A Brief Lapse of Confidence and other stories

 A Brief Lapse of Confidence was the title of my one and only published short story, in a magazine called Fisheye in the 1980's but that's another story. I was distressed a couple of years later when a popular music ensemble called Pink Floyd released an album called A Momentary Lapse of Reason, as if me and them had the least thing in common but I needn't have worried. By then my fiction writing career, and probably Fisheye, were things of the past.

My more recent lapse of confidence was to remove the Racetrack Wiseguy selections from here early on Saturday which was a shame because the best bet, Next Destination, won although none of the others did. I wouldn't remove losing tips after they've lost because that would be somehow (although not) 'post ergo propter hoc' and inadmissable. And glorious failure and the refutation of optimism are poems in themselves.

But I'd like to restore the result for the record as well as the chess finish detailed in the same item to mark the occasion of setting a new personal best rating at 30 minute games at Lichess. It means a lot to me to improve past 1900 - to 1901 last night and then to 1906 by winning again this morning - because, to use an idiom from a more brutal if no more combative sport, I'm 'punching above my weight' and it takes a sustained run of good form to post such figures. I suppose I thought I would eventually but it could have taken a long, long time.

I still really need to go beyond 1917 (my rating for 5 minute games), which is two more wins without losing, before I can go back to shorter games but in a time when every little detail is seen to affect 'mental health', reasons for cheerfulness like that are hugely to be celebrated. On the way to it, I pulled one or two species of animal out of hats, bags and other recepticles. My favourite was when I thought I'd blown it and was facing checkmate or necessary ruinous sacrifice to delay it in this position.

But one has painfully and very gradually learned to have a look and not play quite so impetuously or trusting more to instinct than analysis. I did, after all, have 18 minutes on my clock compared to the 7 on white's. And sacrificing the Queen, it turns out, is not ruinous but sets up the rook to move and across and get checkmate thanks to the help of the brave little pawn working wonders in enemy territory. Thus QxRP, then,

And it's 'Bang, Bang', like something Maradona might have done, I'd like to think and maybe I'll see it as a puzzle somewhere. White mates in two.

It's surely not that clever but it made me feel like Abraham de Lacey Giuseppe Casey Thomas O'Malley, O'Malley the Alley Cat. And I'm very proud of that.

--

I do hope that someone among those who come here from time to time to read the latest ramblings will be kind enough to tell me when it finally becomes incoherent. Vaguely connected ramblings come with age and there are touching, if grim, anecdotes of Auden shuffling round to the cafe in Oxford in his last years, repeating himself and possibly not being as interesting to listen to as he once was. But there's no need to feel sorry for him. I bet he felt fine.

The audience figures here suggest that somebody's re-tweeted, cited or otherwise put a link to the Vandini review and they're welcome. It's been top of the playlist and is even better than I said and I said it was great. There is much more to enjoy than is intrusive in the augmentation in the likes of the bassoon part in a way that's a bit like the clarinet flying off to apparently do its own thing in trad jazz trumpet pieces like those of Humph. It's never going to unseat Handel's Nightingale as Best Disc of the Year but it's a wonderful thing and much to be valued in what I'd love to be an awardless world which simply took things at their own worth.

Like Muriel Spark does, who did win her fair share of prizes but who I didn't know very much about until surrendering to the biography I was leant. That led me to order three of her novels and The Ballad of Peckham Rye was well worth the not-very-much time it took to read it and the not-very-much money it cost. If I didn't know better- and I don't- I'd say it might owe something to the great Patrick Hamilton's interpretation of humanity and its sometimes sinister motives. She's an exemplary fiction writer and I'm looking forward to more but I bought the Rembrandt biography a little while ago now and thought I'd have a look, with half a mind to dismiss it as a mistake, it arriving with scant authority to explain why it was 'printed by Amazon'. But maybe it's okay. Interesting enough for me at least.

But I don't want to waste time. Heaven knows how the months since I gave up the day job have slided by. You multiply that up by a factor of no more than you dare to and soon realize that Louis Armstrong was wrong. We do not have all the time in the world. 

