The Reading Diary

 The History of Writing is a brilliant survey of a vast subject. A few more chapters continued to amaze with paragraphs seeing whole languages come and go while all the time the relationship between the markings on the page and the sound made by speech became closer although it still hasn't and maybe never will align perfectly. Also, we are reminded that Greek came before Latin. Of course it did but if ancientness confers any greater respect then Latin is the junior partner.

But that can wait again. It's thrilling to read but, like a cheap film full of gratuitous shootings and car chases, cliff-hanging scenes and tawdry drama, I'm not learning a great deal from it, I'm only enjoying the thrill. I'm not going to come out of it fluent in Aramaic any more than anybody addicted to bad films is going to become James Bond, Wyatt Earp or an intergalactic superhero.

 

No, the deep impression made by Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait directed me almost straight to more Maggie O'Farrell to see if she's still such a good writer when not applying her very fine writing to the genre of historical fiction.

Perhaps one isn't quite as taken with the prose for its own sake of The Hand that First Held Mine that, one dare say, will bring together the two separate stories of the girl's adventures in 1960's Soho, including the legendary Colony Club, and some relationship dysfunction from more recent times but it's convincing in other ways and it keeps her in the very top echelon of that inadequate sample of contemporary fiction writers that I've read. They are so many. One can only try one's best.

Rather than bother the Portsmouth Library Service with bringing that and another one to my nearest, local library, I walked no more than half a mile more to fetch them from where they were and that's where I'll take them back to. The service they provide is sensational in our bleakly mercantile, business, profit-motivated, Rees-Mogg times but I like to help if I can. If I thought that getting them delivered to a library a few hundred yards nearer would help keep somebody in a job then I would but they might only be a volunteer anyway. 

 

I don't blame any of our writers these days for being 'bleak', if that is what they are. The optimism of The Beatles, the mini skirt, the transverse engine in Alex Issigonis's Mini, Concorde and the Moon landings in the 1960's are as effectively as far behind us by now as Dr. Johnson's C18th Toryism, which was well ahead of its time, and by the 1970's, there were darker sub-texts in Bowie, the Three-Day Week and the Sex Pistols.

But we must make the best of it as best we can. This is not an Age of Enlightenment. It can't be, not with Putin abroad, China apparently hard at work and Boris and Trump both hanging about hoping to make comebacks. It's not surprising if, like Hamlet, we have 'bad dreams' but it must be our job, those of us who can avoid living awful lives, to not do so. Or else we bring the overall average down.

I don't mean we should be (Boris) Johnsonian by continuing to 'party' while everyone less privileged is traumatized but we can keep reading books worth reading, appreciating things worth appreciating and hope that, if we ever do re-appear at the end of this long, dark tunnel, we carried something through it.     

Diary, and 100 Books

 I've never been sure how diarists managed to be so. The likes of Samuel Pepys or Tony Benn led active lives and yet found the time to write much of it down. So did Philip Larkin but his admirers (for the poems) should be eternally grateful that one of the girlfriends followed his instructions and burnt them, unread.

Surely if you've not done much, you can only say,

Wrote diary about writing diary

but if you're busy you wouldn't have the time.

But today, taking up again The History of Writing I saw the history of civilisation from the perspective of whole cultures developing from one to the next, through consonants more than vowels, not always by any means from left to right in Aramaic, Nabatean, Tifinigh and all sorts of such systems by which people made themselves understood. Whole languages are passed over in a sentence, giving a glimpse of how there's a bit more to communication that 'i before e except after c'.

I realize my reponsibility to the internet that must be on tenterhooks with my chess career not far short of 'trending'. Well, I got to 1990 today, had a shot at an all-time high rating and blew it but remain well-placed to have another go.

Not only that, I saw an Austin 7 in a car showroom, a well preserved example of the first car I ever went in, except that turns out to have been a Morris 8, and then found myself playing dominoes with strangers who were very happy to be friends in the afternoon. Perhaps it is of such contingent detail that life, and thus reports of it in diaries, is made up. 

But if David Bowie made a list of 100 Books, maybe I should, too. It's not Best, it's not Favourite, it is Important to Me, as they some to mind. There's no point listing the Complete Works of 100 writers and I haven't decided yet whether they can only have one each but Selected might have to be allowed in. Let's see how it goes.

 

James Joyce, Dubliners

Samuel Johnson, Selected Essays 

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived

Shakespeare, Hamlet

Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper

Rosemary Tonks, Bedouin of the London Evening 

Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel

Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare

Ian Bostridge, Schubert's Winter Journey  

 

John Stubbs, Donne

W. H. Auden, The English Auden

Sean O'Brien, Ghost Train  

Wendy Lesser, Music for Silenced Voices

Danny Baker, Going to Sea in a Sieve

Thom Gunn, Selected Poems, ed. Clive Wilmer

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

 

Simon Jenkins, England's Cathedrals

Maggi Hambling, The Works   

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach 

Haruki Murakami, Clorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage 

Richard Yates, Collected Stories

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

Albert Camus, La Peste

Andre Gide, La Symphonie Pastorale 

Patrick Hamilton, Rope

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

 

Montaigne, The Essays, a Selection

Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu

George Orwell, The Decline of the English Murder 

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch 

Banana Yoshimoto, Lizard

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 

Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

A.N. Wilson, Jesus 

William Trevor, Reading Turgenev

George Moore, In Minor Keys 

 

Mark Paytrees, Bolan, the Rise and Fall of a C20th Superstar 

John Preston, A Very English Scandal

Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson

Roddy Lumsden, Not All Honey

Martin Mooney, Bonfire Makers

Norman MacCaig, Selected Poems

John Donne, Songs & Sonets

Joseph Brodsky, Of Grief and Reason 

Wislawa Symbosrska, View with a Grain of Sand

Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life, edited and translated by Robert Spaethling

 

--

 

Well, there's 50. I'll have to owe you 50 more, relax the rules or go a bit deeper. What, no Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Bronte, Edward Thomas, etc, etc. Well, no, not yet but I can hardly claim to have lost faith in poems when there are so many poets there. There'd be not much of me left if they were taken out.

That was interesting for me to do. Whether it was quite so gripping for you to read isn't for me to say. Those who write diaries thinking that anybody will later be interested enough to read them risk flattering themselves. Larkin got a lot of things wrong but he got the poems right and did the right thing in preventing us from having his daily record of himself.

 

Chess Report

 One last note from Paul Morley's account of David Bowie before it's consigned to its upstairs shelf alongside Lou Reed, Marc Bolan and Tony Visconti. He includes Bowie's list of 100 books which might be a project to replicate one day but he also says Bowie spent a lot of time playing chess later on. Perhaps that's what we creative types ( ! ) do when the urge to produce new work diminishes, something abstract, with ideas but ultimately meaningless. 

It's a while since I reported from the front line of Lichess. I was floating aimlessly in the 1600's at Bullet, which is 2 mins + 1 second per move, and left it at 1677, which is only Top 29%, bearing in mind that the bottom 30% are likely to be players that gave it a go, got beat a few times and didn't go back. I returned to Rapid, with 10 mins on the clock. I had reached an all-time high of 1993 in February 2022, had a shot at the landmark rating of 2000, lost and slithered down to 1894. So, in the last six weeks I rebuilt that to 1981, Top 8%, almost within touching distance of a personal best and another shot at 2000, but now I'm back at 1946.

