With Ms. Duffy's new book imminent, she is the only poet likely to be added to this year's shortlists for Best Poem and Best Collection and prevent a walkover for Sean O'Brien's Goddess and Europa respectively. Although one can never quite say.
But my reading of new poetry, releases of new titles that recommend themselves and the buying of new such books has dwindled to the extent that this tenth year of the minorest of minor poetry awards is likely to be its last.
However, it was always the intention to look at the winners from those ten years and make a further shortlist for the Poem of the Decade, not the customary decade but 2009-2018.
I'm going to summarily give the Best Collection title to David Harsent's Night, from 2011, which has stayed in the memory most persistently but, for me at least, those ten years haven't produced the sort of list as competitive as those decades in which Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Larkin, Gunn, Sylvia Plath or Paul Muldoon were putting in their best work. But perhaps it's just the morning sun, when it's in my face, really shows my age.
Best Poem, however, is due more consideration, and I am doing this ahead of this year's O'Brien-Duffy head-to-head but can supplement any further contenders before reaching the decision. The shortlist as it stands is picked from the winners thus far.
Yesterday was a glorious Sunday going back to these poems while bathing, a picture to relish once conjured, only for The Early Music Show to follow up on the subject of Francois Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres and suddenly one was re-assured that being alive really is worth it. But these are six excellent poems,
John Burnside, Mistaken for a Unicorn, from Still Life with Feeding Snake
Julia Copus, Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden, from The World's Two Smallest Humans
Helen Farish, Pastoral, from The Dog of Memory
Roddy Lumsden, Women in Paintings from Not All Honey
Martin Mooney, Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, from The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen
Sean O'Brien, The Beautiful Librarians, from The Beautiful Librarians
--
There will be much more to think about in deciding this year's Best Event, with a few still to come and several already shortlisted.
Best Novel might be unsatisfactory with the Murakami here but having to wait its turn while Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf makes a powerful case for being Best Biography Ever.
The Best Record of the Year might also be hotly contested with other contenders involved beyond a debate between Shostakovich and Buxtehude.
We will see.
Monday 29 October 2018
Monday 22 October 2018
Field Guide to the English Clergy
Fergus Butler-Gallie, Field Guide to the English Clergy (Oneworld)
In a culture that has become so commodified it must be difficult to establish oneself as a 'personality' but if the Rev. Richard Coles can do it, surely Fergus Butler-Gallie can have a shot at filling the vacancy that has remained unfilled since the passing of Derek Nimmo. With the universities full of academics who really want to make television programmes, if ever Channel 5 want their own cut-price version of A.N. Wilson, Fergus will be top of the short list.
In a clever reversal of the usual process, his biographical note says he once 'accidentally appeared on Only Connect' when we all know the correct procedure is to introduce yourself on Only Connect by saying you've written a book about eccentric English clergymen, for men they all are.
There are several famous names among the brief lives catalogued. Spooner and Jack Russell have passed into the language; Webb-Ellis is the Rugby man credited with being the first rugby man, Michael Ramsay was Archbishop of Canterbury and Sydney Smith will be a name familiar to many.
It is a short book and after a few pages I thought that might be a blessing, with Fergus's manner and humour being rather more predictable and trite than one might expect from such an intellect but one either becomes accustomed to it or he improves as the chapters fly by in their lively fashion. I had begun to enjoy these slightly repetitious accounts of lazy, unemployable, gorging, boozing, libidinous spendthrift men of the cloth before I was genuinely taken by the phrase in which one international adventurer is admired for his 'ability to remain unmurdered'. But, given that in such a litany of unconventional characters the unconventional becomes the convention, the book is long enough and need detain us no longer. It has made its point and entertained without overstaying its welcome.
The Church of England is to be admired for the liberalism that allowed many of these true stories, that would furnish any Blackadder plot to satisfaction, and several are from not that long ago. It is due to such tolerance that the Reverend Butler-Gallie can both take his stipend and ridicule the organization from which he takes it, some denominations not being quite so open to seeing the funny side either in the past or now. But maybe in his Glossary he has gone too far. He didn't have to try quite so hard to make his book qualify for the category of 'humour' suggested on the inside back cover when a more detached tone could have given the reader more chance to take part, the bare facts of these accounts being good enough on their own.
