The Renaissance Choir in Wells

The Renaissance Choir, Wells Cathedral, May 29

Not long after I bought my David Cassidy t-shirt ( ! ) I heard that one should never wear a t-shirt featuring anybody better looking than you. It was too late by then. Similarly nobody should perform in a venue they're not worthy of which is probably why I never read my poems in the Albert Hall. That, and the fact I was never asked. But you need to be pretty good to justify an appearance in Wells Cathedral. The Renaissance Choir didn't let it down and were well supported on the last leg of their short tour of Somerset.

The slow-moving calm of some choice Victoria and some more celebratory Palestrina led to Bogoroditse Dyevo, a reprise of one of last year's stand-out events, the Rachmaninov Vespers, and always likely to be a highlight as soon as the tenors turn on the turbo chargers and, to me at least, it sounds like we are forlorn and grief-stricken in our wilderness.

Director Peter Gambie introduced Rheinberger's Abendlied as an 'antidote to modern life' in his self-effacing way before it evoked a restful evening with its blend of voices. Peter has the confidence in his choir necessary to make his modest approach ironic. If you've much to be modest about it wouldn't work.

Orlando di Lasso re-echoed through the acoustic before the sopranos stretched it further in Great God of Love by Pearsall. 

It's possible that by putting myself away in a corner in order to annoy as few people as possible with my note-taking deprives me of hearing any such ensemble performance at its best. I was aware of a bass line by being sat right by where much of it was coming from. The sopranos were fine from across the other side but what I heard might not have been quite the same as what most people did. 

William Byrd is a choir speciality and it wouldn't have been right for them not to represent him on such an occasion in this anniversary year. We had too little of the best bits, really, in only 40 minutes. This was more of a taster session than any magnum opus but the Sanctus hung in the air beautifully if too briefly and in need of more to go with it but when they want me to programme their concerts for them, I'm sure they'll ask.

Eric Whitacre's Sleep made me write 'wall of sound' whether or not I'd been reading about Phil Spector recently but it sudsided to a minimal finale that might not have occured to him. This Marriage expressed some hope over expectation for those disciples of Diogenes amongst us before Hail Gladdening Light by Charles Wood filled Wells with top notes and a swelling sound to finish impressively.

 

For once, it might be suggested, less wasn't more. I was anything but disappointed having made the intrepid journey on public transport through deepest Somerset to see my friends in such magnificent surroundings. Wells Cathedral was an ambition achieved in itself and is a masterpiece that will stay with me. To be able to get there, on the very limits of my orbit, to hear The Renaissance Choir in it only multiplied the thrill. There must be good reasons why no more than 40 minutes were possible but, without knowing them, an hour wouldn't have hurt.

In my own, much more justifiable way, I like to play down any claims to being a reviewer, still less a 'critic', which is not a pleasant sounding thing to be. These things I write are brief essays prompted by having attended. Among many great memories will be being invited to take tea with members of the choir as I passed the cafe where they'd ordered their lunch afterwards, which was a privilege for me but half an hour of their lives they'll never get back.   

Fumi Otsuki & Sarah Kershaw at Lunchtime Live!

 Fumi Otsuki & Sarah Kershaw, Portsmouth Cathedral, May 25 

Last year in Lunchtime Live! Sarah Kershaw played Fumi Otsuki's Piano Sonatina no. 1 and I was at least half expecting no. 2 today but things move quicker than that. It was no. 3 we got, its passages of dark disturbance interspersed with lyricism until in some extreme version of counterpoint, they were brought together but if anything in a sort of coda to the finish it was the disturbed mood that predominated rather than any calm resolution.

It had up to then been more the Sarah Kershaw show as she opened Mozart's Violin Concerto no.3 K.216 with some impish, feelgood piano introduction before Fumi's delayed entrance in the Allegro. Carefree and presumably as enjoyable to play as to listen to, her biggest moments were still ahead of her. The Adagio is lilting piano lullaby with the violin serene above it and exploring the acoustic of the choir area of the cathedral where we were today by way of a change. There is a third movement, a Rondeau, to K.216 and for the sake of 6.38 and completeness maybe we could have had that as well in what was from then on a very subtly linked programme.

Fauré's smooth Après un rêve led into Rautavaara's Notturno which continued the mini Lunchtime Live! Rautavaara revival. It's a lonely night without being too dark but it has a recurring piano bass note that very loosely anticipated a similar one in the final piece.

