To Know, Know, Know Him is to Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

 The next book off the shelf is Mick Brown's Tearing Down the Wall of Sound, the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector. The main reason for it is to see what connection can be made between creative genius and madness.

The answer, as much as there is one, is the obsessive nature and the inferiority complex. Spector was small and not an athletic type and his immigrant, Jewish background only compounded his outsider status at school. He gained some cachet by being funny and became a very good guitar player but his wiseguy schtick and shallow relationships didn't endear him to everyone he met. He listened to the doo-wop records on the radio all the time and gained a deep understanding of how they were made. He had precocious success as a songwriter aged only 18 with To Know Him is To Love Him, taken from his father's gravestone that said 'To Know Him Was To Love Him' after which his career stalled until he served an apprenticeship with Leiber and Stoller and then promptly moved on when he'd learnt enough from them.

It's a finely-written and detailed book, most compelling for its account of those early 'hit factory' days of American pop music with sightings of so many big names in their formative years. Did you know that Little Eva, of The Locomotion, was Carole King's baby-sitter. And, were you aware of this saccharine masterpiece,

 

I'm fairly sure we should hate that record but there's enough in the 'amazing production', the arrangement and some perfect way in which it is almost too good at being what it set out to be that it is possible to excuse its excesses and see in it where Be My Baby came from. Stephin Merritt would love to have written that for 69 Love Songs and if he had, we would know it was darkly ironic pastiche but for Phil Spector it was a significant step on the way to his first Rolls Royce and his mansion.

I've got as far as the chapter where he's going to create The Ronettes, who were his masterpiece but led to an extension of his controlling personality. Ronnie's book explains how there were plenty more Ronettes tracks recorded but Spector wouldn't release them because he could see her becoming more important than him and he couldn't have that.

As well as making a seminal contribution to how pop records were made, like Roy Wood's taking up of the 'wall of sound' in such long ago nostalgia as Angel Fingers, Spector kept alive the USA's love affair with the gun that is costing innocent lives increasingly still now. If that's the price of 'genius', it isn't worth paying but what was Lana Clarkson, his ultimate victim, thinking when she went back to his place. It's the same question as that which Robin Givens or Desiree Washington might have benefitted from asking themselves before being blinded by Mike Tyson's large fortune rather than seeing him as a volatile and dangerous man.

Phil Spector worked with Tina Turner. We'll see what the book says about that soon enough but, having been married to Ike, she was in a better position than most to ask What's Love Got To Do With It.

I think I've got a few more chapters of industry insiders making glamorous pop confections before it goes horribly wrong. It might not go so wrong until the last few chapters. He got a double helping out of Baby, I Love You by producing the binary opposite of The Ronettes, The Ramones, doing it to almost equally spell-binding effect but, no, Dee Dee Ramone reported that he 'pulled a gun' on them.

 

It's not easy to assimilate why people - and it is 'men', usually, if that is still an allowable gender - feel so inadequate that they need a gun. Or, to lesser extents, a big house, a fast car or an aggressive-looking dog. It must be possible to make great pop records without shooting people.    

But, for my purposes, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound is a brilliant book.

At what cost great art comes, and I'm allowing Phil Spector all the credit for making Be My Baby, perhaps we could have managed without some of it. The history of Tamla Motown isn't all delightful reading but it didn't ever reach quite such levels of mania and horror. However, every bit of silver lining comes with its own bit of cloud.

Corbyn

 Jeremy Corbyn banned from standing as candidate for Labour party

I thought it might make for a change if, in as far as DGBooks strays into the murky waters of politics, I didn't indulge myself by finding fault with Boris Johnson. Anybody can do that and it's only a wonder that even more don't but, even given his reputation as a 'greased piglet' capable of slipping out of any of the zugzwang situations he habitually got himself into, surely he's finished now. It is to be hoped that Rishi Sunak can run his party as coherently as Keir Starmer is managing Labour and have no more to do with a self-styled troublemaker. If there really is a lecture circuit on which useless articles can go and deliver their same old, tired stand-up routines for big piles of cash then that is the free market economy for you, but mainly for him.  

Politics is an endlessly despairing business in which those taking part can only see things their way. I voted for Labour, as led by Jeremy Corbyn, once. But not the second time. Even someone as disreputable as Dominic Cummings had to concede that a General Election that was only offering a choice between Corbyn and Johnson was a poor version of democracy.

Corbyn now reckons it to be a "shameful attack on party democracy" that the NEC, democratically elected by the party, vote 22-12 against having him as a candidate. That's the bit that Rishi needs to read.

The other bit is how he said the decision to block him showed "contempt" for the voters who had supported the party at the 2017 and 2019 elections. 

