The Sweeping-Up Process

 One of the more convincing ways one can persuade oneself that one is doing something worthwhile when no longer having to go to work for a living is reading some of the books one ought to have read. It seems I'm some way behind in certain areas. At least a couple of my friends who read proper books read Crime and Punishment many years ago.

Having been a teenage reader of Solzhenitsyn, I can hardly be accused of not taking on heavy Russian novels, or maybe that's why, but I always imagined Dostoevsky would be hard work. Not as hard as Finnegans Wake but harder than Proust. I simply didn't take to Gogol. I'd prefer George Eliot to Dickens every time. Henry James lurks on the outskirts of necessity, I recently saw something that made me think Borges would be good. I don't think one can ever say one's read everything one ought to have. There's always plenty missing from those 100 Books To Read Before You Die lists.

But, as the blurb on the Wordsworth Classics edition says, Crime and Punishment is 'one of the...most readable' of novels. But nobody ever took the trouble to tell me. One, hopefully not only I, have some sympathy- or even empathy with Raskolnikov, whose name doesn't mean 'rascal' but comes from the Russian for 'schism, break asunder', it says here. I shouldn't be too definitive about that yet, only at the end of Part 1 when he's just lured himself into committing a double murder which I can't help feeling is going to turn out to be inadvisable. So far, an obvious comparison is with L'Etranger for its amoral implications and if that holds, Dostoevsky will be on his way to an exalted position on my hit parade of novelists because if you get anywhere near Albert Camus you are very near the top. It might even be a case of Fyodor, Now that I've Found You I Can't Let You Go but there's a long way to go yet. A horse I backed the other night was three lengths clear after the second last and it looked as if it was all over but there was a bit more shouting and it wasn't.

We will see but certainly the next week or so of reading looks like being the pleasure it is expected to be.

As the writing might be, too.

A few hundred words, most days if I can, have got the Twentieth Poetry in English book up to nearly 10 thousand words by doing the easy bits. It's called C20th at present, with a dreary subtitle like English Poetry from 1898 to 1999 and then an introduction that sets the criteria of being about poems written in the English language in the British Isles. One has to be so careful even if it isn't going to be remotely academic or definitive, despite the accumulation of footnotes which I've almost come to enjoy. But, taken as a slow process, punctuating the quotes with some sundry commentary but, increasingly importantly, all the off-hand, ​blasé truisms I've thought up about poetry over the last 45 years.

What might have set out as being intended to be a fairly sensible survey of something I thought I knew about and something I could do, maybe it will become a maverick, if genuinely 'mainstream' point of view and some sort of contribution to 'scholarship' on the subject.

I doubt it but you never know.

By now the point about writing is the enjoyment of doing it, not that of who reads it or any praise it accrues as a by-product. 

I was, at least at some time, an admirer of Bill Shankly but not in the end of his dictum that football was more than a 'matter of life and death'. A better manager than him, Brian Clough, demonstrated that he thought otherwise.

Dr. Samuel Johnson expressed the view that No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.  

I have come, sir (or madam), to admire the vastly greater part of Dr. Johnson's writing this side idolatry but that is one of the finer details that I refute. Fine writing is done in exchange for cash, as Handel wrote his music, Shakespeare his plays and Damien Hirst put a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde but there's more to it than that.

I don't know if it's better that second-best teams of footballers are sent out to represent their clubs professionally in the next-to meaningless League Cup as they were this week or that amateur poets enjoy writing poems that are mostly of even less consequence but if we take enjoyment as the best reason for doing anything once the demands of avoiding fiscal depravity have been met, I'm with the amateurs.

I need to spend some time with the poems of Paul Muldoon in order to decide with which glib remarks to sum up his colossal, if evasive, contribution but, wow, it's a job to relish without worrying that I might not get it right. I will enjoy doing that and the enjoyment, rather than whatever the result of my casual research turns out to be, will have been the point.         

'David Bowie' 1967

50 years' worth of inflation probably make £32.99 for Electric Warrior a comparable price to what it cost new then. 5 LP's worth of 1972 by T. Rex amounts to not a lot more than multiple versions of The Slider, though, at £132. I'd like to know who's going to go in there and buy it but there is no need to meet them.

Emsworth's Harbour Records is of interest to see what they keep in stock, presumably knowing that is what there's a market for. Yes, ELP, some heavy metal et al but not at all bad on T. Rex, reggae, the Velver Underground and what you'd hope they'd have. I went back for David Bowie by David Bowie from 1967. While the best things to have are the albums from Hunky Dory to Station to Station but great artists are more of interest before they made it big rather than after they're past their best. 

David Bowie in the de-luxe edition is two CD's so you get Love You Til Tuesday four times but it's still a gorgeous thing without, of course, being Hunky Dory, from the days of the beautiful people when his girlfriend was the dancer, Hermione Farthingale. 

At £4.50, those best Bowie albums on CD are not unreasonable. I'm not sure I'd play them very often and I do now have the facility again to play the cassettes but I feel I ought to patronize Harbour Records by going back and buying them if only to thank him for being there.

