The Sunday Afternoon Show

 One of the perceived advantages of having the local library order in books, that it would save shelf space and money, was immediately torpedoed by the necessity of buying the first-up selection, Ungentle Shakespeare. It's the best of its kind in a field I like to make my own and so I had to have my own copy. However, finding one for less than a fiver inc. p&p was all good, and a credit to WeBuyBooks, and then it arrives in pristine condition. Joy is unconfined.

Balzac's Harlot Hugh and Low kept turning into something other than what was expected. I read it to follow up the further destiny of Lucien, the poet, back in Paris. Esther, the harlot that loves him, commits suicide halfway through, thus giving the title to a work she only appears in half of, like Julius Caesar, but then Lucien similarly dies when he didn't need to, echoing Romeo and Juliet. There's over 150 pages still to go with the two main stars gone and we focus on Vautrin, Jacques Collin, Dodgedeath or the Abbe Herrera, whichever iteration of the master criminal you choose to know him as before, whose book it really is,when, in a twist one surely didn't see coming, he becomes head of the crime squad. Well, I never. The last section has a glorious few chapters written in prison slang, like,

'They say you've heaved our chink,' Biffon put in with a threatening air.

'There'll be some rhino coming from you, no doubt?', asked Hair's Breadth.

One assumes that takes some translating but it was immense fun.

Balzac has been rich and rewarding but it's time to look elsewhere now. It might be a week or two before the library provide the latest Sebastian Faulks and so there's a gap to fill. They have David Copperfield, weighing in at 850 pages and I'll give that a go in due course even if I read Dickens more as a duty than a complete pleasure. There's biographies of R.E.M. and Prince which would fill the space without being entirely esseential but I was impressed that a nice, quiet, local library found a reason to have a feature on Japanese literature with a selection of Murakami, Mishima, Akutagawa, Kawabata et al. I'll maybe support that venture by borrowing a couple of those.

 

Meanwhile, making use of my own resources, I went back to some George Orwell essays and enjoyed their unphased common sense. Decline of the English Murder soon made me want to make such a thing my next failed attempt at a novel full of period echoes, vague sub-texts, inter-textual references and 50 thousand words I'd need to find from somewhere. I'm fairly sure I won't be daft enough to attempt it and it will be another 'conceptual' novel that I thought of but didn't ruin by writing it.

But in Benefit of Clergy, Orwell considers the charlatan that was Salvador Dali in unconvinced terms not dissimilar to those that Larkin chose for Charlie Parker. He's less than impressed by the man whereas Larkin was more less impressed by the music, but,

The two qualities that Dali unquestionably posseses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism. 'At seven,' he says in the first paragraph of his book,' I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.'

One only has to replace an inexplicable gift for getting himself elected where the gift for drawing is and one has an alarmingly good fit for the surrealism and self-obsessions of Dali and the Prime Minister we have now.

Such feelings are common enough, Orwell continues, 'I knew I was a genius,' somebody said once to me, 'long before I knew what I was going to be a genius about'.

Yes, yes. Maybe we all had that in childhood but most of us grow out of it. For those that lack the required self-awareness,

There is always one escape : into wickedness.

And in our present day malfunctioning leader that would be habitual lying, reneging on fly-by-night promises, ebullient but groundless optimism and a fecklessness that belongs with the schoolboy who can't be bothered to do his homework.

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But matters arise. One thought leads to another. The list-making habit is  often prompted by having something one feels the need to put on that list and see what it looks like alongside other such things. I've long wondered about finding The Best Book in the House and Ungentle Shakespeare would be a contender. It lends itself to a Top 6, that old feature we used to have here and still can if we want.

The shortlist would certainly include Dubliners by Joyce, the best prose fiction in the language. I'd have to see if Terry Eagleton's memoir, The Gatekeeper , makes me laugh as much as it first did. I remember not too long ago thinking that Ian Bostridge's Schubert's Winter Journey was the best book I'd ever read for its far-reachingness beyond the Wintereisse. Out of all the poetry biographies, John Stubbs's Donne was a hugely impressive book, as was John Carey's John Donne, Life, Mind and Art so it would be difficult not to consider the Penguin paperback John Donne, Complete Poems, too, as well as that poetry which has best survived all my doubts about the art form such as-

Rosemary Tonks, Bedouin of the London Evening

Sean O'Brien, Ghost Train

and, of course the Collected Larkin, the Complete Elizabeth Bishop, the copy of Touch Thom Gunn signed in Cambridge in 1979.

I don't have a separate edition of Hamlet but The Works by Maggi Hambling (happy birthday yesterday) needs consideration as would a careful walk round the house making sure I've not missed anything. I'll do that one day but consider yourself invited to submit a guest Top 6 on any subject if you've got this far.

 

The other matter, that arises out of mentioning R.E.M. and Prince, was a programme last night called The 80's, Music's Greatest Decade?

It need not have taken long. The answer is, 'no'. 

I'd have a fiver each way on the 1720's but preferably the 10 years that go from 1713 -1723, except by 'music' they meant pop music, I dare say.

The dubious case seemed to be made that the 1980's resulted in much fusion and thus Soul II Soul. Prince, R.E.M. and the Jesus & Mary Chain might have made the argument better but a decade strangled by the bombastic U2 and the law of diminishing returns reminded me why I had so many reggae LP's to say a traumatic farewell to.

It was a daring but ill-fated enterprise to claim any such thing for the 1980's that limps in far behind the likes of the 1970's, 1960's, in either order, and probably the 1950's and 1990's, too. Tamla Motown's best work went on into the 70's, The Beatles didn't, David Bowie's most glorious years were in the 70's, with T. Rex, as were those of Al Green and Joni whereas Aretha, Dusty, Cliff and Petula Clark did their best work in the 60's.

It's one thing to like one's own formative period best, as I do with a very specific dating of the singles charts of Sept 1971, but it's entirely another to waste airtime on such ludicrous agendas. The best decade, if we can free ourselves from such designated time zones, was 1963-1973.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum.