Red Herring

I wanted to have a book to write. I thought it would take me ages to think of one worth doing, if there is one worth doing at all.
I simply don't know where to go with poetry next and expect a long hiatus in that idiosyncratic discipline, if not an end to doing it completely.

So, I was surprised that one slightly old-fashioned phrase in Julian Barnes suggested a whole book, a collection of anecdotes by way of fragments of memoir. Heaven knows it would be vainglorious to think I was anywhere near worthy of an autobiography, even for its own sake and I wouldn't tell you all that, anyway, but, Red Herring is the title of the new book. That is the title of the first piece in it, too, which begins,

I came across the phrase ‘red herring’ while reading Julian Barnes. It brought back a swarm of memories that it wouldn’t have for others, not unless you were in the same ‘O’ level Latin class as me. Which demonstrates how language carries different associations for different readers and no text is going to have quite the same meaning for everybody. Lesser writers would cite Proust for the way it unlocked a stream of anecdote and fine detail but I wouldn’t sink to that commonplace comparison. 

We'll see. But at least an idea of a 'project', something to do, to enjoy doing, has presented itself. It's most welcome.

Alternate Title

My officeful of secretarial staff have been inundated by queries querying my reference to The History of the World in 9 1/2 Chapters. Miss Trixie Naughtie came into my office the other day,
Mr. Green, I can't cope, I've had letters from all over the place from professors mystified by your apparent misinformation.
Of course, I meant 10 1/2 Chapters, and I don't know my Barnesy from my Fellini.
It's an entertaining book, so bloody ingenious it's forver in danger of doing itself a disfavour but one can take that from Barnesy in a way you couldn't take it from anybody else. It's much, much cleverer than Nutshell and still far, far better.
One of the most memorable chapters is on Gericault's Medusa. I always think of George Melly on Gallery, with Maggi Hambling, a television masterpiece of a quiz show, whenever Gericault is mentioned, it seemed to be George's default guess whenever he was struggling. However, such was the enjoyment in reading such an interpretation that I was compelled into the acquisition of Keeping an Eye Open, the Barnes essays on French painting apparently prompted by his own enjoyment of such writing. And, somehow, that is how the world should be.
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A real Bank Holiday treat was Don Letts presenting an all too short hour marking the 50th anniversary of Trojan Records on Radio 6, with a definitive playlist essential to any record collection owned by one of my generation. There remains something residually scary about Double Barrel, a record that was exotic and unfathomable to a young boy in 1971 although obviously wonderfully so. Would that the hit parade might feature anything so adventurous at no. 1 now.
The weather having cooled a bit, I went to work in trilby and Harrington jacket as a mark of respect today.
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The bank holiday weekend didn't hang too heavy about me with enough here to entertain a cartload of highbrow monkeys but my tendency to treat myself to more of my favourite pastime, another little nap (and not Expert Eye re-retrieving my position at York), rather than produce anything creative, did offer a bleak glimpse of the retirement that is impending, on an as yet unspecified date, in the next few years.
That is an abyss worthy of depiction by a German Romantic poet.
There is nothing to do. Convincing oneself that there is is a trick one can't keep pulling off.
Poetry will stop one day if The Perfect Book and Don Paterson's exhaustive account of what poetry is don't prove enough to have stopped it already. I am not adequate to progress from where I got to.
What book could I usefully write.
I don't know.
I could measure out the days professing a newly re-discovered interest in cricket or football, or try to become one of any sort of established crowd, like those pretending to art or music in galleries or at concerts. I'm only good enough to blunder along in Div 2 of the local chess league.
I saw a notice in a shop window on my way home tonight. Some people are away for two weeks in September and would like somebody to look after their well-behaved dog. I'd do that like a shot, for nothing, but I can't do those two weeks. You never know what might turn up.