--

These last days of summer are the anniversary of the last worthwhile poem I wrote, Romanticism, on a trip out in the opposite direction to Netley Abbey. The purpose of today's venture was the pilgrimage to see Rosemary Tonks at Warblington. I didn't expect the stone I left on her headstone last July, in the Jewish tradition, to still be in place so I found a matching one this time.

It's a pleasant walk along the shoreline to Emsworth but Emsworth isn't a Dostoevsky sort of place and the bookshop there had none.

--

But David Bowie was worth it as the first time in how many years- I don't know - since I went into a record shop and bought a record, even if it was made 56 years ago.

It's a bit Anthony Newley but it's also Scott Walker, Ray Davies, of its time but mainly interesting for what one can find in it of what Bowie became in those Golden Years from 1971-75 (at the very least).

Elegiac

It wasn't especially elegiac but getting a later bus back from Chichester today than I'd usually be on, the more advanced hour seemed to rhyme with the advanced stage of summer we are now at and have a suggestion of that sense of 'all over' that was most keenly felt on the way home after the 12 hour races, 1994-96, with the sun setting not only on a personally historic day for me but on the summer, too. Although the last one I rode is now twenty-seven years ago, memories of that are as vivid as anything in those 'epic' rides. Done and dusted; signed, sealed and delivered; the record books can have it all now, history takes possession of it all from now on.

That is more 'writing' than it warrants but if it were all fiction or a poem, it's the sort of long perspective ending that is more satisfactory than, say, the carnage in Hamlet or one of Jane Austen's heroines successfully getting herself married off.

It's a bit odd going to Chichester not for a concert or any other cultural event but days out can be organized around things other than them, as it turns out. The bookshop in Pallant House had Maggi Hambling's The Works priced up at £120 so I'm £80 up on the deal already on their terms. To be fair to them, you can pay more than that at Amazon if you want.

I haven't actually been to the Bishop's Palace gardens before, which is ignorant of me, but it was probably best to wait to go with a guide like Graham who knows his japonica from his tradescantia, not that we necessarily saw either of those today. The canal goes all the way to the sea but we only went as far as Hunston having lunched on, I don't know, Cheese and Pepper Toasted Ciabatta which seemed not overly chic but more so than the mushrooms, pa fritter, chips and curry sauce I had yesterday.

I should know the contents of my record shelves better than I do. Any music writer worthy of the name would surely know whether they had the Shostakovich Violin Concertos or not but although I could remember the cello and piano equivalents, I now have Daniel Hope conducted by Maxim, as well as Vengerov. I probably don't need that but it takes little off the pricewise value of a haul from the Oxfam Bookshop that brought with it The James Bowman Collection in memory of a very favourite singer, the Collected Poems of Elizabeth Jennings to upgrade the Selected and Crime and Punishment with which to begin my dutiful attempt on the north face of Dostoevsky which, all being well, won't prove onerous.

--

One is always reminded how good Louis MacNeice was whenever looking back at his Autumn Journal which I did this morning when adding a few more paragraphs to 'the project', such as it is but it is over 8000 words now and it is moving tentatively, even quite thoughtfully, along. The project doesn't have a title yet and doesn't need one - yet - but Autumn Journal is the sort of place where I might find a suitably telling phrase.

I'd always rather be 'commentator' than 'critic' because 'critic' sounds like 'fault-finder' even if all one does is provide gratuitous praise. But this week has found me very supportive of Auden and most of what he did and stood for while set against Ted Hughes at any available opportunity. That is what I think but hadn't thought that I'd quite so readily put it down in writing. But maybe having a point of view will be a good thing rather than those balanced, pros and cons essays I offered up at university because I was keen to get a good mark and thought it necessary to appear sensible.

--

But this week, thus far, has been a bad one in the office for the Racetrack Wiseguy. It's been no serious setback from the bridgehead that has been established this year but one does prefer the gradual, careful accumulation of profit to resemble how Sunil Gavaskar used to collect runs - not always quickly but surely.

One or two steps back are fine as long as one can resume with two or three steps forward.

Tomorrow is a big day's racing, if you believe ITV and the industry that want you to believe every Saturday is a highlight of the season. It isn't for me but the Ebor Handicap is not quite the unsolvable riddle that the Stewards Cup, Cambridgeshire or other such pin-sticking lotteries can often appear to be.

We need to be afraid, very afraid, when Willie Mullins is sending two likely types over from Ireland in pursuit of a £300k pot but William Hill is giving everybody a free bet this weekend. I feel like Blanche Dubois who coyly suggests that she has often depended on the kindness of strangers but I'll take it on the off-chance of retrieving some of the week's losses.

Sweet William (York 3.35) isn't exactly 'under the radar' at 7/2 fav but is officially 4lb well-in and, by Sea the Stars, could easily still be ahead of his handicap mark on his way to non-handicap races.

But the agony of Saturdays of flat race guessing games won't go on much longer. We can start trying properly again at Chepstow in October if not before. It's not so much these days that summer comes to an end, it's that autumn begins. 

--

And, finally, I thought I came out of Mendelssohn's more famous Violin Concerto in not such bad order, not giving up trying to follow the score until about bar 350. That's a big improvement on what I did with Beethoven 6. It helps having one main instrument to focus on.

