Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

Firstly, absolutely hats off to Tony Blackburn for this morning's Sounds of the 60's.

Cliff, Cilla, Dusty, Petula, Miss Ross, Auntie Dionne, the Walker Brothers, Glen Campbell sings Jimmy Webb and some upstarts with one of my first ever favourite records called Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, but that came after my very first which was Doris Day and Move Over Darling. And that is what pop radio can be like when it's not made dreary by Dire Straits, Coldplay, Radiohead. It was a masterpiece of broadcasting by the very doyen of the art.

-- 

While there is nearly always something missing these days, looking for those things can result in finding other things. Like looking for the print out list with my lost, last ISBN number resulted in me finding some old cassettes and, in turn, that reminded me that quite some time ago I did buy a machine that could play such things with such things in mind. So, a 1992 R3 programme with Thom Gunn interviewed and reading poems from The Man with Night Sweats had me bathed both in nostalgia and bathwater but while that was a fine thing, it's the August Kleinzahler programmes I almost want more so the dialectic between things lost and found continues like a Trotskyite manifesto.

--

Radio 3's change of schedule throws one's sedate life into turmoil like never before.

The final, once-and-for-all sacking of Danny Baker from Radio 5 changed Saturday mornings forever. Five lost its flagship and I've not been back there much since. 

Radio 3 won't lose me by moving Composer of the Week to 4pm but I won't hear Donald MacLeod's gentle tones as often as I have been doing, especially when he's doing Buxtehude, Pergolesi or Josquin des Prez rather than Bruckner, Wagner or Korngold. For a week or two I'll think it's 9am when it's actually 9.30 and Petroc hands over to Georgia but after that it will be the new normal.

--

29 runners in six races at Fontwell on Thursday was indicative of both heavy ground and a gaff track in decline but that doesn't make it a waste of time.

I was out with my mate, who went, the night before and advised that Mr. D. Maxwell was worth avoiding on a short-priced favourite whereas Gavin Sheehan in the bumper was worth a look if he was backed so that's a 4/7 chance shot down, a 100/30 winner tipped up and a self-proclaimed Wiseguy reputation intact.

--

The Joyceana project continues most satisfyingly with Kevin Birmingham's biography of Ulysses, The World's Most Dangerous Book (Head of Zeus). 

Made so much weightier by putting the difficult birth of the seminal book, the Moderrnist revolution is shown to be much more of a plot by dissident factions than the inevitable shift in sensibility or consciousness that hindsight has since seen it as.

Ezra and his committed sponsors worked long and hard under what look now such antiquated laws and attitudes and it didn't come quite as naturally as those Blair and Boris landslides seemed to.

Joyce's life was a nightmare of impecunious itinerancy and irresponsibility but he lived for his art, he

believed that marriage was the first step toward foisting upon their children the same nightmares of history and belief that they had traveled so far to escape. It was a coercive institution of property and power, and Nora's pregnancy made that coercion clear - the couple was forced to leave three different flats.

But rolling home drunk from bars having spent money he didn't have doesn't make him seem feckless in the light of the 'Oxen of the Sun' chapter costing him a thousand hours of work. Being a writer can't always be equated with being a layabout.

--

It can be for such a small-scale writer as me but not one in pursuit of such epic achievements as Ulysses.

I had more telling revelations, though, when happening across Dawn French in her one-person show entitled Dawn French is a T***, in which the forbidden word is a bit like, but isn't, 'twit'. I didn't watch it all. I didn't need to. I'd had enough of my own 'Me, Too' epiphany after half a dozen of her shudderingly cringe-making anecdotes.

Yes, Dawn, I know. I have maybe nearly sixty years of similar, if not worse, stories stored up and they take turns in their multitude to ambush me either when triggered by something or when brooding unhealthily on bygone days.

For some reason- necessity more than anything else I dare say- I spent most of my time thinking I was okay, mostly reasonably liked well enough, getting by as best I could within a vague agenda and while clearly out of my depth in some circles, cool enough to do okay in favourable conditions.

It comes as some small compensation to know that much-loved Dawn had her share of gauche moments, too, and that she can even monetize them. It's not Impostor Syndrome. I have that by the gallon as well whereas she shouldn't have. It's being found out as being utterly dreadful.

It is further, and almost as small, compensation to be sure that others were more conspicuously dreadful much more of the time and that we are betting without Boris and his like. But, but, but Anne Stevenson's biography of Sylvia had a chapter entitled 'The Stigma of Selfhood' and that, even thirty years or so ago, made a lot of sense.