 

Alternate Title

In a period such as this when one has not ordered any new books or records, it's possible to feel as bereft as the Wulf and Eadwacer poet, coming home knowing that nothing new is expected indoors, below the letterbox. Never mind, I'm sure September will bring plenty.
It's not that I need anything. Six Four is fine to drift through although I'm not yet compelled by it or its central position in the world vogue for noir. I did wonder whether to take another sabbatical from it in favour of Waterland, thus far a shameful omission, or History of the World in 101/2 Chapters. No, let's re-kindle the old stamina and determination of the 12 Hour cyclist and see this out, unless anything else demands attention more urgently.
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In fact September will bring Elizabeth Jennings by Dana Greene, which will, I trust, provide plenty of material with which to furnish an evening next March with the Portsmouth Poetry Society. Please see the new programme on the link over there >>>> once my technical department have uploaded it.
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Another presentation I might be offering will sadly be restricted to work colleagues only.
Long-standing readers - and thanks for being there if you are- may remember a couple of years ago a Learning At Work Day, held in a liberal enough spirit to include extra-curricular subjects, on which I presented an hour and a half on Latin for Beginners, which took us from the nominative and accusative cases and first conjugation verbs to Ovid and Catullus. Enthrallingly.
For this year's forthcoming day I have offered a few alternatives, the most promising of which might be Reading Poetry by which I mean a brief discusdsion, if anybody is bold enough to make it a discussion rather than a monologue, on what constitutes 'poetry' followed by a few poems to look at. I'm thinking four poems.
Edward Thomas is of local interest having lived not far from here. Adlestrop might not be as local as some but it's a sure-fire hit that nobody will miss the point of.
One is always aware of diversity issues in work although I tend not to find it necssary to worry. If you tell it how it is rather than make inane policy statements, you can't go wrong. As such, anybody would surely include Elizabeth Bishop in any list of paragon examples and looking at the vilanelle, One Art, would deal with lots of issues like autobiography, form, rhyme and how the fashion has changed from insistence on the text and the 'intentional fallacy' to something that considers the author, sometimes perhaps more than it needs to.
Also of local interest and a poet I could hardly leave out would be An Arundel Tomb. This might be a good place to reflect on two things that poetry is thought to do, hopefully both at the same time, which is say something profound and also be an artwork of interest in itself.
Which, if we have time for a fourth poem, leaves every other poem in the language as candidates to be it.
Perhaps we should do something earlier than C20th. Tennyson's of local interest. Perhaps we should do something earlier than that. Maybe even Wulf and Eadwacer itself. Or perhaps something C21st, Muldoon, Duffy, or something 'weird'. I have an idea what I'd like to do, which is recent and might illustrate the idea of 'objective correlative'. We'll see.
 

Alternate Title

It's Oh, Babe, What Would You Say, really, but I thought I'd take my title from the Monkees' American naming protocol for Randy Scouse Git.

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama has achieved something that many other books never did. I had to put it to one side to read Patrick Hamilton's Monday Morning and Don Paterson's The Poem. Needs must sometimes.
The house is not quite strewn but intermittently ashamed of its unfinished books. Not always ashamed. Sometimes you wished you'd never started and from time to time I wonder whether to get myself a Collected John Ashbery but fear that it might be twenty minutes of amazement followed by however many more years there are left eyeing it nervously.
But I've gone back to Six Four, sometime admirer of Japan with special reference to prose fiction as I am, and I will make it to the end. Apparently, not all noir is Scandinavian. I am much more Midsomer Murders than I am all that fashion for endless darkness. Having been less than impressed with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, somebody gave me a fiver for it. They could have had it for nothing but you admire a man who stands his round or pays his way. I sat through the first series of Marcella, for no better reason than Anna Friel because there is no better reason, but I think there was a second series. Oh, come off it. Eventually one needs to know. Suspense is a fine thing but I'm not prepared to wait forever.
But I am persevering and we will see now the complications of Six Four, which is a 'police procedural' with missing, sometime dead young girl, rivalry between the machinations of departments, something to be got to the bottom of, work out. It is to be hoped that nothing essential needs reading for another week or two. Please, Danny Baker, don't surprise us with any more unputdownable memoirs just yet. Or, let me put that another way, please do.
--
The TLS. What can you do.
An e-mail from them saying how sorry they are I've left, please have another introductory offer.
I haven't left but it is as if they are reading my mind. Perhaps the internet is more sinister than I thought. It would be great if they would just keep sending it but not charge me for it but it's not the money.
It's the self-regard.
It remains of interest in places, sometimes even in the bath. For instance, V.S. Naipaul hardly had a good word for anybody. Let me put that another way, he regularly had a bad word for a lot of people. But one writer he liked was Maupassant. And then you think he might have had a point.
All these old curmudgeons-  not so much the young ones- it would be great fun to become more like them. I'll try my best.           