Moving across the Baltic Sea from Finland to Estonia, the week became a hall of mirrors with a very welcome second chance to hear Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel in the flesh after Chichester on Tuesday where it was played on cello and piano. So here was a chance to play Building a Library and compare two performances. 

It doesn't seem to me as if the piano is an accompanist. The two parts are symbiotic and one is as much taken up with the piano motif and the notes picked out above and below it as with the string pärt's ever extending lines. Soohong Park's piano on Tuesday expressed fragility where Sarah's intense, concentrated performance today was more luminous. Fumi brought more vibrato to the string part and so, in a way, that delicacy was in the other place. At a time when everything starts reflecting back on itself, what one would really like next would be for the two pairings, William Clark-Maxwell & Soohong Park and Fumi Otsuki & Sarah Kershaw, to exchange partners and see what happens then.

As happened on Tuesday, there is no following Spiegel im Spiegel. Anything after it would ruin the spell it casts. To hear it at such close quarters twice in the space of three days was a special treat indeed but special treats don't stop there. Your intrepid reporter intends to establish base camp at Swindon over the weekend in order to achieve Wells Cathedral by public transport at Whitsuntide, not only 'because it's there' but because the Renaissance Choir are, too.

They've got a job on, coming up straight after such an excursion into the sublime but they've not let me down before and I'm only taking on the vagaries of our vaguely timetabled infra-structure because I want to. Sometimes there's somewhere you know you ought to be.

Whoever heard of a poet going on a train journey at Whitsun.

William Clark-Maxwell & Soohong Park in Chichester

 William Clark-Maxwell & Soohong Park, Chichester Cathedral, May 23 

Mozart's operas are enough to put him among the greatest composers even if they were all the music he'd written, dense with such wonderful tunes. It comes as no surprise that Beethoven saw fit to extemporize on those tunes more than once. William Clark-Maxwell, cello, and Soohong Park, piano, gave the first statement of the theme of Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen from The Magic Flute plenty of air before setting out on its capricious adventures, at one moment sprinkled starlight over a moody cello and at another lively and ludic but never less than inventive.

It was quite a big jump to Poulenc's Sonata from there. In the Allegro Soohong scattered patterns and trills among the effects and longer lines of William's cello. More quicksilver than Beethoven's ingenuity, the cello was zesty, the piano lusty.

Calm descends in the Cavatine, which is sleepy, broader and brought out the soft touch of both players, of which more was due later. Ballabile was new to me and the news to me is that it is 'a dance in classic ballet performed by the corps de ballet by itself or with the principal dancers', in this case a happy one.

The dramatic flourish that the Finale opens with led in succession to disembodied top notes on the cello and frenetic fingerwork of the two instruments taking each other on in friendly rivalry.

On any other day, we'd have been well satisfied with two such contrasting pieces in fine performances but there was a further contrast to come.

We don't seem to hear as much Arvo Pärt now as we did in that 1990's heyday when music found its often ecstatic, accessible renaissance with his music and that of Gorecki, John Tavener and James MacMillan. We've lived long enough to see Pärt's minimalism become mainstream repertoire.

Whereas John Cage's 4'33 in some way makes the point that absolute zero isn't achievable because extraneous noise will always intrude, Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel casts a spell that evokes silence, stillness and maybe the stopping of time. Soohong's delicate pulse in the right hand motif throughout was immaculate, the left hand picking out pin drops of notes from above and a solitary cantus firmus of a bass note below while William was other-worldly in slow scales wrapped around the piano. Absolutely scintillating, in an entirely mesmering way. While an encore was entirely appropriate, there was no following that.

The Empty Room

 By tomorrow morning this room will be empty. In readiness for its complete refurbishment, I've moved four bookcases worth of books to other rooms. By the time the computer is in the kitchen there won't be a room in the house that isn't full. Except this one, the latest stage of this ongoing updating programme which nobody would say isn't due.

It might not have been a thousand books I moved elsewhere. The three shelves of the glass-fronted bookcase were doubled-up, mostly slim volumes by the poets who haven't qualified for their own shelf - like Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Auden, etc. have - so maybe there were 800, many of them representing short-lived enthusiasms or maybe even disappointments but one never knows when one might have a reason to read Frank O'Hara, Hart Crane or have a better look at Peter Didsbury one day. It has served to make the point that I don't need to buy books at the rate I once did, though. 

There is nothing new waiting to be read and no time to acquire such a thing before I go away for a few days, though, so it's a good thing I'll be busy. Perhaps I'll find a couple of poets and a novel to take with me to re-read on the trains.

