Rachmaninov Vespers in Portsmouth

It was an honour and privilege to do the review, such as I am able, of the Portsmouth Choral Union and the Renaissance Choir's Rachmaninov Vespers on Saturday. A bit like what is said about teachers, 'those who can, do, and those who can't only write about it'. Critics have not always been the darlings of the cultural world, trying to make their secondary points on the back of the work of genuine artists but I hope that's not me. I go to enjoy and celebrate the occasion rather than find fault, which I'd rarely be able to do anyway. 

I'm not a 'critic', which sounds like it implies 'criticism' in its negative sense any more than I'm a 'poet' which sounds like it implies I'm somebody dreamy and somehow apart from the everyday world like Keats. I just like writing about things I like.

Rachmaninov Vespers review at Music in Portsmouth 

I think that's the 28th 'classical' concert I've been to this year out of what might be 33 in the end. In December, once the busy schedule is over, for my purposes at least, we might have a Review of the Year and at least a shortlist, if not daring to nominate an actual winner, for Event of the Year. I can't imagine the Portsmouth Choral Union and the Renaissance Choir not making the shortlist.

Q&A

Matthew Stewart posted this questionnaire for poets at  Rogue Strands , possibly not expecting answers but offering a way for them to think about what they are doing and why. One can't help doing them oneself even if one's claim to being a poet is a partial one or even one that one would make.

What drives you to write and then attempt to publish your poetry? 

The grappling with craft to turn it into art?

Yes, I think it's exactly that. And art for art's sake, for the most part, I like to think.

 

Your self-worth? Your self-expression? Your sense of identity?

Not primarily, I hope. No. And, yes, maybe a bit.

 

Likes and shares on social media? 

No.

 

Your Mum? Your muse? Your mentor? Your need for a job in C.W.? Funding? Prizes? Publication? 

No. No. No. No. No. Very rarely. And rarely but, as it happens, a magazine arrived today with one in. 

I hardly ever send them out but on this occasion it was nice to be asked.

 

Is your poetry simply for yourself? If so, why do you bother to seek publication? For a sense of validation?

Yes. As above, I mostly don't. But maybe it's that, the fact that somebody else sees fit to put it into print.

 

Your readers? But who are they? Where are they? Why might they want to read your poems? How might you reach them? Do you care about them? 

I don't know who all of them are. A few friends, locally and further afield. Maybe they read them out of politeness. I can reach them from this website, by e-mail or through giving them my booklets. I care about them as I would any other friends, not especially as readers.

Racetrack Wiseguy

Saturdays like tomorrow are very much the sort of days one is interested in horse racing for with good horses coming back for the jumps season and running against each other.

It was all looking cosy here earlier in the week but two steps forward can be followed by some steps back, hopefully not too many. Luckily, I have a bright idea. 

Goshen in the first at Ascot (1.30) has been a bit haphazard over hurdles and so it remains to be seen what he makes of fences. He should win by a long way on talent but strange things happen to him so he's in the combinations but not trusted with the main money.

Paul Nicholls is rarely shy about his horses and especially not Bravemansgame of who he expects great things. I'm a big fan, too, but desert him tomorrow for Anoy Senor (Wetherby 3.35) who has possibly produced more so far in competitive races and so he's again one for the little three-timer rather than a big investment,

because I'm seriously interested in Molly Olly's Wishes (Wetherby 2.25) taking the mares race she won last year and 11/8 is a very fair price. She represents the sort of bet that, if she did get beat, I'd say okay, fair enough, but I'd do the same thing again. We would be nowhere without belief and I'll still be somewhere if it all goes wrong.

If and when she wins there'll be time to re-invest a small amount on Before Midnight (Ascot 2.40), possibly in a reverse forecast with Nassalam.

The Waste Land, a Biography

 Matthew Hollis, The Waste Land, a Biography of a Poem (Faber)

Reading two big books on T.S. Eliot in the space of a few months could be hazardous to one's state of mind. He's not such good company as Dr. Johnson, a dispiriting figure always ailing with one complaint or another. The second half of Robert Crawford's biography in the summer mainly served to remind us what a gruelling read the first volume was but not all reading is purely for pleasure. Some books, even now, still need to be read because they are 'important'. Both Johnson and Eliot were major contributors to poetry criticism, it's just that one made it, and everything else, more enjoyable than the other. But while Prof. Crawford wrote the life of the poet, Matthew Hollis writes the life of the poem which, while overlapping with that of its author, is a different thing. And while Crawford was scholarly, Hollis is a better writer. 