Aretha

Pastiche

This seems to me very close to being completely the business, which rather underlines the implications of Whatever Next below.
We know too much. You can make almost, almost perfect T. Rex out of the recipe Marc, and Tony Visconti, left behind.
I haven't seen Jurassic Park but I imagine it to work on a similar principle.
And the odd thing is that, temporarily at least, I want to listen to how good a pastiche this is rather than Get It On. That can't be right. 

It reminds me of the story of when Neil Innes and/or Eric Idle played the songs from The Rutles to George Harrison,
Oh, it's a bit close, that one,
by which I'm sure he meant With a Girl Like You and If I Fell.

Well done, sir.

Whatever Next

One of the many thoughts provoked by Don Paterson's thought-provoking book, The Poem, was that if we now understand so much about how poetry works perhaps we know too much.
While on the one hand, we don't believe in magic, on the other we don't always want light to be let in on magic if any such illusion is conjured. The Don has gone a long way to explaining away all the tricks, nuances and effects that poetry, whatever 'heightened form of language' it is proclaimed to be, has. Whatever brilliant line you thought you'd come up with out of your sublime inspiration, it turns out to be textbook zeugma, metonymy or else Prof. Paterson will have a phrase for it. All the poet can do is concatenate and assimilate all their niceties into a coherent unit.
By now we know too much. Keats was happy enough as long as he was swooning transcendentally; the Gawain poet, or classical poets, had appointments with sophisticated metre they couldn't afford to miss; some C20th after-the-fact adventurers delighted themselves by self-styling themselves against an orthodoxy they perceived for themselves and the likes of Housman, Hardy or Larkin just got on with it. Now, though, I could understand how, after reading The Poem, a poet could despair of what to do next. It doesn't bother me. I wasn't going to write any because I already didn't know what to do next.
Are the universities to blame, the industry full of academics and students all needing a point to make and paid to do so, ruining it by their more, or less, rigorous analyses and worthwhile, or passable, ideas. In order to achieve her degree in Pop Music Performance, the girl with who I'm so pleased to share a songwriting credit was encouraged to bottom out how pop songs worked. I'm not sure how much influence such courses have had on the product now offered to pop-pickers but it does appear, at least to old heads of my generation, that everything from Elvis Presley, through The Beatles, Motown, David Bowie, reggae, punk and all else has been incorporated into a homogeneous recipe that has resulted in a sterile, post-apocalyptic synthesis.
I regret having to produce quite that sort of banal sentence to describe it but what can you do.
It's probably a good thing it's all downloaded now because they'd need a lot of plastic to serve the demand for Ed Sheeran records and it's great that young people (if they are mostly young) have the same sort of mania for his music that we had for T. Rex. But it's a shame he is targetted by more than his fair share of copyright holders who think he's used their template. Also that the Marvin Gaye estate are quite so litigious.
And, of course, it isn't going to stop here. Even I will recover from The Poem. It was very enlightening and I'd run into a lacuna of my ownmaking anyway. I worry that eventually every possible chess game will have been played and, mathematically, there are only an immensely vast but not infinite number of viable 40, 50 or 60 move games that are possible. It is the same sort of neurosis that provides the material for thinking that every worthwhile poem will eventually be written. But we need to have faith in both the 64 squares and 32 pieces on the chess board, the much greater potential for variety offered by language and the fact that the time left to us is finite and there is nowhere near enough of it remaining to need to fret over using up those particular natural resources.
It must have seemed to every successive generation that they were the unfortunate inheritors of the end of the line. But soft, what light from yonder window breaks - some new kids on the block who are now going to all do it their way. Good for them. I'll leave them to it.

