Quite some time ago now, I wrote that I was trying to think of a new, and better, title for these miscellaneous postings but nothing suitable came to mind, the weeks went by and turned into a long time and nothing happened.But let's try this, Oh, Babe What Would You Say, in honour of the great Hurricane Smith. It was the title of one of my earliest internet efforts and is ready to be revived now. It is no less borrowed than View from the Boundary was but I believe it to be more allusive and just as apposite as the previous heading, which began at a visit to the cricket at Arundel and was retained long after cricket was no longer any part of the subject matter.
Norman 'Hurricane' Smith was a recording engineer, responsible for The Beatles recordings up to Rubber Soul and subsequently albums by Pink Floyd and Barclay James Harvest. The story goes that he began making his own pop records during Pink Floyd's tea-breaks, thus not only making the most of the studio time but ensuring that something worthwhile came out of it. Don't Let It Die was a big chart hit in 1971 and was followed by Oh, Babe and the Gilbert O'Sullivan composition, Who Was It. They are still fondly remembered here and these haphazard columns, these idle thoughts of an idle fellow, will be a memorial to them.
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So, we might consider why poetry is regarded as the highest of art forms and whether it should be. In places, it still seems to be and if the ancient world accorded it such status, then Emmanuel Kant seems to have been occupied with the question a couple of millennia later.
It is likely to have been around almost the longest but whether the first poem, or song, predates the first cave painting might not be independently verifiable. But the status of poets on the highest reaches of Mount Parnassus is due to the assumption that their special, rarified language is imbued with some magical power. Inevitably, a lot of poets are not going to be disposed to disagree with such a gift of an assessment but I would. And, sometimes, poets have since gone out of their way to make their language not special and not rarified so poetry might not be the same thing now as it was then.
The ancient world might have had prose to read but the idea of the novel doesn't appear until, when, more than a thousand years later and even then it probably didn't know it was one. But now that we have so many of them, I'd have to say that the achievement of a great novel is much beyond that of a great poem. Perhaps too much is made of poetry's heightened language, its perceived capacity for the sublime. Poets don't have that to themselves, novels can do it, too, and while poets can think their profound thoughts and sometimes concentrate them into telling phrases and verses, in our time they do so quite economically so that they don't need to be poets all the time. A novel needs far more craft, sustained consistency and hard graft than the work of the dilletante poem and has to produce and show its breadth, compass and range rather than suggest or hint at it in (sometimes only) a few inspired lines.
And so poetry might be hard pushed to claim to be the highest form of literature, if it wanted to, before it can even proceed to be a candidate for the highest form of art.
Literature is tethered by its words to meaning. Some have tried to slip those surly bonds, like 'concrete' poets or 'language' poets but none have done so with any lasting success. Music, by its very nature, is allowed to be more abstract. It can be programmatic or descriptive when it wants to be but a Bach partita can mean nothing, mean everything or mean whatever one wants it to. However many layers or perspectives one may find in Hamlet, it is tied by its text to some ostensible meaning. And so it is no fault of Shakespeare's, who might have been the greater talent (I don't know), that he can't be as good as Bach. A pool player doesn't have the capacity to be as good as a snooker player and a draughts player can't be as good as a chess player. Their disciplines are defined by limits that won't let them be.
And that's what the highest art form must be, that which allows the most. It is no reflection on the talents of the practitioners of each various genre.
Painting seems to me (not having the slightest technical understanding of how to hold a brush), more restrictive still and then sculpture, dance, architecture, film and origami are further restrained by the limits of their remit.
And so, let us not have it that poetry is ahead of other art forms. It might not even make the top three. It is not the poets' fault but they would be culpable if they were to accept this dubious distinction.
But I took Sean O'Brien's poem, The Beautiful Librarians, to this week's Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting and advertised it as a ready-made masterpiece. I was most gratified at how well it was received by the assembled company. It's a beautiful thing and it's a beautiful thing when others agree with you that it's a beautiful thing.
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Two years ago, I posted a tip for Ruler of the World to win the Derby here well ahead of the race but, a few days before it, I lost confidence in the advice and removed it. That was much to be regretted when it took its place in turf history at odds of 7/1.
This year so far looks like an underwhelming renewal with no obvious star emerging from the trial races. On the evidence available, one would have to back Golden Horn who is entirely justified as clear favourite but 7/4 is neither a price to get heavily involved at nor is it attractive to those who want to have a couple of quid.
I had a small interest in Elm Park after the Dante Stakes but there doesn't seem to be much confidence that he can find the necessary improvement to go passed Golden Horn.
One has to read into the paltry evidence what one can and it is one reason why I don't like the Derby or much flat racing as much as I do jump racing because there's never enough. Jack Hobbs won his race by a country mile but it was only a handicap. Not much has impressed enough to say they are any better, though, and so I'd take the gamble that Golden Horn might not stay and Giovanni Canaletto (pictured) has been well backed and so I'd follow that money if was to do anything at all.But I had backed Crystal Zvezda for the Oaks, then that was well backed, she finished 10th and the race was won by a 50/1 shot. This is not my time of year for backing horses and I must stop and keep my year's profit so far intact for the autumn when I'll be right back with the regular Saturday Nap.
Unless I think of a new name for that.
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And, finally. I do feature the occasional obituary when it is deemed necessary.In another very uncompetitive field, Charles Kennedy was a favourite politician of mine. For once, the tributes that flowed in did not sound quite like those lip service soundbites satirized in Alas Smith and Jones where two gladiatorial types are taking each other on until one has a heart attack and dies and the other immediately switches to saying, 'he was, of course, one of the great parliamentarians, etc, etc.' It genuinely does look as if Charlie Kennedy was massively well liked.
I admired the way he didn't promise tax cuts but said, yes, we will put income tax up by a penny in the pound and spend it on education and, of course, he opposed the war on Iraq.
But it's too late now. Politics has decided to run itself on the same model of absurd correctness as business does- the same lies and corruption as the banks and FIFA, the same inane image management as the Miliband brothers- and Vince Cable and Simon Hughes have gone and the very honourable Nick Clegg has nowhere much to go.
What a shame. All that progress achieved by a Liberal party summed up in a disastrous General Election and then the death, at 55, my age, of one of its great architects.
When will they ever learn.