It looks increasingly unlikely that I'll be going back very often to the work of Medicine Head or the Sutherland Brothers. On the one hand there's plenty of Muriel's sharp observation with which to try to excuse her adoption of that colossal sin, Catholicism, and there's also all the aimless rambling, the modest levels of chess success and the self-induced challenge of defending myself against bankruptcy by finding horse racing so endlessly unforgiving.

As everybody who ever retired from a day job has always said, I don't know how I ever had time for it.    

Vandini - Complete Works

 Antonio Vandini, Complete Works, Francesco Galligioni, L'Arte dell'Arco (Dynamic)

That satisfying sound of a thump of a package landing as the charming post lady moves on down the street is always the more welcome when one has forgotten one has an order outstanding. What can it be. Delivery dates of over a week allow the item to fade from the memory. I spent some of yesterday with the first disc of Britten's War Requiem, which is challenging. Bought partly to augment the Maggi Hambling paintings as it is her favourite piece, it comes with a seriousness I'm not always equal to. The Schubert Trout and Death and the Maiden made for more unadulterated, or maybe less adulterated, enjoyment.

So these light, ornate chamber pieces offer that music which could be the food of love or any such joyousness. As well as adding to my composers that nobody's ever heard of. And as well as adding another Complete Works to my Buxtehude and Chopin. At 55 minutes, if it is as complete as it says, top marks to Vandini, five years younger than Bach and Handel, for not detaining us over long. Would that a few others delivered only a concentrated illustration of their modus operandi.

This morning I sketched out an introduction to Fulke Greville for the benefit of a future Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting and took the trouble of quoting Thom Gunn's somewhat classier and more thorough job on the same subject,

Nowadays the journalistic critical cliché about a young poet is to say that ‘he has found his own voice’, the emphasis being on differentness, on the uniqueness of his voice, on the fact that he sounds like nobody else. But the Elizabethans at their best as well as at their worst are always sounding like each other. They did not search much for uniqueness of voice:

It strikes me the same might be said of baroque composers. In fact, the diminishing of 'personality' and 'self' in art is fast emerging as dominant among my many recurrent themes. One doesn't form any opinion of Signor Vandini from these pieces beyond his competence and huge likeability as a composer. For the most part, I might be happy with the solo cello part, which is not to find fault with L'Arte dell'Arco and in places, like the cute harpsichord part in the final Allegro of the A minor Sonata, they do contribute more to Francesco Galligioni's fluent phrasing.

The pace and mood shift and vary as per the formal requirements of the three movements in these six sonatas and one concerto. I could live with such harmonious, stylish music for a long time. If I were still assessing my Best of the Year categories, Best Disc would be the most competitive heat in a year when events have been so few. This would be short-listed, certainly, but with Sophie Junker's utterly glorious Handel's Nightingale in opposition, not much else is realistically playing for more than place money.

I'm Not Dreaming of a White Christmas and other stories

 I'm Not Dreaming of a White Christmas, or of any other sort very much. Today's announcement rules out any place I might have been going and rules is rules. Otherwise where would we be. We'd be the Prime Minister's Chief Advisor.

It'll be fine. If anybody's well set up to survive such hardships, it's me. Kempton and Chepstow, a house full of books and records and some words of introduction to Fulke Greville to write for a Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting next year which will almost certainly be virtual. And I'm not short of people to meet in the outdoor circumstances that by now have come to seem entirely normal.

We have seen the seasons come and go on our Tuesday walks and become experts in the tide times of Langstone Harbour. They are particularly fascinating round here due to something to do with the Isle of Wight causing two high tides a day in these parts.

But the weeks fly by. It's not as if I'm looking for anything else to fill the days. One does notice, though, that Autumn, by some way the finest of the seasons, is short changed and there's no way it gets its fair share of three months. September is gorgeously not summer but November isn't the same sort of Autumn. Wouldn't you just know that we get the least of the best bit.

-

Having been lent Martin Stannard's biogrpahy of Muriel Spark I thought I'd better read it, not having read her novels. And one turns out to be grateful, has ordered three of the novels which are mercifully short having read a lot of long books this year.

