Lesser is More

 It wasn't that the history of Tamla Motown was a chore to read, it was useful and of interest, but one notices the difference when moving to a writer like Wendy Lesser. Nothing Remains the Same is her account of re-reading books she read in her early days and into her twenties after a gap of about 25 years. It's a pleasure to read her writing about the writing she's re-read, some of which I've not read, some of which I have and some I've equally re-read. It's in the quality of the prose and the intelligence. It matters less whether one agrees or not.

It's to be expected that books will look different second time around. We are different people by then. It's no different than the same book looking different to two different people. I am comforted by how little Wendy sometimes remembers of books. I thought that was just me and not eminent editor-critics. I remember impressions but not detail and often not endings. I have been known to come back here and look up what I thought here as a reminder of what I thought at the time.

Wendy's less impresssed by Anna Karenina and Middlemarch than she had been. Having only read Anna once, I can appreciate her shift but with Middlemarch I went in the opposite direction, finding much more in it after a 30-odd year break but I suspect my second reading only brought me up to somewhere closer to the level of her first.

She finds more in Pope and Wordsworth than previously, two poets at opposite ends of a scale where she occupies admirable middle ground in Donne, Gunn and, up to a point, Hopkins and Wilfred Owen. She is also good on the deeply flawed but sporadically great D.H. Lawrence, in the end lighting on the short stories and The Rocking-Horse Winner in particular as best, and proof of Lawrence's own verdict that,

once it is fathomed, once it is known and its meaning fixed or established, it is dead.

I'm glad about that. I think of that as the 'magic' and what makes anything 'art' or art worth having.

I'm sure we were all enamoured of George Orwell as serious, more or less bright, teenagers but Wendy is less so now and she starts out by declaring she's not even going to try with The Catcher in the Rye, which is surely a teenager's book but I'm sure is more than the capturing of alienated adolescence in studied laconic style.

It's mot obvious that Wendy and I would see things the same way if only due to the difference in gender and talent. I haven't seen through George Eliot but I've yet to be persuaded at all by Jane Austen but anybody who could write so well about the Shostakovich String Quartets is worth reading and there will be more of her books here in due course.

--

I was most grateful to a friend at Portsmouth Poetry Society for printing off copies of my Free Verse introduction the other week.

I had gone for the bargain option of having a print cartidge refilled and it didn't work. It wasn't obvious, to me at least, that it wasn't the printer's fault but I need it still to scan in the Times crossword every Saturday. But such a state of affairs can't go on indefinitely and I ordered a new cartridge only to be dismayed that it still didn't work. Good money seemed to be following bad like a losing run at the races. But, undaunted, I kept on pressing buttons, watching videos on re-setting a Canon printer and going back to basics and, well, I never, eventually printed off the poem with the unsatisfactory title You Won't See Me Follow You Back Home.

So perhaps the re-filled cartridge will work, too, but I'll stick with what I've got for now.

Two poems that didn't prove deserving of printed status, as yet, were Rainyday Woman and Canute in Bosham. Perhaps they'll click into place and convince me but it's best if they do that sooner rather than later and appear to me at least as smooth, marble things of some beauty rather than bad carpentry in which one can see the joins.

 

But The Church Fair is done in the first and only draft it's likely to see. Perhaps 45 minutes of entirely derivative period (1957) English comedy. Like the novel, Time After Time, it was done for the sake of being able to say I've done it but, inlike the novel, was more enjoyable to do. I wish poetry didn't seem to be what I was better, or only more successful, at but it is the easy option and I did invest more time, effort and thought in it. The good thing for the writer is that the work remains for them how they imagine it looks, not what it looks like to its readers.

Which is roughly where we came in.   

--

Last week at Lichess, I stepped outside the comfort zone of fiddling about at 2 minutes + 1 second per move and my rating drifting aimlessly in the 1600's to reach for unimaginable heights by improving the 1972 I was preserving in the 'Classical', 30-minute discipline. It didn't go too badly and I found myself on the threshold of greatness, for me, at 1993, one win away from the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail or the Novice Chase at Fontwell which is a rating of 2000. I'd have loved, cherished and left that undefended forever if I'd won the next match but I didn't and now I'm down somewhere near 1880. But I tried.

Also, in the Sports News. I was regarded by myself and others as a big-hitting batsman, for as long as it lasted, thirty years ago but any scoring rate I put up in those stately days by now looks like a medley of Boycott, Gavaskar and 'Barnacle' Trevor Bailey compared to what happened in the European Cricket League T20. With teams from Austria, Denmark, Norway and France, this is not 'first-class' and many from my generation would struggle to recognize it as cricket but 88-0 from 3.1 overs, which is 19 balls, in 13 minutes is something historic as the game further mutates. The 50 partnership came up in 10 balls, which is only one more than is mathematically possible without the bowlers donating more wides and no balls.

Tunbridge Wells v. Dreux T10

But don't worry about Tunbridge Wells. They played Dreux again in the play-offs and won by 50 runs.