Don Paterson - The Poem

Don Paterson, The Poem (Faber)

Before I went to University to play pool, attend pop concerts and write some terrible essays on poetry, I had imagined seminar groups poring over poems identifying dying falls and suchlike. That never came about as such and in the forty years since I have heard little about dying falls. Don Paterson here provides one paragraph and two examples on the subject as a section in his chapter on ‘Closure’. They are commonplace, not really of great interest per se, and so that’s that.

The Poem is not for the faint-hearted, it’s not a primer or a guide to reading or writing poetry and there are a lot of other things it’s not. For long stretches it is more about linguistics and neuro-science than it is about poetry, like the idea brought forward from his book on Shakespeare’s Sonnets that three seconds is a natural length for the human brain to take in a line of poetry and thus the iambic pentameter, that lasts that long, lends itself to being the most viable line length in English. This looks to me like the book that Don Paterson wrote more or less for himself and if it’s of any benefit to anybody else, all well and good.

It is not quite exhaustive and readily admits it can’t be quite regularly. Paterson, who can be scabrous when he feels like it, kindly signals to the reader when they can miss out the next fifty pages if they don’t feel up to it. But, being diligent and not wanting to miss anything, I wouldn’t dream of doing that. He recaps and apologizes for deviation when necessary, has plenty of long footnotes that are often well worth not skipping over and finishes with Endnotes that are essays in themselves that I chose to wait for rather than read when directed to them.

And it can be exhausting, mainly in the second section, on ‘Sign’ – the book is sub-titled Lyric, Sign, Metre – and more than once one is tempted to wonder how much we really need to be thinking about aeteme, syntagm, quale or metonymy when reading Goblin Market and I’m not sure Don expects us to but if we want to know how poems work, at a deep level, this is his account of how he thinks they do and hats off to him for throwing the kitchen sink at his theme. Never knowingly unaware of what he’s doing, he does at an early stage accept that this sort of analysis is like dissecting a frog – you find out how a frog works but it dies in the process.

If almost anyone, never mind how high-minded in their pursuit of poetics, might find themselves challenged by the relentless specialist vocabulary of section two, or wondering why the third part, on metre, takes up nearly half the book – although I might agree with the implication that rhythm and music have such a degree of importance in poetry- The Poem is never far away from being hugely entertaining (to its target audience) in its apposite use of anecdote, example and attitude.

In the TLS, William Wootten expressed reservations about Paterson taking a ‘mainstream’ position as the bane of the avant-garde. I would hardly think that of Don’s poems. He makes entirely worthwhile points about the self-serving nature of avantism, using a story about Gaelic speakers using Gaelic to talk about speaking Gaelic, which seems to me exactly what those old-fashioned experimentalists are still doing. The fad came and went, nobody’s saying it wasn’t interesting once but by now it’s like playing old albums by Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.

The examples used in the book, often understandably from Heaney or Donaghy, led me to look up poems by Richard Wilbur and George Mackay Brown amongst others. I particularly enjoyed the verdict of Sorley MacLean on the latter when he thought about it before saying,

Lovely poem.

What?

That one he always wrote.

There are worse things than having that as your epitaph.

The significantly larger third section on metre makes it clear that there’s more to it than stressed and unstressed syllables. The salient point is how lexical stress diverges from metrical stress. Paterson has a sophisticated set of symbols to perform his analyses, with values, punctuation marks pressed into his own usage, arrows and tables but even his decisions are still open to discussion. Having done so much work in pursuit of the final analysis, it might have saved us much time and effort just to have said, ‘it is what it is’ and ‘if it feels good, do it’. Rhythm and music are inevitable in language, even in the poetry of poets who proclaim themselves to work against such traditional effects. While damning them for their foolishness, Paterson is ever open to experimentation which is inevitably absorbed into the dreaded mainstream if it is anything more than a trivial gesture.

However often one feels like parodying Paterson’s sometimes highly technical language, he does it for us in an Endnote that quotes a passage from one Judith Butler in which abstraction and jargon has gone beyond useful meaning and reminded us again that satire is hopeless once we go beyond a certain level of absurdity.