But one is struck by Muriel's devotion to her art, never mind her refusal to be treated with anything less than the respect she deserves, and the time she spends on it and how much she produces. That must be what being a writer must be like and why, with my dilettante disposition, I could never have been one. It's not that the horse racing is an excuse, either, because Muriel was an owner. But the idea that even for a couple of days a week I could put in office hours at such 'work' was a non-starter from the beginning. 

Wide Realm, my workmanlike survey of Thom Gunn, progresses gradually two mornings a week until after a couple of hours it must be lunchtime and then maybe it's a better idea to read good books rather than write bad ones. Writing a poem doesn't take long if and when a suitable idea presents itself but they tend not to. I wouldn't mind if one did from time to time because it can provide some satisfaction but it doesn't matter. I very much did not become the defining poet of my generation.

 

But, much more crucially to a devout 70's pop fan. Who knew which teenage sensations turned up to back Gilbert on this not forgotten, most appropriate masterpiece. Not me.

Record Review - Tallis Scholars and Stephen Isserlis/John Tavener

 The Tallis Scholars, Josquin Masses (Gimell); John Tavener, No Longer Mourn for Me, Stephen Isserlis at al (Hyperion)

The Tallis Scholars come to the end of their 34-year cycle of the masses of Josquin Desprez with the ninth such disc. Not that it began with any ambitions to be so.

It might now seem as if Josquin was the pre-eminent composer of his age (late C15th-early  C16th) on the back of the efforts of Peter Phillips and his select group of singers but he was among the stars of his generation at the time, too. Exactly what he heard is hard for us to know and the likes of Bach are known to have been dissatisfied at times with the standard of musician they had to deal with but Titian is known for a blue like no other blue and Renaissance wine might well have tasted better than the supermarket plonk we tolerate so abjectly these days and so there's no reason to think he didn't hear his own music in the Tallis Scholars's chosen style of purity and clarity. And authenticity's a dubious virtue to claim or assign anyway.

Connoisseurs will no doubt be satisfied with no less than all nine Scholars/Josquin discs whereas such depth in numbers would be wasted on me and I have non-Josquin Scholars records as well as Josquin by other groups. In retrospect, I wonder if Peter might have called his project the Josquin Scholars.

The non-connoisseur might find it difficult to differentiate between many of the masses but to Peter's finely-tuned ear, they are all unique. The Missa Hercules Dux Ferrarie, with the composer keen to impress his employer, uses the Duke's repeated name as the basis for the first mass here. On much of the disc, as in the Sanctus & Benedictus, the notes are taken at a lively enough pace, there probably being no metronome markings to go by but the Agnus Dei is gentle and cool. Maybe I take my bearings from the colossal, if brief, Deploration sur la Mort de Johannes Ockeghem, which will be first on my list when I select the music for any invitation to appear on Private Passions but I often think music is taken if anything more quickly than it might be.

The Missa del aultre amer is an oddity in being comparative short and not expansive when expansion is something that Josquin does as well as Handel does embellishment. It is again fleet-footed in places with a certain lightness of touch and the interest is often in the shifting techtonic plates of the tenor or bass lines, as I so often find I'm following in Bach cantatas.

The Missa Faysant regretz shows no sign of being a precursor of Miss Otis Regrets but if you think that's an inappropriate and irreverent comment, wait for the Tavener review in a minute. I'm sure it's not right to find pre-echoes of baroque style in this polyphony but I often do, as in the 'Amen' of the Credo. It finishes with a spare Agnus Dei and, unlike a lot of Beethoven, doesn't insist on a climactic ending but is calm and restrained with a fitting sense of completion.

Very differently religious and 500 years later, the music of John Tavener seems to need to be more intense to insist on its spiritual essence in an age that no longer takes such texts as given truths.

This album, put together by Stephen Isserlis, who was a friend of the composer, also brings in a wider range of cultural influences than slightly different versions of the mass.

Preces and Responses, arranged by Stephen for eight cellos, is a rich exposition of themes that might loosely be taken for the early C20th English pastoral and we might wish for more of the same but there is much darker and more mysterious territory to explore before they reconvene for the finale.