Paul Alexander's biography of J.D. Salinger made the point more than once that he wasn't a particularly convincing recluse and could be thought to have kept media speculation about him alive by tempting them with such things as the abortive plan plan to publish Hapworth 16, 1924. He was quite insistent that he wanted to be left alone but not as good at it as Thomas Pynchon. It's a long, bleak journey into themselves that such artists undertake, though. Clearly not easy to live with and the acerbic tone of so many of his goddamn characters apparently coming naturally to him, there is something of the Michael Jackson neverland fascination with childhood about him which might seem all sweetness and light to them but is treated with increasingly deep, dark suspicion by now.

He might well have been one of those artists who never recovered from their first, great masterpiece and produced pale imitations of it from thereon in. I don't know. I'd like to think there's plenty in it but the Zen and the selfishness and maybe the inability to move on become the point. Art that exists on the brink of unworldliness risks becoming little more than a session in the psychiatrist's chair but Salinger doesn't let that worry him, it's implicit in his writing all the time.

It's not only Phil Spector, Rosemary Tonks and Michael Jackson that, in their different ways, disdain the world. There's a second biography of George Orwell by D.J. Taylor, as if his first had left unfinished business. Another brilliant writer whose work was a paragon example but who, by this account and others, was an appalling human being. At least it makes the point more convincingly than ever, as per Larkin, Hardy and others, that the artist and their art are not the same thing and one can admire one without the other.

I dare say there are even more who are very fine people but whose work isn't up to much.

Fontwell Preview with Racetrack Wiseguy

 One can look all one likes for the touch of class on Thursday evening's card at Fontwell but one will be searching in vain. We're not going in the hope of seeing world beaters or any sort of memorable sport but because, when all available discounts are applied, for which we are most grateful, we're almost being paid to go, so keen is the industry to have customers.

There are seven races and so there will be seven winners but few of the runners advertise themselves as worthy of a 1 against their name but all they have to do is arrive at the winning line before the others that also don't. It might not be until the fifth race, at 7.05, though, that one has enough serious faith in one that might when Anthony Honeyball's Pure Theatre is one that's on the go, with recent form and the stable look like they're trying. And on a night when it's not obvious how to go about making it a pay day, we might have to wait until the last and Smallach Liath (8.15) to land the double that could pay what expenses there are. Oliver Sherwood's a proper trainer and has a respectable strike rate here and it's not obvious what he has to beat.

That's always the problem with low quality racing, the winners don't have to be any good but any sort of price about those two will multiply a sensible outlay up nicely enough, separately and together.

The market might provide the necessary clues about the other races.

In the first, I prefer to read the form of Honeyball's Somespring Special at 4.50 as more attractive than Komedy Kicks in a race where descendants of three illustrious classic winners turn up to contest a race in circumstances their ancestors would be disappointed to see them in. The bold type could be transferred to another horse, though, if it looks as if there are some people in the know at Fontwell who read the form differently to me.

I'd only be inclined to Gary Moore's Tara Iti in the 5.25 because it re-appears only four days after having had a few excuses for getting beat when favourite at Plumpton on Sunday.

There only being four runners in the 5.55 doesn't make it any easier. Gary's Jerrash was sent to Ascot last time but showed precious little. Honeyball tries to succeed where Mr. Henderson could not with Farouk de Cheneau and Neil Mulholland's Any News had also been entered in the 3 mile race but it's not easy to be tempted by any of them.

At 6.30, we could go with In the Air on the basis that it stayed on over 2 miles at Taunton last time out on these shores as it continues to channel hop between stables and flat and jumps without having ever got closer than it did there.

By 7.40 I'm so exhausted by trying to find reasons why anything might win that I'm happy to wait to take my chance in the last.

I really don't mean any disrespect to these horses or the sport on offer although you might be forgiven for thinking so. People will be gladly paying money to watch them do what they were bred to do and nobody ever had to pay to watch me perform the several sports that I was no better than mediocre at and I'd have given them their money back if they had.

It''ll be a nice evening out. We won't come to any serious financial harm and it is to be hoped that nothing worse happens to anything else. I'm not even going to try to find a picture with which to illustrate this preview, though, because I doubt if any of the runners have ever been newsworthy enough to get their picture put on the internet. 

Jerry Salinger

 Seeing the film, Salinger (2013), on Sky Arts last week immediately prompted a retrospective.