2000 could happen. There will be a celebration here and I'll immediately switch to Blitz so as never to ruin that rating again. Meanwhile, I persevere. I'm not sure if it's therapeutic or addictive but it has its moments of both inpsiration and despair. 

--

Next up in books, I should return to the History of Writing. I don't think I can quite face the horrors of Phil Spector after the interminable elusiveness of Bowie.

--

I understand the remaining Beatles and Stones are making a record together. I'm not convinced that's a brilliant idea. It's better than doing some more Fawlty Towers for sure but almost any idea would be a better idea than that.

Jackie - White Horses

 

 I try to say the right thing, I really do, but it doesn't always work. It can be best just to 'tell it how it is' if you can get away with it but there's no such issue with nominating White Horses by Jackie on a 7 inch single as one of the best birthday presents I ever had. I was probably in my early 40's but my sister had the internet and could find the sort of things I was going to spend much of the rest of my life stocking up on before I could. When I very much mistakenly sold off that significant portion of my life represented by my pop vinyl records for meaningless cash, I kept back White Horses for myself. I could somehow let the Sex Pistols bootleg go, and the Public Image Ltd Metal Box, but money is nowhere near enough to part me from this.

I'm not sure I ever watched the dubbed, European TV series it was the theme for. I did sit through any amount of chivalrous swash-buckling in The Flashing Blade and Belle and Sebastian was a much better drama than the mawkish indie band that took their name from it. White Horses had done all its best work by the time its signature tune was over.

Jackie Lee made a brave attempt at cornering the market with Rupert, Rupert the Bear and Johnny Said Come Over but the dreaminess and fantasy of this could never be equalled, could never,

softly sigh

and nothing else could

race to meet the dawn

quite so gorgeously.

 

 

Ernie - Benny Hill

 

Benny Hill doesn't fit with recent thinking on what is acceptable and what isn't. Apparently a fat-faced man being chased around a park by a string of nurses in short skirts to a saxophone soundtrack isn't funny anymore but maybe not all of Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Morecambe & Wise or Spike Milligan accord entirely with the dire restrictions of such correctness.

And the careers of the likes of Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle can be examined elsewhere as to how far they succeeded in living out their professed principles. They both did brilliant work but didn't Ben write the Queen musical and isn't Alexei still Corbynite.

No, Benny Hill was a proper poet to be admired because the appreciation of work like his was precisely what all my school education, and some of it beyond, on poetry was concentrated on.

It is heavy on alliteration, rhyme, hyperbole, epic and drama. There will be assonance whether he meant it or not. Hill is not a poet given to enjambment but you can't have everything. At least anybody who comes across this poem can be expected to understand it which is more than can be said of Ezra Pound.

What he does is exactly what we were educated to believe meant 'poetry'. 

I think it's 'verse' but the definition of 'poetry', with plenty of input from me, is available elsewhere.

It has taken a lifetime to recover from the education the system in place at the time visited upon me. I don't know if I'd have been better off without it
And so it bounds along as the greatest of all those heavily nuanced presentations, like The Gay Caballero, that filled out his once prime time television shows.

You just do what you do. Like Frankie Howerd, and even the greats like Tommy Cooper or Ken Dodd. Like Robb Wilton, Julian Clary and maybe even Ronnie Corbett. They just did what they did and they got away with it. And that's all anybody wants to do, for as long as they can, unless something that they do becomes a timeless masterpiece. Or no longer acceptable.

There is a war on, as there usually is. Some of them are being fought to defend the sort of harmless fun that we can live with against tyrants who'd prefer us to be beholden unto them. I'd rather have Benny Hill, thank you very much. There wasn't much point taking all those years to educate me about poetry only to find that a poet who did many of the things I'd been taught to recognize turned out to be verboten.

Painting a Ceiling and other stories

 I'm more impressed by Michelangelo this afternoon than I was this time yesterday having painted a ceiling this morning. The ceiling I painted was no more than two square metres in the porch where rain had got in before I had the guttering above done last year, it wasn't as high as the Sistine Chapel's and I

was only attempting to apply some silk white rather than anything on this scale but it gave me some small insight into the problems he must have encountered.

The main problem is that paint, like anything else that has weight, is subject to the effects of gravity. I think Michelangelo's paint would have been a bit thicker than mine and not so much of it would have dripped off his brush onto him, his ladder ( ! ) and the non-ceiling parts of the chapel. I don't think Pope Julius II would have been impressed to find his inner sanctum splattered with all the paint that missed the ceiling although Michelangelo would have inadvertently anticipated Jackson Pollock, the Dripper, by 450 years if he had.

There might not be many painters and decorators who provide reviews of local classical music concerts for the internet or poems and essays on poetry for any publications that'll have them and it's best if I keep my attempts at their sort of work to a minimum, too, but one can hardly ask a professional to come in and do such a small job. The painting took maybe twenty minutes but the wiping of surfaces afterwards took more than that.

Oh, what fun I had. 

It is best if we all stick to what we are good at. At school it was at an early stage that those who didn't look like being academic enough to do Latin were not persevered with but I think in my case they kept me doing Ancient Roman up to reading Caesar's De Bello Gallico and Ovid because I'd have been even worse at Woodwork and Metalwork. I wish one could have been taken off rugby union at an equally early stage but they could see I was quite good at sport, I just didn't like that one. Now, fifty years later, it's becoming apparent that it's dangerous. I could have told them that but, sadly, in Gloucester, rugby takes on the proportions of a religion more than just representing one's prescribed quota of exercise.

However, the painting of the Bosham Road Porch ceiling could count as a valuable apprenticeship for the much more ambitious project of the bedroom ceiling. I think I'll be looking for 'non-drip' although it would be best if that applied not only to the paint but the person applying it.

--

I was more at home in The Times on Saturday when the headline of a review of a new book on Anaximander called him, The greatest mind you've never heard of.

Well, I have, actually. There was a poem about him in my 2000 collection, Re-reading Derrida on a Train.

Yes, Anaximander, Jacques Derrida, Tycho Brahe, they're all in there. It's not easy to convince all of those who think painting a ceiling, putting up a fence or fitting a carpet is easy and I can see their point if they think what they do is more useful than what I do. I do, too.

--

Paul Morley's The Age of Bowie will be done with shortly. I've had plenty of reservations about it, below, but maybe I chose the wrong Bowie book to read. Morley is one of those writers who likes to be in his own books but there are things to be said for it in mitigation.

We have got as far as Let's Dance by page 430, out of 471, which is 1983. The book has gone into detail about the formative years and is called The Age of Bowie and spends most of its too many pages on that, which was the 1970's. We must be grateful that he doesn't go to such lengths to make such claims for the later work.