The death of Ivan Ilyich, based on Tolstoy, which might be as close to religion as many get by now, is not a 27 minutes I'm likely to repeat often. It takes a long time for the agonies of a dying man, sung in the bass by Matthew Rose, to imagine it sees some light. It makes much of Arvo Part sound like Showaddywaddy - and I did say there was more irreverence to come - but there are a lot of records to choose from on the shelves and 27 minutes can be made to seem much longer when music takes us to the edge like this does. 

Mahámátar, featuring the Sufi singer, Abi Sampa, who appeared on The Voice in 2013, could hardly thus be much more multi-denominational. It is an invocation that one must allow to do its work as it builds, not necessarily in tension or volume, but by amassing its mysterious message. I'm in two minds as to whether it convinces of any spiritual truth or if, ultimately, it sounds like the bewailing of the lack of any.

Popule Meus isn't quite here how I remembered if from Natalie Clein's performance in the Cadogan Hall prom in 2011 when it turned out that John Tavener himself was sitting somewhere up behind me to my left when he came out and took a bow at the end. I don't remember the timpani being quite so thunderous in the live performance and the subdued cello line emerged from the chaos more 'organically'. The text is, 'Oh, my people, What have I done', which at least shows the continuing relevance of old scriptures to recent politics. The cello is my favourite instrument and many of my favourite musicians are cellists, which doesn't make me an expert, but the sensitivity of Stephen's playing on Tavener's sustained lines on this compensate for any imbalance I imagine for myself between what I heard live once nine 9 years ago and what one of the composer's great interpreters sees fit to put on record now. 

The final religion to be covered on the album is Shakespeare with the title track being a restrained 4.26 of a sonnet setting. It is lush, it is plaintive and another laudible quiet ending. There ought to be more of those. It's amazing how much better it leaves you feeling. A soft landing is often preferable to an explosion.

Needs Must and other stories

 Probably the very highlights of my comfortable monthly routine are the Thursday lunch meetings in which the tea and coffee are not really the point but the company one keeps. I can understand what the fuss about mental health and loneliness might be about because, as in so many cases, there but for the grace of God would we all be. 

I had been concerned that today's chillier conditions might not lend themselves to the new lockdown under which sitting in the cafe is again verboten and we were exiled to the park with a takeaway. But it was fine. One ought not take such friends for granted. It's worth having a few if you are lucky enough. Their value should not be under-rated. No man is an island, etc, etc, as the greatest poet in the language once said. I voted for him as such in the BBC's poll several years ago, anyway.

 

Afterwards, I went into two shops. One can't fault Tesco. Say what you like but they do what they do and aren't bad at it. However,

 

I walked in WH Smith's like I was walking into a shop,
They had strategically placed the magazines
so mine was right at the top.
I had one eye on the 'Gramophone'
but that's about all they stock
out of the things that I might have wanted,
I might have wanted,
oh, they're so lame,

they don't know what a shop should be like.  

 

It's hardly for me to do a consumer report. The helpful member of staff was looking up details of a book they'd been asked for. It was a title by Nigella Lawson.

Was it Cook, Eat, Repeat.

The customer, a gentleman more elderly than even me, thought it might be.

Of course it's bloody Cook, Eat, Repeat. Even I know that even though it's a book I'm only marginally more likely to want than one by Jeffrey Archer. 

In the 1970's, there was a point to WH Smith. It was where I bought my Complete Works of Shakespeare, my Ulysses and I'm sure many of the more aged paperback classics that are upstairs. I know I bought an LP of Beethoven 5 and 8 there because I'm sure the two girls behind the counter gave me an odd look when I did so. That was a couple of years before I bought Never Mind the Bollocks there and plenty more records, either there or elsewhere, that were far cooler than they would know.

At the age of about 13 or so, the chance of a summer day out to Salisbury (from Gloucester) was snapped up on the basis of the belief that Salisbury had an even better WH Smith's than Gloucester. But that was more than 45 years ago.

In the intervening years, it became the Mary Whitehouse of the High Street by making a point of not stocking Gay News, which may or may not be a criminal offence by now. Its uncustomered aisles stay bleakly quiet for long days now as demand for its olde worlde ring binders, filo-fax refills and glossy tribute magazines to Manchester United, The Beatles and the English Countryside aren't the sort of things that retail outlets are firing out of the door. And neither are next year's diaries that cost £6 when the same thing can be delivered by the postperson from elsewhere for £1.29.