Gladly, The Poem sent me back to poems more often that it might have and it is an impressive account of how poetry works except, of course, rules are just as recondite to those that insist on them as they are to those who insist that they’ve broken them and that all you have to do is be any good. It might have put me off writing any more poems for quite some time, feeling overwhelmed by trying to keep all these aspects of the art form in mind at once. But that doesn’t matter. I had no plans to write any anyway.

Oh, Gyles, What Would You Say

If you didn't imagine Gyles Brandreth and I as natural mates - should we not say 'bedfellows' - I wouldn't have blamed you but I have come to not mind, in fact quite like him. Obviosly not Boris despite the Latin, not even the sneaking admiration for Jacob's strange charm, that seems to have evaporated recently, but Gyles is a different matter.
A couple of years ago he said on Just a Minute that he had a Latin master at school called Mr. Stocks. So had I, and am unlikely to forget. So I contacted Gyles to compare notes. It was not the same Mr. Stocks.
But this week, on the same programme, he challenged the assertion that Anne Hathaway was allegedly pregnant when she married Shakespeare. Quite rightly, he pointed out that she was not 'allegedly pregnant' but was pregnant. And, before being challenged, he was just about to explain about Judith.
No, not Judith, Gyles, she was one of the twins, conceived within wedlock. Although alleged by some not to have been fathered by Shakespeare. Me, for instance, although I take no credit for the original idea.
It's Susannah, the name you were looking for, Gyles. You're good but you're not that good.
--
I would like to offer an alternative to the hastily-assembled Top 6 Jews posted in celebration of my newly confirmed Ashkenazi heritage. They certainly are six Jews with whom I have some feeling of affinity but a Top 6, as such, might be expected to include Albert Einstein and Yehudi Menuhin. So, I want to present a, still personal,  

Top 6 Jewish Musicians

Felix Mendelssohn
Marc Bolan
Yehudi Menuhin
Natalie Clein
Lou Reed

I could go on for quite some time here but a tradition grew up in the Top 6 to have a certain other something about the sixth, so, in support of what seems to be considerable new acknowledgement of her talent,

Fanny Mendelssohn

None of which newly proven DNA should deflect attention from the significance of Kurdish and Druze found in our family line.
Now all the impulse to go east rather than west makes sense. 

Patrick Hamilton - Monday Morning

Patrick Hamilton, Monday Morning (Abacus)

Gratititude to Abacus should be unconfined for making this book available, having been for so long unobtainable and other plans to re-issue it having come to nothing.
At 19 years old, Patrick Hamilton had the blueprint for his mature work already in place and this novel is tremendously assured and confidently made. It is his last work, in Unknown Assailant, that is the more questionable, the booze having got to him, the callous treatment of innocence having got out of hand and the prose having collapsed into little more than notes towards a novel.
With the hindsight of knowing all what was to follow, though, Monday Morning is very familiar Hamilton territory, set in the transient world of London hotels, infatuation forever being led on, one suspects, to unrequitedness and, in what is understandably a bildungsroman, first encounters with alcohol culture in theatrical circles.
In many ways it prefaces the later work by having its main character actually differentiate between being 'in love' and 'Love'. His more mature characters, like Bone, the hapless victim of his own sorry devotions in Hangover Square, have lost that level of awareness.
Anthony is delayed, delayed and delayed again in beginning work on his novel, would prefer to be a poet but there is no money in that and is relieved when his applications for jobs in journalism are unsuccessful. In the end, his pursuit of the fickle Diane apparently over, he writes his great poem, two having been printed in Poetry Review, but this inability to forge a career path seems to parallel his blighted courtship of first one love and then another. It is the way in that one so swiftly follows the other that we suspect Anthony of being no more than the 'in love' he regards as not the real thing and not in possession of the Love he mistakes it for.
It is all beautifully done and were we not in possession of the novels that came after, we wouldn't think we could see what's coming. It looks the theme on which all successive variations were based on. But we should be wary of assuming we know as much.
It arrived at about 11 a.m yesterday morning, wasn't begun until early afternoon and was finished by 9 p.m. with only essential functions attended to in the meantime. It's been a long time coming but it was worth waiting for.