Bowie was a work addict as well as a drug addict and it's easy to forget the film career. As easy to forget as it is to believe that a generation not born when Hunky Dory came out knew him from his role in Labyrinth and not for Ziggy Stardust. That's like knowing Bing Crosby for Little Drummer Boy.

We are also reminded that Bowie worked with not only Marc Bolan but John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Nile Rodgers and Freddie Mercury, among others, but we can tell that Morley is making sure we know he has as little regard for Queen as any other right-minded pop-picker when he writes, of Under Pressure,

Queen haters who were Bowie lovers were torn at the time, as the man who had just been 'Low' and 'Lodger' should not be singing with someone who for musical snobs, or realists, of the time was a corny pop music equivalent of Bruce Forsyth.

So, Paul, your book is a 2:1. There's a lot of good work in it but it tries too hard and is over-written. You want too much to both capture the perceived elusiveness of Bowie and yet appreciate it. Putting more distance between yourself and your subject could have achieved something better and saved some repetition of the same idea being recycled time and again which might have been what Bowie was doing and how he fooled you into it. 

--

Edward Thomas is a poet celebrated by having a Fellowship rather than a Society in his honour. There's posh. I can't imagine that all the poets that have such groups fixated on every detail of their lives would have enjoyed the idea but what can they do.

Not get themselves famous is one thing they could have done, or hide the 'real' them behind a series of disguises like David Jones did as David Bowie and all the personae he inhabited as such so that Paul Morley could be one of all the Paul Morleys he's been by writing a book about them.

Honestly, it never stops.

However, the Edward Thomas Fellowship are likely to be good people. Their annual walk near Petersfield is on 5th March,

Edward Thomas Walk

I hope the weather is not inclement and one could make a day of it by attending the talk in the afternoon.

Sanity, sanity. All of it, one has every reason to hope, should be sanity.

Wild is the Commentator

 He was tackling truths that could not be represented directly, mapping a rapidly evolving set of new social spaces not yet classified, and creating a series of blueprints that the listener and viewer needed to complete through an application of the blueprint to their own reality.

Thus Paul Morley in 2016 on David Bowie in 1970. Maybe he was if you like that sort of thing but maybe all innovative art could be said to be doing that if it gets us anywhere to say so. Paul Morley provides a torrent of such paragraphs in his book, as below, enjoying himself far too much in his inexhaustible facility to do so. He is the critic in excelsis, engaging with the artist like an unnecessary adjunct less interested in helping his reader to see the light and apparently more intent on getting in on the act. The book could lose much of such self-indulgence, be half its length, more to the point and we wouldn't have lost anything. But even though it's not doing Morley, or Bowie, any favours I'll stick with it.

It was many years after Station to Station before I became aware that Wild is the Wind was not a Bowie composition. For all the world he makes it sound like one but not knowing it wasn't is the price one pays for enjoying the music ahead of doing a Ph. D. in it.

But now a Radio 3 trailer for a celebration of Nina Simone at 90 is playing her version,

  Having known the Bowie version since 1975 and this only now it's not possible for me to reset and not think he wrote it and think of this as a sultry cover version but Wikipedia says,

The album was compiled from several recordings that were left over from sessions (in 1964 and 1965) for previous Philips albums.

Good heavens.  That means to say there were Simone albums that this wasn't considered good enough to get on. One can't help wondering what they're like.

---

I see we are due the Collected Anne Stevenson from Bloodaxe next week. I am tempted to try her as one that might revive my debilitating loss of faith in poetry. She was one of the good 'guys'. I very nearly got a book of hers signed when a friend went to a gathering she was due to be at except she wasn't and she died before we had another chance. Her books on Elizabeth Bishop were excellent and she was in on the Bishop Industry very early.

I'm not entirely convinced the Collected will be quite as reliable a resource for bedside dipping in as the Collected Morman MacCaig, though, and so might sample a couple of slim volumes at secondhand giveway prices before having the confidence to buy something so big and new that might not be quite as good as I hope it will be.

That's how bad it is these days and I'm not sure if I'll ever get poetry back.

FOR SALE. Maybe 1000 poetry books and related items.

No, only joking. I now regret taking so little for my pop vinyl and feel as if I sold off some important part of my life for not very much so I don't think the poetry books can be allowed to go or else I risk being left without the sort of map, spaces or blueprint that Paul Morley seems to think we need. 

Cheltenham Preview with Racetrack Wiseguy

 

The Cheltenham Preview industry is becoming almost as big as the festival itself with every Tom, Dick and Harry who's got an opinion that anybody can find signed up to share their hapless guessing for the benefit of audiences who think they're going to learn something.

So let's hope they know something, then, but the Wiseguy tip for the pundit worth listening to is Kevin Blake.

I've had a bad year so far, I'm not afraid to admit, and am only ahead because I carried forward a healthy amount, promotions on bookmaker's websites help, I've withdrawn to pitifully low stakes and the on-track bookie at Fontwell made a mistake and paid me twice as much as he should have done but it won't show in his records so there was no point in telling him.

 

State Man is a good horse that might have had a few Champion Hurdles lined up ahead of him waiting to be collected but he reminds me of Excelebration, the horse unlucky enough to be the same age as Frankel who thus mostly turned up only to see his rival's backside leaving him behind in the final furlong. State Man is the only one likely to have a chance of finding a way of beating Constitution Hill but 11/4 is not tempting enough to make me invest in him doing so. They could try chalking up 20/1 but, like Spenno said at Fontwell last week, Constitution Hill is 'unrateable' so far. He's apparently seen off all the classy opposition he's had by some distance and without coming out of second gear. He's never going to be a price worth taking, not least because he frightens off most of the opposition there could have been. We might never know how good he is so I hope he goes over fences and further and wins a Gold Cup or two rather than make the Champion Hurdle a non-event for the foreseeable future. Although horse racing doesn't usually work out like that.

However, the knock-on effect is that there is no point in Honeysuckle (Tues, 4.10) taking him on. Matt Chapman, in his ebullient way, insists that she's kept her form and is running as well as she ever did when winning her hurdle titles but she wasn't up against much when she did. Thus, it's entirely common sense to go for the Mares Hurdle and finish her glorious career in the winner's enclosure by outclassing the ever-improving Marie's Rock even if it is only by a short head.

Mr. Henderson's Luccia (maybe Tues, 1.30, or otherwise Thurs 4.50) has done nothing but impress so far and will be a bet whether taking the easier option of the Mares Novice Hurdle or if we have to trust his judgement that he can beat Facile Vega, who got beat by surely going too fast early doors at Leopardstown. Not all of us still trust in God but we will have to trust in Mr. Henderson on that.

Also on Day One, there can often be some good things hidden away in the non-headline races and Gaillard du Mesnil (Tues, 5.30) might well add to more than Willie Mullins's fair share of the winners slightly under the radar. There was nothing wrong with what he did at Leopardstown and the extra distance might make him almost nap material.

On Wednesday, I'm not convinced that Paul Nicholls thinks he has the ammunition to take Cheltenham on with these days but Hermes Allen (1.30) has done it all very well over hurdles even if his future is going to be even better over larger obstacles. We will see about that, as we will about Queen's Gamble, now available at 16/1 for the bumper (5.30) after her very distressing defeat at Market Rasen last week. There have been more names crossed off the Cheltenham short list in recent weeks than added to it.