The book that the film is based on, by Paul Alexander, arrived today while I was reading Zooey, having read Franny this morning. When I first read The Catcher in the Rye, it was almost at one sitting and several years later the same applied to Ian Hamilton's In Search of J.D. Salinger. Franny and Zooey today similarly zipped by. There is something compulsive about all of it.

There is a 'compare and contrast' to be made with the recent look at that other American maker of cult art, Phil Spector. Each specimen of genius strangeness has its own causes, it seems. I don't think there are rules or truisms to be diagnosed. On the face of it, while Spector had an inferiority complex and terrible insecurities, Salinger had 'liberated' a part of Dachau as part of his army service and had been packed up by Oona O'Neill in favour of the much older Charlie Chaplin, too, so some reclusive, difficult types are born to it but others have it thrust upon them.

No writer can escape being themselves and perhaps the more they try to escape the discomfort of self, the deeper they find themselves in it. It will be hoped by many of Salinger's devoted admirers, who might be mostly 'of a certain age' by now, that we will see the complete histories of the Glass family and Holden Caulfield that he is understood to have continued to write but we must be wary of hoping for too much.

The further an artist goes into themselves the more they risk losing of that thing that made them great in the first place.  Franny and Zooey was already heavier on the nervy repartee between Franny and her boyfriend and Zooey and his mother than Holden's recalcitrant attitude and suspicion of phonies ever was and Salinger in 1962 was on his way to Zen, renouncing the world he had seen through and indulging himself with his reclusiveness.

I can see so much good in it, though, like Franny's reasons for not wanting to be an actress mapping accurately onto my own reluctance to be a poet,

'I just quit, that's all,' Franny said. 'It started embarrassing me. I began to feel like such a nasty little ego maniac.'

like Zooey's reasons for not graduating,

I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I  knew had them by the peck.

and how,

Seymour had already begun to believe ... that education by any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter, if it didn't begin with a quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge.   

There's much to be said for leaving the difficult world behind by means of literature but it immediately becomes for its own sake and diminishes rapidly if it disdains the world. Franny and Zooey was moving in that direction, examining itself, prolix and extending inwardly and one can only imagine that the still unpublished Salinger only becomes more so. I still want to see it, though. I would like to see Twenty Two Stories, the bootleg edition of those early New Yorker pieces that he disowned but at £350, I don't want them badly enough until all my horses win on the same day and multiply their odds into more money than I have sense. 

Not everybody is convinced by the Salinger thing, and maybe he's not quite George Eliot, but some things shone so brightly once that they will never dim. The sort of things he was talking about through Holden Caulfield have hardly receded in the years since. It's either that or, given enough rope, even a genius will hang themselves. I think he's still in my Top 10 most thrilling writers.

How Many Words

 How many words are there in this house, I wondered the other day, knowing that when I did a rough count of how many books and records there were I had been satisfied with very approximate answers.

Printed, hard copy words, many of which will be the same common ones.

There aren't 2000 books but there are a lot of magazines. 500 are poetry books but some of them are big anthologies.

There's hundreds of CDs, all of which have booklets or inserts.For the sake of a completely meaningless, vastly underestimated number, I'ne multiplied up some very rough estimates.

I chose Mansfield Park to be the sample novel and possibly stand for all books. It has 10 words per line, 40 lines per page and about 400 pages which makes 160000 words but it has a lengthy introduction. Given that's there are books like two Shorter OED's, The Bible is quoted at 773746 words, Complete Shakespeare, etc, a book is conservatively estimated at 250000 words and I'll pretend there are 2000 of them to make up for much underestimating elsewhere and say Books account for 500 million words.

A TLS seems to come in at 65000 and maybe there's 120 of them = 8 million

PNR we'll call 4 million.

Gramophone and the BBC Music magazine can be 8 million.

About Larkin might be 1.5 million

Other poetry magazines, old newspapers must be another couple of million.

So, periodicals 25 million

 

There are quite a few words in the booklets of hundreds of CDs. I have absolutely no idea. I'm already beyond caring. 2 million. 

The co-efficient of underestimation on a figure that has left out all kinds of things and taken no account of small print could easily take us well beyond a billion but any counting I did to achieve it was recondite because I've over-ruled it and recalibrated it at every stage but such numbers soon cease to mean anything.

It's just that I've been in houses that have hardly any books in them. Perhaps the people that live in them spend their lives living them rather than reading about things elsewhere.