How much does one sometimes wish not to have to be oneself. It is the ultimate prison. I might have once thought I'd rather have been George Best or Alex Higgins but they didn't seem to like it much. Cliff Richard or Paul McCartney are better options but one has less chance of being born as either of them than winning the big Premium Bond and landing the ITV7 in the same week so we are stuck with it.

Without wanting to sermonize too much on this most Christian of weekends, it's all about forgiveness, isn't it, and we should hope to be forgiven our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.  

More than Fair to Middling

Samuel Beckett's Dream of Fair to middling Women has been an entirely worthwhile experience. It's probably okay to call it a bildunsroman although it might prefer not to be called anything and just be itself as is the wont of many of us.

It doesn't want to be seen as a novel in the sense of Balzac or Jane Austen with their sense of character. That is just one of the things it sets itself against as coherent 'personality' seems to break up in this sensory world. It can't really be said to have a story either but it wouldn't be the first or last novel to not have.

What it can't help but be, though, is Joycean not only as a portrait of an artist as a young man, its myriad literariness and the way in which it is a gentle introduction to the ways and means of Ulysses and the Wake. 

Quite how well it works as a whole will be for professors of Beckett to explain but there are such glorious passages of writing that it serves to revive the jaded spirit that sometimes wonders when the resources of language might become used up like other natural resources of the world.

One of the three women the 'hero', Belacqua, finds himself caught between is the Alba, described as,

Alone, unlonely, unconcerned, moored in the seethe of an element in which she had no movement and from which therefore she was not doomed to filch the daily mite that would guarantee, in a freighting and darkening of her spirit, the declension of that movement.

and we might guess at what's happening two pages later when,

it is now or never the time to sidetrack and couple those two lone birds and give them at least a chance to make a hit and bring it off, would it not be idle on our part to temporize further and hold up the happy event with the gratuitous echolalia and claptrap rhapsodies that are palmed off as passion and the high spots of  creative ecstasy...

 

So, Beckett was not always the absurd minimalist he became more famous for being, reducing theatre and writing to as little as he very meaningfully could. He had once expounded quite beautifully, while equally dismissively, and word is that had Joyce lived a bit longer he would have followed up the Wake with something reduced back to Dubliners-style plain-ness maybe because once one has explored as far as it is possible to go and searched beyond, that is all that remains.  

--

Next up, then, is a choice between the 745 pages of the Ellman Joyce biography or the story of just Ulysses that is only half as much. One can't put them off forever.

The Last ISBN

David Green (Books) was issued with 10 ISBN numbers in 1990 on the occasion of the booklet Museum. 10 came free in those days but now 1 costs £91 and 10 cost £174. I won't be having any more, then, and I've got one left.

So one day I'll use it and after that I'll either have to find a publisher for further titles - which isn't ideal because they will want to at least break even - or go without being listed which is fine in as far as nobody will order it but it won't feel 'official'.

It's a bit of a pain in the neck being official, having to send copies to copyright libraries and remembering to delete the title as 'out of print' as soon as looks respectable but it feels better.

The last ISBN, then, must be decided on sooner or later. I can wait indefinitely for the irregular output of poems to very gradually make it a bigger book(let), do the big career retrospective Collected Poems and include those from the last five years or we can have those in a book of their own which looks like the best idea because it's in keeping with the 'series' such as it is.

This afternoon I put together fifteen poems representing those worth seeing print, I reckon, since The Perfect Book. I like it well enough. Three poems were candidates to give the collection its title - Rainyday Woman, Romanticism and Success - and its Romanticism that's winning so far because it fits with the cover and, I'd like to think, continues with the ironies of The Perfect Book and a cover that said The Last of the Great Dancers, David Green.

It's all set up and ready to go, then. I realize that proper publishing houses take months if not years to produce a title but I can do it in a week or not. I'll think about it and look at it a while longer, though, because like it says in Aldi once that last ISBN is gone, it's gone and after 34 years of David Green (Books) that will be that.

Happy Birthday, Miss Ross

 80 today.

You can't make records like that and not be one of the very greatest.