If there's a reason for not getting involved in the first on Thursday it is that Gordon Elliot looks like he has the better horse but I don't want to take on Mr. Mullins with it. 

Last year's dead cert, much better than a penalty kick, Allaho, is doubtful for the Ryanair Chase and so I've no idea where we stand but I liked all I read about Teapuhoo (3.30) and his easy warm-up win that takes him to the stayer's hurdle as a horse on the upgrade that obviously has one to beat but you don't get 3/1 if you haven't.

In a Gold Cup in which the dour stayer, Stattler, who would probably win if they went round three times instead of twice, is 13/2 third favourite, one might think Galopin des Champs, who put lots of daylight between himself and the second in the Irish Gold Cup 'from the back of the last', must be a good thing. I can't see which one beats him unless Ahoy Senor continues to make the form book a complete waste of time. If I'm winning, I might have a couple of quid on Bravemansgame but I'm not even sure he'll run there. And, if it was, by some outrageous fluke, completely party time, I'd stay on for the last, the very last, after what can sometimes seem to be a hard week, and keep faith with a favourite horse, Fantastic Lady.

But this is a dodgy game, much like batting, that seems easy when it's going well but hellish when you can't quite get it right. I'll be taking it carefully, not seeing the point of throwing money around with the same wild-eyed optimism as those ostentatious, tweed-clad twenty-somethings who used to board our train to Ascot at Twickenham and start shouting the names of horses to each other.

I'd have laid them all at least 16/1 about all those they saw fit to mention and I'd have cleaned up. They are those who think a day at the races costs a few hundred quid and then don't give it any further thought.

But I'm not like them at all. I much prefer it if an interest or a day out can pay me.

I hope Honeysuckle wins on Tuesday and Gaillard du Mesnil should do, too. It could be all over after day one if Luccia's made it a treble by winning the Supreme but we might be waiting until Thursday for her. I'll be throwing Teapuhoo into the trebles that involve them all and Hermes Allen can multiply them up if it all goes right. I just don't want to find myself in the workhouse that is hidden somewhere in the small print of Jacob Rees-Mogg's manifesto. I don't think writing about local classical music concerts is what he means by 'work'.     

 

The Age of Bowie

There were two books on Lou Reed and two on Marc Bolan in the pop music section of my library and an obvious David Bowie-shaped hole. I had forgotten I'd ordered something to fill that so when it turned up it was a surprise Christmas. I had chosen the Gospel According to Paul Morley. If John Peel was the avid collector and like a watcher of the skies for all things new or arcane and Stuart Maconie was the super-annuated anorak, Morley is the pop critic as T.S. Eliot, a cultural scribe going deep into meaning and significance. He is also far too much of a devotee of Bowie not to tell us everything he thinks at some length.

We are on page 69 before the detailed biography starts and all we've had by way of preamble is Morley letting himself count the ways that he can describe how Bowie is forever 'other', not even himself for he immediately subverts and moves on from being one Bowie to being the next, having been David Jones and other names before he was that. It is excessive, if something can't be pinned down, to spend quite so long not doing so.

The biography is useful and instructive but Morley is like a student intent on making everything in his essay pertinent to his thesis. At the age of 3,  young David is found by Mrs. Jones putting on her make-up and after that every anecdote is laden with significance for how it contributed to, or was an early indicator of, the later Bowie.

Like The Beatles and Marc Bolan, he serves a long appenticeship before, after several years of obscurity and failed projects, he becomes an overnight sensation, each incarnation for Morley containing some ingredient of the eventual Bowie. And why wouldn't it. We are all the product of our DNA, where we came from and everything that ever happened to us. So, dull, emotionally distant parents, dull Bromley but a vivid imagination and, like Rodney Trotter, just one 'O' level - in Art is the perfect recipe for a rare talent to become self-obsessed and develop the ambition to escape although thousands similar presumably didn't. Needs must these days that few would have quite as long to find their way and would be consigned to the call centre or the lowly clerical job that Lou returned to after the Velvet Underground before arriving at their Space Oddity.  One thing I hadn't known is that the significant teacher that saw something in young David Jones was the Art teacher father of Peter Frampton who, after being in a teenage band with our hero, for a while sold millions more records than he did by way of some vapid soft rock and a gadget that for unexplained reason he made vocal noises come through his wah-wah pedal instead of doing a guitar solo.

Morley's account will be worth the time and effort, hagiography though it may be and probably not filling the Bowie-shaped hole as it doesn't. But maybe that failure, which tends to occur in Shakespeare biography, too, is the point. David Bowie's art was the sort of art that looked as if it was art but the quote attributed to Mark Twain that 'Wagner's music is better than it sounds' might need to be adapted to 'Bowie's music is great because it sounds great' and that, in the highly contingent, fashion-conscious zeitgeist of pop culture from Andy Warhol to Damien and Tracey, Gilbert & George that's all it needs to do. The more one says about such things the more likely one's chances of saying something unnecessarily portentous multiply themselves exponentially. It's like when we used to go out to look at the pitch before a cricket match. It's best to look and just nod sagely rather than say 'there's some runs in that' before contributing very few to 52 All Out.

Somewhere below here it says that disc 1 of Best of Bowie, especially if we could add in Heroes from disc 2, is as good a disc's worth of pop music by a white artist there's ever been. Paul Morley is right to say that for 'our generation', his and mine, he's two and a half years older than me, Bowie was more important than The Beatles. Yes, I had Beatles wallpaper in my bedroom, was excited by She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah and Ringo was the funny one and my favourite but I was 5. That wasn't like Ch-Ch-Changes, Drive-in Saturday, Station to Station and, yes, Starman, though. 

They are, like Morley suggests Bowie is, both fake and real, alienated but with some sense of community and somehow impossible to define, maybe like a Rembrandt self-portrait, so it might be a bad idea to try to define it and better to just 'know'.

Marc Bolan seemed to simply enjoy being top of the pops for a few years and said a few cryptic things in interviews but he was much more obviously joking than Bowie, who took his mystique more seriously, made himself look more 'art' than 'pop' and that is probably why it's always seemed possible to love T. Rex more than Bowie but admire Bowie more than T. Rex.    

Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait

 Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait (Tinder)

On the evidence of Hamnet and now The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell exemplifies everything one could want from fiction to make reading the great pleasure it can be at its best. Yes, George Eliot, the accessible James Joyce, Julian Barnes, Thomas Hardy and any number of others but, coming straight out of this book so deeply impressed, it's hard to think of anybody whose prose is quite such a champagne experience to be immersed in.

It is in the very writing. Quite how profound it is, I'm not so sure. On the face of it, the story of Lucrezia, the teenage bride made Duchess of Ferrara, as a substitute, in 1560, isn't much more than Henry VIII all over again. It might not be more more than a cimplistic feminist tract in which our sympathies can only be with her innocence, fragility and artistic talent isolated and at the mercy of the wicked Duke, Alfonso, his need to produce an heir, political expediency, his unremitting ruthlessness and uncaring cruelty. Lucrezia's life doesn't count for much to him and is soon in the way whereas, like any such tyrant, it can't be his fault that no heir is forhcoming even though we can all see he's firing blanks. And, we understand, not only in her direction.