The Waste Land's biography, like the poem itself, is augmented by notes and so not quite as big as it looks. Only 388 of its 524 pages are the text. There's something infectious in these books so learned that so much extraneous explication is required that it becomes integral. For me, the high church of C20th English poetry that is difficult by design includes is at fault for fancying that it needs to be like that. And much of the story of how Matthew Hollis shows The Waste Land coming into being is the very antithesis of any claim it had to be like Keats for who, 'if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all'. What Eliot takes from Keats, or thinks he does, is how he,

sought to overturn the conviction of the Lyrical Ballads that 'all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'

which he makes into his manifesto point that,

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

And if we must have such maxims about what poetry is or isn't, that's not the worst.

388 pages of how a poem came into being must involve a lot of detailed background and this, more than a biography of a poet, overturns the orthodoxy we were taught some 40-odd years ago that the text is all there is. Not many poems are as complex as The Waste Land and would need quite such analysis of its DNA but Hollis brings together many tributaries, like those of the Mississippi-Missouri, to show how it happened.

Not far from the 'escape from personality' is Eliot's idea of the 'objective correlative', 

a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion,

which might have made poetry sound more like a science than an art but in a passage that puts Ezra  Pound's Canto VII alongside Eliot's poem, the 'confluence' between the two is too clear to be uncanny. It refutes those who claim that textual similarities in Shakespeare and Marlowe are evidence that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare because here are Pound and Eliot doing the same thing, because they knew each other, read each other but were lucky enough not to have copyright lawyers finding their clients' ideas in the each other's work.

To simplify The Waste Land to one simple sentence, Eliot finds an 'objective correlative' in post-WW1 Europe for his own exhausted, derelict psychological condition. It's only how much he brings to it that makes it complicated and how its fragmentary state can be seen as a coherent work without claiming that it is its fragmentary nature that brings it together. It wasn't until very late that it became a poem in 5 parts rather than 4 when Death by Water was put back in.

Rather than the notes provided by Eliot or the subsequent Student's Guide to the Selected Poems by B.C. Southam, this book should hereon in be the place for student's of the poem to go for guidance but students, rather than readers, is all it will properly have because nobody, neither now or then, will pick it up, read it and 'get it' as one would with poems by Hardy, Edward Thomas or Larkin. Hollis ends with two pages of quotes from contemporary reviews, such as that it,

may be nonsense as a whole, but is certainly a sporting attempt to turn accident into substance.

In the final exams on C20th English Literature at Lancaster University in 1981, I had intended to answer whatever question there was about T.S. Eliot. I thought I ought to. When I saw the question I wasn't so sure and thought about it while leaving it until last and doing three other essays. Finally, I decided to cobble together some thoughts on a question about Yeats that suited me better and I'm sure it was a good decision.

The biography's last appendix is the poem. It takes maybe 15 minutes to read and by now is full of its own quotes as well as those from Marvell, Spenser, Thomas Kyd and all and one gets the point much more than one immediately does of Finnegan's Wake. There is much to admire in the restrained diction, the 'impersonality' and the way that the fragments add up to more than their constituent parts. What we owe to Eliot, and we are never left in much doubt about how much he owed to Pound in his turn, is how the poetry is better for not being too self-indulgent, however much Eliot himself was. Not everybody has taken the point and poetry has had to be repaired once or twice since but we are in his debt without having to admire everything about him.

Chichester Symphony Orchestra in Chichester

 Chichester Symphony Orchestra, Chichester Cathedral, Oct 25

It's always a capacity crowd, and more, for the CSO's lunchtime turn. There are more friends and family, of course, than for a soloist but the full orchestra is a rare treat for lunch and they never let you down.

Mozart would have been one of the great composers if he had only written his operas but he did a bit more than that, I understand. One can't go straight into a Beethoven Concerto and so the overture to Cosi Fan Tutte was the warm up. All orchestras behave like that. It gave the woodwind a fine opportunity to bring in some happy phrasing before being propelled by busy anticipation.

Tim Rumsey then presented the main course, Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 4, op. 58, from 16 years later. The Allegro moderato begins with a hint of the anxieties one finds in Mozart until the piano tip-toes, trills and runs like quicksilver in Tim's hands, not imposing himself on the music but in sympathy with it. It has a fine cadenza that reolves into warmth which I will go back to on the discs by Mitsuko Uschida that I bought in support of her some years ago when a Times critic who shall remain nameless said she missed some notes in a marvellous Proms performance. What a nerve. You can't trust a reviewer.

The orchestra is more forthright and darker in the Andante with the piano apparently in search of reasons for optimism but that is a brief interlude between the longer outer movements. The Rondo strains towards a gallop while the piano, for me at least, was again trying to make a different case, here insisting on being melodic and maybe it made its point because the big ending isn't as big as some of Beethoven's symphonic climaxes. 

Some standing to applaud was entirely justified for the empathy and poise of a performance augmented by the well-tempered sound of the orchestra. Thus there was just enough time for an encore and, as one who enjoyed nothing more than the old quiz show, Face the Music, I had a confident stab at 'Gershwin?' and was right. It was Oh! I Can't Sit Down from Porgy and Bess in a jazzy arrangement providing a signpost towards a different area of Tim's repertoire and interests. He's a rare talent. I can only remember Steven Kovacevic getting a standing ovation in Chichester before and the local heroine, Angelina Kopyrina, in Portsmouth. They shouldn't be given away like platitudes and they aren't.

