View from the Boundary

Our campaign to have ourselves a merry little Christmas hit with Walter the Worm got us to no.13 in the Humourous chart and no.14 in the Poetry chart on Amazon's Free Kindle Download listings, as far as I could see, which isn't bad.
It doesn't compare with Benny Hill's Ernie but it provided some diversion over the holiday period, following its fortunes, and it's not a bad result for something that some might say isn't humourous and I'm sure others would say isn't poetry.
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And so we can put that down as a qualified success even if I have to admit defeat this year with the Saturday Nap selections. We are left with The New One going to the Champion Hurdle as joint favourite but even winning that won't quite balance the Nap's books for 2013.
However, I'm not ready to resign as a pundit yet. The Ashes series might have prematurely ended the test careers of Graeme Swann and Jonathan Trott but the one figure who failed more spectacularly than any, having predicted 5-0 to England, is Ian Botham.
2013 remains a gambling Annus Mirabilis for me having shown a healthy profit (the first ever in a calendar year) even if that profit is below what it was in March.
How different things already are, though, with Sprinter Sacre and Simonsig suddenly no longer looking like banker bets for Nicky Henderson. I like Nicky Henderson a lot and wish him well. I just don't wish him any compensation via My Tent or Yours in the Champion Hurdle next year.
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I read most of Donna Tartt's The Secret History over the last few days- and it is as good as it is reputed to be, I think- mainly because I thought I ought to know about that before moving on to The Goldfinch.
It is funny in parts, beautifully done and at times easily does enough to qualify for that category of novel that exists specifically to remind me never to try to write one myself, however much I'd like to write even an awful one- just so that I can say that I have.
In between times I had a last look at Fairford Church, and by far my most thorough look. Best known for its fine stained glass windows, it also has some choice graves surrounding it and is one of the best churches for providing that feeling of a piece of history, a corner of England and all those lives that have been and gone through it.
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And I caught up with some recent CD purchases which included the excellent L'Enfance du Christ of Berlioz in the recording by Philippe Herreweghe. Apart from being a marvellous account, the booklet includes the text in French, English and German. A line sung by Joseph, 'I am a carpenter', translates as
Moi, je suis charpentier

and

Ich bin Zimmermann

which appealed to me as a tremendous ambiguity in which he lays claim to having responsibility for Goodbye to Love, some gorgeous baroque music and If Not for You all at once.
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And just in case that wasn't entertainment enough. I was impressed by John Milton's partisan thoughts on whether poetry should rhyme or not. This is, of course, a perennial subject for debate among poets of all sorts.
Explaining why Paradise Lost doesn't rhyme, he says,
that rhyme 'is the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre'.

The lack of rhyme may be seen as a defect by 'vulgar readers'  and rhyme is a 'troublesome and modern bondage'.
So, there you are. I don't mind either way. It is just that I would never have wanted to be on the wrong side of an argument with John Milton.

A Happy New Year to you all.

We can but hope.

Times Crossword Solution

Walter the Worm now Free to download

Walter the Worm is now free to download from Amazon. Via Author Page as above.

So here we go up the charts, one hopes.

Thx & HC.

John Milton, Life, Work and Thought

Gordon Campbell, Thomas N. Corns, John Milton, Life, Work and Thought (Oxford)