It might be possible to read the book from the sort of Clarksonian, Trumpian, Boris Johnsonian and Henry Tudor point of view that says, no, women are accoutrements of only limited use but it would be a radical interpretation. We don't need to be convinced of any moral rights and wrongs because the prose is alive, or pulls off the legerdemain of seeming to be, in all its sensuous gorgeousness and that is what convinces and would be the point of reading it ahead of any taking of sides that we are given little choice about.

As with Hamnet, I had thought that fact and fiction were two different things, and opposites, that shouldn't be mixed together. Stories are surely one or the other. But that's not right and I've changed my mind. All history is partly fiction, coloured by those who wrote it, interpretated as they saw it and filled in with detail that 'must have been' or 'might have been'. And fiction has to be based on something real, or relate to it, or else it would be meaningless, recondite and do nothing for us at all.

Maggie's 'author's note' at the end sets out exactly how she adjusted her source material to make her story, maybe via Robert Browning's My Last Duchess which forensically justifies what she's done just in case there were any doubt. I'm no longer convinced there are such 'facts' as pure, reliable history. Certainly not having lived through the Trump-Johnson Axis. I'm not sure there's pure fiction either. Maybe I could have worked that out for myself before but it is The Marriage Portrait that brings it so readily into focus.

But even that is not the main point. It's a thriller, compelling not only in its exciting finish - and I'm sorry to say that some minor characters have to be routinely or mistakenly murdered as collateral damage- but for the sheer thrill of how it does, honestly, transport the reader into its world. As has happened a few times before, I raced through the last pages like a dog bolting its food so greedily that more enjoyment could have been had by savouring them but, what can you do.

There is a trick to it, a technique, and it might be one that only a writer born to be such could pull off without missing a beat. I'd be very sad if Maggie O'Farrell had been taught how to do it on a creative writing course. I hope it qualifies as serious 'literature' and it's surely better than genre 'historical fiction' but I also hope such books fly beyond any such categories and are simply 'any good'. I can hardly imagine a reader who would not enjoy it. I would feel sorry for any who didn't. 

The wonderful Library Service provided it. For all that the general prognosis on almost every issue in the world is bleak, we at least still live in a country that not only will do that for us but the NHS are determined to keep us alive as long as they can so that we can take advantage of it. It would be a dire and dismal soul who found reason to complain about that.

Piano Spectrum at the Menuhin Room

Piano Spectrum, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, Feb 11

Andrew McVittie and Helen Morris set this new series of recitals in motion with a hugely enjoyable shared programme billed as 'carefully selected piano sounds designed to soothe the mind and body'. 

Andrew was first up with Debussy's First Arabesque and made it glisten but maybe the much-vaunted Steinway helped and it continued to live up to its reputation from hereon in.

Helen's Philip Glass, the Étude no. 12, was another version of that piece that he usually writes with its rhythmic and harmonic misfits expressing more than such limited use of the palette one might think could offer in its tones of modern melancholy. But if Andrew's Rachmaninov Prelude, op. 23 no. 6, was intended to suggest cherry blossom then it was invested with more of an emotional charge than any I've seen.

Piano Spectrum was the title of the programme rather than the double act and Andrew was interested in synesthesia and what colour the Adagio from Beethoven's Pathétique sonata is. Being completely immune to the condition, I voted for green but few of the audience did so with me so it was a bit like some General Elections. Maybe it's reddish, then, but what I heard was Andrew beautifully paced and modulated. While tempi tend to quicken and speed is sometimes achieved for its own sake, music is not a competitive sport - I hope- and Andrew relaxes comfortably into his music.

Three original compositions by Helen herself were an attractive special treat. Written as exercises for her students, it was too tempting to try to find which composers she had borrowed from. Maybe none at all and such things might all be in the mind of the listener but maybe if Michael Nyman turns down his next commission, it could be offerred to Helen.

Andrew's Grieg Nocturne was a restful night for the most part but his account of Philip Glass, in the Metamorphosis no. 1, was as evocative as Helen's but necessarily more ominous and both performances, as candidates for the main highlight among several, could easily send one back to the likes of Koyaanisqatsi, Akhnaten and maybe the Violin Concerto to re-live their out-of-kilter C20th aesthetic which came before our more recent need to bury ourselves in the comforts of Bach and the C18th.

Emma Lou Dierner's Piano Sonata, just the first movement today, was the most demanding piece to listen to and, quite likely, to play, departing more than somewhat from the stated manifesto. Good Heavens, where does it go from there, having scattered itself in all directions and put in such a rumbustuous finish. Helen delivered it with impressive panache without necessarily making it mean as much to me as the gorgeous finale.

Andrew returned with Farewell to Stromness, the misty, nostalgic elegy by Peter Maxwell-Davies, again very much at home relishing something that sounds timeless in the music and not going any faster than he has to. It was a gorgeous finish that carried me home. Had there been a four-handed encore, which maybe there could have been, maybe it wouldn't have and, honestly, it would have been unreasonable to have expected more.

Andrew's comments have implied that there is more, maybe 'better', to come, from this series but it won't need to be any 'better' for it to completely or more than exceed our optimistic expectations. It was great to see this first event well supported but it wasn't full. You'd be well advised to get your seats for the rest of the events before anybody else does.

Thanks for being there, Helen, and Andrew, who has done such a good job of making it happen.   

Humphrey Lyttleton, Blues Excursion

 The last record on the Playlist schedule, leading up to 1 a.m. as the finale in The Jazz Show, is this but they aren't appearing here in any order. There's loads more still to appear.

One Tuesday evening in 1969, my mother very patiently sat with me while we went through a pile of records in search of the tune I wanted. We hadn't had a record player very long and Aunty Chris had donated a pile of roughly 'jazz' records and I knew there was a good one among them. We played Tommy Dorsey, Syd Lawrence, maybe Glenn Miller and possibly Satchelmouth. No, it's not that. Nope, nope. Hang on a minute....no. 

Eventually we came to a 10 Inch, 33 rpm disc that didn't look likely but there weren't any others left. Yes, that's it. It was Beale Street Blues on Jazz Session with Humph I was after then and we found it. It's a tremendous album. I am no jazz man but Humph's user-friendly retro trad is its most acceptable face. Blues Excursion takes up most of the second side, its lack of urgency giving space enough for Wally Fawkes, clarinet, and Bruce Turner, alto sax, for their excursions as well as Johnny Picard (it says here) on trombone and Humph's signature trumpet. New Orleans was re-created for a British audience by public school, ex-army Humph, in a way that pre-figured the blues being the inspiration for two like-minded art school students who met on Dartford station and decided to form a beat combo and acted out their fantasy quite realistically for the next sixty years and counting. Popular music, and all art, was ever thus, taking something you loved and doing something else with it.