Johnson v Johnson

 "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."

 Of course. I'd forgotten, in among all such other eminently quotable things, that that was Dr. Samuel Johnson.

He might not necessarily have meant it as a general truth but it will do for me.

I can't help thinking how one of the greatest Englishmen had the same name as one of the worst. At least the ex-Prime Minister, as I hope we will forever be able to know him, was born in New York and so for me he's American and they can have him back.

But he is also a scoundrel and demonstrates very convincingly the good doctor's sentiment. He likes to be pictured with the union flag behind him, to make him look patriotic, but it's only one of his many ruses. He's no more interested in his country than he is in anything else beyond the one thing he really loves, himself, but even he hasn't yet had the nerve to stand in front of a portrait of himself.

Give him time.

Dusty Springfield, I Just Don’t Know What To Do with Myself

 George Best was non-plussed by Dusty Springfield, his genius for unlocking the defences of Northampton Town, Benfica and most other football teams not translating into one of his other god-given gifts. He need not have fretted.

With Petula Clark, Cilla, Lulu and Sandie Shaw for opposition but with Burt Bacharach writing songs like this and symphonic production to compare with Phil Spector and Tamla Motown, Dusty need not have fretted either, and yet she did. The majestic diva act and heavy mascara were an impressive disguise but inside, it seems, it hurt as much as the songs she sang said it did.

I'm not convinced there's such a thing as a white soul singer. Reports that Elvis thought Tom Jones must be black only serve as further evidence that Elvis wasn't very bright. But, if there ever was a white, British reply to Tamla Motown, it was Dusty Springfield.

It's this song ahead of several others like I Can't Make It Alone (Carole King/Gerry Goffin), You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten as well as the still desperate but ostensibly more positive I Only Wanna Be with You, mostly on account of,

Baby, if your new love ever turns you down
Come back, I will be around
Just waiting for you
I don't know what else to do

 

which expresses desolation in words of almost always one syllable.

For Dusty, it wasn't to be the films or taking a penalty, however badly, to open the World Cup by the iron ambition of Diana Ross. It went quiet until the Pet Shop Boys gave her the opportunity to come back in 1987 with What Have I Done to Deserve This?, re-invented as ironic, electronic and a bit disco but gorgeously mature and glam.

It wasn't a happy story but genius and greatness aren't a passport to comfort, as George Best would have been able to explain. 

Roxy Music - Virginia Plain

 Lest we forget, I'm supposed to be gradually compiling short essays on pop records here towards a book that will never be finished. I'm easily distracted. It's working title changed from 'A Perfect Day of Pop Radio to 'Playlist' because its contents are a playlist of radio shows from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. and now the file is called' Wake Up, Maggie'. I had better add something further to it before it loses all momentum. 'Virginia Plain' is the first track on The Rock Show'.

Anybody inclined to follow Pop Music Theory in horse racing- and I suspect there aren't many - would have been rewarded with 'Legend of Xanadu at 12/1 yesterday and Riders on the Storm at 16/1 today. Maybe somebody noticed because then Jean Genie was a well-backed favourite- and finished second.

---

Roxy Music are currently touring their 50th Anniversary show. Most of them are. To many of us it's not completely Roxy Music without Brian Eno. A number of acts have caused some consternation with their first appearances on Top of the Pops. Boy George and Culture Club made us wonder a bit more deeply about gender as well as what we thought might be Polish national costume, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown seemed to have been conjured from some deranged underworld, my father was concerned how Hawkwind knew they were playing Silver Machine right and perhaps most disturbing of all were the likes of Clive Dunn, Neil Reed, Terry Wogan and Lena Martell. What we had been used to were debonair heartthrobs like Engelbert Humperdinck, girls next door like Sandie Shaw and harmless groups of likely lads like Herman's Hermits.

Roxy Music came in with the wave of less denim-clad, more made-up artists like David Bowie and T. Rex and yet still made us wonder what we were looking at, like ground-breaking art is supposed to. They mixed the lounge lizardry of Bryan Ferry with some sparkle and the sophistication that Nile Rodgers was later to use for Chic with Eno, who was clearly from outer space, overseeing some electronic apparatus and a song that seemed to spend most of its time on the same note, not have a chorus and not mention its title until the last words, which Up the Junction by Squeeze was due to do in what seemed like another age then but was really only seven years later. But whereas Squeeze referred back to 1960’s socially aware commentary on working class Britain, Virginia Plain referenced the set of outré hangers-on in the Andy Warhol set.