One also realizes that the esteem in which Cambridge and, especially, Oxford Universities are now held, rightly or wrongly, can't be projected backwards and confer any honour to those that went up before there were any other universities to go to in England. For many that attend or attended those institutions, they were more a version of the Bullingdon Club than places of high academic rigour.
It is nonetheless an enjoyable stocking-filler, as much as some of the cross-dressing vicars you might find in it could be said to be, and is sure to gather a certain chortling readership in the demographic of readers of The Oldie or listeners to Radio 4, who appear to laugh at anything. Whether the Reverend succeeds in escaping into the orbit of celebrity from his launch pad of curacy remains to be seen but if that's what he wants one can't blame him for trying.
I knew All Gas and Gaiters was a documentary and not a situation comedy all along.
In a clever reversal of the usual process, his biographical note says he once 'accidentally appeared on Only Connect' when we all know the correct procedure is to introduce yourself on Only Connect by saying you've written a book about eccentric English clergymen, for men they all are.
There are several famous names among the brief lives catalogued. Spooner and Jack Russell have passed into the language; Webb-Ellis is the Rugby man credited with being the first rugby man, Michael Ramsay was Archbishop of Canterbury and Sydney Smith will be a name familiar to many.
It is a short book and after a few pages I thought that might be a blessing, with Fergus's manner and humour being rather more predictable and trite than one might expect from such an intellect but one either becomes accustomed to it or he improves as the chapters fly by in their lively fashion. I had begun to enjoy these slightly repetitious accounts of lazy, unemployable, gorging, boozing, libidinous spendthrift men of the cloth before I was genuinely taken by the phrase in which one international adventurer is admired for his 'ability to remain unmurdered'. But, given that in such a litany of unconventional characters the unconventional becomes the convention, the book is long enough and need detain us no longer. It has made its point and entertained without overstaying its welcome.
The Church of England is to be admired for the liberalism that allowed many of these true stories, that would furnish any Blackadder plot to satisfaction, and several are from not that long ago. It is due to such tolerance that the Reverend Butler-Gallie can both take his stipend and ridicule the organization from which he takes it, some denominations not being quite so open to seeing the funny side either in the past or now. But maybe in his Glossary he has gone too far. He didn't have to try quite so hard to make his book qualify for the category of 'humour' suggested on the inside back cover when a more detached tone could have given the reader more chance to take part, the bare facts of these accounts being good enough on their own.
One also realizes that the esteem in which Cambridge and, especially, Oxford Universities are now held, rightly or wrongly, can't be projected backwards and confer any honour to those that went up before there were any other universities to go to in England. For many that attend or attended those institutions, they were more a version of the Bullingdon Club than places of high academic rigour.
It is nonetheless an enjoyable stocking-filler, as much as some of the cross-dressing vicars you might find in it could be said to be, and is sure to gather a certain chortling readership in the demographic of readers of The Oldie or listeners to Radio 4, who appear to laugh at anything. Whether the Reverend succeeds in escaping into the orbit of celebrity from his launch pad of curacy remains to be seen but if that's what he wants one can't blame him for trying.
I knew All Gas and Gaiters was a documentary and not a situation comedy all along.
Thursday 18 October 2018
Madness
But another small mention struck me in his piece, that he bought his copy of The Waves from Woolworths in Cheltenham High St - would that one could now, Mr. Dyer- and he's still got that copy and still not finished it.
Well, having been more of a To the Lighthouse man and 'done' some Virginia years ago, I did recently re-read Mrs. Dalloway and was impressed all over again. But my copy of The Waves, acquired much more recently than Geoff's, has been overtaken by more pressing demands and might be embarking on a similar moratorium. But let's hope not. In her writing, Virginia is the most vividly alive of writers and a hugely attractive prose writer but how at odds that is with her life.
Borrowing back Hermione Lee's biography that I bought somebody else for Christmas twenty years ago, I was well aware of her difficulties but not quite the extent and oppressive weight of them as documented by Hermione.