British Trad Jazz was more faithful to its precursors than most, though. The laments of a New Orleans funeral are carried forward, it is syncopated sadness and these gentrified college boys paid respectful homage to the likes of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Bix Beiderbecke. They weren't like the rock'n'roll people by who they were due to be swept aside into the niche they've occupied ever since but they weren't so different.

It was Trad, Dad. And most things turn out to have been so in the end.

Diana Ross, I'm Still Waiting

 Once a disc jockey reaches the age of 80 and has been broadcasting for 60 years, it's understandable that they might use the same story more than once. It is now 53 years since I'm Still Waiting was lifted from a Diana Ross solo album to make a number 1 single. It was done on the advice of Tony Blackburn who persuaded Talma Motown to do so. You may have heard Tony tell the story on the radio. I'd be surprised if you hadn't. But he was right because schmaltz though it might be, it is a masterpiece of childhood heartbreak and evokes the summer of 71 like nothing else, 

              once again alone
Like a child without her playmate
I had to face the truth
I was still in love with you
But you said:

Little girl
Please don't wait for me
Wait patiently for love
Someday it will surely come

 

Some groups are revealed as only ever a vehicle for the talent or ambition of one of them but the Supremes did well enough when reverting to that original name without Miss Ross after she left them, and collateral damage, behind her on her way to iltimate diva status. She was not the greatest singer but she was, as Berry Gordy's flagship glamour girl at Motown, the girl most likely given her commitment to her own cause and Berry's quality control department, which was him, giving her the best songs.

Neither Mick or Keith can be said to have been successful as solo artists but the Stones were such a brand that they didn't need to be. George outgrew Wham!; Lionel Ritchie was bigger on his own than he'd been as a Commodore, the likes of T. Rex and Simply Red were only ever Marc Bolan and Mick Hucknall and some session men but the most hilarious decision to jettison the band and be a star in one's own right was surely Ali Campbell, leaving UB40 after maybe 35 years. It didn't noticeably work.

Melancholy and Marriage

 The prolific and ever-reliable Anecdotal Evidence has taken as its text The Anatomy of Melancholy the last couple of days, sounding quite Johnsonian as it does as well as being the only thing the good doctor said got him out of bed two hours earlier than he would otherwise have got up.

It's one of that legion of books from university reading lists that I didn't read at the time but ought to catch up with now. In this case, though, I don't think I had to read it because my C17th Lit offering was a dissertatioon on Marvell. You might think there would be plenty of secondhand copies from ex-students who saw no point in hanging on to a 1400 page book they had hardly looked at but there aren't. I can't imagine how graduates can so readily dispose of their books once they've cobbled together their 2:2 and secured employment in a call centre but many seem to. I'd have thought the object of going to university to read one's best subject was very much to enjoy the books, Vanity Fair notwithstanding, but plenty get unloaded.

Not Robert Burton, though. I don't think many bought it in the first place. There are some extracts from it in the first volume of the weighty Oxford Anthology of English Literature that was mandatory in the first year and so I'll look at them. I don't want an abridged version, though, it's all or nothing so I'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, The Marriage Portrait confirms Maggie O'Farrell as a 'proper writer', one who takes the reader vividly into the experience of her world. Or, the world of Lucrezia, the young Duchess of Ferrara. A proper writer does much more than put the words on the page, they apply them like Vermeer applies paint. I summarily refute the definition of poetry as a 'heightened' form of language when such a definition does nothing to differentiate it from such prose as this. It's as alive as her description of the tiger in its cage 'pouring itself' rather than moving and, like the young Lucrezia's art, it still gives the impression of three dimensions although it has reduced the world to two. 

The surprise hit of Hamnet was no fluke. There is plenty on the reading horizon with books respectfully waiting their turn to be called up but more Maggie will be among them, too, whether or not there's 1400 pages of Melancholy, which I understand to be funny and not all melancholic.

Jenny Lewisohn & Antonio Oyarzabal at Chichester

Jenny Lewisohn & Antonio Oyarzabal, Chichester Cathedral, Feb 7

Women composers are hopefully, if somewhat belatedly, no longer a curiosity. At one time the prevailing attitude to them might have been like that of Dr. Johnson to women preachers,

Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

notwithstanding Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, to name only two.

Antonio Oyarzabal's ongoing project is to explore their work further, going into lesser-known names of which there are plenty in either gender. Today with Jenny Lewishon, he presented music for piano and viola.

And it's been great to hear the viola featured prominently in some local recitals recently. It is much under-rated and under-used outside the string quartet and in Minna Keal's Ballade was more cello than violin in its rich register but more much itself than either. Calm, composed and measured, the question was to persist whether those were qualities of the composers or the musicians throughout the concert.

I've wondered from time to time, and for a long time, whether there is a difference in literature between the work of male and female writers, prompted mainly by the apparent need for anthologies of 'women's' poetry and women's prizes, as if 'women's writing' was a different thing to writing. In writing, as in music, surely all work uses the same syntax but it's certainly possible than some women take up different themes to those that men do, or approach them from other perspectives. Music, though, is less encumbered by literal meanings and I'm not convinced there's the same difference.

Freda Swain's English Reel was a darting, mercurial thing demanding much more from the bow and all the fingers of the four hands involved before her mellower Song at Evening had Antonio's piano embellishment following Jenny's top line around.

But those pieces were not on the same scale as Rebecca Clarke's Sonata. She might not he a household name in non-musical households but at least she is famous enough for me to have heard of her. Immediately imposing in its opening statement and more 'modern', the piano in the Impetuoso was like a loaded sub-conscious under the viola's flights of emotion. The mixture of pizzicato, spiccato * and bowing in the Vivace was more agitato than one might expect from a Vivaldi vivace and made me think again than Jenny is a brilliant technician rather than one that exaggerates the passion. 

It again isn't traditional to finish with an Adagio movement but those markings are not metronome settings. Sometimes they appeared almost ironic as it developed from the bare piano line into elegy but it included more than that. If there had been a hint of Scottish song in it that impression was given some support by the encore I'll Bid My Heart Be Still which was exactly that and all clarity and wide spaces.

As ever, it was another tremendous Chichester lunchtime with everything to admire about it from the programme through the performance to the setting and the value.

 

* Spiccato [spikˈkaːto] is a bowing technique for string instruments in which the bow appears to bounce lightly upon the string.  I looked that up.

TV Appearance

I'm always glad of an alibi just in case I'm wrongly accused of a crime and questioned about it.

- Where we you at 3.20 on the afternoon of Feb 6th.

- I was at Fontwell Park, Chief Inspector Barnaby.

- How do I know you were?

- Because I was on the telly.

 

I was broadcasting to the nation. Admittedly only to that tiny fraction of them that were watching Sky Racing and were so ultra-vigilant that they could recognize me from behind in a fleeting moment.

But, having recorded it and gone through all the bits I could have been in it frame by frame, that's me on the telly. Not quite as ubiquitous as Bradley Walsh. Couldn't call it a cameo role, not even an extra and the tree is doing more for the snaphot than I am but that's me alright.

