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The TLS continues to just about save its skin, like a test batsman who regularly gets out cheaply but then plays a good innings just before he was going to be dropped. England have a surfeit of such players at the moment although most of them are going to Austrralia because they are due to play well.
It's an excellent piece by Seamus Perry, Was Matthew Arnold Any Good? One might have thought the answer was, Well, he wrote Dover Beach, didn't he. Most of us would be more than happy to have done that. But I'll look forward to the case for and against, which is likely to be slanted against, and it's a good idea for a series. Were Queen, was Walt Whitman, is Paul Muldoon, is Alan Hollinghurst, are Gin and Tonics any good?
Derek Mahon's poem, Howe Strand, is a very fine one and is being re-read time and again to see if it can be put on the short-list for Best Poem of the Year. And it is to be hoped that its appearance might be a portent of a new collection to come because we are due one at his usual production rate and such a book is always a bit of an occasion.
But then J.C. on the back page alerts us to a list of the 'Most Popular Out-of-Print Books' in A Book of Book Lists by Alex Johnson, which might prove too tempting not to obtain. But J.C. asks,
if they're popular, why are they out of print?
and that takes us back to square one and makes me want to cancel the subscription forthwith.
I know you can't rely on the BBC to write clear sentences all the time and some announcements can be misleading. 'Chris Froome won his fourth Tour de France' is the sort of thing they tell us and it is true but not what they mean. It was on the sixth Tour he had ridden that he achieved his fourth win. But the TLS likes to think it is a bastion of linguistic accuracy and a paragon of scholarly virtue only to completely misunderstand the list in a careless assumption. The books are out-of-print, not popular. They are the most popular of those that are out of print but that doesn't make them popular. Those of us now clinging desperately to the publication date of a re-print of Patrick Hamilton's Monday Morning, set for next summer, can only cringe at such blase disregard for matters of such high importance. There are books I still want to live long enough to have read.
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It's been a hard week here in Lake Wobegon.
I achieved 58 years, which doesn't seem a bad age to be. Maybe not as good as 35 or 11 were but it will only last as long as they did without seeming to.
I had to make up a pop quiz at ultra short notice for work, which is fine. One's head teems with possibilities like the biggest sudden eruption of natural energy since the last time Krakatoa went off but some of it was too hard for the poor dears.
Well, hard luck. You should have seen some of the questions I crossed out. Tell you what, next time you can have a bakery quiz and I'll just put Lemon Drizzle Cake for all of them. I'm more of a fruit cake person myself.
And then yesterday, to Bristol. Of course, many of those charging around the road network think nothing of it because they're used to it. Our driver likes it and is used to it but top marks to him but even as a passenger I found it hard work. It's not that far, it should be easy but it bloody isn't. It costs over £17 to leave a car in Temple Meads station car park. Good, double it.
At least it's the weekend now.