Modern but still surrounded by all kinds of Victorian weirdness, one feels Virginia's fragility, and how perhaps she only lives through her writing. We have more terms and categories for 'madness' now and perhaps a different understanding, for what it's worth, and it's not the right word for her anyway when genius would do better. I have little appetite to suffer all the diaries and journals and rarely can autobiography and fiction have been quite so fused together. All such lines are blurred, but with a heavy enough load of good books on their way, Hermione's Virginia isn't likely to be put to one side as casually as The Waves has been.
--
Still. Is it madness for me to troop into work 5 days a week when it's possible I don't need to or would it be even madder to pass up the opportunity of having somewhere to go in the daytime and expect Radio 3, all the books and records here and bracing walks along the shore to sustain me. I can suddenly understand how madness gets you one way or the other.
Yesterday's Times crossword was a titanic battle, made more difficult by me having put in 'Sight Screen' rather than 'Organ Screen' and it was a good thing I had the internet back or else I wouldn';t have finished it. But that is Saturday excursion that might not lend itself to daily involvement.
I am a dilettante that dabbles, an interested amateur, not an expert or specialist, as is evidenced by my partial careers in various sports and the current hiatus in not wanting to write anything not worth writing. Well, it never bothered me before.
But there is a rare glamour in deciding to describe oneself as a 'failed pop song writer' when Black Lace, Paper Lace and the Starland Vocal Band all had hit parade success.
Saturday 13 October 2018
Handel in London
Jane Glover, Handel in London (MacMillan)
One for the general reader, thankfully. John Eliot Gardiner's account of Bach, Music in the Castle of Heaven, and the great tome on Buxtehude that I have out of needing to have it, are really for musicians, not designed for me. Gardiner's book, especially, becomes a guide to the cantatas, which is very much his field. Jane Glover does deliver Handel from her own professional perspective but it is entirely accessible to one who only enjoys listening to the music and can't play it.
She spends more time than some biographers on the political and historical context, the house of Hanover having considerable bearing on Handel's career, as did Shakespeare's relationship with the Tudors and Stuarts. It is of interest to those of us who didn't know that the two political parties, The Whigs and The Tories, were derived from Scottish terms of abuse,
whiggamore, meaning 'cattle driver', and torai, 'robber'
Not much changes, does it.
While the royal family remained devoted supporters of Handel in the London opera house rivalries, Jane's most shocking revelation is that there is no evidence that we all stand for the Hallelujah Chorus because the king did. Maybe he just wanted to stretch the royal legs, maybe it didn't happen at all but, still, just because there's no evidence for it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Personally I enjoy it and intend to continue to do so.
Handel's story is firstly that of bringing Italian opera to England, with the concomitant issue, as later in Amadeus, of whether opera should be sung in the vernacular. Well, of course you can if you want but it's Italian, isn't it. The move to oratorio neatly solves that, with his librettists, sorry, text providers, doing so in English. But what Handel also brought to London was star Italian singers - Senesino, Farinelli, the great castrati, as well as soprano superstars- who were offered outrageous contracts in something similar to the way that football clubs now pay nonsensical money to bring talented players in to keep bums on seats. He had it by no means all his own way, with rival companies luring away big names and critics not only alert to when a new work wasn't as good as it might have been or simply, for their own reasons, set against the great man.
Messiah wasn't the immediate hit in London that it had been in Dublin and took time to gather the momentum required to make it the monument it is today. But music is hard to write about and Jane, having described the early big hit, Rinaldo, in superlative terms, can only use up all the thesaurus has to offer when more mature works are considered to achieve greater heights.
As a professional musician, her concerns are also weighted towards how Handel organized his singers, wrote parts for them, adapted works to fit his available talent and although we get a sense of Handel's imperious temperament, as well as being given credit for his charitable, sympathetic side, we might have had a few more anecdotes to establish his larger-than-life personality even if some of those anecdotes are anecdotal.
We are also given plot summaries of the major operas and oratorios, which may or may not pad out the text when anybody with a CD can read the story if they really want to know.
A highlight among the numerous photographs, of places and people, is one of the autograph score of Zadok the Priest, with a circular stain below the parts where Georg had put his drink down after knocking out those opening bars, that I think might have come from an Albinoni Oboe Concerto that Jane doesn't mention. What modern techniques need to work out is whether the mark is coffee, tea, wine or beer. Then we would know.
