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NkBB-nu28E

An Indiscretion

An Indiscretion 

The room is unfamiliar and so are

the minutiae of etiquette here.

For neither of them has been here before. 

It’s not as awkward as one might think, though,

to linger on buttons being undone

inside an ecstatic, unworldly calm. 

The vertigo of zips in slow motion,

the dazzle of such ordinary flesh,

are choreography you don’t mention 

while all the time it seems to be going

at least as well as could be expected.

And, having achieved the necessary 

standard of detachment and disarray,

they put each other back how they found them

close enough to what they’ll get away with.

The Saturday Nap - Week Ten

We were a bit unlucky last week with Join Together coming with a late flourish that would have nailed it for me, this project and lots of other good judges had the winning post been just a few yards further away. As it happened, Hello Bud got all the plaudits for staying on tenaciously at 14 years old but we now have a genuine Grand National prospect (16/1 favourite), which is something I apparently haven't had for a few years and the story has a happy ending.
For all I have thought about Blue Square in recent weeks, they do, once in a blue moon, add a free bet to your account (out of sympathy, I imagine) and last night I noticed that the exact amount of the two bets I had on Join Together had been added to my account in free bets. So, having missed the well-backed At Fisher's Cross when he won recently, I took the 4/1 about him at Cheltenham today and he readily obliged at 11/4. So, hats off to Blue Square.
But we do still need to make sure that the Saturday Nap ends on a level stake profit at SP. Doing Join Together each way would have put us mathematically safe but I deliberately went for the big hit. So this week we are back on a 'safety first' strategy.
One way of finding a horse to avoid in recent weeks has been to simply check the headline of the Racing Post Weekender and this week they go for Walkon. It has drifted in the market today while Nicholls' Cristal Bonus has been supported but Nadiya de la Vega at 11/1 might be worth staying with again in a race that doesn't look like one for a big punt.
Zarkandar is tempting in the hurdle at Cheltenham and while I would oppose Rock on Ruby there, I am less happy in taking on Grandouet, who I might even back against the favourite but this might be one best watched because you'll only have yourself to blame when being wiser and poorer after the event.
With Far West and Oscar Whisky at prohibitive odds on in other races at Cheltenham, it might be preferable to look at Doncaster where Henderson and Nicholls send their second jockeys to contest a Grade 2 hurdle and where Vasco du Ronceray, 2.45, is preferred.

Patrick Moore

One of my first memories of the internet was being shown this, http://www2.b3ta.com/patrickmoore/ and so I thought I'd leave it as a tribute to the great man.

The Saturday Nap - Week Nine

Novice hurdles are generally the sort of races I like best for sensible investments but we are safely ahead of the bookmakers in this project and I don't mind having an old-fashioned punt once in a while.
And so, while Sam Winner in the handicap at Sandown is of interest and there might be a couple of short priced, safety first options available, I might try to put this project to bed once and for all with a 6/1 shot and none of that each way messing about either.
Of course, the first clash of  the Henderson- trained Sprinter Sacre and Nicholls' Sanctuaire is a race to relish but not, I think, to bet on. These two are likely to get to know each other fairly well over the next couple of years, one might think.  But the Becher Chase at Aintree is one of those minor classics that provides real jump racing. A horse I have liked for a little while now is Join Together and I hope that this might be the race in which he makes a name for himself. But I don't just hope, I think that 6/1, or more if you can get it, is a fair enough reflection, and worth doing.