 

If there are a thousand CDs in the house, a thousand hours of music only takes 42 days of playing them continuously to listen to them all. That sounds nowhere near enough but we are betting without the LPs and cassettes. But whereas just about all the recorded music in the house has been listened to, the percentage of all the words in the house that have been read would be alarmingly low.

 

 

Racetrack Wiseguy

 I wasn't expecting to be detailing the proceedings on the turf in quite such detail in mid-May, when my interest usually lies low and waits for October but I'm prompted to some thoughts by the Professor who points out Wiseguy in the 7.25 at Warwick tomorrow night,

I assume you will be on Wiseguy tomorrow night.  

He's ahead of me but, yes, I am now.

I like to have a 'flagship' horse. Rainyday Woman became a poem before losing her way; Fantastic Lady has done much to live up to her name but it's only the likes of A.P. McCoy (Champ) and me that get horses named after them.

There's everything to like about Wiseguy at Warwick tomorrow night. Mr Henderson is placing a few winners at this easier time of year although I hope they don't all struggle like Choccabloc had to at Rasen today.

I myself had given back half of the year's profit thus far before regaining it, some of it at Chester

with the likes of Savethelastdance when she put 22 lengths into a field of hopefuls who can't all have run below form, upheld 'pop music theory' and smooched to favouritism for the Oaks for which I was just quick enough to take advantage of 2/1 with Corals and make use of a free bet I didn't know what else to do with. Look how blurred the also rans in the background are in this photo from Chester.

But being clever doesn't always help in sport. Look at Frank Lampard with his IQ of 178. Maybe his players can't follow his brilliant thinking and the Good Lord only knows how somebody so bright can be expected to play alongside Wayne Rooney. But I entered two competitions to name horses for the Coral Racing Club, very much my sort of game, one might have thought. I bundled in with numerous suggestions for a horse by Cotai Glory out of Green Boulevard that got better as the night went on but they decided to call it Aspire to Glory. Any bloody dimwit could have could have come up with that. But, tragically, I was too late for the deadline to name a horse by Sixties Icon out of Shadow inthenight.

Hank Marvin would have won that by 22 lengths, surely, had it been supplemented. So that horse will be known as Rockstar Icon.

I ask you.

 

I did have to consider my position on horse racing at Aintree. Fitzy and A.P. put up very poor defences of the industry that's made them rich and famous and were no better than Mr. Kipling defending cake. All the protestors are right - Extinction Rebellion, the nurses on strike, those that glue themselves to the M25, and the way the world is, designed by and for vanity projects by mostly male, overblown narcissists, is wrong.

It's not easy, but I've been vegetarian as best I can since 1995. I don't require animals to die. It's not the expressed intention of horse racing that animals should die as it is in hunting, shooting and fishing although too many horses do.

I'm also good at it. It's an interest that pays for itself these days and has done for years and me not doing it wouldn't stop it happening, which isn't the most copper-bottomed and righteous reason to be involved but it's not self-righteous, either. And so one finds a way, somehow, to carry on doing what one does.  

 

I had a vague idea that I had done a little yankee at Chester this afternoon and when I got home and looked at the results it looked like I'd landed it and I was quids in. I couldn't find it on my accounts, though. What I did find was a similar effort at Market Rasen in which all four came nowhere. And that, honestly, is how hilarious the game can be.

That's a tip in itself, in the 5.25 at Warwick, ridden by Bridget. Glorious Fun.

I wasn't always the most diligent about my homework in some subjects at school, I'd rather understand it without trying and get away with it.

So, let's see what happens. Don't put any actual money on the races on ITV, wait for those easy races they try to hide from us,

Wiseguy (Warwick, 7.25)

Glorious Fun (5.25).

 

TO THE REGIMENT.

I WISH I WAS THERE.   

Sebastian Barry - Old God's Time

 Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time (Faber)

For quite some time now I've not been able to hear the word 'righteous' without it meaning 'self-righteous' to me. Increasingly, it's hard not to hear 'priest' without it meaning 'abuser'. That might not be what it is intended to mean but, like 'decimated', it is losing its proper meaning, not by being mis-used but by becoming freighted with associations.

One can sense some of what is going to happen in Sebastian Barry's bleak novel. In a way we have been prepared for the way that the past hangs heavily over later events, in Ireland, in James Joyce and William Trevor to name but two. 

Tom Kettle is a retired detective called in to help with an old, unsolved case. For a while we can't be entirely sure that it's not him that's the suspect.