Not known as self-indulgent, and unlikely to have been since he produced enormous scores in alarmingly short time, Jane can be applauded for not speculating on such issues as our contemporary obsession with a 'private life'. Handel never married, there is no suggestion that he ever entertained the idea or was otherwise inclined. And so be it. If he's happy pouring out the most glorious oeuvre of sublime music, it's a good thing he was left to do so.
It ends in crippling blindness, Jephtha being a hard won last masterpiece, and the funeral being a state occasion for the greatest of Germans who adopted London as his home, for whom England remains very grateful. And we can be grateful to Jane Glover, too, for her highly readable follow up to Mozart's Women, which was many years ago now.
She spends more time than some biographers on the political and historical context, the house of Hanover having considerable bearing on Handel's career, as did Shakespeare's relationship with the Tudors and Stuarts. It is of interest to those of us who didn't know that the two political parties, The Whigs and The Tories, were derived from Scottish terms of abuse,
whiggamore, meaning 'cattle driver', and torai, 'robber'
Not much changes, does it.
While the royal family remained devoted supporters of Handel in the London opera house rivalries, Jane's most shocking revelation is that there is no evidence that we all stand for the Hallelujah Chorus because the king did. Maybe he just wanted to stretch the royal legs, maybe it didn't happen at all but, still, just because there's no evidence for it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Personally I enjoy it and intend to continue to do so.
Handel's story is firstly that of bringing Italian opera to England, with the concomitant issue, as later in Amadeus, of whether opera should be sung in the vernacular. Well, of course you can if you want but it's Italian, isn't it. The move to oratorio neatly solves that, with his librettists, sorry, text providers, doing so in English. But what Handel also brought to London was star Italian singers - Senesino, Farinelli, the great castrati, as well as soprano superstars- who were offered outrageous contracts in something similar to the way that football clubs now pay nonsensical money to bring talented players in to keep bums on seats. He had it by no means all his own way, with rival companies luring away big names and critics not only alert to when a new work wasn't as good as it might have been or simply, for their own reasons, set against the great man.
Messiah wasn't the immediate hit in London that it had been in Dublin and took time to gather the momentum required to make it the monument it is today. But music is hard to write about and Jane, having described the early big hit, Rinaldo, in superlative terms, can only use up all the thesaurus has to offer when more mature works are considered to achieve greater heights.
As a professional musician, her concerns are also weighted towards how Handel organized his singers, wrote parts for them, adapted works to fit his available talent and although we get a sense of Handel's imperious temperament, as well as being given credit for his charitable, sympathetic side, we might have had a few more anecdotes to establish his larger-than-life personality even if some of those anecdotes are anecdotal.
We are also given plot summaries of the major operas and oratorios, which may or may not pad out the text when anybody with a CD can read the story if they really want to know.
A highlight among the numerous photographs, of places and people, is one of the autograph score of Zadok the Priest, with a circular stain below the parts where Georg had put his drink down after knocking out those opening bars, that I think might have come from an Albinoni Oboe Concerto that Jane doesn't mention. What modern techniques need to work out is whether the mark is coffee, tea, wine or beer. Then we would know.
Not known as self-indulgent, and unlikely to have been since he produced enormous scores in alarmingly short time, Jane can be applauded for not speculating on such issues as our contemporary obsession with a 'private life'. Handel never married, there is no suggestion that he ever entertained the idea or was otherwise inclined. And so be it. If he's happy pouring out the most glorious oeuvre of sublime music, it's a good thing he was left to do so.
It ends in crippling blindness, Jephtha being a hard won last masterpiece, and the funeral being a state occasion for the greatest of Germans who adopted London as his home, for whom England remains very grateful. And we can be grateful to Jane Glover, too, for her highly readable follow up to Mozart's Women, which was many years ago now.
In the Computerless Wilderness
Thursday before last, I came back to the computer just to make sure none of the Nobel Prize Committee, The Honours List or the Motown Hit Factory had e-mailed me but the screen was blank and none of my limited troubleshooting techniques could bring it back.
My technical department now being in Spain, I had to use other means to contact him.