That was two elections that Labour were nowhere near winning and so unelectable that they allowed the school buffoon to persuade places like Workington and Bolsover to vote for him. That's how far doctrine can get you. Let's see what happens at the next election when Corbyn isn't the Labour leader and Keir Starmer has to take on much more credible opposition in Rishi. The bookmakers, at least, are of the opinion that Labour are in with a proper chance next time.

 

I know it's not going to happen but I wonder if Starmer and Sunak couldn't work together more easily than either of them can work with the 'Left' and 'Right' of their own parties, the Corbyn supporters and those supported by Jacob Rees-Mogg. While Boris was supported by Jacob, he was really a 'right-winger', he didn't believe in anything really and just made up simplistic vote-catching slogans.

I feel like some old, idealistic Radio 4 listener from the 1970's finding myself wishing we could have a genuinely Socialist Party with Arthur Scargill, the militant trade unions on strike, Eric Heffer forever walking out of conference in protest and Corbyn devoted to demos and opposition, anti NATO, but with no real interest in running the show or even having a position of Europe, and a Right Wing party made up of unreconstructed hanging judges, Little Englanders and Liz Truss ecomomists who can make the financial sector take flight and surrender at a stroke.

Harold Wilson and Ted Heath were relatively sensible and responsible and Jeremy Thorpe a bit more radical than either of them. All we need is for the lines on this alleged spectrum between 'right' and 'left' to be drawn in different plaves, a bit wider apart. A Starmer-Sunak coalition would be no more of a coalition than the Labour and Conservative parties already are, and certainly no less unmanageable.

Almost

 

The graph of my adventures in Rapid (10 mins each) Chess at Lichess shows how exciting it was here last week, reaching a rating of 1987, only one win, or two, from an all-time high and, realistically, three from breaking the 2000 barrier. But having got close, once one's missed it, one goes into freefall and goes from being unplayable to being unable to play. I've stabilized back down at 1935 now, still in the Top 12% of people who've ever played there, which presumably includes a wedge of people who tried, lost and gave up that make the rest look better than they are but they were people who saw fit to give it a go. 1987 had me in the top 8%.

And so I'll wait for months for the next alignment of planets to bring about another surge in form and if I ever achieve 2000, I'll park it and play in some other time limit so as never to  lose it.

--

Nobody wrote masterpieces all the time. Dr. Johnson's 'bad book' is The Complete English Poems.

No doubt brilliant at the time and quite possibly the equal of Pope and Dryden but how would we know, or care. We don't do poetry like thay did it in the C18th anymore and even that which was regarded as the finest of the period looks stilted and dull now, at least to me.

I have recorded Frank Skinner's programme on Pope on Sky Arts and am glad to give him as many chances as he needs but I don't think I'm ever going to be convinced. I wasn't expecting too much from Rasselas and was impressed. I thought I'd better have the Johnson poems if only to make the shelf look complete but that's all it does. That doesn't come as a surprise.

It's not Johnson's fault that he wrote in the prevailing way. That's about all one can do. But neither is it entirely the result of my increasingly deep resistance to being impressed by poetry. I can't think that I'd have taken the point even when I thought it was my job to appreciate poetry and not its job to persuade me that it matters.

James Bowman

 

Sad to hear the news of the death of James Bowman just now on the wireless.

He was a favourite singer alongside the likes of Al Green and any number of 1960's soul ladies and other counter-tenors.

His recording of the Couperin Lecons de Tenebres with Michael Chance was a revelation and the first of several of that music I bought but, having been in place first, it remained the preferred option.

He appeared in Portsmouth Cathedral a few times in semi-retirement, with Catherine Bott in a memorable double act and what I think was his last Messiah.

You Tube doesn't appear to have the Couperin and perhaps he never recorded Buxtehude's Klag-Lied but there is other Buxtehude.

The Racetrack Wiseguy Grand National Preview

 I did once know somebody who had a lucky ante-post punt on the 1000 Guineas for more money than sense at 16/1 and his hapless little independent bookie, who tried to make a living out of equally hapless punters who habitually didn't land such winners, closed the account. Barney Curley knew much more about what he was doing and I'm not the least bit surprised that he had some of his accounts closed. He had to organize a team to spread his money about various betting shops to land his coups. Your average branch cashier doesn't look too closely at what a betting slip says so top marks to the Victor Chandler employee who turned Barney's cash pony away having read it and understood its implications.

I'm very disappointed, only three months into a newly opened William Hill account, to find myself 'Restricted'. It's not as if I've taken them to the cleaners but their algorithm has quite rightly identified that they're never going to win. It will be a slow process, I dare say, but they will gradually pay me.

I was barred from playing some of their free promotional games but their website does funny things and I got on to their football prediction game this week. You need to nominate six games in which there are 3 or 4 goals. A couple more goals at Swindon would have landed me £200 in free bets but, very gladly, there were no more goals at Fratton Park once Portsmouth had got level at 2-2 and so that's worth a fiver which means a free stab at the Grand National.

