Missing Bits Out and other stories

I don't know how much of a book one can miss out and still claim to have read it.

Some years ago I found some reaction to my review of a book on Shakespeare from an authorship sceptic who noted that I'd read it all. Also, in the sixth form, in one of my very rare absences, the French teacher returned essays on Gide's tremendous Symphonie Pastorale and told everybody that I'd obviously read it (whereas most of them hadn't). I fondly assumed that that was what you were supposed to do with books. Notwithstanding that I seemed to be the first to spot a typo in some recent translations of Catullus. I thought it was me that could be a bit devil-may-care with some highbrow literary issues but at least the point of the words for me is to read them.

So, when deciding to fast forward a few pages in the Shelley biography, I wondered if I could really say I'd read it. The point was that several pages of exegesis of Prometheus Unbound didn't look promising. I wouldn't have remembered much of it by the next day. I looked to see if there was a more succinct synopsis on the internet but soon gave up on that, made sure nobody was looking, and missed out half a dozen pages. It won't matter.

One can find things to like about Shelley, not much of which is in his poems or his relationships with women and money. It might be instructive to note that some time ago I reviewed Alexander Larman's Byron's Women and said it was just as much about money. It seems odd that the two are somehow linked. 

One differentiates the Romantic poets by the various calibrations of their worthy idealism, their failings in real-life, whether they wrote any sensible poems or not and their self-regard. And one finds that one much prefers Elizabeth Bishop. 

Robert Southey might not have had Shelley's visionary fire but they had their differences and Southey let him know what he thought. He had the advantage over us of having known him.

The book is impressively detailed and still a good read but after being with it for a couple of weeks I will be ready to read something else soon.

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It's nearly a week since I saw the pop vinyl carted off to see if some dealers could make themselves a few quid out of the artefacts of a big part of my heritage. Some of the earliest items among them were all but 50 years old and had been very important to me. There weren't any New Seekers records among them but that's not to say there couldn't have been,

But when I'm here without you by the soft fire glow
I hear the golden oldies on the radio
Well I can't hide the moment when
The mood inside me changes
Then I get a little sentimental when they play
That old love song we sang back then
I hold back the tears until the music's through
Then I get a little sentimental over you

  

It was just a lot of old plastic, wasn't it, and now it won't be me that's guilty of disposing of them in environmentally unsound ways when they eventually are.

Part of the recovery, or grieving, process was to pick up some CD bargains in the same way that people get over the loss of a much-loved, old dog by getting a new puppy. I haven't actually played The Seekers or Hot Chocolate yet. I hardly need to play any favourite records because I know them inside out and Mott the Hoople hasn't arrived yet but I did want to hear Petula Clark at full blast through the headphones. It is a complete and utter joy. If she wasn't quite Dusty then it wasn't by much and if Tony Hatch wasn't quite Burt Bacharach then that was by less than you might think, too. But however much one might indulge oneself in a luxury like grief, which I'm well aware is not always possible on more serious occasions, the new puppy becomes such a joy that the old dog becomes an iconic memory.

We should here also be paying tribute to Mary Wilson, from the sensational days of Stop! in the Name of Love, and recognize a shift towards the genuinely exciting days of 60's pop ahead of the more knowing 70's that might have been more my period. I went into W.H. Smith's in Southsea this afternoon and declined a magazine that claimed to be a comprehensive guide to T. Rex at £8.99. No, thanks, for that much I'll write my own.

But you can't know how good this is until you've heard it at volume 45 and it doesn't depend on being loud, it depends on being tremendous. Surely they didn't need to be that good. They just did it because that's what they thought.