New computer, then. Go and see Currys/PC World for a laptop like another friend's, it can't be that difficult. But what a terrible salesman. He might have had me for a £300 laptop but he went for broke, told me that Microsoft Office is £80/year now, but he could do me a package worth £400 for £150 to keep me going for two years.
Does it fit this printer cable?
Printers are wireless now.
Mine isn't.
How do you store your photos?
On a stick.
We can rent you cloudspace.
No you won't.
It's got this security.
I've got security.
You can cancel that.
No, I won't. I was out of there smart-ish.
I ordered the same re-conditioned unit I have already, straight from the suppliers, by-passing Amazon. It came today.
My technical department now being in Spain, I had to use other means to contact him.
New computer, then. Go and see Currys/PC World for a laptop like another friend's, it can't be that difficult. But what a terrible salesman. He might have had me for a £300 laptop but he went for broke, told me that Microsoft Office is £80/year now, but he could do me a package worth £400 for £150 to keep me going for two years.
Does it fit this printer cable?
Printers are wireless now.
Mine isn't.
How do you store your photos?
On a stick.
We can rent you cloudspace.
No you won't.
It's got this security.
I've got security.
You can cancel that.
No, I won't. I was out of there smart-ish.
I ordered the same re-conditioned unit I have already, straight from the suppliers, by-passing Amazon. It came today.
It was just a
new screen I needed.
How was I to
know.
New computer
arrived. Set it all up. Still no good.
Went and got a
new screen. Set it all up. Still no good.
Accidently
touched the button that turns the screen on. Aha.
Went back to old
computer. Still works.
So now I’ve got
a huge new screen and a spare re-conditioned computer. But at least I can review Jane Glover's Handel in London and order books and records without the considerable rigmarole life in the computerless wilderness would re-impose.
Nine days without a computer. One can begin to manage without. Most importantly, I finished two Saturday Times crosswords without a wordfinder. I spent some time with Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, I realized I'm not addicted to chess and did some dusting and arranged a few books a bit better on the shelves. Oh, yes, and I wrote a letter in handwriting. Amazing.
It was an informative long week and might have informed the forthcoming years few years that not quite everything happens on this screen. Much bigger screen that it is, e-mails arriving in an expanse of blinding whiteness.
Wednesday 3 October 2018
Reasons to be Cheerful
Would rarely include the Portsmouth to Cardiff train line. This morning the 7.13 was just 'cancelled due to train fault', just that, no apology, nobody to ask, just get on with it. But we are due in Bristol for 10 o'clock, and our return tickets cost over £50 each. Welcome to Britain, never knowingly at a loss for something to moan about.
But it was fine. We were there for 11. The Prof thought the highlight of the day was his Aidan O'Brien 9/4 shot at Cork, to go with his 7/2 at Naas yesterday. And here's me waiting for a gilt-edged plunge to put the year's account right while all these tremendous prices are going in without me on them. It matters not very much. No, Prof., at present there are no plans to re-embark on the Saturday Nap series for the last quarter of the year.
Whereas the highlight for me was a bloke with boxes of discs, including some for vinyl revivalists, for sale at lunchtime. It was the Shirley Bassey that kept me looking. And for £2.50 I came away with The Stylistics, The Drifters and a double Rod, too. Not cutting edge, you might say, but classic and now available again in the elderly CD format that I don't intend to modernize from when previously dormant on vinyl or cassette here.
I might envisage my late period being devoted to The Complete Bach Cantatas and Buxtehude Opera Omnia. Always inquisitive about what other passengers are reading on trains, and chronically disappointed, today across the other side of the carriage, I noticed someone reading the same magazine as me, the BBC Music Magazine, except on closer inspection, not with Stephen Isserlis on the front and so probably not the October edition. And then he got his book out, John Eliot Gardiner's Music in the Castle of Heaven, his doorstopper labour of love on Bach.
But you simply can't approach people on trains and engage them on such nosey subjects for fear they might pull the communication cord and have the police waiting for you at the next station. Even, several Christmasses ago when I sat next to a nice old lady who showed me her Lizzie Spender book and I said, yes, her father was a poet (of sorts), I still refrained from adding that I am in possession of a letter from him, somewhere.