What one needs to do with a free bet is turn it into actual credit and the safest way to do that is back Delta Work each way. 11/1 is fair enough for this reliable performer who wasn't too far short of landing Gold Cups but found a career opportunity in going over the longest distances, including National Hunt racing's answer to crazy golf, the Cross Country. Such races are an outlet, possibly even a last resort, for those horses that weren't quite classic winners in the same way that the 2 mile cup races are where good horses who found the Derby a bit too fast for them become champions of a different type.

I don't necessarily see Delta Work as an outright win option, though. Noble Yeats came from under nearly everybody's radar last year but has gone on to prove that no fluke, not least being noticed by enough people staying on in the Cheltenham Gold Cup to make him 8/1 second fav to confirm the form with Any Second Now on, is it, 11lb worse terms. We could be back in the Golden Age of 1970's Nationals when, so it was thought, the likes of Red Rum, L'Escargot and Spanish Steps would always be in the first four. We like to think it works like that. It makes us feel secure and as if we understand what's going on but we don't. These are horses and one reason why Mrs. Bet365 is able to pay herself quite so much is that the form book is a record of what has happened but not an oracle that can give reliable clues about what will happen next. However, there's every reason to put Noble Yeats in the four while not expecting him to win it.

Since 2000, in the current millennium, only three winners have carried more than 11st. So I'll have Le Milos at 20/1, carrying 10-11as the 'profile' horse that ticks a lot of boxes and look forward to Harry's signature 'aeroplane' celebration. That is jump racing's reply to Frankie's 'flying dismount' on the flat. Maybe I could have introduced such panache into amateur cycling time trials thirty years ago but you don't feel like it after 12 hours, not even 25 miles and, anyway, I never won.

Looking further down the betting, I wonder if Joe Tizzard will find a race for The Big Breakaway somewhere one day but I'd want all of the 50/1 about it being in this race so Longhouse Poet, sixth last year, could be thereabouts.

When Tiger Roll won at 4/1 in 2019, we all knew he would. I told anybody who wanted to know that he would but 4/1 isn't what one wants for backing a National winner so even I didn't do it, which is madness but Corach Rambler, who has won regularly enough, doesn't look like a 6/1 chance over the longest distance and so is left out at our peril.

So,

1. Le Milos

2. Delta Work

3. Longhouse Poet

4. Noble Yeats 

  

More Will Be Donne

John Donne lends himself to having good books written about him, perhaps his vivid life and famous poems make him a more interesting figure than a late C20th poet's life on a university campus. David L. Edwards's John Donne, Man of Flesh and Spirit is neither a biography or a commentary on the poems but dies both things in chapters loosely on themes like Donne's early career, his marriage and his sermons. Edwards has an ecclesiastial background and the book was a 'selection of the Episcopal Book Club' and so the emphasis is more on religion than a purely literary study would be.

It's difficult to approach Donne without some 'compare and contrast' between the young Jack Donne, the ladies' man and careerist, and Dr. Donne, the sermonizing Dean of St. Paul's. The connection is the words that make his reputation but the turnabout in moral and spiritual attitudes is more complex.

Edwards is persuasive in throwing out previous ideas about Donne's libidinous poems being all made up. They might have been exaggerated but it's hard to deny that the young rake was not entirely a figment of his own imagination. The rite of passage that he undertook on his way to being such a crowd-pulling churchman could be mainly expedient for an ambitious man in Protestant times but his marriage to Ann is very significant, too. He seems to give up the pursuit of any available women as soon as he meets Ann and ruins his career prospects by marrying her to the disapproval of her influential family. He found a kind of 'love' that surpassed the laddish sport of seduction for seduction's sake.

However much that might seem admirable, it leaves us with the lasting impression that, like many creative artists, he was all about himself. Exchanging the life of self-indulgent gadabout for that of the fundamentalist convert threatening his congregation with all kinds of damnation for their sins, Edwards points out that in between Ann dies aged 34,

Her body worn out by the sexual appetite of her husband, who seems to have been feeling proud as he counted up her twelve pregnancies which went to their full term, on the monument over her grave.

 

Edwards takes on earlier accounts of Donne, most determinedly John Carey's Life, Mind and Art which had seemed seminal in Donne Studies, but does so with such gusto that we feel inclined to take his point. And, in his final chapter on the sermons, he is happy to concede that the insistence on the presence of God everywhere in human life would not be taken as so absolute and incontrovertable by a modern audience as it was by his, for whom the term 'atheist' didn't mean anything as unthinkable as 'non-believer' but designated someone maverick or unorthodox in their religion.