However, my friend Andrew tells me that you are no longer expected to do such things at school, or not in the third form anyway.

The way education is, ever needy of proving its high standards, I think these days you can have a Music 'O' level by recognizing the violin and saying you like it. If you know the composer was C19th and his name was Felix that's an A* but you're still not Alina Ibragimova.
    

The Edward Thomas Study Centre

 Portsmouth and its surrounding area are well served for choirs, their concerts, lunchtime piano recitals and the like but it's not everybody who can live quite so close by places associated with two of their favourite dozen poets.

Having waited patiently for summer to pass, it's suddenly time to fit in some of those days out that haven't happened yet. Next week I must return to Warblington to visit Rosemary Tonks where she is buried but The Edward Thomas Study Centre in Petersfield is another of those little places one needs to know about that make a trip worthwhile.

It's not as big as you'd quite reasonably expect but there's not an inch of space wasted and it is immacualately presented. It's more library than museum but it won't be found wanting for much in Thomas and Thomas-related literature. For the asking, one can see books signed by Thomas but, as advised by Jeremy Mitchell there, don't ever be persuaded by a book of his poems signed by Thomas because they weren't published until after his death. Not that I'd stretch to the asking price for any such thing but, as with John Donne and Auden, the Signed Poetry Books feature here will have to be glad of a photograph and accept that no such signed book will ever grace my shelves.

There isn't much to see in most towns these days now that they've become generic versions of each other with their Gregg's, charity shops and supermarkets but Petersfield retains considerable charm with its famous, labyrynthine second-hand bookshop (which didn't have any Dostoyevsky) and kindly atmosphere almost redolent of Camberwick Green but maybe it only seems like that to one like me who is attuned to the mean streets of Portsmouth.

The very fact that there is an Edward Thomas Study Centre is something to be glad of. It couldn't be called a reading room but some of us who are devoted enough to books like looking at them for their own sake in the same way that trainspotters enjoy seeing locomotives without taking a ride on them.

If I'd known there was a visitors book I might have thought of something appropriate to write in it in advance but even when I've thought of lines to say in advance I sometimes forget them in the pressure of the moment and ad lib as best I can.

Some people left and some people came.

It might not look much but the genuine Edward Thomas cognoscenti should appreciate what it is meant to mean. I hardly felt worthy of signing so soon after wit, raconteur and all-round oddball talent, Gyles Brandreth, who had attended nearby, upmarket Bedales school. I'm very glad I finally made the effort and got there. The stated objective of societies like the Edward Thomas Fellowship is to,

Perpetuate the memory of Edward Thomas and foster interest in his life and works,

and, yes, of course it is but we wouldn't want it catching on too much, would we. It's not such a bad thing that it is our own little secret so that when you meet people like Jeremy and distract him from his work it seems like you've shared something special.   

The Curator

 We are all curators these days. It's anybody who makes a list of their favourite records, like me. In days gone by you were expected to have an art gallery or museum and arrange the display of choice items of interest to best effect.

I wasn't entirely convinced by Stuart Maconie's idea, as curator of the Northern Soul Prom, that the makers of the original 60's records would have liked to have a resource like the BBC Symphony Orchestra to make their records with and so his concert would be how they wanted their 7" singles to sound. They might well have used such musicians had they been available in some studio in downtown Detroit in 1964 but they weren't and by now the records are iconic and we like them as they are, thank you very much. As with Trojan Records, how they sounded then is what we like about them and the lily doesn't need to be gilded.

Last night's Stevie Wonder Prom didn't stay on my radio for long. It wasn't Stevie Wonder. Of course, Lauren & the Heatwaves the other week weren't the Ronettes, the Vandellas or the Supremes but several of those are no longer with us and the Heatwaves put in a tremendous performance of various artist masterpieces and were a joy. I'll have a look at Stuart's Northern Soul effort on the telly when it comes up but the Albert Hall isn't the Wigan Casino, Stoke's Twisted Wheel or even a weekend in Skegness in an out of season holiday camp so it won't be very 'real'. I don't necessarily object to things being 'commodified', that is what a lot of music is, but there needs must be a limit.

--

But the art of 'curation' isn't as easy as it looks.

Compiling the playlist that comprises DGBooks Radio has been a great pleasure, sitting here remembering records and deciding which of them and why get included. People have listened to it. The undeservedly obscure Jess Davies Band's listeners have increased by 150%. Those are the records I'd play on a pop radio show. As Rick Nelson sang on Garden Party, which might yet get added in,

You can't please everyone

So you'd better please yourself.

 

But while there's always going to be things one forgets, it's good that there's always someone there to remind me. It is definitely not a request show but unless the correspondance generated by the 24 hours' worth of tracks gets out of hand, it is all welcome. I am indebted to a listener who pointed out the omission of White Horses by Jackie. Yes, of course.

Admirers of Queen, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, Black Sabbath or Music by John Miles need not apply. They won't be entertained quite so welcomingly.

There's no Ian Dury, Police, Paul Weller, Springsteen, Eagles and ever onwards. No, they haven't lasted or weren't that good in the first place but there's no Joni Mitchell because it looks like she's not made most of her work available.