It unfolds slowly at first and I'd be by no means the first to admire many things in Barry's prose narrative way of showing, not least,

The city was lying under a huge dark belly of cloud, like a child reading a book under a blanket, except there was poor light enough for the city to read by.

At first the suicide attempt at the end of chapter 2 seemed a bit melodramatic but by the end it doesn't look so out of place. The mortality rate is high, though, accelerating towards the end like Hamlet and one wonders, as one does with Graham Swift, if fewer deaths might make death less commonplace and more significant. The blurb on the back that says 'Barry writes about unconditional love better than anyone' the reviewer has ever read and Tom certainly adored his late wife but that is diminished by how grim the rest of it is and, more than love, it is about time,

Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into God's time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck , and then they're gone. Maybe old God's time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and wristwatch. 

But it would appear that time isn't quite that big and things can't be buried in it.

Like a deep, dark, Catholic Midsomer Murder, Old God's Time produces an unexpected murderer in its quickening climax. Not every reader will see that coming.

There's precious little solace to be taken from the story beyond its brilliant writing. I'm not quite as keen as I thought I'd be to see what else is to be found in the Barry back catalogue because I fear it might all be so relentlessly true. Grief, and abuse, spread like uncontrolled vegetation and thrive by not being expressed or going unreported. I suspect that other Sebastian Barry books are likely to come with the same, or other such, difficult messages but the quality of his writing makes him worth at least one more chance before I decide, no, I know but I've heard enough. 

Emmanuel Bach & Jenny Stern at Lunchtime Live!

 Emmanuel Bach & Jenny Stern, Portsmouth Cathedral, May 11

One doesn't generally know what's going to be played at a Portsmouth Lunchtime Live!, only who will be playing it. Today Emmanuel Bach and Jenny Stern gave a programme of Scandinavian composers.

Grieg's Sonata no. 2, op.13 sounded great from the first note on Emmanuel's violin. The first movement takes little time to leave behind its lento opening before it is gaiety and summery throughout with Jenny's floribunda piano making it full of vibrant life.

The tranquillo of the second movement was sometimes no more than implied because it was passionate and danced, too. Emmanuel's tremendous technique appeared to be doing the work of two violins in an echo effect before the finish. And the Allegro animato - Presto was exactly that, busy and cantabile in turns.

I've had a difficult relationship with the music of Einojuhani Rautavaara since many years ago buying a disc on the basis of a review and not hearing what the words had led me to expect but that's words for you. His Lost Landscapes, however, did much to establish the composer in a better light although there was less light in this music than the Grieg. Introduced as 'sepia flashbacks' to places he had studied, Tanglewood was crepuscular and Rainergasse II, Vienna was sepulchral while in between them Ascona writhed and unsettled but the performance accumulated as it progressed before WEST 23rd, NY was slick and fast-moving in the piano while the violin was big and expansive.

Immediately lighter to end with was a rustic dance from Sibelius's op.106 that briefly gave Jenny some of the main melody over some pizzicato.

It was a top quality performance throughout. With such assurance and technique, it would be easy to say that Emmanuel Bach is an obvious star of the future but for one so young, his CV already includes playing with the likes of Vengerov and Anne-Sophie Mutter and so that future is here already. There is still most of a big career ahead of him, though.  

Well Set Up

 One is at one's most vulnerable when everything seems in place, well organized and 'nothing can possibly go wrong'. Confidence and complacency are the bane of those who much prefer, or only know how, to be anxious. Thus it is that I survey the dubious state of affairs that makes it all look well set up at the moment.

The library would only let me have Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time for two weeks because there's a waiting list for it. I know, I've been waiting. It won't be a problem because I've only had it for a couple of hours and I'm 51 pages out of the 260 done already. And I'm not at all surprised. He's a very fine writer, steeped in all that Irishness that runs through Joyce, George Moore, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien and a powerful squad that makes them contenders in any Literature World Cup against England, France, Russia, America, Italy, Japan and all those we either haven't read or haven't been translated. Some words about it will be here, if only to concur with all the other eulogies, before one needs must go into the back catalogue.

 

Less enthralling was an investigation into some names listed at the ever captivating Anecdotal Evidence. I simply don't know how he does it, every day. In 45 years of Thom Gunn Studies, I'd not heard of,

the “Stanford School,” the finest of that generation of American poets – J.V. Cunningham, Edgar Bowers, Janet Lewis, Thom Gunn and Helen Pinkerton.  