It's never been easy to assimilate the fact that that Donne was only eight years younger than Shakespeare and that so little mention is ever made in writing on the lives of either of them that surely they would have known, or known about, each other in the comparatively small community of courtly and literary London in the 1590's and 1600's. That there is no evidence of it has never been a reason to discourage much more outlandish speculation on the lives of either of them. One thing that they certainly shared, or their legions of commentators have insisted on commentating on, is their fixation on the pun as a literary device which, through their perceived insistent usage, has been regarded as a set piece of Elizabethan and subsequent literary fashion.

For all the ambiguous uses of 'will' in Shakespeare, Donne is littered with 'done's' and 'more's', from Ann's maiden name, so that it's impossible for him to use those words without a scholar finding personal resonances in them even if he had wanted to. 'Die' and 'rise' are other words that can't be allowed only their strict meanings but it could equally be Donne's fault if he can't because he usually does intend the double meanings.

It's not often that a poet, or any other sort of creative type, emerges from a book about them as a more attractive figure than one thought. They are only human, after all, and invoking the terrors of an all-powerful, highly judgemental god, doesn't make the later Donne any more amenable than the man about town with a low opinion of the women he is so infatuated with. There is something to be said, after all, for those days in which we were told to study the text and no more than that because we can usually admire the art if not the artist. 

But those days are gone when, as a sixth form protégée, one took it for granted that because poems were in libraries and bookshops they must be any good and one should know about them. It's not like that at all. Books are in bookshops because the proprietors think they are likely to be bought by their clientele.

Donne remains admirable for making more in his poems than the sum of the, often monosyllabic, words he uses which is where the 'poetry' is. Nobody disputes the ingenuity and I, for one, wouldn't be offended if the poems were entirely 'performances' that don't count sincerity a top priority. He has to be given credit for the many great such performances he put in, not least, 

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

One is less impressed that Donne was really only ever about himself, though, and even in 'No Man is an Island', where he begins by saying that,

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

What he really means is, 

therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. 

 

It was him that was dying and he went to great lengths to make a performance out of that, whether or not he really thought that eternity awaited and from there earthly affairs would, look like,

what an adult sees when watching children's games: when the saints 'look down and see Kings fighting for Crownes', earth's struggles look like boyes at stool-ball'.

That's what they look like anyway. 

More will be done before Donne can be properly re-assessed in the light of this excellent book. I'm not sure if I can have him in my Top 6 Poets until that enquiry is completed. It's quite possible that the poetry is still great once Donne and God have been distilled out of it but that's a lot of distillation that's required.

  

Simeon Walker at Lunchtime Live !

 Simeon Walker, Portsmouth Cathedral, Mar 23

Music rarely benefits from being put into categories. You might find Simeon Walker filed under 'Contemporary', a term so meaningless that one can do what one wants. And that's what Simeon does. He plays his own compositions which are for the most part, and by his own admission, 'sad and melancholic'.

Beginning with Nocturne, we were on the outskirts of Ravel territory but four pieces from his Imprints CD, like Gleam, reminded me of Gymnopédies in their chords and phrasing and Michael Nyman was an obvious comparison to be made throughout.

Simeon's programme note invited us to find 'stillness, beauty and meaning as much in the spaces between the notes as the notes themselves' in the same way that some poets claim the white page where the words are not as part of their poem. I'm more prepared to buy the idea from a musician than a poet because the sudden, crashing silence that comes after a big Beethoven finale sounds different from the silence that a piece like Simeon's Three Impromptus disappears into after being slow-motion and flirting with nothingness.

Chiaroscuro was a bigger, more 'Romantic' interlude at the centre of the programme without abandoning the contemplative atmosphere entirely.

Paean is pared down to its chords and, like the wistful Crave, was a piece from Simeon's 'lockdown' period, as if he needed an excuse to be more introspective than usual.

Saturnine - and I'm all in favour of his one word titles - expanded into a ringing ending before Compline was the quietest and simplest piece of all and it was very appropriate to end thus.

From where he is now, there could be two ways Simeon could go. Possibly into a kind of middle-brow therapeutic music for Classic FM's late evening listeners or maybe towards a minimal, post-modern vision of emptiness and he could do both but I'm sure he'd make a great job of a film soundtrack. Something in French, perhaps, in black and white in which disillusioned philosophers gaze through the rain on their window at the garden they've neglected.

Portsmouth was glad to have him and can only apologize that there weren't more there to hear him but that's what it's like and I don't think any of the faithful went away disappointed.

 

It's all here and well worth a look,

Simeon Walker 

Pál Banda in Chichester

Pál Banda, Chichester Cathedral, Mar 21

The homework I did yesterday on Beethoven's Archduke Trio will perhaps be useful another time. The English Piano Trio were incomplete due to illness and so cellist Pál Banda took on the audience of about 300 on his own. And won hands down although nobody who was there to hear him could be regarded as having not been a winner, too. Any disappointment one might have felt about the loss of an Archduke was banished in an instant.