They were clever and very good at what they did. It's hard to imagine now why anybody would find fault with it but at the time it was no doubt far too arty for those who could understand Slade but not T. Rex or for who an exhibition of machismo for machismo's sake was all that counted. Virginia Plain remains musically adventurous as the first incarnation of Roxy Music were before Eno took himself off into even artier adventures and Bryan developed his louche stylings towards a more mainstream career and some high maintenance girlfriends.

Racetrack Wiseguy

 I will only have myself to blame if Pied Piper (Cheltenham, 2.40) doesn't repay my blind faith in him tomorrow. I plunged in peremptory fashion on the even money even though the two Gordon Elliott raiders I backed today got beat and only then did I check his record for the last 14 days, which isn't very good.

But, the scientific way of reassuring myself that it could be okay is that the even money is disappearing from the early prices and he is a bit more odds-on at the moment. He's also probably expected to be a better horse in time than Knight Salute who he dead-heated with before a debatable disqualification at Aintree last season. The entirely unscientific reason for hope is that Pop Music Theory did well by us earlier in the week with You Wear It Well and so perhaps Crispian St. Peters might prove as good a tipster as Rod Stewart.

They don't make videos like that any more.

--

After the debacle of 2016 when I invested confidently in a Remain vote of 50-55% and Hillary Clinton, I'm not betting on politics any more. Common sense goes out of the window. However, I note the sustained market move for Boris Johnson in the Next Prime Minister market. My friend, armed with his degree in politics, is confident that Rishi Sunak wins but, as in the previous race, the best horse doesn't win if not suited by the conditions.

The conditions of this event are that two names go out to the Conservative Party membership who are a seriously deranged group of insulated weirdos with no concept of much beyond Rule Britannia, the Union Flag and, yes, Boris Johnson. They don't care that he's an incompetent scoundrel, narcissist and compulsive liar. And it's them who decide, so if Boris has 140 MP's prepared to back him, we've had it and even at 7/4, he's the bet although you could have had 10/1 last week. And that's the trouble with politics these days, you simply can't imagine what will happen next.

The prospect is too gloomy to contemplate. We simply can't have two more years of that bad circus act followed by the faint chance that something might go disastrously right for him and he gets a second, or you might call it a third, term in office.

My next job is to scan a list of countries to emigrate to. I've heard good things about Antarctica and I'm not a fan of hot weather, I'm just not sure if the library system, brilliant as it is, will deliver biographies of Brahms, Schubert and the like when I want to read them to somewhere nearby I can collect them from.

To re-write the Carpenters,

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft,

Please could you drop the Conservative Party

back at the planet that you brought them from.    

T.S. Eliot in Bosham

It's time for a break from Dr. Johnson for a few days. One can't read the same writer all the time, even if it's such a good one. Reading the same writer all the time, sir, is like drinking nothing but the same vintage. However fine it is, one's palate becomes accustomed to it and in due course fails to appreciate its fineness.

The reason is the arrival of The Waste Land, a biography by Matthew Hollis, so come back here next week for a report on that. Meanwhile, though, I am reminded that he stayed with Vivien in nearby Bosham, as pictured. I know exactly where that is.

It prompts the idea of a series that might be called something like Poets in West Sussex and East Hampshire. We already have Rosemary Tonks buried at Warblington. There's Edward Thomas houses at Steep. There's the book signed by John Donne in Chichester cathedral, pictured some years ago here under the John Donne label. John Keats stopped off at Bedhampton on his journey to Italy. Simon Armitage attended Portsmouth Polytechnic. There's the plaque in Chichester marking where Keats began The Eve of St. Agnes. Looking up the Eliot picture, one finds Dylan Thomas also spent some time in Bosham.

I'm sure there must be a few more.

The Rambler

Givega didn't run at Fontwell today, having been well backed, and so we'll be looking out for when he is entered next. But, although Pop Music Theory isn't either scientific or proven, You Wear It Well was impressive and saved the day.

Meanwhile, reporting from the frontline of Comparative Tory Studies. Good Grief, one can hardly take an evening out without coming back to more horror stories. It seems to me they've lost something since the 1750's when Dr. Johnson was a most amenable and considered commentator on humanity. One of several epithets one gladly applies to his thought and writing is integrity. He sees through the trivia of fame, fortune and glamour in passages that conjure up some recent eminent Tories to who such scepticism has obviously not occurred. Always prefaced by a translation from Horace or other Classical source by the likes of Dryden or Pope, it is like long-standing wisdom that was self-evident but not, it seems, to the desperados intimidating reluctant members through the lobbies this evening to shore up, for one more day at least, this most ramshackle of governments.

It is hugely enjoyable to read Dr. Johnson, bringing forward from Socrates,

casting his eyes over the shops and customers, 'how many things are here', says he, 'I do not want!'

and he finds himself, or someone like him, beholding,

a thousands shops crouded with goods, of which he can scarcely tell the use, and which, therefore, he is apt to consider of no value.