Give a Poet a Bad Name

It might not always be wise to introduce oneself as a 'poet' when asked 'and what do you do?' Some little pieces of body language tell you all you need to know when people start glancing at their watch, looking across the room for some imaginary acquaintance they need to see or simply shuffling away uneasily.
While many poets are perfectly reasonable sorts, the epithet has dubious overtones that usually make me offer some other enterprise I'm involved in, even if I genuinely think of myself as a poet on that particular day or don't. Sometimes it might be preferable to say you are a tax inspector, an accountant or even an estate agent, shrug and airily make some observations about the state of the property market. It is a worthy occupation on the face of it, the equivalent of a carpenter, I sometimes like to think. It's just that the idea of 'poet' brings with it a number of connotations or overtones, or the unavoidable prejudices that others carry with them.
Most harmlessly, but not to be desired, would be the lingering stereotype of the Romantic dreamer somehow detached from the humdrum world, thinking of higher things and with a predilection for swooning. Long hair (on a bloke), some disarray or eccentricity of dress sense or a distracted manner might be identifying aspects of one of these. It's an old-fashioned idea in many ways but still, I imagine, with some currency.
One might be suspected of some self-regard, announcing one's poetic calling, as if you valued your own wit, insight and use of language above that of lesser, non-poetry writing mortals. This is based on the assumption that 'poet' is a good thing to be and that 'poetry' is intrinsically a good thing when clearly, and in vast reams, there is such a thing as 'bad poetry'. Thus, if admitting to being any sort of poet, I generally add that I'm not a very good one. The responsibility to be consistently profound, original or hilarious in conversation is far too much pressure to bear.
Among any other assumptions one might trigger would be that relatively modern curse of poetry which could be that you are 'difficult'. This would be the worst situation and, if poets do have a bad name that has only journalists, politicians and bankers as obvious types to put below it, then there is a certain faction among them who brought it upon the profession and it is they who really need to be identified and separated off from the otherwise less blameworthy majority of peaceable wordsmiths who, in Auden's phrase, are never going to make anything happen.
Ezra Pound, of course, must take his fair share of the rap. There possibly was difficult poetry before him but it became part of the agenda for a significant number of poets roughly 100 years ago. By no means all of Pound's manifesto was damaging and, as a sharpening up exercise, his legacy had arguably as many beneficial effects as bad ones. However, individuals will pick and choose for themselves which parts of a menu they will find to their taste and the tradition that remained high church modernist, translating into areas of the precious 'avant garde', are those that took to heart the maxim that poetry should be difficult.
Why anybody would want anything to be difficult when it doesn't have to be is as mystifying as their poems, especially in the light of Homer Simpson's wise advice that 'if something's hard to do then it isn't worth doing'. I had some trouble with Prof. John Fuller's argument in Who is Ozymandias, that poetry presents puzzles that the reader enjoys solving. I don't. I don't necessarily want one reading of a poem to reveal all I'm ever going to find to appreciate in it but neither do I want it to be unfathomable and, in the end, I'm often happy for my understanding to be incomplete if I've enjoyed the outing. In fact, I'm not sure one can ever be certain that something has ever been fully understood or if it is desirable for it to be reduced to that.
I can see that some readers will enjoy difficulty. Whether that needs to be a prerequisite of poetry when there is The Listener crossword to be done every week in The Observer to satisfy those savants, I would doubt, though. But if difficulty depends on a thorough grounding in classical references and etymology for interpretation then there are many of us who will make little progress however hard we study the lines. Geoffrey Hill tells us that poetry is not 'self expression' and I like the idea although it does rather torpedo anyone who feels like expressing themselves in verses. But certainly, a poem is often best regarded as a free-standing thng, succeeding or otherwise on its own terms.
The enemy within are those that deliberately set out to be difficult, even going to the trouble of attacking those for who some degree of clarity was regarded as a virtue, and then complaining that some of their potential audience are philistine for finding it difficult. These poets are affronted by the lack of gratitude they encounter from the dismal 'mainstream' (which means everybody except them). And, yes, as you can now see, I've arrived at my old sore point, the itch that I have to scratch once in a while.
Why should we be surprised that if someone deliberately sports what they consider strange attire that they are once in a while met with raised eyebrows or the non-committal gestures of a cartoon Frenchman by those who accept that, yes, okay, that is a bit strange, isn't it. We cling to whatever remains of our liberal culture and welcome all comers but if they take great pains to make themselves obtuse and then are recognized for their obtuseness then it is nobody's fault but theirs.
Of course, there is no stereotype with which to define the generic class of 'poets' and if some of the vestigial impressions of  poetry weren't the fault of the poets themselves in the first place, it's a shame that one of them is ostensibly actively encouraged. By those who then take great pleasure in complaining about it.
So, next time I'm asked, Oh, are you a poet, I'll probably shift uncomfortably from one foot to the other, glance down at my diminished glass of wine and remark how property prices in the area have been flat-lining for a long time now.
   

Kristina Train / Matchbox Twenty

 

Kristina Train, Dark Black (Mercury); Matchbox Twenty, North (Atlantic) 

 

I happened to catch Kristina Train singing Dark Black on Loose Ends on Radio 4 on Saturday and was immediately smitten, having first noticed that it was based on the Whiter Shade of Pale/Air on a G String chord progression that serves so well. It was another factor in her favour that Kristina is a much better candidate to inherit the role of Dusty Springfield as the new white soul diva than was Duffy, that passing fancy who I once paid tribute to by going via Warwick Avenue tube station when going to Lord's cricket ground..

I understand entirely that studio maestros these days can do anything they like to make a consummate pop record because the suspicion remains for some of us of a certain age that pop music ate itself some time ago and can now only reproduce itself, only flawlessly, should it care to. But none of that sort of know-all, seen it all before world weariness can argue with the one and only genuine barometer of critical judgement, which is the involuntary thrill down the back of the neck which the first two tracks here actually restored after I'd been missing it for quite a while, especially in 'popular music'.