 

Unquiet Flows the Don

Some books have a turning point and sometimes one can find it a halfway through. In Don Paterson's memoir of his Dundee teenage years, it comes two-thirds of the way through, exactly where I was when I hurried here in my excitement to proclaim one of the funniest books I'd ever read. Continuing from there, it became the one of the most terrifying and I could tell that because it seemed to stop describing various aspects of life in 1970's Dundee as such and began to 'show' rather than 'tell', in that much-used creative writing tutor's advice.

Maybe not all sufferers from mental illness are quite as well-equipped to let others into the experience as one who recovered his senses and went on to be a writer and, if prizes can reflect genuine worth as well as a cheque from a sponsor, a very good one at that. The book suddenly stops being bleakly hilarious and undergoes a key change into the hellish Crazy Z minor which also seemed to be the key that most of Don's jazz musician friends played in anyway.

You wouldn't want to go there. You wouldn't have wanted to have ever been there. Whereas one can, if one sees fit, read his evocations of the 'schemes', which in America I think they called 'projects', with some appreciation that he's indulging himself with some hyperbole, mostly for dark humour's sake, that suddenly stops.

One can't help wondering if the almost essential flirtation with madness that might be required of anybody who is going to become a 'creative artist' of any profundity is worth the ticket. Not all of us found it necessary to devote ourselves to the posturings of Frank Zappa however clever he might, or might not, have been. I was devoted to The Faust Tapes, aged 13, but somehow avoided the worst of what Don went through before he was 18 by retrieving that perilous situation and finding my way back, not only through Beethoven and Shostakovich, but to Al Green and Tamla Motown. 

The breakdown and the inside of the sanatorium, we might like to think, were of the time of Cuckoo's Nest, Sylvia, Salinger and Phil Spector and highly fashionable in their way but the mainstream was safer even if it didn't enlighten you into how Eric Clapton only borrowed a dozen licks from Buddy Guy. Don still almost deboanirly slips a mention of Dark Side into a list of three records he approved of some I'm left hoping there's something else out there that doesn't need of the Moon to be understood.

Don, and the book, recover. As much as any of us ever recover from anything. And the rest, from thereon in, was mostly an upward trajectory to the very minor celebrity of poetry stardom which by now has long since not been the equivalent of what Tennyson achieved and much less likely to get one mentioned on the wireless than if you are much less eminent in, say, British tennis, cookery or the more demented factions of the Conservative party.

The turn that Toy Fights took made it less of a glorious exposition of Don's capacity for grim, devastating wit and into something more harrowing which gives it considerably more depth and makes it yet more memorable than it would have been if it had only been the tour de force stand-up routine it was looking like being.

I'm not entirely convinced he's got it exactly right yet. Surely best known for his poems, I've never heard him play guitar and guess I'm not qualified to understand him doing so if I did, but the prose books, the prose books. He is very good at them.

Fontwell Preview

There will be no need of taking one's notebook to Fontwell tomorrow to write down the names of all the horses to take forward to Cheltenham next month. I'm not even going to try to find a picture of any of them to use here, either. These horses are to their sport little more than what I was to cycling, cricket or football but I did beat a Russian girl at chess the other day who I found had been playing in international tournaments so I'm not going to include chess. But, heaven knows I'm looking forward to it. 13/8 pays the same whether it's in the Cheltenham Gold Cup or the Cazoo 'Hands And Heels' Handicap Hurdle (Conditionals And Amateurs) and it is well overdue we got back to a racetrack on which to be a wiseguy, it having taken only a few weeks for our planned fixtures this season to stop being abandoned due to firm ground and be abandoned because it was too heavy.

And so I've done more homework on this meeting than would be customary where 'homework' means not much more than 'realizing why the favourites are favourite' and hoping that three of them win when put together in the same treble.

I'd have left the 1.20 out completely but for early moves in the betting for Gary Moore's Abingworth, a stable long noted for its winners being well-backed.

At 1.55 Unit Sixtyfour, despite being asked to give weight away all round, has been chalked up at a prohibitively short price and so might have to be left out. Kilbeg King at 2.30 ran in a far, far more glamorous contest last time, admittedly as a 50/1 chance, and so ought to get more of a look-in here.

More from the Moores on what could easily turn out to be a pay day for them is likely to come from Ozzie Man at 3.00 as long as he doesn't get dizzy or lose his way on three laps of the figure-of-eight chase course. And you'd think Auriferous might be ready to beat not much at 3.30.

One could easily have four guesses at the 5-runner 4.00 and still not find the winner and a 5-runner race in which one bookmaker can price up the outsider at 4/1 makes the old Portsmouth dog track's betting market seem like a land of bountiful opportunity but we're having a day out and so ought to have a mug punt and Whatsdastory at least fits in with my pop record theory (which very rarely works). I was also looking at Clear White Light, the early Lindisfarne hymn, in the Carlisle 3.45 but early doors it looks like they can't give it away.

Joe Tizzard knows the time of day and I like him a lot but his Tamaris, in the 4.30, is widely available at 10/1 which suggests it might not be this time but I'll have a look what happens on course. Force de Frap won by 13 lengths last time and has duly been given more lead to carry but remains the one to beat.

Now comes the hard bit, sticking them together and hoping that, if we have any winners listed there, they can all find themselves joined in holy parsimony. This is where it often goes wrong. One is doing little more than playing a fruit machine but it's set fair for a nice day and win, lose or draw, we can at least take part. There will be other days on which to conjure the year's profit from that cute cocktail of a little knowledge, a careful plan and the determination to make sure it happens.

Toy Fights by Don Paterson

Don Paterson, Toy Fights (Faber) 

There have been three generations of poets since the end of the line of the effete, other-worldly stereotype that defined the species from Wordsworth to Stephen Spender. The non-poetry world that doesn't take any notice of poets still thinks they're all much like John Keats. Never mind that there's been Tony Harrison, Ciaran Carson, Derek Mahon, Sean O'Brien, not to mention Carol Ann Duffy or Kathleen Jamie since. And Don Paterson. Toy Fights, his memoir up to the age of 20 would do much to redress the misconception if anybody outside of those poem-reading people likely to read it would also do so. Not only that, they would be richly entertained.

Toy Fights bears comparison with that paragon of the droll literary memoir, The Gatekeeper by Terry Eagleton, which is the highest of endorsements since that is one of the best books I've ever read and won for Prof. Eagleton the Emeritus chair of Literary and Cultural Comparative Sinecure at the University of Lancaster, that renowned centre of scholarship that gave me 47% for my essay on Vanity Fair that could hardly have persuaded Prof. Carroll that I'd sat in front of Thackeray's dreary masterpiece never mind read it. That some of that paltry effort had been slung together at Cambridge University on a visit specially undertaken to see Thom Gunn didn't seem to count for much. Insight into Regency Lit is apparently not acquired by osmosis.