Campbell and Corns are two leading Milton specialists and the title of the book says that Milton's work and thought are going to be equal parts of its subject and so one can't complain if it becomes scholarly at times.
Their account of Milton is based much on his thinking in the very long-windedly titled treatises through which he argued his way to controversial stardom. Doctrine and Principles of Divorce was one such of his books but one which might have been motivated as much by his own first marriage than high-minded piety. And its full title did continue for 46 more words. The discussion concerns whether marriage is really about procreation or companionship. Milton is ahead of his time in many ways but a little way behind ours if he thought that surely if it was about companionship then men would prefer the company of other men.
But he is good at arguing his case, famed for it, and especially good on the Republican case in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and he reasons that it is tyranny that has a king rule over his people rather than their peers in turn because, well, they could easily be 'fools'.
Any reader of the book would do well to be well appraised of the religious movements of the time from Presbyterians to Laudists, Smectymnuans to Quakers as well as Puritans because it is a complicated situation and the finer points might be lost on those who thought it was just about Protestantism.
Campbell and Corns, or at least one of them, write with a donnish propensity for le mot juste and from time to time drop in a choice selection from their extensive vocabulary- not only, among many others, 'otiose' for speculation that is pointless, 'euphonious' for writing that sounds nice but 'unmysterious' for something that isn't difficult to deduce. Hardy and Larkin would have appreciated that negative but one begins to relish their verbal showmanship however naturally it might come to them.
But, more than that, another treat are the picturesque names that minor figures in the narrative had. Emery Bigot was a French humanist, 'wholly aware of (Milton's) blindness', who asked him to check certain readings; Brabazon Aylmer bought the rights to Paradise Lost; Praisegod Barbon and Sir Baptist Hicks were presumably named by god-fearing parents while Livewell Chapman was given a bit more leeway in the spiritual guidance offered by his christening.
And, so, what could have been a forbidding subject- and I have no intention of returning to Milton Studies any time soon- provided much entetainment along the way and I am the wiser for having added this volume to my collection of biographies of the English poets.  

James MacMillan - Alpha and Omega

James MacMillan, Alpha & Omega/ Cappella Nova, Alan Tavener, Madeleine Mitchell  (Linn)

I am prone to a sort of brand loyalty in some areas. I am the owner of 35 or so LP's by Gregory Isaacs even though by no means all of them are worth having but I always hoped the next would be as good as the best rather than be the routine item of contract fulfilment that many later ones turned out to be.
In a similar way, I have several CD's of James MacMillan's music, all of which are fine but few of them repeat the first thrill I had when hearing his Seven Last Words from the Cross.
Much of MacMillan is more apocalyptic and portentous than I would usually like and with a title like Alpha & Omega, one might expect this new release to be more of the same. But I was taken by the credit of a solo violinist, the solo violin part of the Seven Last Words being one of the best things about it.
Missa Dunelmi begins in quiet, monastic fashion before the Gloria rises to a great shining forth; St. Patrick's Magnificat has more of a recognisable melody as if subliminally from a folk tune and the same could be said of I am your Mother. But it is Domine non secundum peccata nostrum that the violin, played by Madeleine Mitchell, features in. At first it is as a shimmering embellishment but it becomes a soaring line, perhaps more involved than involving, before finally taking up a central position and delivering all that was expected of it ('a response of pure, ethereal emotion'), reminiscent of the earlier masterpiece and almost as good.
One hopes that MacMillan would do it more often but finds in the interview in the booklet that it is a difficult thing for him to do, mixing solo violin with choral textures and so we must be grateful for a rare treat. But this is one of the better recent releases of MacMillan's music and I am glad to have bought it.

The Christmas Nap

I'll take The New One to beat My Tent or Yours in the Christmas Hurdle at Kempton and double up with Dynaste in the King George.
And that will be that until I'm back with a Cheltenham Festival Preview in March.

And a Happy Christmas to you.

The Saturday Nap

I missed Easter Day (Ascot 1.15) when he won a couple of weeks ago and so will be hoping to make up for lost opportunities with him.
And although the Ladbroke is exactly not the sort of race I like to get involved in it might be worth taking a chance with City Slicker (Ascot 3.35) who looks the type and receives weight from some other major players and he can be done each way at 8/1 with Paddy paying 5 places.

Walter the Worm kindle edition

For no other reason but to try to have a big Christmas hit in the Amazon Free Poetry Download chart,
we are releasing Walter the Worm as a kindle on Amazon on or about December 23rd so that it will be free to download for five days
over Christmas.

It is an inane classic that would be too patronizing to children to say is a 'children's book'. It first appeared in a very limited, private edition in 1990 and bears no relation to any other worm character in books you might find on the internet.