Perhaps he's made it up but I thought there might be some names with which to revive my fading enthusiasm for any poetry that I don't know already. Lewis and Pinkerton were two I looked up and, certainly, they must be well-regarded because their books don't come cheap. But reading some samples on the internet didn't make me want to add their titles to my library.

A bit profound, maybe a bit too obvious; well-crafted but maybe a bit too structured; serious but maybe a bit too much so. I'm sure they're fine poets and it's not their fault if poetry's moment, and integrity, has become lost on me. If I know your work already and I believe in you, you're probably okay but I'm very hard to impress with anything I don't already know I'm comfortable with. It's a shame but perhaps 45 years is enough of anything for anybody. However, 'engagement' is a word I've embraced more than most of those terms thrown about by the corporate powers that there were in work. Engagement is a good thing and I have it again with a new essay to write, re-adapting all the old truisms and ready-made lines on a select bunch of favourite writers, mostly poets, and so -one more time, at the very least- I'll gradually compile a loosely assembled survey that I'm sure will convince few of its academic rigour but seems absolutely crucial to me.

 

That said, the end of the football season is putting on a rousing show. Not least for Nottingham supporters, which I still am by birthright even if I adopted Fulham at an early age for reasons of my own. County's last gasp, fingernail hold on their chances of returning from the National League were almost equalled by Forest's nervy dog fight with Southampton and both are now favourites to achieve their season's objectives although neither has actually happened for sure yet.

And, taking advantage at the last reminder of the latest Waitrose wine offer, having thought I'd better not do that again, they are brilliant. Not only the office people on the phone but the gorgeous delivery drivers. Being Waitrose, they must be specially trained in etiquette because they know they are dealing with the 'middle class', at least. It's not for them that it's just a job in some resentful way. They make it seem like it's their pleasure. 

MontGras De-Vine Reserva Zinfandel is from Chile, not California, but Chile has a great reputation of being not noticeably, to me, much different from the 'real thing' in the same way that the premium of travelling to Wigmore Hall to pay £40- £75 to hear internationally famous musicians is hard to justify when I'm just as thrilled by those who play in Portsmouth and Chichester and cost me next to nothing in travel time or actual cash. 

The good lord only knows how much I'd like to find out what it would be like to sit here in my Armani suit with a bottle of Pauillac but that's not sensible. 

I'll maybe review Portsmouth Cathedral's Lunchtime Live on Thursday with the aid of some Chilean Zinfandel. Somebody has to.      

Procul Harum, A Whiter Shade of Pale

 It's about time we sneaked another one of these in,

The royalties from A Whiter Shade of Pale were the subject of a protracted court case and very much worth fighting for, it having been the soundtrack to the summer of 67, spending six weeks at number 1 and played regularly ever since. The law suit would have been made exponentially more complicated, though, if J.S. Bach had still been around because Gary Brooker couldn't have done it without his Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068. 

A Whiter Shade of Pale doesn't sound like pop music and its venerableness is augmented by words that, although quite possibly meaningless, sound most profound. It's perhaps mostly due to, 

As the miller told his tale,

which suggests Chaucer and that Keith Reid had done The Canterbury Tales at school, but also the 'light fandango', the 'vestal virgins' and something affecting about 'wandering through my playing cards' with the formality of 'playing cards' and 'leaving for the coast'.

Even the band name, Procul Harum, looks as if it is Latin and means something. It has been taken to mean 'beyond these things' but it might not. Like the song, it suggests things without standing up to too much rigorous scrutiny.

Of course, like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Puff the Magic Dragon and much of what was recorded in later 1960's pop music, the use of drugs has been implicated as its inspiration but intoxication can serve to blur as well as enhance creativity and what we have been left with is a masterpiece of psychedelia, evocative and redolent of much more than hazy weekends spent in fields. It's a piece that stands alone not only in a period of hectic creativity that puts some much later chapters in the history of pop music to shame but even within the work of Procul Harum because, as any number of acts have demonstrated, trying to go back and work the same miracle again is a short cut to the law of diminishing returns. 

Unkind Art and Coronations

 Dubliners was as impressive as I remebered it and easily defended its title as my facourite prose fiction book. I progressed to Richard Ellman's The Backgrounds of 'The Dead' in the MacMillan Casebook from the series that provided so much of my university essays. Surely I must have read Ellman 45 years ago but it all came as news to me about Joyce's sources. He had more in common with Eliot than I ever imagined, re-treading old literature to his owns devices, Ulysses notwithstanding.