But it was a good day. Mustn't complain. I realize my house would never have been complete without The Drifters and Stylistics on CD, this notwithstanding,
But it was fine. We were there for 11. The Prof thought the highlight of the day was his Aidan O'Brien 9/4 shot at Cork, to go with his 7/2 at Naas yesterday. And here's me waiting for a gilt-edged plunge to put the year's account right while all these tremendous prices are going in without me on them. It matters not very much. No, Prof., at present there are no plans to re-embark on the Saturday Nap series for the last quarter of the year.
Whereas the highlight for me was a bloke with boxes of discs, including some for vinyl revivalists, for sale at lunchtime. It was the Shirley Bassey that kept me looking. And for £2.50 I came away with The Stylistics, The Drifters and a double Rod, too. Not cutting edge, you might say, but classic and now available again in the elderly CD format that I don't intend to modernize from when previously dormant on vinyl or cassette here.
I might envisage my late period being devoted to The Complete Bach Cantatas and Buxtehude Opera Omnia. Always inquisitive about what other passengers are reading on trains, and chronically disappointed, today across the other side of the carriage, I noticed someone reading the same magazine as me, the BBC Music Magazine, except on closer inspection, not with Stephen Isserlis on the front and so probably not the October edition. And then he got his book out, John Eliot Gardiner's Music in the Castle of Heaven, his doorstopper labour of love on Bach.
But you simply can't approach people on trains and engage them on such nosey subjects for fear they might pull the communication cord and have the police waiting for you at the next station. Even, several Christmasses ago when I sat next to a nice old lady who showed me her Lizzie Spender book and I said, yes, her father was a poet (of sorts), I still refrained from adding that I am in possession of a letter from him, somewhere.
But it was a good day. Mustn't complain. I realize my house would never have been complete without The Drifters and Stylistics on CD, this notwithstanding,
Monday 1 October 2018
Deranged
It's not worth writing down, really, is it, to draw more attention to the attention-seeking. How he damns the heroic Mrs. May's plan as 'deranged' and then proposes building a bridge to Ireland.
They just don't care, these people, and have to say something, anything, to keep themselves in the news.
Too daft to laugh at, my father would say when presented with unsophisticated humour.
Ignore him, just ignore him, I keep thinking. And I must try harder at that one.
--
I've just trawled through the last three years of the 'blog' in search of the first time I went to Wigmore Hall. I'm convinced Carolyn Sampson wasn't my first visit but I can't find anything previous.
But, local though it isn't, it is the venue of choice and I'll make sure I report back when more Maggi Hambling at Marlborough Fine Arts is on the menu for November.
At first one feels a bit awkward looking back through these 'posts'. Did I really need to say that, did anyone care, did it make any difference. Most of the timev it's no, no and no but it accumulates and has accumulated over the years and I might be lost without it. Perhaps I like it ore than I thought and nobody has to visit here if they don't want. And, it has to be said, it looks as if fewer do than used to.
So, up and coming, before Christmas-
Handel In London by Jane Glover
Letters Home by Philip Larkin, ed. James Booth
maybe Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks
Maggi Hambling's portraits
and, I'm sure, much more along the way.
They just don't care, these people, and have to say something, anything, to keep themselves in the news.
Too daft to laugh at, my father would say when presented with unsophisticated humour.
Ignore him, just ignore him, I keep thinking. And I must try harder at that one.
--
I've just trawled through the last three years of the 'blog' in search of the first time I went to Wigmore Hall. I'm convinced Carolyn Sampson wasn't my first visit but I can't find anything previous.
But, local though it isn't, it is the venue of choice and I'll make sure I report back when more Maggi Hambling at Marlborough Fine Arts is on the menu for November.
At first one feels a bit awkward looking back through these 'posts'. Did I really need to say that, did anyone care, did it make any difference. Most of the timev it's no, no and no but it accumulates and has accumulated over the years and I might be lost without it. Perhaps I like it ore than I thought and nobody has to visit here if they don't want. And, it has to be said, it looks as if fewer do than used to.
So, up and coming, before Christmas-
Handel In London by Jane Glover
Letters Home by Philip Larkin, ed. James Booth
maybe Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks
Maggi Hambling's portraits
and, I'm sure, much more along the way.
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