So, please, if you own a kindle or the app, could you take a couple of minutes to download this free Christmas present not only as a gift from here but also to support this self-serving attempt on the charts.

Thanks.

A Crossword for Christmas

It is traditional for some publications to feature puzzles or entertainments to amuse their audience over the Christmas holiday. So, here is a crossword, the first gift to you from David Green (Books).

And, yes, there will be another along shortly.

I have tried to make the clues more elegant than they were to begin with but apologies if they seem sometimes a bit more contrived than the usual level of contrivance allows.


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Across 

1. Len’s suit swapped for tools (8)

6. Fish backed away from the wind (3)

8. Loud music with fast food followed Fools and Horses (4, 3,5)

9. What’s the point in being awestruck (4)

10. Old lady confused about song in the fields (8)

12. For example including badly bred tennis player (6)

14, and 17 down, Carol’s period of abstinence nearby. It’s different outside. (6, 5)

16. So, grain’s for ladies in Spain (8)

18. Erica kept Christmas treat inside (4)

20. Oregon acting, acting like people in church (12)

22. It’s encountered in some towns (3)

23. He’s got nothing on (8)

Down 

2, and 19, They came from the Orient, they said (5,5)

3. Present you have to get knotted (7)

4. Unhappily am nearing where baby was born (2,1,6)

5. He is onside with no one around (3)

6. Composer in trouble, hardly (5)

7. Make clear previous stretch of land (7)

11. Fend off insect that is obdurate (9)

13. I formed into a god-like shape (7)

15. More fortunate to be braver without beginning (7)

17. see 14 Across

19. see 2

21. An age in France once (3)

 

The First Teenagers

The First Teenagers 

It seemed a good time to have a good time,

adventures on the brink of a new world

like sputniks in orbit or angels blessed 

in coffee bars on Saturday nights.

Everything’s American, it’s nearly

always summer and it’s hard to resist 

someone who looks like someone in a film.

And this is just the start of it, the long

suburban jitterbug and twist 

for those who found themselves on the jukebox

or in the back seats of cars at the drive-in,

the first people ever to have been kissed.

The Saturday Nap

By far the most important thing that is going to happen this weekend is seeing The New One run at Cheltenham.. I'm afraid he will be at prohibitive odds with only Zarkandar to beat, which he should do over this course and distance, one would hope.
And so although he is the nap to clear up the loose change of this feature's deficit this year, it is also recommended that one takes the 4/1 still available in a number of places for the Champion Hurdle to get back the other 4 points we are down to a level 1 point stake which means we might not know if we ended up in profit or not until the middle of March.
But that is a serious suggestion, the best bet to have on a day like this, because once he has won, he won't be 4/1 any more, I believe he is a considerably better horse than My Tent or Yours and Ladbrokes, who sometimes know better than anyone, have him 3/1 favourite already.

Best Poem and Best Collection 2013

It is decision time.

I kept reading all the new books of poems I bought this year and some gained in stature while others stayed roughly where they had been from the start.
Sue Hubbard's book was always one to return to as it impressed more and more. Michael Symmons Roberts already has the Forward Prize to his name for a book that surely extended his achievement so far and then after I had picked shortlists for Best Poem and Best Collection, Helen Mort came late into the reckoning and was added to the Best Collection list.
Any of the Best Poem shortlist would be a worthy winner and one of Helen's could be added in there but I won't go to those lengths and I'm glad I don't nominate a runner-up in these awards because that would be too difficult but a clear winner is Roddy Lumsden's Women in Paintings, http://edinburgh-review.com/extracts/poetry-women-in-paintings-roddy-lumsden/
I have already made special mention of it here in the summer. It does all I want a poem to do and perhaps that bit more and makes one look forward to a new volume from Roddy whenever that might be.