But, Good Lord, You know it ain't easy - you don't know how hard it can be. I'd put 460 songs on there until just now I remembered Sugar, Sugar all by myself. 

Recent Acquisitions

Those scores of Bach, Beethoven and Ravel look fine on the shelf but might prove to be more ornamental than of practical use. I persuaded myself I could see roughly what was going on for a few pages of the Pastoral Symphony but was soon lost. The Ravel isn't scored for the same orchestra as I played it so that was a dead loss. I'll await the arrival of Alina Ibragimova's Mendelssohn but I don't have high hopes of following it very closely. It occurs to me that solo piano scores might be a better option but I didn't see any of them. 

Not to worry. I like having them to have the place look more expert than it is, like the copy of Finnegans Wake that meant precious little without an accompanying guide to it.

--

I missed the obvious thing about Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, that it was by Derek Jarman.

It's far too 'arty' and self-indulgent and I shouldn't have been surprised by that.

It would benefit from a large screen showing because it's great to look at. Jarman was a 'failed' painter before being a successful film-maker and it recreates some tableaux in primary red and black but Jarman is doing what he does, being himself. It was worth a try, not a complete waste of time and it would be dull if everything was an unmitigated success because then it would be like the Chichester Cathedral lunchtime concerts - always to be relied on to be superb.

The book is better than the film.

--

Whereas A.N. Wilson being A.N. Wilson is a guarantee in itself. Paul was highly informative and astonishing in perhaps more ways than it meant to be, not least as an insight into a religious mind.

It is outrageous, as below, but it happens. We are all, I dare say, the last ones to be aware of our own absurdities. In a 'post-modern' way, nobody knows what happened to Paul in the end. Wilson wants to imagine he found his way to Spain to spread the word there but it doesn't look like it to me.

Andrew Graham-Dixon wasn't entirely sure about Caravaggio's end but at least he knew roughly where it was, just not whether it was illness or revengers that finally got him.

With Jesus's brother, James, having been a political agitator who left less of a legacy after being stoned to death, the precedents and odds for all these vociferous figures give them a high percentage chance of meeting grisly deaths and whether it's in classical times, the Middle Ages, Plantagenets, Tudors or Elizabethans, right up to C20th American good guys or Russians through the ages, not much has changed in that respect. 

--

Tales from the Colony Room turns out to be a better read than it first looked.

It's a horrific world, much better viewed from the outside, and surely a great deterrent for anybody considering a life dedicated to booze unless they are likely to find the descent into slavery and paralysis an option they think they might enjoy.

Elvira Barney, we are told, got off with shooting a 'lover' after a 'party' but went on to make 'dreadful scenes' in the club, with her cry,

'I've murdered one bugger and got away with it. Don't think I'd hesitate again'

Muriel Belcher, the club owner,

remembers her as 'enchanting'. 

 

It looks worth staying with before moving onto something less harrowing. It is about time I read some proper Dostoevsky.  

Racetrack Wiseguy at Perth

It's a bit of a stretch to get to Perth for tomorrow afternoon but while the attention of ITV is on the flat action at Newbury, Newmarket and Ripon, about which I have no idea, it just might be one of those days to sneak in the back door and possibly help oneself to some obvious free pickings while most people are looking elsewhere.

Once in a while one can't help but think there's an opprtunity to 'go through' a card. That sort of thing doesn't very often happen and certainly not when one thinks it might. The results usually turn out to be no better than any other meeting might have been but, with the proven track record, and paid for by it, one can have a little go at being a mug punter, blindly believing that one might just get it all right.

I want two goes at the 3.55 because it's unreasonable to think all the in-form good things are all going to go in and I reckon I'll want three winners together in a treble to get my studiously parsimonious outlay back. Fortune does not favour the foolhardy; success isn't a matter of luck, it's a matter of sticking to a plan that works.

But,

2.15 Oliver's Travels (nap)

2.45 A Different Kind

3.20 Liverpool Knight

3.55 Dalileo, and River of Joy

4.30 Judge Earle (pictured)

5.06 Born Famous

 

If it was that easy everybody would be doing it but sometimes a lot of favourites all line up like an alignment of planets promising a calm sea and a prosperous voyage.

It's money that was once the bookmaker's that I'm playing with so I'm dancing without jeopardy on their bit of dancefloor. I'm always grateful for their hospitality. As the summer jumping season will soon have to acknowledge that its warm-up act will soon have to give way to the proper business, the winter game, maybe some of these will cash in one more time. And if they all do, that will be fine by me.

Not What I Went For

The annual exhibition of the Hampshire Art Society is in the cathedral at present, until 24th. This year I was pleased to recognize the work of Frank Clarke, one of whose paintings I bought last year, and also to see that there wasn't an identical one produced on the back of having sold that to me. There were things to like, plenty not quite to one's taste, but if I wanted any of them it was one priced up at £800 and I didn't want it that badly. I don't expect Rembrandt for that amount but I'd like a small Maggi Hambling.