It's a godawful small affair how somehow WH Smith is even still there at all as the rest of the High Street closes but it can't be for much longer. And although it is a terrible shop that even I, with no pretensions to business acumen, can see has a business plan that is playing 1950's football against a much fitter, Klopp-run XI, will miss it.

In the 1990's, before Sainsbury's stocked Cycling Weekly, when I wanted to buy it before it was worth anybody else's while having it on their shelves, WH Smith's did. I don't need that magazine anymore because most of it is reviews of bikes that cost £5k and upwards and I don't want a bike. But I would like a monthly look at Gramophone before deciding to buy it. It was a quick decision today as soon as I saw it advertising its articles on the masses of Josquin des Prez and Isserlis on Tavener but I don't need it every month. For a minute or two I was going 'all-in' with the BBC Music magazine and its CD of The Lark Ascending and other English idylls, too, but not enough horses have won this week. In fact, none have.

When, as will happen, WH Smith's gets the comeuppance it has so long deserved, one of its severest critics (me) will miss it. I don't know any other shop that stocks Gramophone. As the world apparently expands into greater availability of more and more cheap, derivative nonsense, it takes these rare species with it. I will be bereft but at least I'll have a very minor incovenience to moan about if I want. Everybody seems to need one of them. Otherwise, I appear to have, like Larkin in Poetry of Departues,

               a life,

Reprehensibly perfect.

Help if help were needed

 I'm a bit disconcerted to find I need to add a tag on here for Louis MacNeice after all  these years but I suppose he hasn't had many new books out recently.

The other day I hid away, at the bottom of some other inconsequential thoughts, some curmudgeonly objections to 'poetry' in the hope that nobody would read them but I could at least have said it.

But, the funeral baked meats soon furnished the marriage tables, and I'm glad to see Martyn Crucefix citing MacNeice when he, in a roundabout way, arrives at the conclusion that,

Hence all poems …  are ironic.

Which is wonderful news except I'd be the last person to want to make any sort of rules or law about what poems should be or do. And so what happens is that far superior poets like MacNeice and poets who take their vocation far more seriously than me put their name to ideas that I wouldn't insist on. But I'm glad of any support I can muster from the likes of them. It's here,

 

Crucefix on MacNeice

 

My reservations were about sincerity in poetry being one-dimensional. There's nothing especially wrong with sincerity but it's not very interesting. Some years ago I received an e-mail entitled Whatever People Say I am That's What I'm Not, which I quite liked, being so far out of pop music by then that I had no idea it was the title of an Arctic Monkeys album. But, yes, that's right. As soon as anybody ever wanted to typecast me as poet, sportsperson, student, vaguely leftist, pop or classical music enthusiast, I'd shift into one of the other modes. And that's irony.

This morning I did a couple of hours on the first section of Thom Gunn's Jack Straw's Castle towards my gruellingly workmanlike plod through (which means exhilarating, insightful critique of) all his work. I'm finding very much a sinister downside to the self-indulgent liberation he found in the fashionable hippy culture of the late 60's. For all the Summer of Love they said they had, for all the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Tiny Tim, there was a nightmare waiting to happen, which subsequently did. That wasn't quite as ironic as bloody inevitable.

Luckily, it also works the other way round and some of the libertarian grip that the West seemed hostage to with Trump, Dominic Cummings and the UK having the most clueless Prime Minister it's ever had answering their every command like an obedient spaniel, might not be quite as tight as it was. Heaven knows what long-term damage they've done and they refuse to go gracefully but whatever things look like, they often don't stay looking like it for long.

It's always the other thing. Poetry can say what it means if it wants to but can be much better if it implies it by saying something slightly different.

The Dead Heat and other stories

 I am indebted to the Professor for the photo finish of the last at Cheltenham yesterday on which it is possible to see that the near side horse won by a nose even though it was dark. The judges weren't prepared to call it, though, and it was officially a dead heat.

And that suits me as Elle Est Belle, on the far side, salvaged something from the wreckage of the weekend for me, even at half the odds, and we are still well-placed enough to finish the year ahead. Having to share the win is fine when one didn't really win at all.

