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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.