A Book a Day

 One can hardly complain that Virgil doesn't warn us,

 

Arma virumque cano

 

Of arms and of a man, I sing. 

While the exile, the ill-fated love in Carthage and the journeyings were fine, The Aeneid does become a succession of battles after that. Something there is in men that loves a war. I personally don't and very much prefer the sort of film, often French, in which characters gaze out of windows and contemplate their amour fou to those that are predicated on car chases, shooting and fighting. 

The Aeneid, and The Iliad for that matter, suddenly make me think of Science Fiction with its staple diet of continuing war between ludicrous, all powerful figures and the litany of savagery, blood-letting and carnage they inflict on each other. You may say I know little about Science Fiction if I think that and you'd be right but that's what it looks like to me. It doesn't matter that much of it takes places in galaxies millions of light years away, possibly millions of millenia into the future between monsters half-human and half-dinosaur that can obliterate their enemies with laser beams shot from their eyes. Those are cosmetic effects to appeal to the sort of retarded teenage boys that are the target market. There is nothing imaginative, futuristic or exotic about it. How can there be. It has been made up from within the limits of human imagining and so is really just another saga about conflict, machismo and destruction with 'destiny' as its theme. Not much has changed in this blueprint for gratuitous excitement. I don't take issue with Virgil as a poet but hope to find his talents put to more peaceful use in his other poems rather than, in the end, tiring of pages and pages of lines like,

And then Anfraxius, mad with rage, raised his mighty axe and cleaved in half the head of brave Arbiducius and the blood and gore spread on the verdant battleground and stained the ever-flowing river. 

Virgil didn't finish writing The Aeneid and so, not all that reluctantly, I decided not to finish reading it. I can save Books X - XII for another time if need be but I flicked to the end to see how far he got.

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Instead, I moved to the diminishing pile of store books and went back to John Burnside, with The Devil's Footprints. If not quite literally 'in one sitting', I didn't do much else between late morning and tea-time today apart from read it. It is compelling if not in the end an entirely satisfactory novel but one is grateful for such a book that keeps one so avidly tuned into to it with no thought of doing anything else. It was raining for much of the time anyway. Not for the first time, I had written a poem about what happened with regards to this absorption in fiction - in The Perfect Book. The real world can be elsewhere doing whatever it likes as a day passes unnoticed while wrapped in the spell of someone else's words.

I'm not even recommending The Devil's Footprints as John's beest work but it had plenty of highly memorable, acutely well-documented 'apercus' and it finds itself on that select list of books read in a day that the likes of Perfume, In Search of J.D. Salinger, possibly Catcher in the Rye and some Julian Barnes and Mothering Sunday already inhabit. When I re-read Middlemarch in a day I'll let you know.

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My own ongoing malaise is not 'writer's block', it is nore realistically knowing that it's not worth writing something that will turn out not to have been worth being written. By now, one knows that to begin any project that requires more investment than a poem, one needs to be sure it's going to be worth the collateral one puts up. All kinds of vague ideas present themselves, not least when reading something good but one soon realizes one has done that before or it simply won't work. My latest mad idea was a novel based on Jackie magazine, full of 1970's teenage anxieties, Donny Osmond and disappointing exam results but irony is best done so gently that much of it isn't even noticed. I'm not sure I could do that. 

It seems like a disapponting retirn on John Burnside's effort that I read that book in about 5 hours when it quite possibly took him a year or maybe more to write. Great value, and quality, entertainment for me and many others but then I have the nerve to say it might not have been that good. And how would Virgil be feeling if he knew his action-packed blockbuster had been laid aside. It's easy to see why one would think twice about setting out on any new, big writing project when reading good books is more satisfactory than writing bad ones.