View from the Boundary

It was beginning to get a bit tiresome not being able to add pictures to pieces here. One is used to any number of problems with the computers at work, one takes that for granted. But you don't want to come home and start it all over again. So, having gone to the trouble of investigating on the internet, it says use Google Chrome, so I did, and pictures of the Jeremy Thorpe book and Handel have now been added.
But why does everything have to be difficult.
Anyway, now we know.
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With 100 days to go now until the General Election, it might be a regular subject here. Not because it makes much difference to how the country will be run, the UK economy is as flotsam and jetsam on the wider, surging tides of the world, but as an unfathomable event where the outcome is genuinely unknowable and, I think, unanalyzable.
I did move closer to deciding my own voting intentions over the weekend as the Green Party made the naive error of announcing some policies. They ought to know better than that. I'm not sure about the de-criminalisation of drugs and prostitution, and how that makes any difference from, say, legalization. But I'm not going to vote for the abolition of the monarchy while HM The Queen is the incumbent because she's my favourite one.
The Green Party are said to be a watermelon, which is green on the outside and red on the inside. That is fine, surely green is always left and no economic growth would be a good thing, unthinkable though it is to world capitalism. But I'd like to think we could, and might, have a green, leftist queen. I don't imagine The Queen being very sympathetic to the sort of oiks the Conservative Party has been sending to the palace in recent decades, including Blair.
And so unless the Green Party can mend their ways then I'll happily support the lost Liberal cause.
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I'm always looking for an opportunity to not review a new book of poems while saying something pertinent about it. I have in mind a time several years ago when Danny Kelly was 'commentating' on an African football match but rather than excitedly remark upon how ironic it was that Mali had their third throw in of the second half from a very similar place to the previous two, or involve himself in any of the routine hysteria of the usual football commentator, he discoursed widely on the general topic of African football, breaking off to point out when somebody had been sent off, or a penalty was awarded or a goal was scored.
So, there was less of the nonsense about how important the next goal would be - of course it will be important, it will change the score- and we heard something rather more diverting.
But to review a book of poems thus might be seen as a bit disrespectful to whichever book was ostensibly under consideration.
So, when the new Paul Muldoon book arrived, the opportunity presented itself because there was no point in rehearsing all the things I've said about his poetry before because I don't have anything very profound to add to the general accumulation of critique on the subject and so, by doing a bad impersonation of the great man, I treated myself to an enjoyable foray into linguistic dressing up. And, yes, it felt like I'd put on a yellow suit rather than the more sober tones I'd usually wear.
At present, neither the Muldoon or the Lavinia Greenlaw have been put into my notebook on the shortlist for Best Collection of 2015 but there is a long way to go yet, with Sean O'Brien due in March with his Beautiful Librarians before in the Autumn he takes us into his Quartier Perdu with a collection of short fiction.
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And, finally, to Wolf Hall, the televisual talking point of the day.
It is dark in the fashion of so much drama on telly these days but if contemporary drama needs must be dark because we do seem to be living in dark times, then presumably so must this, when it probably was quite dark, too, except for the colourful clothes that the aristocracy wore.
But in among a top drawer cast, it is about Mark Rylance, isn't it. Staring out of windows or staring into any available space was much the fashion in Ingmar Bergman films but Rylance has brought it straight back as a substitute for doing much other acting. Thomas Cromwell has every right to stare into space after his family all die suddenly. But I take against Mark Rylance, you see, and for me he has to come back from 2-0 down, firstly on account of the three-handed Tempest he gave at The Globe, representing the storm and shipwreck by standing centre stage doing all the parts while jiggling a chessboard about and secondly holding conferences at The Globe in which he gave yet more space to the oddball ideas about Shakespeare not having written the plays that have his name on them. Well, really, I ask you.
No, he didn't write all of all of them. But if he didn't write most of most of them, then Mark Rylance needs to provide evidence that somebody else did and a coherent argument as to why Shakespeare might not have. Which are only the first two vast, gaping holes in his half-baked manifesto. And liking an actor or not can depend on such personal affinities.
My favourite Hamlet was Fran Lewis for Southsea Shakespeare Actors for all of her androgyne, impish darting about; my favourite actor will always be Gerard Depardieu however much he is cast as big, useless layabouts in films and plays a recalcitrant oaf in real life because it is in his eyes and his expression and he evokes a great sympathy, and my favourite actress will always be Emmanuel Beart, who was quite prepared to keep her clothes on if the part demanded it, but learnt to play the viola, or possibly violin, for Un Coeur en Hiver and has gone beyond the call of duty in support of political refugees in France.
So, Mark Rylance has some ground to make up. Otherwise, the only problem I have with Wolf Hall is the permanent difficulty we must all have about knowing which bits are history and which bits are made up. Like, which version of Anne Boleyn are we supposed to believe and, to be fair to the much-married Henry, he was married to Catherine of Aragon for twenty years.