However, out back by the back entrance were some books available for a donation, most of interest among which was a box of pocket scores. Yesterday I took Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, came home and found I didn't have it on CD. That came as some surprise but it can't be the only essential msterpiece I don't have. Alina Ibragimova is already on her way to remedy that omission along with the 'other' such Mendelssohn concerto and the Hebrides Overture. It goes with Derek Jarman's Caravaggio on the list of this month's new acquistions.

But I like these scores and went back for more today so that I didn't regret leaving them there.

The number of Bach cantatas in the box, and lack of piano pieces, made me think a choral person had had a clear out but I came away with some Brandenburgs, my favourite symphony (Beethoven Pastoral) and a teenage favourite, Ravel's Pavane for a Dead Infanta.

Quite how I get on with these remains to be seen but I know all these pieces fairly well and that should help. I knew the first movement of Beethoven 5, I thought, when it was the subject of a music exam at school. The tape was stopped in 30 places and we had to write down which bar we were on. Sadly for me, I missed the repeat marking that takes you back to the start, was immediately lost and scored 0/30 having given up at halfway and opted to stop guessing and just enjoy the Beethoven. That was one of the last things I ever did in Music at school, finding that finding out for myself served me better which, in the end, it did because it eventually got me the job of honorary reviewer of local recitals.

However, 50 years on there is unfinished business and I'll hope to satisfy myself at least that I can follow music better now. Either that or I can just marvel at how this strange language encodes it, for those who can follow it if not for me.

The Also Ran

 I had all but convinced myself that I'd win the poetry competition in which, against my better betting judgement, I re-invested £10 on myself and my best four poems of recent years. One should always stick to the plan, the plan in this case being that its harmless enough entering free poetry competitions but as soon as any money is involved, it's better off on a horse or might as well be in a lottery.

Come to think of it, in my relatively successful but very occasional poetry competition career the prizes have all come in free-to-enter affairs and all entry feees have been cash thrown away in vainglorious efforts at microscopic celebrity. One only has to look at the litany of winners in Poetry News each quarter to know that winning a minor prize is no big deal. By now, you'd think, most poets must have one.

Not to worry. I looked up the three winners and found they were respectable enough at what they did without finding it necessary to buy their books. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. I might have received orders for my micro pamphlet. I wouldn't have had the nerve to take money for them. I've read the poems and enjoy them very much. It doesn't matter to me whether anybody else reads them or not.

---

Meanwhile, back at the ranch. A.N. Wilson impresses as much with his Paul as he did with his Jesus. I'm no theologist. As with Economics, and probably Sociology, I'm less than convinced that Theology constitutes an academic subject. All three 'disciplines' are surely no more than a lot of old hokum that belong alongside Astrology, Palmistry and Bingo for all the intellectual rigour they demand.

But rigour is what Wilson appears to bring to unravelling the complexities of early Christianity which has only become exponentially more and more involved since Paul's time. One of the few things I took from my ill-advised venture into 'A' level History was a grasp of what the Reformation, Protestantism and the Counter-Reformation were; who Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and the Jesuists were. I might also have had a looser idea of Con-substantiation and Transubstantiation.

Neither Paul, or Jesus before him it seems, had any concept of 'Christianity'. They were Jews and at most only offering yet another variant of Judaism. But things get out of hand. It could have been much simpler if Saul had not gone to Damascus on his way to persecute a few more emerging off-beats and had a funny five minutes.

It's not just Wilson's impressive insight into the evidence of the New Testament that makes his book so thrilling, it's the very fact that he has such a labyrynthine welter burden of sects, doctrines and wild superstitions at his disposal, not least the 'gift' of 'speaking in tongues' which is the sort of charlatanry that in comparison might begin to make the likes of Trump, Boris, Putin, Jacob and Liz Truss seem like almost passable empirical rationalists.

No. Wilson's purpose might have been to re-habilitate Paul to some extent by contextualizing his contribution to the outbreak of Christianity. If I feel as if I want to side with the Jews, there is more than enough for them to answer for. One of the most interesting things about books from other periods and cultures is the way one can glimpse ways of life organized with entirely different priorities, whether it be Rembrandt's life, Shakespeare's or Handel's. 

What comes out of Wilson's Paul is quite what an astounding human invention religion was. The amount of imagination, creativity and commitment that has gone into Christianity, without its precursors ever having intended that it should, is wildly off the scale and has proved horrifically cruel and destructive. And that's before it is multiplied by Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and all the other religions. I tend to think that Buddhism might be kinder than most but I don't know for sure.

Religion has a longer history, one might think, than other human achievements like the moon landings, music, the wheel, the Theory of Relativity or sport but surely it had much the most significant legacy, especially as it quite clearly was just made up but, somehow, caught on.        

High Art and Low Life

There simply can't be many biographies as good to read as Andrew Graham-Dixon's Caravaggio. Admittedly, he has more to work with, as far as a tense action thriller requires, than Andrew Motion or James Booth had with the life of their university librarian poet, but it's a brilliantly organized story over and above its sensational content.

Caravaggio's art, it seems, benefitted from his lack of formal training. It would be difficult to think of anyone whose sublime talent was at quite such odds with their turbulent, troubled life. Before he died aged 38, he had spent several years on the run from the crimes he left behind him, most of which were generated by a volatile personality in conflict with a finely-graded social system in which slights and disrespect were readily the cause of grievances that needed to be settled.