Portsmouth Music Festival Gala Concert

 Portsmouth Music Festival Gala Concert, Crookhorn College, Mar 24

Portsmouth Music Festival is a compendium of categories and compartments like a local musical version of Crufts and so its celebration of the winners is as various as those jamboree bags of bygone days in which you might find a whistle, a paper hat, a bubble gum and a gobstopper, all of which once seemed like special treats. It's not often a programme opens with a piece by Muse which is followed by Hummel.

It's a strange feeling to find that 'young people' now are into rock music that came after I'd affected to grow out of it. My nearest reference point for singer Millie in Attica, a 4-piece band, was Siouxsie Sioux. Their version of Hysteria is impressive and, not being familiar with the original, I'll take their word for its verisimilitude and retro sympathies. They know exactly what they're doing.

Elias Simojoki's Hummel Trumpet Concerto soothed and smoothed in contrast before then merrily and militarily parading Elias's fine phrases accompanied neatly and confidently by his brother Markus.

An early highlight, though, was surely Mia Drover's Rachmaninov Prelude that noticeably stilled the audience with its atmosphere and composure. Any reservations I'd had about surrendering a Sunday afternoon to a lucky dip of a show were banished there and then.

The classic recipe for such a show is to make 'em laugh, make 'em cry and then send on the dancing girls and Mabel Alsford's performance as Veruca Salt from Willie Wonka brought forward what used to be the somewhat demanding personality of Violet Elizabeth Bott remade for a later generation, delivered with consummate self-possession that prompted our genial host, Andrew McVittie, to enquire how much of it was acting. All of it, I'm sure.

Ben Ward's two Villa-Lobos guitar Preludes were next a captivating contrast full of technique and sensitivity that made a deepening, mystical impression as they progressed before equally compelling was Emme Hensel's sonata movements by Taktakishvili, the first sorrowful and so soulfully played and the second chirruping like a nest of birds that kept Karen Kingsley as busy as one of those dextrous pianists from the early days of cinema.

In such a gala event that does have 'something for everybody', there will be items that aren't quite the business for some of us. When I was about 13, Jack, 'a seasoned metalhead', would have been sensational to me and blown everybody else off stage. He brought in a wide range of electric guitar effects into what was ostensibly a blazing performance of some Metallica. I'm looking forward to celebrating the 80th birthday of Miss Diana Ross on Tuesday, though, and the flying-V guitar looked like the most olde worlde exhibit of the afternoon. The audience loved him, though, and that matters more.

Shifting as erratically as ever through genres, Hazel Humphries flirted with any idea of Crookhorn Sunday afternoon decency in her performance of The W.I. Calendar that thankfully went no further than it did and, in the hope that all my retro references don't become tiresome to anybody born since about 1980, she'd have been ideal for an old TV show called The Good Old Days.

Karen's versatility in the role of accompanist went yet further in switching from that to violinist Katie Ho's Smetana with its change of tempi and stylistic nuance before Katie was joined by sister, Priscilla, with her magical harp and they sparkled together through a Romance by John Thomas. 

And so, bring on the dancing girls, indeed. Lily Pearce was a lyric poem incarnate with her sequence of balletic moves and, as was remarked afterwards, was, like all the performers, brilliantly in 'performance mode' as soon as she was on stage. Katie Bone's vocal on Wherever He Ain't from Mack and Mabel was full of personality and New Juysey attitude and the Fortuned Cookies were a 'kooky' 4-piece a cappella doing what a barbershop quartet would have done if there had been barber shops for ladies. There was once a group called Fascinating Aida but that's the closest I can get.

But it wasn't all over because Students from the Marie Clarke School of Dance provided extracts from Beetlejuice full of slick choreography and vibrant song'n'dance by way of a literally showstopping finale. It was ages ago that it was suggested that the age, and even idea, of Variety was over. Well it isn't on this evidence. 

In a way it's easier on the performers who each contribute their part but the audience have it coming from all directions. That was a tremendous show. Exhausting, really. Best of luck to anybody who has to write about it.

Let's Mek It Beckett

 Next off the ranks is Samuel Beckett's Dream of Fair to middling Women, still part of the ongoing JoyceFest because it features a version of Lucia. I didn't feel like taking on another vast volume like Ellman or the biography of Ulysses just yet so I eyed Beckett with some trepidation and began. 