Dream of Me is a masterpiece that could have come from Roy Orbison's Mystery Girl album,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNyhWXrLv8Y. We readily suspect that Kristina doesn't actually live a life in which she needs to dream that there is a life where 'everything is bright' that one day she will call 'this life'. On the more bereft of these songs it is hard to believe that anyone would sound quite so gorgeous but that, I suppose, is part of the trick of cheap music's potency. And good luck to her.

I don't quite accept that in the dark grey of winter I'd ever 'Wanna live in LA' but each to their own.

The album uses the track ordering convention of CD's rather than that of LP's in stacking up its best pieces at the start rather than saving them for the beginning and end of each side and so it might be suspected that it trails off towards banality with those less immediate songs that might have been hidden in between their more attractive peers all grouping together towards the end but this is still music that passes pleasantly if not quite as memorably as the opening pieces, which I think will remain favourites.

And I do realize that these are two MOTR, AOR, mainstream, FM and presumably artistically unadventurous albums that would be bought by people that don't buy many pop records. Well, it's a long time since I bought The Faust Tapes, Psychocandy, Metal Box or The Velvet Underground with Nico and so perhaps I ought to be checking out the Katie Melua back catalogue because there's nothing better than music that you enjoy rather just than identify with because you imagine it gives you some credibility.

I hate to think how Matchbox Twenty came to settle on such a naff name for their band. It deserves some sort of prize in a putative award ceremony for the Uncool, and I'm sure they would qualify for the shortlist in other categories there, too. But that only makes Rob Thomas with his routinely impassioned songs of angst and self-examination more attractive.

I saw once that it was their ambition to be Fleetwood Mac and, on reflection, I wouldn't mind being Fleetwood Mac either. They also claim a rare place in popular music by being the answer when I was once asked if I could think of a pop song with the word 'jaded' in it. Yes, Bent.

In my daily considerations on candidates for the Top 100 Pop Songs, Last Beautiful Girl is the Rob Thomas performance that is nudging itself upon my attention but it is early days yet. The thing is that formulae work and this sort of relatively undemanding music 'does what it says on the tin' in that rather blase cliche and if you think you're going to like it, you probably will.

She's So Mean, detailing the attributes of quite an interesting sounding lady, and Overjoyed are presumably the two here that might become Matchbox standards. It's not immediately obvious that this album, their fourth, is one of their best three but in its honest way it does enough and, in that tame genre of mid-Atlantic rock (albeit Australian, it says on its passport), it seems to me at least to come with a bit more verve and spirit, a genuine will to do a little bit extra than some of the safer purveyors of the creaking tradition.  

I daresay it will easily satisfy the existing fanbase without extending the franchise by much.

                                                                     



Alan Bennett - Smut

Alan Bennett, Smut (Faber)

While one can hardly complain when one has gone to a usually reliable source of entertainment and found it very much as you expected, the question will eventually arise as to when did the prepetrator eventually not be quite themselves any more- by being very much the same as they've ever been..
Alan Bennett has been a tremendous writer of plays, films, television, memoirs and fiction for longer than one of my age can quite remember. His masterpieces are many and he has more variety of style about him than any who immediately think of Thora Hird and afternoons eating macaroons might imagine. But there might come a time when we've all played the part of ourselves too long. It would be very harsh to make this allegation of Bennett quite yet but I have an inkling of it in these 'two unseemly stories'.
The theme is familiar in which the racy and, quite honestly, illicit is contrasted with the prim. Satire and/or gentle mocking is achieved on the fulcrum of an unlikely balance between the two. In the first story here, The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson, a widow's student lodgers find an innovative way to make up their rent arrears and Mrs. Donaldson's life seems to benefit from the distraction. You'd say it was unlikely but if you were to read some of the stories in the less edifying Sunday papers - which I admit I haven't for some decades- I'm sure more outlandish things happen. It is no less artfully written or realized by Bennett than one would hope but it wasn't quite 'classic' and one suspects he never got out of third gear in writing this one.
The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes is more successful, more contrived in its plot but openly admitting itself so. There are subterfuge, counter-espionage and layers of deceit as the intricacies of snobbery, money, lust and hypocrisy gather forces in a slightly more convincing tale.
For Graham's mother there was little to choose between Jews and Catholics. The Jews had holidays that turned up out of the blue and Catholics had children in much the same way.
And, of course, Mrs. Forbes needs no shielding from the facts that nobody thinks she wouldn't be able to handle. She knew all the time as the story criss-crosses nearly all the possibilities in a denouement as beautiful as The Importance of Being Earnest.  
Enjoyable but, possibly suffering from the immense expectations one has of its author, it is no better than it should be.