I'd know. I was so forlorn of suitable paid employment at one time that I worked in retail jewellery, selling the gross untruth that gold and silver, rings, bracelets and other such adornments meant something. It wasn't my job to tell the bedazzled customers that it was all rubbish. Once in a while one might sell a Seiko watch and think that although they've paid twice as much as it's really worth for it, at least it's a well-made thing.

Dr. Johnson did also consider that,

A voyage to the moon, however romantic and absurd the scheme may now appear, since the properties of air have been better understood, seemed highly probable to many of the aspiring wits in the last century,

 

but I don't entirely blame him for that because out of all the conspiracy theories put about by outlandish fringe thinkers, often socially distanced, male and geeky, the idea that we never did put a man on the moon seems one of the more reasonable. That we are expected to believe that Wilbur and Orville Wright first made an aeroplane fly for 12 seconds in 1903 but, by 1969, Apollo 11 had landed Neil Armstrong in the Sea of Tranquility is much more astonishing than the progress made from Rock Around the Clock in 1954 to Hunky Dory in 1971 or from The Lake Isle of Innisfree to Byzantium.

However, on balance and having no more than a poor 'O' level in Physics to argue with, if Brian Cox and Stephen Hawking believed it, so will I.

I'm more dubious about Economics as a subject, though. I entirely understand how prices shift according to demand at the racetrack. That is free market supply and demand and one doesn't have to play if one doesn't want to. Liz Truss and her ferocious back bench supporters have proven once and for all, though, that a theory can't be applied to the world in the hope that the world will comply with it.

If only it would.

She is surely a record-breaker in waiting as the briefest term any Prime Minister ever served and the record she breaks is that of the recently more famous than he had been, George Canning, in 1827, who died.   

Liz Truss, thus, is likely to go down as the worst Prime Minister we ever had, which would have been inconceivable in the last days of the Boris chaos but lest we forget, lest we somehow come to regard the Boris years as an idyll, a missed opportunity or a Golden Age and suffer any remorse, let us remember. I had twelve of these reasons last night without trying very hard-

His default position was that of a barefaced liar. He preferred the challenge of obfuscation to any admission of the truth.

He lied to Mrs. Queen in order to suspend Parliament, which was illegal and quickly overturned.

He didn't believe in Brexit. He didn't believe in anything apart from him being Prime Minister. It was only a career move to get the job he wanted which it soon was to prove he couldn't do.

He first said Covid was 'only bird flu', then he said 'let the bodies pile up', then he nearly died of it but only offered the NHS nurses that saved him a 1% pay rise while inflation shot up to 10%.

He hid in a fridge to avoid an interview with a journalist as well as avoiding as much scrutiny as he could while being the 'front-runner' in the leadership election.

The neighbours in the flat next to where he lived with Carrie heard shouts that suggested he was assaulting her before she decided to be his third wife and mother of yet more of his children.

It wasn't Partygate, the events in Downing Street at which juniors were sent out with suitcases to the off licence to fetch more booze during lockdown that did for him,

it was Pinchergate, in which he stood by one of his allies when he was accused of sexual assault, 

stories not unlike those in recordings made of Donald Trump boasting of his own such behaviour who endorsed Boris as 'a good guy'.

He attempted to dismiss female MPs in the House of Commons as 'hysterical' and referred to homosexuals and 'bum boys'.

He never answered a question at Prime Minister's Question Time but came back with spurious claims such as that he had 'got Brexit done' but Northern Ireland remains unresolved, he signed agreements only to later renege on them and promised 'levelling up', selling places like Workington and Bolsover down the river, spending money he would never have to or be able to repay- which is what it was feared Jeremy Corbyn would do, including the gaudy redecoration of no.10 Downing Street to his taste which was, as far as we know, paid for by somebody else.

As Foreign Secretary, his intervention in the detention of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iran resulted in her sentence being extended.

Boris the Third is a play by Adam Meggido based on the time at Eton when he played Richard III but didn't bother to learn his lines and previewed his polotical career, and his appearances on Have I Got News For You, by showing he couldn't do anything properly or get it right but needed to have the starring role.

 

I haven't done any research beyond confirming some detail. There's plenty more than that. I haven't even started trying yet and that's betting without all the stuff that nobody knows about yet, or ever will.

Jennifer Arcuri. Throwing out those respectable, remainer Conservative grandees, like Ken Clarke. Accusing his rivals in the leadership campaign of being 'vanity projects' ( !!! ). The book would take too long to read, never mind write, and you wouldn't want the story contaminating your bookshelves.

So, please, let's not him back. He's currently between 8/1 and 10/1 to be the next Prime Minister and only 11/1 after the next General Election. 

That is conspiracy theorists for you. I can forgive Dr. Johnson everything but I'm not having that. 