Brilliant though his paintings clearly are, his subject matter alone couldn't make him a major favourite because I'll have the Dutch from a few years later any day but Graham-Dixon's explanations show how much was in them. By the age of 38, though, whether due to injuries sustained or not, he was well into decline, usin his chiaroscuro technique to hide his shortcomings in darkness.

It is remarkable how much of the desperado life can be pieced together from such disparate sources but there remain inevitable gaps and the exact circumstances of the last few days, trying to get back to Rome, separated from the paintings on the boat he had been going on before he was detained, would either be better to know, or not.

For me, an artist's story should be that of tremendous early work, a middle period of masterpieces and maybe a sad decline. I'm not sure I'm going to try to claim that Shakespeare suffered that but the last plays aren't quite Hamlet; I had the feeling that Seamus Heaney was going over old ground in his last two books but Patrick Hamilton, who had written such fine novels, turned in no more than his outline of a work in progress in Unknown Assailant.

 

Caravaggio on film was done by Derek Jarman and the DVD can be had for less than a fiver and so I'll have one. I'm in no hurry to return to the overly scholarly Schwartz Rembrandt and Tales from the Colony Room looks no better than it should be so next up is likely to be A.N. Wilson's Paul, who was possibly the inventor of Christianity, not Jesus Christ who, it might say, never said he was anything but Jewish. Maybe Paul's got a lot to answer for but we can rely on Wilson to put a contrary slant on it.

Books about such faraway times and places have the advantage of all their contemporary detail, as far as it can be understood, or misunderstood, and so Shakespeare's London, Caravaggio's Rome and Paul's Mediterranean travels can be made more vividly of interest than a walk up the Copnor Road to Tesco Express although I'm sure they'd be very taken by the opportunity to see suburban Portsmouth in 2023.

--

Racetrack Wiseguy writes - Diego Velazquez was worth waiting for yesterday, 2.4m gns worth of Frankel progeny, especially at 4/6 when returned at 2/5 and coming home alone.

Hold your bets, though, on next year's classics. Aidan O'Brien has a jigsaw puzzle to do, over the winter rather than just yet, in deciding which horses to send where in order to win everything and there will be more 2yo's to be seen yet, probably from him but hopefully from somebody else, too.

Diego did the necessary business to get me past the latest milestone in accumulated profit for the year. It's been a steadily, gradually winning summer and that's all I expect of it. Extrapolating the year so far across the remaining four and a half months would break last year's record but that's not the game. Winning at all is good enough.

It's necessary to understand that. Unlike the Daily Express a few weeks ago who appeared to think that the rate of inflation being reduced made us better off. No, it means we're still getting worse off but not quite as quickly.

Perhaps they were Liz Truss's economic advisors in disguise or, like just happened on Sounds of the 70's, they thought that Creedence Clearwater Revival's I Heard It Through the Grapevine was 'Better than the Original' ( !!! ).

One presses on regardless. Letsbefrankaboutit was a well-backed favourite from an in-form stable in the first at the Curragh this afternoon. It was a big field and so I even looked at the alleged draw advantage, found it to be 'high' and so thought 15 out of 16 was a good thing.

It easily won the race on his side but finished nearly 4 lengths behind the horse drawn 4 on the other.

It not being something I usually look at, being mostly a jumping man and not liking big fields on the flat, I don't even know what 'high' means. Maybe two horses drawn on the other side of the Curragh's wide open spaces were better horses. Chepstow in October can't come soon enough for me.

 

Works in Progress

DGBooks Radio perhaps ought to stop at a playlist of 300 tracks. I remember Johnnie's Juke Box on Sounds of the 70's was going to, and then didn't. It's not really a selection if you include everything so apart from when I become aware of glaring omissions, of which there will be some, maybe that will do.

I can't see the playlist below the first six and already can't remember exactly what I put on and what I didn't. There must be a way of doing it but it's like not being sure which books or records one has. Andrew Motion's book on Edward Thomas? I'd have thought so but I can't find it. That Sebastian Faulks novel I bought twice? I was on about page 73 before realizing I already had it. I'd have been no better at being an academic than I would a librarian.

 

But there are reasons to be cheerful. Attempts at writing novels are discouraged by the idea that a 'novel' should be at least 50 thousand words. I know it's all wrong and one should write as much as needs to be written but a big, and very bad, reason for trying to write a novel was to be able to say I've written a novel. It's the same bad reason why there are so many bad novels, bad poems and bad pop songs not all written by me.

A 'book' of poetry commentary isn't defined by its word count, though. Anthony Thwaite's Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Heinemann, 1978) wasn't a big book although it could only cover its period up until its publication date. It's a summary at best - there weren't that many about at the time- and gets as far as Heaney had got by then. It wasn't much use then and is less now.

It's 125 pages of text, say 33 lines a page and 10 words per line = 41250 words.

Neil Corcoran's English Poetry since 1940 (Longman, 1993) is more expansive at 260 pages of about 42 lines of approx. 10 words = 109200 words.

Corcoran brings in a lot of names. Thwaite gives three pages to Edward Thomas and ends with the quote from Yeats that 'we are too many' that he made into a poem either before or after as an observation on contemporary poetry.