It owes a debt to Joyce and no mistake, published in 1932 when he was 26, it comes before the Wake but he would have been aware of what was being written by his chosen mentor. It's immediately more accessible to the extent that it is comprehensible and I have high hopes of it. As the title might lead one to expect, it carries an erotic charge but its language is the sort of joy that Joyce's much heavier technique outweighs in some ways to its disadvantage,

they kept it going in a kind of way, he doing his poor best to oblige her and she hers to be obliged, in a gehenna of sweats and fiascos and tears and an absence of all douceness.

That is brilliant and it's not the only bit that is.

We may be on a winner here and a visit back upstairs to revisit the likes of Murphy and Molloy after heaven knows how long could extend the queue of books lined up.

--

We call Beckett 'Beckett', of course. We call Hardy 'Hardy', Dickens 'Dickens' and Larkin 'Larkin'. Sam, Thomas and Philip seem inappropriate. So would it be inappropriate to refer to some authors by their first names? It might seem to imply some familiarity, some casual acquaintance or even something patronising. Quite often here in book or music reviews I prefer first names if only to be friendly and not academically austere. It's different in each case. For some reason, I'd never call Paul Muldoon 'Paul' or Ms. Duffy 'Carol Ann' but, perhaps as long term favourites, Gunn is often 'Thom', O'Brien can be 'Sean' and Bishop is 'Elizabeth'. Sylvia is 'Sylvia' because she's famous enough as such, and if Dylan Thomas isn't always 'Dylan' it's in order not to confuse him with Bob.

The matter arises in regard to the essay due soon relating to Rosemary Tonks and Philip Larkin. I can see why it's not treating them on equal terms to call them 'Rosemary' and 'Larkin' but that's what I call them. I'm not 100% okay with calling Rosemary 'Tonks' but the 'house style' and academic propriety perhaps demand that I do so that's what it might have to be. Larkin is the institution that he has become and doesn't invite the informality of 'Philip' but 'Tonks' objectifies someone one has immense sympathy for and sounds too abrupt.

One of my first appearances in print, circa 1975, was in the letters page of the august Listener on that very subject. Linden Huddlestone, teacher of fourth form Eng. Lang., was a fellow subscriber and impressed that Thursday morning but word was, in a school where first names were rarely used before the sixth form, that it found little support in the staff room. Green !!! Good Lord, whatever next ??? He'll be wearing coloured socks and listening to pop music next. But, no, I wasn't. I was mis-spending my youth by taping Shostakovich String Quartets from the radio and reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

-- 

There is much to look forward to on all fronts, not the least of which is the appearance of that essay in print making me feel somehow like a bona fide contributor to Rosemary Studies. Long term there are some absolutely choice artefacts that might become mine that will be fine to have for the want of having before they are assimilated into the library and are taken for granted.

Ahead of those, though, this week's arrival of the Busoni Fantasia Contrappunstica will be the playlist until the arrival of the Brahms Viola Sonatas. Both come from the repertoires of much-admired artistes I've met as collateral benefits of my ideal retirement job as hack concert reviewer. The Busoni is somewhere up in that rarified area of his Bach Chaconne, a wonderful hybrid of the baroque and C19th indulgence. That will last until the arrival of yet more Brahms chamber music, a glorious niche, some of which is due in Portsmouth's Menuhin Room on May 11, at 12.30, and if you can get yourself there you'd be doing yourself a big favour.

Before the Dark Ages

The Lord, it was reported, had said, 'let there be light' and there was light and in due course the magi followed the guiding light of a star to find the new-born Christ who became 'the light of the world'. That is the Christian side of the story but Catherine Nixey, in The Darkening Age, the book before her recent Heresy, catalogues the other side.

She puts in her caveats early, in her introduction, that she is,

an almost daily beneficiary of such goodness 

as that performed by many, many good people impelled by their Christian faith. And I might add that Christianity has not been the only movement in history to do untold damage to our wider cultural heritage in the interests of its mania. Pol Pot's 'year zero', the Soviet rewriting of history, Donald Trump's fake news and all sorts of fanaticism have done similar things to establish their supremacy and delete all opposition but if Vandals gave their name to vandalism they owe a huge debt to Christianity who set them a paragon example to follow.

Having been brought up on stories and hymns about 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', which Heresy cast considerable doubt on, it takes a lifetime to recover from the sort of 'education' instilled in one at a formative age and not thinking that piety and devotion are somehow to be admired. Whatever goodness or faults Jesus Christ had in him it is unlikely that he would have condoned quite the levels of tyranny, cruelty and barbarism carried out in his name in the centuries after he had once and for all departed this earthly life.