Racetrack Wiseguy

 We landed the nap, at least, here on Saturday. If you do nothing else, it's best to do that. At Plumpton yesterday I led everywhere except where it mattered but, undaunted and with ammunition in the account to go with, this is the time of year to be involved and some of these little midweek meetings are the bread and butter jobs worth looking at.

It was one of Gary Moore's than did me on the line at Plumpton and then he had another winner. He is generally one to keep on the right side of at Plumpton and Fontwell and so we'll be having at look at Givega (Fontwell, 1.12) when Mr. Joe Coral chalks his prices up.

Mr. Henderson sends a few to Worcester and while we will expect Fuji Rocks to improve for his first run, Morning Line (2.40) looks like one we can take an interest in here and 'going forward' and then You Wear It Well (3.45), which was one of the more likely prospects suggested by my very unscientific 'pop music theory' when I had a rare bet at Catterick last time out.

We will have to see how they price them up but 7/4 about each of them, they look like the ingredients of a trixie, one of the Professor's favourite recipes, the three doubles and the treble. These are fairly confident selections but I've been confident before and regretted it so there will be plenty left in the account even if nothing comes of it as long as we don't have an irresponsible plunge in a wildly optimistic hope of 'growth'. One tends to stick with a proven strategy. 

In a fine valedictory essay in the last issue of The Rambler, Dr. Johnson writes,

I have seen the meteors of fashion rise and fall,

while hoping that he has left behind something of worth.

Translating that into horse racing investments, it means one has seen big, noisy gamblers come and go but, having been quieter and more considered about it, one has outlasted them and is still getting by,

A little old fashioned but that's all right.   

Johnson Fest

 

 

My own private Samuel Johnson Festival costigitates phantasmagorically in tribute to Robbie Coltrane whose finest hour was surely as the good doctor in Blackadder.

Meanwhile, with any number of notes from which to select a theme for a further episode here, the latest is one made of,

Words which convey ideas of dignity in one age, are banished from elegant writing or conversation in another, because they are in time debased by vulgar mouths, and can be no longer heard without the involuntary recollection of unpleasing images.

 

I don't know if Wordsworth's Daffodils is taught to 14 year-old boys these days but one can hear the barely-suppressed snigger going round the classroom at,

A poet could not but be gay,

I remember 'groovy' in the 1980's being used to mean 'old-fashioned' when in the 60's it had meant 'fashionable' but in that case the word could refer to the same thing appropriately at different times but with contrary connotations,

but I had a problem with 'righteous' at a poetry club meeting a few years ago and couldn't hear it without the involuntary recollection of unpleasing images that wouldn't have troubled Dr. Johnson and probably didn't trouble many in the meeting either.

I can't hear 'righteous' without hearing 'self-righteous' in it. Some of us have become more ironic and self-conscious and would hardly dare to think of ourselves as 'righteous' but for Johnson, and many still now, I'll wager, righteousness is still something to aspire to or at least offer the appearance of.

For him, piety is a virtue, religion unconditionally accepted as a good thing, the abuses it is put to and responsible for not having been generally recognized by 1751. But every age has its orthodoxies. We had thought the pursuance of some objective 'truth' was a good thing until the Age of Trump and Boris Johnson aligned us with previous tyrannies that accommodated no account of what was what beyond their own. 

Another idea that goes unquestioned in Johnson's essays is that fame and reputation are desirable and to be admired. The world is a competitive place and, time and again, taking part in it competitively rather than retiring from it are implicitly what he recommends. The Selected Essays almost have a train of thought of their own, developing from one theme to the next, so only half way through them, he might yet find in his own period examples corresponding to those of Gerald Ratner, Boris, Trump and the still unravelling Liz Truss whose pursuits of fame and glory was vain and in vain. The vanity so much that they won't ever conceive of the contempt that so much of the world held them in.

 

But none of that is Samuel Johnson's fault. He tries his best, sometimes stuck in the quagmire of attitudes that he couldn't be entirely blamed for then. He worries at human nature and identifies its absurdities, knowing that many of them are his, too, as we all might, not necessarily the happier for it but with the satisfaction of having expressed it.

Racetrack Wiseguy

For some years now I've insisted that this is my time of year whether there's been any evidence in the actual results or not. That is mainly because it's when the big stables start to bring out their best horses for the winter jumping season, which is the sort of racing one can understand a bit better.

How ironic, then, that a big part of the 'kickstart' this year came about yesterday by following the Professor in with the Aidan O'Brien treble at the Curragh, on the flat, all of which won well at surprisingly good prices and turned negligible stakes into proper ammunition for the forthcoming weeks.