From the opening phrase of Bach's Suite no. 2 one was struck by the sound his instrument made. I've heard this music any number of times in the flesh, on record and on television by many of the 'legends' of the cello but I'm not sure I've heard it sound quite like that. I first thought it was the instrument but it can't do it without the musician, or the acoustic. They all need each other. However, the instrument is a bit special, 'a Grancino that was once owned by the Esterházy family' and so it's possible that Haydn was acquainted with it but we don't know and probably we never will. But it's occasionally remarkable how few degrees of separation one is from such greatness.

Not long ago in Portsmouth Cathedral we had Ravel on his birthday and today was Bach's 338th, depending on which calendar you go by. In the Suite no. 2, the Prelude was all unhastened clarity, the Allemande exemplified this music's solitary but apparently all-encompassing enquiry into eternity or whatever one wants to believe its explorations are in pursuit of. It noticeably gathered pace, possibly enhanced by Pál's behest, in the Courante before the deep, grave Sarabande brought to mind the sorrows of St. Colombe in the film Tous les Matins du Monde, as it usually does. (Apologies if I always say so.) 

Pál plays with such authority that by this time I was already wondering how he is regarded by those who know in comparison with the litany of musicians who have played this music from Casals, through Tortelier, Rostropovich and many more since. The cello is my favourite instrument bar none but I'm not in a position to say and wouldn't want to. The Minuets wore their hats on the side of their heads before the Gigue was driven towards a bit of a flourish to end with a flourish but not quite such a flourish as Suite no.3 begins with. 

The Prelude on this occasion evoked eddies and whirlpools, for me, but it can be different each time. Like much great art it can be made to mean whatever you find in it. After which, using entirely different patterns, very much the same words as described no. 2 could be used to describe no.3 which just goes to show what a hopeless task trying to describe music in words is because it didn't sound the same at all. 3 is a much happier suite than 2 and I'll be checking Steven Isserlis's book later to see if he thinks so, too.

In the Courante, Pál was all dexterity. The solemnity of the Sarabande made it very hard to believe that these pieces were only written as exercises. Surely anything so profound-sounding must have meant something to the person who wrote it and for the Bourrées and Gigue see as above under Minuets and Gigue but with, as required, a bigger finish.

The book I took with me was yet another brilliant account of John Donne (about which more later and elsewhere) and upstairs in Chichester Cathedral's library they have a book signed by - but not written by - Donne which was an even closer and more definite degree of separation from greatness. But Bach and Donne are entirely different. Donne is dubious for writing primarily about himself and his poems of 'love' and religion, and his sermons, are much more about him than love or religion. You can't say that about Bach who, surely more than any artist since, and maybe even before, said nothing about himself beyond using his name as a tune in The Art of Fugue. He takes himself out of the equation and that might well be where his unparalleled greatness lies.

And in Pál Banda he had an ideal vehicle for these ever-thrilling compositions. They thrive on their own mystery. Come December, it may or may not be deemed necessary to compile a short list of Events of the Year. This is the third candidate for it already. Such things should not be reduced to the tawdry level of a league table and last year I didn't pick an outright winner but some things are somehow 'better' than some other things and sometimes, in some way, that is in some part, the point.

Portsmouth Baroque Choir - Music for Lent

Portsmouth Baroque Choir, Music for Lent, St. Saviour's Church, Stamshaw, Portsmouth, Mar 18

One thing we don't give up for lent is music. It's best to give up non-essentials. I don't give up Music in Portsmouth, either, without which I might have walked to Southsea on a fool's errand unaware that the concert was moved to this venue. Where would I have been without it. 

Southsea, obviously. 

It's a westward walk from my house and I was aided in finding it by following yonder star, Venus, inappropriately referring to a different festival but conveniently giving directions. The change was made, I found out, due to St. Saviour's having heating. Portsmouth Baroque always make a warm sound. One of their other features is the way director, Malcolm Keeler, finds lesser-known repertoire.

J.S. Bach is well-known enough, though. His O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht was introduced by Peter Gould's ambulatory footwork that steadily paced throughout the piece beneath extended soprano lines.

His cousin, J.C.'s Fürchte dich nicht was followed by excursions into Aus tiefer Not by Michael Praetorius in which the divergent parts became one to finish and Peter provided an organ account of the same by Johann Sebastian before the programme gathered momentum with his predecessor in the Leipzig job, Johann Kuhnau's, Trisis est anima mea, immediately more sombre but with some soaring soprano lines generating quite moving melancholy and then the Credo in F by Antonio Lotti changed up a couple of gears with a rhythmic, more characteristically 'baroque', and bigger, sound. It's not everybody that can set words like 'consubstantialem' quite so effortlessly to music.

