Oh, Babe, What Would You Say on a Sunday

 One of the most golden of rules in horse racing is not to chase one's losses. It isn't necessarily part of the recipe for success over the last several years but it certainly was part of the recipe for disaster forty years ago. However, everybody has to sometime break the rules, as Status Quo so cogently argued, and today was my third time of successfully doing so. 

At Sandown in December I piled into Stay Away Fay after the double went astray, yesterday the stake money on the ill-fated Hermes Allen was retrieved by lumping on Galopin des Champs and now the obvious Grade 1 4-timer at Leopardstown going amiss at the first opportunity is put right by diverting to Musselburgh for Liari.

I know I shouldn't do it and I've got away with non-textbook practice. I'd prefer it if Plan A went right and not be led into temptation.

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David Kalstone's posthumously published, and unfinished, Becoming a Poet adds to the thrilling shelf of excellent books on Elizabeth Bishop, a great poet but one that it could be easy to write badly about.

This book is half and half about her relationships with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. The first remained on good terms even if Elizabeth insisted on going her own way and they were less of a kind that some would make out. Lowell, though, is more difficult. Like Eliot he is forever on the verge of, or having, a breakdown. For some reason he seems to think that Elizabeth might marry him and he puts a private letter from her almost verbatim into a poem. 

While Bishop is admirable in almost every way, Lowell is not and so with some cross-pollination in their poems it is tempting to have a better look at Lowell. Some 45 years ago I thought he might have been 'the business' but, try as I might, I couldn't convince myself then and so, with some prejudice against him, he might have even less chance now.

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And so I arrive at the bottom of those books that have been waiting their turn and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, bought to complete the run of Kundera  novels. I think it was the first I ever read and that which brought him to our attention. And that's possibly because it's the best of them. It does those things that Kundera does most convincingly.

Whether it was life in Prague under Soviet rule that made life seem so precarious I don't know but, as ever, it is for him a 'contingent' affair - 'affair' often being the operative word - fragile and insecure but potentially luminous. 

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The end of the writing of C20th is probably in sight. At 30000 words, it won't be what it set out to be but one doesn't realize how hard doing the actual work on such a thing will be. Even to produce such a paltry thing of that is a big enough undertaking for me and at least I didn't abandon it. It's been enyoyable enough to do without straining myself and I've found out plenty in the process while recycling many of the set piece things I've said at least once elsewhere before.

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In the end I didn't abandon The Decline of the English Novel, the latest attempt at a novel, either. It just became The Decline of English Fiction, as a 3400 word story. The title comes from Orwell, of course, as well as being self-deprecating and making reference to its theme of 'fictions'. 

I will put that title on it next job and make it into a pdf just in case anybody wants to see it. By all means I'll e-mail it if you'd like to see it. I won't be troubling the likes of The New Yorker but some of the lesser outlets for short stories I've found look a bit naff. I'd like to think I can get poems into print if I see fit but fiction is another matter.

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So, I'll soon be at the end of another stage of 'works in progress' and on the lookout for the next things to read and write. Anything's possible, one might hope, but it has to be the right thing. There is a glimpse of Existential angst in the prospect of the freedom that suggests when the corollary is the despair at the thought that there might be the nothingness and alienation of finding no such thing to do.

I'd better think of something, then. One doesn't live by routinely rotating the available adjectives to report on musical events alone. It's too late now to undo the fragments of Sartre that counted towards a minor subject of Philosophy 43 years ago. It all seemed very convincing but sometimes it's better not to know and be happier living vicariously by the horse racing results.