Landing the double today in similarly impressive fashion, my economy is at a year's high point compared to that of the government's, which is wretched, but they don't exercise caution, wisdom or apply any sort of sense to prevailing conditions. And they are a complete shambles. The way things are going, with the revolving doors in Downing Street spinning at a dizzying rate, I'm likely to be Chancellor of the Exchequer sooner than I thought with my proven track record but, of course, confidence is a dangerous thing and so we stick to the plan because it works. Unlike that of Prime Minister Truss. Who would have thought that the worst Prime Minister anybody can remember could be replaced by a worse one. I honestly never thought I'd have to say that.

But not only do we sing when we're winning, we press on.

The success of those O'Brien horses yesterday was 'easy to be persuaded' to back, as I wrote to the Prof. Horses ready to go after a prep run. Not many of his good ones need three chances to win their first race. It's exactly the back-end time of the season when those horses can help themselves. And even though it feels more like jump race weather now that summer's over, there's big prize money to be had. It's always reassuring to read of him in Timeform, Yard having good spell.

We stick with the momentum of the O'Brien stable in making Peking Opera (Leopardstown, 2.05, nap) irresistible if we can have even money. But Ryan Moore goes to Ascot for the Big-Time Charlie races that begin with the long distance heat where Trueshan looks like a favourite worth taking on and the progressive Waterville (Ascot 1.25, pictured) is an option worth taking, mapping the trajectory of his improvement and finding it potentially good value at 7/2.

Also progressive could be Progressive (Stratford, 3.54), with Mr. Henderson going softly softly on a day that is very likely to see Paul Nicholls having any number of winners. Which ones, though. It really is a mug's game to spread it all across big combinations because at short prices it only takes a couple to get beaten to reduce your palace to matchsticks.

Him Malaya (Newton Abbot, 2.55) and Huelgoat (Stratford, 2.14) could be the ones to put in tonight but if the bandwagon starts rolling we could start throwing money around like confetti at all of them because one doesn't want to read the headlines about his fantastic day and not have been on.

Another O'Brien doing well is Fergal and Free Handshake (Market Rasen, 1.17) goes onto this list of six that my next job is to mix up into doubles, trebles and even more ludicrously ambitious concatenations. 

There is a sort of symmetry about believing that having had 6 out of 6 winners on Thurs and Fri, one can do it all again on Sat but even Garfield Sobers only did it once. As Dr. Johnson points out in one of his many brilliant essays, unlike animals, we spend most of our time thinking about the future and the past whereas they, for all we know, seem to live in an ongoing present. And he's right, we live in the present while the race is on but otherwise, we are thinking about what will win forthcoming races or fondly remember those that have won races in the past.

But what we do is go carefully until we have manufactured an advantageous position and then play with that advantage. What those bonkers Conservative politicians do is gamble on an unlikely outsider called Growth when it obviously isn't going to happen. I'd bloody love to be their bookmaker. 

Top 6 Songwriters

Ahead of next week's Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting on the subject of Song Lyrics, I've been giving it some thought. For those of us for who pop music began with Move Over Darling by Doris Day, or anywhere near it, there's plenty of it and would be enough for a whole new society rather than an evening. I first thought I'd be betting without classical composers but we mustn't do that, we must answer the question. However, I have reframed it to songwriters, which includes the tune, rather than just the words.

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which prompted some debate and consternation. Of course, being Dylan, he had to be difficult about it but found time to accept it in the end. I'd have preferred it if he could have stuck by his principles having once said that Smokey Robinson was the real poet among pop song writers. That was the right answer.

 

Tamla Motown overflowed with talent organized into the production line in the hit factory that ensured huge commercial success on the back of artistic excellence, which wasn't always the way in pop music. As well as Smokey, the engine roon was driven by Holland-Dozier-Holland, Brian, Lamont and Eddie, who provided Berry Gordy's quality control with a job as enjoyable as wine taster. The question for them was who to give the best songs to and the answer was usually Diana Ross & the Supremes.

 

My interest in pop music was extended longer than it might have been by being introduced to The Magnetic Fields and the potent combination of heartbreak and dark satire in the songs of Stephin Merritt. I suspect he's not quite the force he was 20 years ago and the songs up to and including 69 Love Songs, and more beyond, but he was a once-in-a-lifetime tip from a friend to who I've been grateful ever since.

For many people Lennon-McCartney would be a no-brainer selection as obvious as Shakespeare would be for a list of people who wrote plays but having set themselves a very high standard they went on to indulge themselves and live off their reputation a little bit which might seem harsh but there's not much room in a top 6 and Burt Bacharach provided the foundations for any number of 1960's artists that possibly amount to more.

 

The second, third and fourth divisions would be easy to fill with great writers that the proper rules of a Top 6 don't allow me to namedrop here and so I've only got one space left and even I don't know who I'm going to give it to yet.

 

But, no, I can't do it. It will have to remain, in such difficult circumstances, that elite Top 4. It was going to be Carole King and Mozart, for his sublime arias that he did the music for but the Italian words wewre by Lorenzo da Ponte and the German by Emanuel Schikaneder, but the original question was Song Lyrics and perhaps it's not for me to re-write it.