Don's story might be even better than Eagleton's but The Gatekeeper has become so hallowed and shrouded in haloes of beatific light that it has gone beyond doubt into those realms of works that one can only shiver and burst into tears at the mere mention of, like Al Green or Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres. At first it might have been going to be a finely-written, acerbic misery memoir full of loathing, dread and Dundee. I live in Portsmouth so I know a bit about grim insularity and places that regard themselves as sui generis without caring what it means but I didn't have my formative years here. Gloucester was idyllic on the edge of what was then fields and Dundee clearly was not but at least deserves the credit for making Don Paterson, and thus this book, what they are. But it weren't all the luxury that creative writing professors have become accustomed to since then, was it, with lino floors that we had Fife to thank for, ice on the inside of our bedroom windows, Nottingham smog so thick that I walked into a lamp-post and school could be barbaric, the in-bred sadism of rugby union in the West Country only now, fifty years too late for me, being revealed as more hideous than character-building.

 

In a way that might not be intended but, as he would appreciate, Lancaster from 1978-81 did its best to instil in me the catechism that the author's intentions are out of bounds, Don's prose books are - for me at least- much better than his poems. By all means, I also,

            love all films that start with rain

and all that Rain entails but am less convinced by aphorisms whereas the books on Shakespeare's sonnets and Michael Donaghy are brilliant and The Poem would probably be, too, if it weren't so exhausting with even him advising the reader once or twice that they can miss out the next 50 pages without missing anything crucial. But we see that obsessive need to fulfil himself, if it were possible, with the whole art, in his account of his juvenile career as an origamicist except one can never tell the whole story, as those 698 pages regularly acknowledge.

 

Like The Gatekeeper, which one reviewer described as the doyen of Literary Theory doing an unforeseen stand-up comedy turn, Toy Fights bangs out the often coruscating laughs like a T20 batter whacking the bowling out of the ground harder and further than he reasonably needs to but 'reasonably' isn't funny. The comparison with the endless host of stand-ups with their routines on Live at the Apollo, many half Don's age and hoping to make their way through a field as over-populated as punk bands in 1977, is highly appropriate because they're doing very much the same thing - exaggerating their real life stories for the benefit of their art and the entertainment of their audience. But why it's funny is for the most part because we recognize it as true. It might not even be overstated. When once asked 'how I did it' in a newsletter I once produced irregularly at work, I said it wasn't me that did it, I just told it how it was.

I'm on page 186 out of 365. I'm likely to finish it tomorrow and then it will be gone, one having to use up the thing one loves until there is no more of it. We could hopelessly hope for more Eagleton one day, some more Danny Baker or anybody else who can make more of their story in the telling than perhaps there really was to it and maybe the childhood episodes are the most fertile but it is devoutly to be wished we get more from Don Paterson. I haven't quoted anything from it because I don't want to ruin it and, anyway, one is spoilt for choice.

I did once try to tell Don, when he was in captivity having to sign books at the Cheltenham Festival, how good I thought the Shakespeare book was but he was having none of it. You can take the man out of Dundee, as far as Kirriemuir anyway, but you can't take Dundee out of the man.

Having yesterday been able to begin the short list for the Event of the Year 2023, today the list for the Book of the Year can be declared open, too. 

Catherine Lawlor and Valentina Seferinova at Lunchtime Live!

 Catherine Lawlor and Valentina Seferinova, Portsmouth Cathedral, Feb 2

Szymanowski for lunch was a rare treat served up with some relish by Catherine Lawlor and Valya Seferinova. Portsmouth and its catchment area are well catered for in musical talent and they are two of its main ingredients. Today they were introduced by the doyen of Radio 3 announcers, Piers Burton-Page who provided comprehensive synopses of the music.

The pieces are as programmatic as they are impressionistic, Valya beginning with Debussy's La cathédrale engloutie, beginning concentrated and intense in the misty depths before rising mightily with its bells, organ and chanting priests but that was just for starters.

Szymanowski is a potent mix of lushness and twentieth century torments. If I thought of him as one of any number of artists who might be called 'The Last Romantic' that does him no justice. The Myths, op. 30, are three dramatic settings of tales from Ovid. The Fountain of Arethusa described her traumatic metamorphosis into a stream and beyond with Catherine conjuring the most delicate effects from the violin. Narcissus was condemned to the loneliness of being transfixed by his own image before becoming a flower with some crystalline top notes on the strings and Dryads and Pan were intoxicated and orgiastic in the sometimes demur understatement of the summary by Piers in music that defied any attempt at gentility. Valya does raw energy and scintillating power as impressively as she does sensitivity and Catherine was compelling in her lightning pizzicato, the distant strains and perfect tone she achieved in what I hardly need guess is a considerable technical challenge.

The whole performance was totally absorbing and the duo's disc, Myths and Legends, is something to look forward to even if one can't beat hearing it for real as it happens in the flesh. I know I enthuse about most if not all of these concerts and that's not just to be polite, that's what they are like but today we can begin the short list for the Event of the Year 2023. 

Diary

 An impressive turn out of 17 at Portsmouth Poetry Society this evening was, I'm sure, due to the interest in Thomas Hardy but one likes to think of oneself as being 'box office' and they do generally, and very kindly, make the effort for the annual 'lecture' by the man from David Green Books.

Next up here, bookwise at least, is Don Paterson's new memoir of childhood. The Elgar book took almost the length of the library loan period but was worth it. There is almost a perceptible slowing of pace, it seems to me, in the last pages of a biography in which time waits to claim its illustrious victim. You can see the pages rapidly diminishing, the sentences seemingly taking on an adagio rhythm and the subject fading but holding on. Or maybe I'm imagining it all. 

The Don takes precedence over the Phil Spector biography and a return to the History of Writing and we'll see how soon the library has a copy of the recent Maggie O'Farrell for me, Hamnet having been such a surprise hit. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised as she's clearly 'any good'. But before all that, come back soon for tomorrow's Szymanowski at Portsmouth Cathedral with local superstar Valya Seferinova and Catherine Lawlor. Imagine that.

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It told us all we need to know about bookmakers when William Hill were offering 13/1 about any two teams being drawn together in the last 16 of the cup. That is a 15/1 chance, obviously, and anybody taking them up on their offer really needs their head testing. Of course, the bookies have to take out their percentage but that is blatantly pickpocketing their customers far too transparently. With an actual sporting event you can take on the odds because you have an 'angle', like the trainer of a horse being in form or believing that one team have more reason to be trying than the other but at least it goes to show how the odds are so plainly set against you and staying in front of them means you're doing something right.

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I thought I'd put on the Brenda Holloway disc this morning. I thought, wow, this is 'soul' and more sophisticated than the glories of early Motown usually were. Listen to that guitar. Good Lord, this is 'something else'. That's because it was something else but it took until I Can't Stand the Rain for me to realize that somehow I'd put Ann Peebles on instead. But thank you very much, dear Bob Harris, for playing You Keep Me Hanging On (but not 'Set me free why don't you') and opening up more of the work of the tremendous Willie Mitchell Band.

I really don't know if it's the songwriters, Ira Allen and Buddy Mize, or the singer that make the line,

My heart is like a yo-yo string

and it must be both but that, and the song as a whole, stop one in one's tracks, as it were and it is a team effort, naturally. You can hardly make a great record with a bad song or a bad singer. I'd know.