This is very belated compensation for a day at Fontwell in the early 1980's when I was on the wrong end of such a decision. I backed a horse called Glamour Show that day which was a short-priced favourite. It hit the third fence from home which might have ruined his chances but he rallied and got up on the line to make a photo finish of it except the judges gave it to the other horse and bets were settled on that result before it became apparent that Glamour Show was in front on the line.

It must be part of the whimsical charm of sport, with its lbw and offside decisions, that the results aren't always right.

--

Record Review yesterday played a piece from a new disc of sonatas by Vandini, who I'd not heard of either, but looking at You Tube, I thought this performance was hugely impressive by a musician who quite clearly entirely 'gets it'.

--

Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark is proving to be of great interest and has already lured me into ordering three of her novels. I hope I didn't do that too soon. It's early days yet and she's already abandoned trying to come to terms with rational thoughts and is going via Magic Realism towards Catholicism which is a downward spiral if ever there was one but it might not prevent her from being a fine writer. We will see.

I'm assuming that Martin Stannard is not a common enough name for there to be two of them and that he was the editor of Joe Soap's Canoe all those years ago. He will thus have been the reviewer of my booklet, Reptiles in Love, of which he liked the first line and said the second line wasn't bad but he was 'rigorous' about the rest of it. Which was fine. A review that 'has its doubts' is always better than unqualified enthusiasm and, at the time, I was most gratified that my poem in his magazine was apparently allocated an illustration. And now I've found it nestling in the undergrowth of the internet, here,

Joe Soap's Canoe 4

 

I'll have to see what else happened there later on.

--

Meanwhile, not wanting to offend too much, I'll hide this negative Top 6 down here in the hope that nobody reads this far. It's really a summary of those things that, some 45 years down the line, make me want to put some distance between myself and 'poetry', such as it is these days, without despairing of all the wonderful things it can do for you as, most recently, August Kleinzahler's poem, Dance, Dance, Dance, most emphatically did.

It almost gives me some justification to quote the Sean O'Brien's novel, Afterlife, in which the most gifted poet of her generation, at Oxford, Jane Jarmain, was reported to be writing poetry 'as if she thought it was possible', although anybody who has tried knows it isn't.

 

Top 6 Worst Things about Poetry

Sequence - There was once something on a forum I read that said, 'when I'm writing a sequence' and struck me as preposterous. If you must write a 'sequence' then surely it will emerge from poems one is writing. One wouldn't sit down with the intention of writing a sequence. I formulated the dictum (which I didn't sit down to do) that all such things are either a long poem in sections or a collection of poems on a theme. Nobody needs the term 'sequence'.

I'm not saying I proved my point.

Voice - Reviewers find reason to praise poets who have 'found their voice'. Such preciousness about individuality would have mystified Elizabethan poets from that Golden Age when impersonality wasn't something one had to work at to avoid oneself but the idea of 'personality' had hardly occurred to them yet. In those days it was more of a discipline than a self-indulgence.

Poet - There needs to be a better word for it. If ever I fancied myself as such as a teenager, full of profound elsewheres, I'd rather be called 'writer' now, as it says on Larkin was on his grave. The distracted dreamer full of highly-charged, beautifully expressed thoughts is something that Wordsworth, Keats and their morbid fellow travellers established and is still inappropriately associated with the term.

Workshop - It's fine if poets want to meet up and discuss each other's work-in-progress. I'm sure the feedback is invaluable. But I don't want anybody else interfering with anything I might do and neither do I want an editing credit for suggesting alterations to anything they've done.

Prizes - It's not the point. It's not school Sports Day. Some poems are better than others but there is no stopwatch, scoring system or list of boxes to tick to prove which they are. So, wouldn't it be great if poetry could be one thing that was not run like a competitive sport but just enjoyed for its own sake.

Everybody's got some. There are so many to go round. I even used to award my own but I have tried to stop.

Sincerity - There is a place for sincerity and it can be powerful, I'm sure, but it's one-dimensional. One can only cringe at George the Poet, Kate Tempest and This is the Place by Tony Walsh. Poetry is a wide church but they are the lowest common denominators of something that can be infinitely more worthwhile. Irony works much better.