So I admit defeat in the face of the choice between Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, Dory Previn, Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, some memorable 'dab hand' efforts by Rod Stewart, the great Newcastle poet, Alan Hull, and the extraordinary reading list that would come about if we did have a Portsmouth Song Lyrics Society. If we had world enough and time which, sadly, I don't think we do.

Adscititious Johnson

I was never persuaded by John Peel's adage that he was more interested in the music he hadn't heard than that that he had. Even aged 6 I don't know if I could have been persuaded to trade Silence is Golden, Move Over Darling and She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah for the promise of The Well-Tempered Klavier. One can't be convinced by something one doesn't know about.

By a certain age one will surely have found one's way to most of what one would like. One thing leads to another until surely the Known must be impregnable to any challenge from the Unknown. And yet, getting into Donald Rumsfeld territory, how could we know. Certainly, being introduced to the music of The Magnetic Fields just at the age when I thought pop music was over extended my pop life and they entered the very top echelon of my favourite things but even then I wouldn't have swapped Tamla Motown, T. Rex, Bowie, Al Green and reggae for them.

Similarly, there must still be writers I've not read that would be added to my Premier League if I found them but I wouldn't abandon James Joyce, for Dubliners, Rosemary Tonks, for her Baudelairean ennui, Larkin for his downright common sense, etc. It wasn't as if I didn't know about Dr. Johnson but I'd read more about him than by him and gladly accepted Robbie Coltrane in Blackadder as a beginner's guide.

Although it was only a few weeks ago, I already can't remember what prompted the recent reading of the Lives of the Poets. It's highly likely to have been an item at Anecdotal Evidence , perhaps the finest of literary 'blogs', that provides something good every day and today, as it quite often is, cites the good doctor. The Lives were a revelation, as below on the 'Dr. Johnson' tab, and led immediately to Selected Essays which is 550 pages of literary joy. To those who've read them, a recommendation would be as useful as one for The Beatles, or tipping Red Rum for the National, but not everybody will have and if you haven't, you must. It is never too late to find a new enthusiasm and I'm very glad I found out in time.

One could call him a philosopher in the way that Alan Partridge, when asked to name a philosopher, said, 'Peter Ustinov', but he is such in the ways that Montaigne or maybe Marcus Aurelius are, not demolishing the rickety systems of previous generations of thinkers only to replace them with flawed edifices of their own, impenetrable, dense with jargon and eventually falling back on 'a priori' assumptions or turning out to be circling around nothing at all. I have a lot of time for Sartre but not so much the free will or the support for the Soviet Union and I'm sadly not one of the six people in the world said to fully understand Derrida. For all their sophistication, that sort of philosopher makes a poet seem as practical as a plumber in comparison.

 

Dr. Johnson is a moralist, Anglican and Tory but one mustn't let our prejudices from 250 years after the fact blind us to the way he saw through superficial human frailties, not least that,

What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught...men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.

He finds Abraham Cowley 'never suspected that the cause of his unhappiness was within'. He notices 'a man writes much better than he lives'. On our tendency to give away secrets, he realizes that,

most men seem rather inclined to confess the want of virtue than of importance,

that, yes, they would prefer to show they know a secret and that they lacked the integrity to keep it than maintain the virtue of discretion.

The Essays is a book where one regularly has to stop to make a note of page numbers and, a rare thing for me, one that it is a pleasure to take time over, re-read paragraphs for pure enjoyment and to see how he did it and relish the language. Few books provide quite such a guarantee that every page is worth reading, not least, indeed, for being 'reminded' as much as informed but that it was 'ne'er so well express'd', which were Pope's words, not his. 

Perhaps it is to Dr. Johnson's advantage, or mine really, that C18th Lit was the period I missed out at university. While 'education' can enhance and encourage appreciation, it can also ruin it and it's a good thing to come to these essays in a better position to simply enjoy rather than have to encounter them on a compulsory reading list. They are thus not a duty like Middlemarch first was, that it took me some decades to return to and like much better. 

I want to do a Top 6 Writers just so that I can put him in it but it would be unfair to leave out any of Elizabeth Bishop, Hardy, Larkin, Camus, Ovid, Rosemary, maybe still Thom Gunn, and the boy from Stratford amongst others from such a crucial list only to honour him.

 

A biography of The Waste Land by Matthew Hollis will be on its way when released, as will new poems by Sean O'Brien in November. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, is on the waiting shelf as well. But with Rassellas due here, too, and a logistical project in hand of where the Johnson section can be accommodated in a suitably eminent position on the shelves, the lives by Boswell and John Wain as well as Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by Henry Hitchings will be re-read with new enthusiasm. So there is an Autumn programme in place even if it makes me sound like a 1973 schoolgirl wrapped up in her devotion to the Bay City Rollers.