In the second half, Charpentier's Le Reniement (Denial) of St. Pierre featured what was probably the high point with the 4-part ensemble drama of,

Non, non sum, vere non eram,

the choir having resources enough to distribute six solo parts from within its own ranks who performed impressively although, to be overly picky, the 'vere' seemed to get literally lost from the text translation. Really. The piteous consequence of the 'non sum' denial did nothing to suggest that there shouldn't be more performances of Charpentier wherever they can be made available.

It's possible Bach's reputation wouldn't be what it is now without Mendelssohn's C19th advocacy and Peter's second half interlude, the first movement of his Sonata no.3, was surely a tribute and owes a debt but one was taken with some fancy footwork on the pedals that led into its final passage.

Caldara's Stabat Mater was written in 1725 when Pergolesi was 15. They both died in 1736, the younger of them far too young but not before he'd improved on it. Caldara's account augments the text's rhyme scheme of AABCCB with a succession of 'dying falls' but the poetry, or the perceived power of redemption generated by the injuries and suffering provide the balm that the Portsmouth Baroque Choir are especially adept at providing.     

There was plenty of it, about an hour and a half of music presumably all put together and rehearsed since Christmas and they've got two concerts to do in early July, the second of which is Messiah. There's no rest for the wicked (Isaiah  48.22). There doesn't appear to be much for the righteous, either. It does them great credit.

The Godfather Pastiche and other stories

I've been watching The Godfather in instalments, not being much taken up by films but thinking one ought to know about a reputed masterpiece. 50 years on, it's hardly its own fault that it looks to me like a parody except that it is the thing that such parodies are based on.

Wendy Cope, in her 'other prose' reports how she,

sat and wept with laughter at the beginning of a programme called 'A Cornishman's View of the North East' 

for five minutes before it dawned on her that she wasn't watching Monty Python and thus The Godfather looks like a hilariously well-observed pastiche of The Godfather, Brando brooding and mumbling. Sadly much of its appeal is likely to be for the sort of men that are thrilled by guns and gratuitous violence somehow being a necessary part of their way of life.

I am enjoying it but not necessarily for the right reasons.

 --

Cheltenham couldn't possibly have been expected to continue at the same level as Tuesday and peaked too soon, great moments and great horses though there still were, and are still to come.

It really hasn't, though. My mug punter Pop Music Theory outdid the usually more profitable appliance of science when You Wear it Well won the Mares Novice Hurdle ahead of Luccia.

But that's sport for you and there's no such thing as a cert. We done okay and got out ahead of where we started which is more than what most bookmaker's clients will have done. The plan works fine but it's in the long run, a percentage game, not usually in a one-off smash-and-grab.

But rather than be a New York mafioso without much of a sense of humour, we can do it for fun and without gunning down the opposition in restaurants.

--

I went up the road to Tesco Express yesterday morning and wondered why One Stop had them queueing out of the door. They were still lined up ten back when I was on my way home but my new friend, Ash, who works there was in charge of supervising the queue so I went over and asked what the big attraction was.

Prime, she said but could see I was none the wiser. It's a new energy drink. Once it's gone, it's gone.

Oh.

Those in the queue didn't look like athletes to me. The genius of it seems to be whoever has persuaded the public that they really must have yet another flavoured sugar water confection, whether it be Coca-Cola, Lucozade, Irn Bru (in Scotland), Lambrusco or specifically this latest one. I'm a Pepsi Max supporter myself.

--

I don't know what Dr. Johnson would have made of such folly. Well, I do. He'd have been as non-plussed as me.

I'd left Rasselas aside from my Dr. Johnson programme, suspecting it of being a bit like Candide, I suppose. But, given that the next options were Phil Spector, a book on Donne that can wait and a  biography 'by' Cliff Richard that hardly needs reading but can provide a few pages of anodyne ghost-writing at bedtime, I took it up.

Oh, me of little faith. Of course it's brilliant. It says Samuel Johnson on the cover and that is as much of a guarantee as those things that are by J.S. Bach, Handel or Mozart. I'm not sure who else can be so confidently included on such a list.

Candide is a cartoon and an extravagant satire but Rasselas, right from the start, is written by someone who can't help but be a great writer. Lines, or paragraphs, that make you want to stop and note them down or read them again pile up and say that which you knew you knew but were not so able to so well express. It's a very short 'novel' and so might be re-read immediately and possibly be the first book for absolutely ages, if there were ever quite such a thing, that I'll carry around with me. Not to Tesco Express or One Stop, that would be madness, but when I'm going anywhere further.

I've been reluctant to do that in recent years, well aware that however far one travels, you can't help but take yourself with you which is a Johnsonian sort of conundrum. There is no escape. One can listen to Bach or Bowie but you can never quite become them. Lockdown was the perfect alibi to stay home, read books and be insular. But that cover has been blown, as it inevitably is being for those self-serving spivs we were unlucky enough to have in government when the plague was visited upon us. And now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.