One can see why Symmons Roberts is already a prize-winner in 2013. Drysalter is a sustained technical achievement and continues to lure one into its meditations. I've been looking at Helen Mort's book ever since I recently got it and, as I said only a few days ago here, it is a debut collection. I'm not sure how many years it is since a first book made quite such an impression. One might have expected some experimental initial efforts before a poet produced anything quite so assured.
For a while I wondered if it ranked alongside my long established favourite, August Kleinzahler,'s book and thought about making it a shared Best Collection this year but the whole point is that I'm supposed to make decisions here and must do so if I can.
And so my Best Collection of 2013 was August Kleinzahler's Hotel Oneira, for its tender machismo, sense of loss and transience done in a way that I think is all his own.

Helen Mort - Division Street

Helen Mort, Division Street (Chatto & Windus)

Hold the front page. Re-open the shortlists.

I had seen some poems by Helen Mort and thought this would be a book to get when it came out. Then I saw some others that suggested she might not be quite so much my sort of thing as I had thought. And then The Observer gave their monthly poetry book review to it and convinced me it was one to order. I'm glad it did.
The Complete Works of Anonymous looks to me a poem that could be in most of any forthcoming anthologies of contemporary poetry from hereon in. Any number of poets will be wishing they had thought of it first. It has an immediacy, a sort of 'instant classic' feel to it that some newly heard music makes you think you knew it already and that it had always been there. The poem has, of course, always been there waiting to be written in some theories of aesthetics but Helen was the one who found it.
It is ostensibly an unrhymed sonnet but it has rhyme to be discovered in it and the sort of music that happens when metre and a sensitivity to the sound of words are put together in considered ways.
And that is what happens in many poems throughout the book. The poems stay with you after you've put it down, and, I have found, through the next day, until you go back to look at them again. Some books of poems can congeal into a general idea of what they were like without any of them remaining vivid in one's memory. And rather than performing my own creative writing exercise in a review, like 'the poems seek the otherness in various elsewheres', of which there is far too much to be found in other places, that is all I ever want poems to do to prove their worth, rather like in Larkin's Pleasure Principle or any other common sense approach to the enjoyment of poems for their own sake.
And so I've been thinking of how we are similar to dogs, of fingerprints, of things turning in on themselves and of loose, sub-conscious associations. Not that I don't think of such things already, but grateful for the way these poems have put them.
The divisions indicated in the title are more than the political ones suggested by the photograph on the cover from Arthur Scargill's pet project, the miners' strike of the 80's. There are other social divisions, the ends of relationships and the division between things and their names.
I think it was poems from Scab that I had my doubts about. This set of poems is autobiographical but, beginning at Orgreave, which was before Helen was born, I wasn't convinced of their authenticity until one realizes that it is really about a later dramatic reconstruction of the picket line confrontations. And so we get any number of divisions between her background and her university life, and between the actual events of the miners' strike and the reconstruction of it.
But, as so often happens for me, thematically loaded poems aren't as good as a more abstract idea brought convincingly to life and explained both clearly and slightly waywardly as in the best poems here which are, at their best, very much the sort of thing that makes me think that poetry is second only to music and only tied to words by necessity and somewhat reluctantly.
The fingerprints are in George, Afraid of Fingerprints, a brilliant list of where George might have left his as evidence of where he'd been, either innocently, with later regret or shame.
In The Dogs, Helen has to remind herself that she's 'not a dog' because

I'll not know love like theirs, observed in mute proximity

and if I sometimes sit bolt upright after dark, sensing
a movement in the yard, it's only that I've learned
a little of their vigilance.

It's hard to pick a favourite so soon. This book won't be put on a shelf for quite a while yet. But the way that the idea of fire runs through the 12 lines of Fagan's, with a pub quiz and a relationship's fracture, makes it a miniature masterpiece, ending,

What links the fire of London and the colour blue?
I'm wondering if a match would be enough
or if there's really no smoke without you.

And if the answer to the question did happen to be 'Chelsea' then it is almost too clever and even better than I thought.
But Helen Mort is 28 years old and this is her first book. That isn't particularly relevant except to think that most poets probably produce a better third book than their first was and so anything might be possible.
No pressure, then.