Any survey, like any anthology, has to stop somewhere and immediately give rise to readers and reviewers asking why their favourites, Wilf Subbuteo or Francesca Scrimshaw, weren't mentioned.

So, let's hold a high line and make our way through C20th English poetry via 'major' writers and take a view, encouraged by the fact that a minor major figure like Thwaite, capable of considerable industry when editing the Larkin letters, thought 42000 would be enough.

There is no point in imagining one can be definitve and so one writes up what it looks like in a subjective way.

It is possible to find unforeseen connections between poems one thought dissimilar and also differences between poets one might have thought had plenty in common. It remains worth doing, gradually and in defiance of abandonment so perhaps it's a work in progress that might make it to be a ramshackle first draft one day.

That day would arrive sooner if I set about doing more of it instrad of writing about writing it but one needs to let such things gestate, be thought about and then, eventually, when all else fails, do a bit more of. 

DGBooks Radio

 DGBooks Radio

 

I should have thought of this a long time ago.

Extending the franchise, remit and all such things of DGBooks, the website, it is with tremendous pleasure that I can announce DGBooks Radio, in conjunction with the ongoing pop music items.

I hope you'll shuffle it and try it, the first 146 tracks have not been put in any meaningful order beyond the onrush of them occuring to me and I'm sure I'll keep adding to it. No DJ, no news, no sport. I think there could be adverts but what can you do.

I thought the music review job was the best I've ever had but making up a playlist is possibly even better. Opinion might be divided about how good I am at it.

It's not often I can go more than three records on any radio station without coming up against one that I'm not interested in but I can come here without worrying about that.

1610

Andrew Graham-Dixon's Caravaggio is an exemplary biography, bringing together the turbulent life and the dramatic paintings in a well-organized, authoritative but always entertaining account.

Caravaggio is painting's bad boy in what is quite a competitive field. His regular involvement in street fights and his swords and daggers might not have been quite as extraordinary in Rome in 1600 but he takes part in more than his fair share. Neither is the mixture of 'sacred and profane', with his Bible story art, quite the contradiction it might seem to us by now because those stories were as familiar to people then as any film story would be today and the churches that employed him was central to the culture. He would have been at least as familiar with the gospels as I was with the Top 40 in 1971 or the work of Philip Larkin, Tamla Motown or the form of the top National Hunt horses now.

One thing often leads to another and I am reminded that I never did get round to reading A.N. Wilson's Paul. I have developed a morbid fascination with the unsympathetic, unrepentant, blindly self-interested right-wing types at least since the Leave campaign, continuing on through the calamitous careers of Boris, Liz Truss and their fellow travellers like Jacob, Nadine and, of course, Trump. Paul appears to be a similar sort of figure but Wilson's book looks like it presents an alternative view and if it's anything like as convincing as his Jesus, it should be invigorating.

Caravaggio, though, also makes me wonder which year had the greatest accumulation of creative genius alive at the same time.

I'm tempted by the years 1606-1610, between the birth of Rembrandt and the death of Caravaggio. Rembrandt might not have yet begun to contemplate his first self portrait by the age of 4 but he was there, toddling about in Leiden, in 1610. Shakespeare was in London coming up with Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale; Monteverdi in Venice presented his masterpiece Vespers and also at work were William Byrd, Cervantes, John Donne and Ben Jonson.

That's not a bad list.

I'm not sure that Bach, Handel and their many composer friends get enough support from literature and painting from 1720-1750 or whether 1910-ish - with James Joyce, Picasso, Virginia Woolf, Schonberg, Sibelius, T. S. Eliot, Hardy and all amounts to quite as much. Neither Shakespeare or Bach can claim their periods as winners on their own- I want a spread across all genres- but they certainly offer sure foundations.

What about now. It's less clear which names even constitute such 'greatness' while it's happening. Perhaps the equivalent of amateur internet commentators in 1610 weren't aware of what momentous times they were living in, or had more pressing things to attend to.

Is it James MacMillan, Tracey Emin, Julian Barnes, Maggi Hambling, Paul McCartney, Paul Muldoon and Joni Mitchell. Burt Bacharach was still alive earlier this year.

I don't imagine it being David Hockney, Roger McGough, Taylor Swift, Kae Tempest and Mark-Anthony Turnage but it isn't up to me. It's just not going to be 2023, though, is it.    

Lauren & the Heatwaves

 Lauren & the Heatwaves, Cosham, Aug 6

When I arrived in Portsmouth in 1982 there was a local reggae band called Charlie Messiah & the Disciples and then state-of-the-art Psychobillies, Emptifish. I never managed to be in the right place at the right time to see either of them but saw Red Letter Day a few years later whose punk-pop was well done.

Since then I haven't been too concerned. Not, that was, until finding out about Lauren & the Heatwaves. These days the Southsea Bandstand shares summer Sunday afternoons with Cosham's King George Playing Field and I can't imagine there's a better act in the area to come on as the headline for the last in the series.

