It seems gauche if not a bit needy to possibly imitate certain aspects of a poet's work in one's own and then claim some kind of kinship. But I didn't know he was a gin man, didn't know he was going to wear the same coloured shirt and jacket combination as me at the Larkin conference in Hull in 97 and didn't know a number of other things we have in common that will remain unspecified here. But he wears it well and he's the one with the Freelance column, the prizes and the (even) more sardonic line so it's easy to tell us apart.
I've read he likes a quiz and a crossword. I wonder if he plays chess.
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The indices by which I measure my own success are my plus (or minus) v. the bookmakers for the year and my chess rating at Chess24. Things are looking up.
It's not a big plus in the turf account but it's better than the minus it was a month or so ago. But it's boom-time on the chessboard.
Leaving my 10-minute rating intact at 1910 while I play 15 minute games and roller-coaster my way down to the 1600's and back to the 1800's, I finally edged up to 1914 on Tuesday night.
I don't know if I can copy the moves to here. Would anybody care anyway. But I can treat myself to the position after white's 21st move after which he resigned. It had been my usual Sicilian Defence but I've only just looked it up that it's the O'Kelly Variation.
I'm obviously going to exchange rooks on a1 and then capture the bishop on b5 and I'm a minor piece and a pawn up. That was enough for him. Joy was unconfined. I looked up my opponent's name on the internet and found he was serious enough to have submitted a question to one of Jan Gustaffson's opening clinics at Chess 24 so I'm pleased that he chose me to presumably blunder against at this vital moment for me.
So now the 1914 rating can be preserved while I play 10-minute games, the next being the most crucial as it offers the chance to zoom up to 1920 or more. I must choose my moment carefully.
There is no reason why this should be of interest to you. I write for my own satisfaction and it is only a lucky by product if anybody else wants to read it. I'm not Boris Spassky. I like doing well at things I'm not gifted at but have taught myself. Chess is for aloof, distracted, other-worldly types who like equations and logistical analysis, as if the brain could actually do what a computer can (Nigel Short, Jon Speelman, Mickey Adams), not word-murderers like me.
Nonetheless.
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After the concentrated, couldn't-put-it-down weekend reading Emma Smith's Shakespeare book, even I don't live by books alone and didn't read much in the next couple of evenings although the next chapter of Les Faux Monnayeurs (en Anglais) was plenty good enough for it not to suffer abandonment after Emma's intervention. Some acts are hard to follow. In Elvis Costello's book, he tells how he was once put top of the bill with Bob Dylan as support. So, just for once, Dylan goes out and delivers two hours of greatest hits just as his devoted supporters want to hear them and, as he comes off, says to Declan, There you go, son. I've warmed them up for you. And that is what it's like having to follow Emma but Gide might well hold his own.
I'm not in any hurry to catch up with Ian McEwan's robot story and Sebastian's Paris Echo is ahead of that as a priority but not a burning issue. Not like Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory, that Emma draws our attention to, which needs to be on a list.
Two essay questions that we never got given in Eng Lit, from This is Shakespeare, are why hasn't Hamlet succeeded his father as king and why is the prospect of purgatory so important in a Protestant play.
One should start by scrutinizing the text with forensic aforethought but Prof. Smith says that the text doesn't tell us and that's got to be good enough for me.
But, Claudius has replaced his brother as king which suggests there is not a rule of primogeniture in place but one that would put Prince Andrew ahead of Prince William in the UK at present. One can see what the problem would be there.(I'd rather have Anne anyway). But that's far too easy.
In line with the thematic movement of the play, it is Hamlet's inertia, paralysis, dilettante nature and melancholic thoughtfulness that he has either slumped into or always been like that, paradoxically, drive the action towards its body count and tragedy. I think he's 27 even though more respected authorities think he's younger. He is forever a student, somehow reluctant to commit to Ophelia, prone to bookishness, thought and inaction and unable to stop life sliding by, until a pivotal moment that spurs him to action.
But I think Claudius has assumed kingship in the vacuum that he knew would occur once Old Hamlet was out of the way. The Patrick Malahide I saw at the National Theatre, opposite Rory Kinnear, didn't convince me he could have done that but Claudius needs to look as if he could.
There's a few thousand words to be done, regrouping all the usual evidence, to be submitted to Prof of Shakespeare Studies, Hertford College, Oxford University.
The purgatory question is more difficult except to wonder how thoroughgoing were some Protestants in their rejection of long-established Catholic fearfulness.
It's one thing to adopt a Corbynite manifesto, for example, but it's entirely another to live by it and let it replace that which has been deeply rooted in the human psyche for generations. Henry VIII established the Church of England for his own reasons, not through any acceptance of Luther, Calvin oe Zwingli.
It's possible that much of the Catholic tradition was still a part of what people believed, whether Protestant or of the Old Religion. They can be as fanatical as they like but the tendency to set fire to each other was partisan rather than done on God's instructions.
Purgatory was a hangover that was far too powerful, that they couldn't escape from.
And I'd know. I was a pop music fan, even going back to Doris Day's Move Over, Darling, then She Loves You, the Monkees and Sugar, Sugar by the Archies. In those formative years at big school and university, I was relentlessly told that the likes of Steely Dan, Black Sabbath or John Coltrane were somehow better and sometimes I tried but I never quite believed it.
Terry Eagleton also writes (probably in The Gatekeeper) that, having been born a Catholic, there's not much he can do about it.
Protestants weren't quite protestant enough to get over purgatory and Corbynites aren't quite socialist enough to get over racism.
I didn't suffer too long in the repressive culture of taking pop music too seriously. By all means, The Faust Tapes, some Capt. Beefheart and the wilder shores of dub reggae but, honestly, pop music. I saw its face and I was a believer.