My diary has never been fuller. Concerts, race meetings, walks. It's what you must do. I like the idea of the hermit disdaining the world and all that happens in it but you can't. If you're going to do that, you might as well believe in God.

American Gothic Zinfandel

 American Gothic Zinfandel, Waitrose

It wasn't obvious how I should attempt to upgrade my 'lifestyle'. I can buy or lay my hands on any book or record that I don't have already. I'm well provided for with the local concerts. There isn't much to want but wanting things and satisfying those wants is one of the main ways we selfishly live for ourselves. But it did dawn on me I could upgrade the wine from whatever Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon was on offer in Tesco Express or One Stop, went in search of Zinfandel and found myself opening a Waitrose account to take advantage of their offer.

It was Fetzer's Zinfandel that came as such a revelation some twenty-five years ago, not least in its spicy tang. There was indeed more to wine than finding it tasted of every other fruit apart from grapes.

You get some Art History with American Gothic, its label featuring the iconic painting by Grant Wood and an explanation that,

their serious long features echo the long lines of the pitchfork held between them

and it all,

suggests that the dark ages have been dragged into the new.

Quite how that is relevant to the wine, I don't know. Maybe it's just 'marketing', aiming it at the sort of people who like to think they are art appreciators. And maybe I fell for it. Zinfandel is Californian but maybe David Hockney's swimming pools and sunshine are too summery, light-drenched and better suited to white wine than this deep, robust red. Those American Gothic figures are Mid-West, suspicious and not very liberal-looking. They are god-fearing and observant of the laws of an unforgiving discipline, we are likely to think and the pitchfork might have subsidiary uses, if need be, beyond those of tossing hay.   

It's the plums you get first. It doesn't do much 'on the nose'. I'm not overly concerned about that, preferring it to do what it does in the mouth but I gave it every chance by 'letting it breathe' first. But proper, quality wine is redolent of something before you taste it. I'm not sure this is.

There is some crisp tingle to it that might accumulate to something quite warm after a while but it's not as 'big' as I remember Fetzer used to be. Lodi isn't far from the Napa Valley but that might be a difference. Not bad value at the 25% off Waitrose were doing it at and their friendly delivery man was a credit to them.

I'm sure by the end of the bottle it will be doing its best work. Some wines stay the distance better than others and offer more than first impressions but, at 14%, it would be best if it didn't require a second bottle to make its case. One would be convinced by anything after that.

There are a few more bottles of it yet and it certainly won't go to waste but I'm guessing this isn't something so complex that I need a case of it to 'understand', I don't think I'm going to completely convinced by it but with the discount making it only a pound or so more than the routine Chilean value, it's no hardship. One more or less gets what one pays for.

Next time I might type in 'Pauillac' and see how much that gilds the lily and adds to the ostensible quality of life. But it's not obvious that by such dubious strategies that which is what it is because it has necessarily become that way can quite so easily be improved upon.

To coin a phrase.

What a Day for a Dave Green

 The first day of Cheltenham is officially my favourite day of the year. I look forward to it full of hope and anticipation and sometimes it goes quite well but it doesn't usually begin with form figures of 11211 for me, immediately covering the rest of the week's investments and the rest is fun, fun, fun which may or may not a tip for the last race tomorrow. Some drippy boys made a record that sounds a bit like 'what a day for a Dave Green' in not quite the worst excesses of the 1960's. It still comes in useful even now.

 But it's not really about the money. It's good to have an interest that pays for itself, an index of how well one's doing and I'd certainly think twice about how much I enjoyed it if it was costing me to be involved but sport, if it's worthwhile, is bigger than that.

I'm not the world's most passionate guy but when Rachael and Honeysuckle won for Henry, I think I'd call that crying. There's a bit more to it on occasions like that than having a few quid on a horse and tipping it up quite confidently with all good scientific reasons here a month back.

If that was emotional for slightly sentimental reasons, I almost cried the race before to see Constitution Hill take another step towards outclassing Arkle, or any other horse there ever was, in the Champion Hurdle. 

He will never need more than a second gear. He will never go off at a price that makes betting on him worthwhile ever again so, thank you, William Hill, for laying him at Epic Odds of even money today, if only for a tenner.

That was wise of you. I'd have had the house on him if I'd been allowed to. It was a performance that put all the available opposition that hadn't side-stepped him, among which State Man could have been a worthy champion hurdler in any other year, very much in the shade. Such class comes along as rarely as once in a lifetime and it was a thrill to see.

 

A third reason for celebration are personal form figures for me of 1121101 on the day. Rachael did try to take the handicap hurdle from the front on Bad but on this occasion Pop Music Theory and Michael Jackson weren't to be. And that is sport. Into each life a little rain must fall. There is simply no point in winning all the time. That would make winning meaningless.