Any band that has already done Stoned Love, Be My Baby and Band of Gold in their first half dozen is clearly doing the right thing and more or less playing the highlights of my record collection - at least before I so tragically sold off the vinyl. And they do it so utterly convincingly. With not all of the original artists still with us, you won't always hear these 60's masterpieces done so well. A four-piece band in the open air can't be expected to reproduce the sound of the Motown Hit Factory but one doesn't stop to worry about that. Lauren Stanley has a great voice for Ronnie Spector, Diana Ross, even Dusty, Aretha and Etta James; the band are close-knit, well-balanced and, possibly my very favourite, often overlooked, bit of soul records, the backing vocals are especially great on the likes of Get Ready and S.O.S (Stop Her on Sight).

 

Sam Cooke was paid a fine tribute by getting two songs on the twenty-song set list and soulful slower tempo items like Bring It On Home, Aretha's Don't Play That Song and Etta James's Something's Got a Hold on Me highlighted the potential there is for Lauren and her friends to be a 'deep soul' group if ever they decide to do more than provide a good time. 

I tend to pass up opportunities to dance in public these days. I'm aware there's quite a gap between how good it feels and what it looks like but it didn't put others off. The best songs came early because, understandably, a party wants to end on a big, dancing finish rather than the sociological issues that once came with being a Love Child or the way in which Be My Baby was the greatest pop production until you read the full story of Phil Spector and understand what it means.

Do You Love Me, Shout, Sweet Soul Music and Twistin' the Night Away depended on the band more than the singers, with the obvious exception of the gutsy rendition of Shout - and one should only attempt that if you know you can do it, but the meaningfulness of soul mattered less by then.   

Whenever I'm with them I'll be thoroughly impressed. This music means a helluva lot to me and it is quite moving to see it done so well. I'd been looking forward to it for some time and sometimes things can be disappointments if you look forward to them too much. Not with Lauren & the Heatwaves it wasn't. They stood and delivered.

 

'Work in Progress'

The latest brainwave of a project towards something 'major' is to throw together many of the well-tried set pieces on C20th English Poetry I've got and then see how much filling in of gaps it takes to call it a 'book'. I'm hoping that a title will suggest itself during the process.

At present, putting in some foundations as and when they occur to me is probably the easy bit. But there's no rush and, as with the pop music book, to travel hopefully rather than arrive might be all I ever do but as long as I believe in it sufficiently to keep adding to it, maybe it will be okay. If one is Casaubon, one needs one's Key to All Mythologies.

Reading good books rather than writing bad ones remains the preferred option, though. 

I think I picked right in taking Andrew Graham-Dixon's Caravaggio off the shelf next. It's not as dry as the Schwartz Rembrandt but it's miles in front of Darren Coffield's Tales from the Colony Room which only serves as damning evidence of the difference between what booze makes you feel like and what it makes you look like.

The likes of Jeffrey Bernard, Francis Bacon, Keith Waterhouse, Peter O'Toole and all the self-made reprobates don't look well. The question that arises is only whether one is having a good time when one thinks one is having a good time, or not.

Quite why Darren doesn't mention Maggi Hambling among the
dubious illuminati is possibly to do her a favour.

But at least I have a new hero in Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan 1564-1584, a Catholic so fervent in his piety that he thought that sin was provoked by the sight of one's reciprocal gender but yet insisted on the visual representation of the sufferings of Jesus Christ.

His broader policy on eyesight remained unclear. 

However, the rhyme of fingi, cheating, with dipingi, painting, in a tribute to him by the artist's friend, Murtola, is very much the telling sort of thing one wants and can expect from Graham-Dixon's lively scholarship as Caravaggio, it is suggested, identifies with the cardsharps and vagabonds - perhaps with some benefit of hindsight but while an artist's early, formative years are often of the most interest, I'm confident that many adventures are to come in the second, third and fourth quarters of this clear-sighted and entertaining story.

--

Surviving a summer these days is like seeing out the fourth innings of a test match, if you can follow a tortured simile. The heat might get you, or the dog days of August but in the UK, unlike Southern Europe, we've been lucky so far. Relatively cool temperatures and some welcome rain have seen us through to now with only the equivalent of, say, three wickets down and we'll be into September in four week's time.

Quite what the major political parties are doing in moderating their commitments to reducing harmful emissions, fossil fuels and abandoning all hope of agreed targets is easier to understand than condone in the light of the Uxbridge by-election result. Short-term priorities, like next year's General Election, will cost future generations all kinds of horror but that's what politics is like and it's almost too late already.

I had thought my commitment to Labour in Portsmouth North was 100% after the questionable loyalties Penny Mordaunt has shown in the current parliament. Not that I'd ever be voting for her but I'd concentrate on the serious tactical push to overturn her 15000 majority.

It's not quite as simple as that, though. None of the cost of living, interest rates, Brexit, scandal and more scandal are going to seem so important once we are under water in a permanent heatwave. The likes of Mercury, Venus and Neptune are inhospitable because they don't have the fine balance of conducive conditions that our planet was blessed with, being where it is. The Green Party should get 90% of our votes with the oddball 10% inevitably unable to see beyond the likes of Farage, Corbyn, Jacob and Nadine who live in worlds of their own.

 I dare say it was ever thus but it is getting serious now.