The Saturday Nap

Join Together came with a great late run in the Becher Chase last year and very nearly landed the nap and a bit of a punt and became my Grand National horse all at the same time. However, having been impeded and effectively taken out in his next race, his form since doesn't read very well. There is every chance that he has been aimed specifically back at this race, particularly on account of his sound jumping, and I'd love to land a 12/1 winner but I need to be taking more confidence out of the form book than I can.
I note Across the Bay from the McCain yard and a plunge in his price but then see that his wins almost always come on heavy ground, not good to soft, and so suspect the Irish raiders might be the ones to look at but there is not a stand out prospect given such a big field and endless possibilities. But I'll kick myself so hard it will hurt if Join Together returns to form and I'm not on him.
We might be better off at Sandown where it is also competitive but it means good horses at good prices. I don't mind taking on Grandouet with Balder Succes (1.50) because I have been impressed with him so far but whether I want to weigh in heavily with Taquin du Seuil and Hinterland also in opposition is another matter.
I would give Sire de Grucy (3.00) another chance but he seems to be drifting a little bit alarmingly in the market at this early stage.
I can't make a good enough case for any of these to myself never mind recommend a bet to the whole of the internet.
On Sunday morning at 6 a.m. our time The Fugue continues her international career in the Hong Kong Vase at Sha Tin. She has proved durable so far and is becoming something like the Triptych of her generation.  I much prefer Aintree, Sandown and Wetherby to Sha Tin but on this occasion the nap is going overseas in search of something to believe in.

View from the Boundary

It took some finding but I found it in the end in the relevant diary. I was in the Clutha Vaults, Glasgow on March 28, 2000. It looked forbidding from the outside and I wasn't sure if I was going to like it and so I said to my mate that I'd look round the door first to see what it was like and if I didn't fancy it, we were going somewhere else, notwithstanding his high recommendation.
It was fine and as the evening progressed it got finer. Ian had a wide knowledge of pubs in Glasgow and Edinburgh and so I should never have doubted him. Which only makes the tragedy that missed me by 13 and a half years all the worse. It was an excellent place and I've remembered it ever since, partly by having picked up this small momento there. The news thus came with added shock value to me which only goes to show what these news events are like for those who are genuinely close to them.
But it also shows what memory is like. Deeply unreliable. I met an acquaintance at Fratton Park yesterday at the Portsmouth Ladies-Tottenham match (great game, it was never offside, ref). His 40th birthday party was 8 and a half years ago, he said. And whereas it seemed that could have been no more than 5 or 6, I had estimated my visit to the Clutha Vaults at circa 1997, and had even ventured back to my diary of 1994 before being surprised to eventually find it in 2000.
Notes made in a diary at the time are so much more trustworthy than memories. That visit to Glasgow included a visit to Hampden Park to see World Champions France casually play Scotland off their own park 2-0 (Sylvain Wiltord and Thierry Henri) as well as art galleries like the Burrell Collection.
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I need to post something here on Monday nights to obscure the latest debacle of the Saturday Nap. It is not going well and is now 32.32 points down to a level 10 point stake. We have only had three winners and those were not at very worthwhile odds.
But, nil desperandum. We have 4 or 5 selections left to retrieve the situation and so could still end up in profit. It could be a nervy Boxing Day, though.
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But, with Christmas almost upon us, David Green (Books) will be launching an audacious assault on the Amazon Free Download charts with a new kindle release. And you can download a free kindle edition with a clear conscience because nobody has to walk around the Amazon warehouse to pick it off a shelf and neither will they make any profit out of it.
The technical department are preparing Walter the Worm, an old masterpiece of inanity from 1990 that only appeared in a very limited edition at the time. And here is Walter in one of the original drawings.
And so, in the hope of a Christmas hit, or even a number one, I'd be grateful of all your help and any other help you can muster to download a copy during the 5 days from around about December 22nd via the Amazon author page as above. Thanks.