It's not worth any sort of fortune. I'm still on the road to recovery from a dreadful start to the year so the stakes weren't high. There haven't been many better days of sport than that, though, even among some heroic 12 Hour bike races either witnessed or taken part in by me, those cliff-edge snooker matches featuring Alex Higgins in which anything might happen, some cricket, some football, I dare say, but that was very special.

I don't know if I could stand it being that good every day but, by definition, it can't be special every day.

If I wanted it to be ordinary every day, I could get a season ticket to Fratton Park.

Dusty and Jimi

 

Oh, My Giddy Aunt. Who knew? Certainly not me until a little bit of it was on the telly during another Dusty Night last night.

It might not be the highest quality video but it looks like it's all there is and so we must be grateful to whoever directed their cine camera at the TV screen to record it.

There is also Marc Bolan with Cilla, which isn't similar. I'm not saying I'd swap that for this but nobody in their right mind would throw this out once they knew about it.

Not Single Spies

 Claudius observed how,

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

And Wendy Cope noted how men are like buses in that having waited a long time for one, a few turn up at the same time. I might add that, not having written a poem for six months, I'm very suddenly surfeited with them and aware that 'surfeit' is an exception to 'i before e except after c' so there's another torpedo in the Bismarck of those who like rules.

One poem was earlier in the week, two were this morning, two more ideas have a few lines towards making a start and a sixth is only so far a title. The example below might be doggerel but such ephemera isn't going anywhere else and so the faults in the last stanza can stay like that.

The other one completed this morning is an old idea I never got round to but was I prompted to finally knock it out because it's in the same spirit of one poem suggesting others that link the three I'm yet to attempt which are related by all means but, oh no, not a dreaded 'sequence'. It is Derrida Re-Reading 'Re-Reading Derrida on a Train' on a Train, a very 'in' joke implying the infinite possibilities of 're-reading' had I somehow miraculously seen Jacques Derrida with a copy of my 2000 booklet, Re-Reading Derrida on a Train.

It's madness, I know, but if Paul Muldoon can get away with what he does these days we might as well all indulge ourselves howsoever we choose.  And 'light verse' did Wendy no harm at all.

The prompt came from thinking there could be a poem, called Reading a History of Writing, based on reading Steven Roger Fischer's The History of Writing. I thought of Writing The History of Reading but before doing that, surely one ought to have written The History of Reading, so that's the third idea. But, here's the kicker. That could be the history of Reading in Berkshire. I know it's a bit late to be so avant-garde and ludic but, like so many of them, it's only myself I have to please by now.

So exactly what comes of this boom in creative activity very much remains to be seen. It might not generate a 'personal best' but something satisfying there is in producing anything that isn't abandoned.

--

The wireless played this this morning,

 

and, had I been on Face the Music, I could easily have jumped in thinking it was Beethoven's Grosse Fuge. Tortelier, Casals, Stern et al is a superstar line-up to rival that brilliant Menuhin-Oistrakh Bach double concerto. Such things seem to work in collaborations like this whereas a football team including Pele, George Best, Cruyff, Gullit, Cantona and Maradona surely would not. Neither would a pop group with Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Dusty Springfield, Ronnie Spector, Gladys Knight and Candi Staton. But this works fine.

I can't see D.956 on the shelves whereas there are two Grosse Fuge's. Momox can send me a disc of this that, with some compensation Amazon insisted on awarding me, will arrive for 71p.

I know that Amazon are tax avoiding rascals that exploit their employees appallingly but they treat their customers will much ingratiation. A couple of shirts I ordered recently were made in Nepal, dispatched from Leipzig and promised for Saturday delivery having only been clicked on on Friday. And because they missed that ambitious promise and only got them here by Monday, I was compensated. It didn't matter. I've not had the occasion to wear one yet. I only hope the compensation doesn't come out of the poor courier's paltry pay but it would come as no surprise if that's how Amazon works.  

The Day the Football Pundits Went on Strike

The Day the Football Pundits Went on Strike

A national crisis. We’d not seen the like
Of it before. It wrecked Match of the Day
The day the football pundits went on strike.

Lineker had suggested the Third Reich
Was like our own government in a way.
A national crisis. We’d not seen the like.

He soon had the support of Ian Wright
Who thought Lineker was onside, okay,
The day the football pundits went on strike.

Those in the Culture Wars tried to outpsyche
Each other and so expressed their dismay,
A national crisis. They’d not seen the like.

It was an unedifying bunfight

And everybody had to have their say

The day the football pundits went on strike.

The trains, post and teachers. For heaven’s sake !
Yes, I’m sure that they deserve higher pay.
A national crisis. We’ve not seen the like

Since the 70’s. They made a mistake,
The BBC. What? No pundit’s cliché?
A national crisis ! We’d not seen the like
The day the football pundits went on strike.