Dog Days

 And so, the 'desk' is cleared. There's a Larkin essay and a Rosemary Tonks essay with respective editors, one with more chance of being found suitable than the other, and there's nothing else to write about from the ongoing vignettes on pop records for the Playlist project that will always be there.

The Wake is finished and done with and filed on the shelf and, to be fair to it, I could say much more about it than I could say about many of the other books up there that have faded to only the foggiest of impressions. So, having seen again most of what the BBC Archives have on Larkin on BBC4 last might, I sat and re-read some of the essays in Required Writing today, impressed all over again by their common sense, not only in the likes of The Pleasure Principle which is almost his manifesto and might just suggest a further Larkin essay, mixing it in with previous pieces on 'what is poetry' and only occassionally raising a doubt about whether he would still be allowed to say some of the things he says.

Next up will be Testimony, the Shostakovich memoir, from the library, and Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, the source of the exhilarating opera but before them, tomorrow I go to collect my new acquisition for the front room art collection and so that will be here soon to enjoy and, to go with it, whether I've done it before or not, we can have Top 6 Painters, perhaps extrapolating from the new acquistion and what is good about it to how it relates to my six favourite painters, which will be a disparate list mostly having in common the fact that they have nothing in common.

But these are truly the 'dog days'. Not joyful days spent in the company of dogs which are creation's reason to be cheerful and have faith in nature but sultry, oppressive days in which the unruly sonne gives us no place to hide. Why does it, through windows and through curtains call on us?

Perhaps it is why bookish publications provide their summer reading supplements as if it is a time when reading is all there is to do except that reading, like anything else, is more enjoyable in more comfort.

No, the 'dog days' are so called because of the appearance, in the Northern Hemisphere at least, of Sirius, the dog star, Alpha Canis Major, which although giving its name to this sultry, increasingly heatwave, period, brings with it the promise that it should be over in a few weeks. A clear evening sky in Autumn, if you live anywhere far enough from city lights to appreciate it, can be relied upon to feature Orion in all its glory, the belt pointing upwards to Aldebaran and down towards Sirius. I'm looking forward to knowing they're there whether I see them or not but will enjoy the corollary of the chill in the air anyway.