We can at least credit Joyce with 'mutinous' but the rest of that snowy ending is based on a passage from The Iliad. The idea, and that of Ivy Day in the Committee Room, Joyce tells his brother, came from Anatole France. And George Moore's novel, Vain Fortune. All of which are filleted for what is useful to him in a story reflecting his jealousy at the thought that his wife, Nora, had been on intimate terms with other men.

I don't know how much those inter-textual references reduce The Dead for me. Already not by as much as they did a couple of days ago so maybe time is a great healer and Brewster Ghiselin's The Unity of 'Dubliners', which I must have depended on for what I handed in as my essay, does a fine job of explicating that theme. I'm not going to dig out my 1980 effort to see how far short of okay it is and be appalled by what qualified for a 2:1 then, never mind now.

But this morning that reading prompted an idea for a new essay beginning from Joyce and bringing in a number of other big favourites - mainly the usual suspects - and it seems I have a project, the old envelope quickly filled with notes towards a plan. I can't imagine it seeing print but that's not the point any more. Increasingly, the point of writing is to enjoy doing it, sometimes even the footnotes.

Simenon's The Late Monsieur Gallet, read in preparation for the new poemsby Sean O'Brien, was short, clear and nowhere near as noir as I had expected. I'm accustomed to not knowing what is going on as a regular Midsomer Murders watcher and so struggling to grasp who and what was real or fake concerned me less than it usually would. Mysteries are a mystery to me which is what they are supposed to be but sometimes it's still a bit of a mystery after it's all been explained.

--

Yesterday's coronation might be the only such to take place in my lifetime so I thought I'd better watch. A few days ago a journalist on Times Radio said Charles was going to be 'coronated'. Good Grief, has it come to that.

I'm no royalist and was immediately less so on thepassing of Mrs. Queen but I'm no republican either. I'm at a loss as to why the crowds are so devoted to this soap opera family who so so fashionably dysfunctional but if having them means we don't get President Boris, Liz Truss, Thatcher or Blair them I'm negatively in favour of them and I need to know from Republicans how being open to Boris, or Trump, presidencies would be preferable.

In its favour, the coronation was colourful, spectacular and immacualtely rehearsed. The big star of the show, as it always will be, was Westminster Abbey. The 'splendour' is quite astonishing - the gold carriage, the uniforms, the legions of minor aristocracy and maybe, just maybe, there is some economic benefit to be had by putting on such a show if it brings in revenue for various businesses. Money needs to move around to create the impression of fiscal well-being although the cost of watching it on telly went up alarmingly as my Virgin Media bill shot up by a large % as it happened.

The absurdities kept on crowding in, though, to make any kind of satire well beyond the scope of Private Eye or HIGNFY.

These elderly men, still mostly men, of high office performed some recondite rituals, the most incredible of which even they had to do behind a screen because even they knew it was too silly- they anointed the king with holy oil !!!  

The king was presented with a specially made Bible and was told,

We present You with this Book, the most valuable thing that this World affords. Here is Wisdom; this is the Royal Law; these are the lively Oracles of God.

 

There were fanfares and religious invocations throughout. If one or two might acknowledge some tradition, they became tiresome but it's not all about peace and the brotherhood of man because the armed forces played a prominent part in all the precision processioning, my MP, Penny Mordaunt, famous for supporting causes like those of Boris and Truss once her own had fizzled out, carried a sword around and Camilla's robe, we were told, was embroidered with things that reflected her and her husband's 'love of nature' that he takes a gun to to shoot out of the sky, or ensnares out of rivers or has hunted on horseback. That's how much he loves it.

So, no, not really. One can find more fault with it than is balanced out by any grandeur. It was very peculiar but there are many far worse countries one could live in or call one's own and it is much the lesser ofmany evils given that nobody lives in paradise and never has.

Which is almost some sort of summary of the literary essay that might come of taking Dubliners and dragging it off in a direction of my choosing. It won't get anything like the audience the coronation got, though. It might not get any audience at all.  

Blitz 2006

Alleluia.

It happened almost by accident in the end. I switched toplay Blitz at 5+3 and, not having played that for some time, for reasons best known to Lichess, games are worth more, win or lose. A win took me to 1995?, a loss back down to 1965? but then this 56 move masterpiece was worth 41. 

 

They take my rook and the pawn can't be caught as it promotes to Queen.

So, I don't touch Blitz again and have a free shot at Rapid, too, to have two ratings of 2000+. And meanwhile sleep the sleep of the righteous and just.