Catherine Nixey accepts that there were periods of persecution of Christians by Romans but while we've heard all about that, we hear much less about righteousness persecuting anything pagan once the conversion of Constantine turns the balance of power in its favour.

The non-sequiturs of faith, the omniscient God and all that the doctrine brought with it had been pointed out by contemporary philosophers like Celsus but thought was of little interest to orthodox Christians,

they actually celebrated ignorance. They declare [Celsus wrote] that 'Wisdom in this life is evil, but foolishness is good' - an almost precise quotation from Corinthians.

Rather than engage in debate, Christians preferred faith, doctrine, uniformity of thought, obedience and intimidation. Not to mention murder, networks of informers and all the devices used by C20th tyrannies carried forward into the C21st because, having nothing but faith and doctrine, they had no answers. The Sociology departments of late 1970's universities were run on similar lines if we believe Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man and I tend to, not least because it was filmed on the campus of the university I went to where it was the campus orthodoxy. 

But it is the destructions of libraries and the desecration of temples and statues that is perhaps the main point of The Darkening Age, the systematic obliteration of previous cultures that wrote over such texts as those of Aristotle. Ovid and Catullus would not have been on their poetry reading list. Enjoyment was frowned upon unless it was smashing up art they didn't agree with and Christianity can take much of the credit for less than 10% of classical literature having survived. It was marauding monks that did it. Yes, we understand that the prayerful monks of Lindisfarne were slaughtered by invading Vikings in their turn but their predecessors were the foot soldiers of the campaign that made Christianity so oddly the dominant force in Western culture.

It is a lurid book but that is because it reports lurid stories. Of course it could be seen as one-sided but that is because it is an attempt to balance that which was instilled in us from an early age which, as ever, was history written by the winners. And then some.

There are some good hymns and I don't mind a bit of a sing myself given the chance but not so much Onward Christians Soldiers, Fight the Good Fight with All Thy Might or When a Knight Won His Spurs, that's all supremacist machismo.

My favourite is Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, Forgive Our Foolish Ways.

That is a lot to expect, though, of a God who wasn't forgiving in many of the available accounts of him and who has provided precious little evidence of being there unless, as Celsus wrote, one is one of the 'foolish, dishonourable and stupid' that were the only people Christians were able to convince.

However, it's not as much the relentless, headlong commitment to her cause that makes Catherine Nixey so readable. She's funny at regular intervals and though one wonders at her rigour, research and scholarship it is by her implacable ironies and sardonic wit that one will remember her books because evidence is one thing but the presentation of it is what makes it not only convincing but entertaining, too.

 

Out of this world and Out of print

 Potato Scrabble is a low-level pastime undertaken to pass such time as needs passing when it is not being passed in higher level pastimes such as chess or crosswords. Activities such as writing, music and reading have been elevated to 'what I do' in the time since finishing paid work.
I operate at level 4, out of 5, and win maybe 30% of the time. Level 5 had seemed impossible as the computer helps itself to 7-letter bonuses on aregular basis and one stands no chance with a rack either full of vowels or none at all. But last night, just by way of a change, I had a few goes at level 5 and got lucky. 484-361 would be a good result at level 4 but at 5 it's a giant-killing comparable to that day when Colchester beat Leeds. I took a picture of it and will remember it always because it might not happen again.
--
News from David Green (Books), the 'imprint' that originally gave this website its name, is that most titles are very nearly genuinely out of print. I marked them as such some time ago so that nobody would order them from the ISBN catalogue. To say that it was not a commercial concern would be some understatement. But looking for a couple of copies of each to give to people whether they want them or not entailed a more painstaking search than most publishing houses would need to undergo, especially if they only ever had nine titles in their catalogue.

Re-read, the Selected Poems from 2005, has a handful of copies still left and there are one or two of The Perfect Book and The Perfect Murder but my own archive copies of anything else is about all I can find without going to the British Library to look myself up. It's both a shame and a good thing. There isn't a great deal of call for them but on rare occasions like now one would like a copy or two to give away. In a way it's a gorgeous thing to be out of print, as in the almost other-worldly irony of Success, the poem due in About Larkin next month.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Friday evening's sports bulletins on Times Radio reported three stories. A rugby player was thinking of going to play in France or Japan which would mean he was inelegible to play for England; a tennis player had been stung by some bees and the manager of Chelsea Women was off to take charge of the USA's team even though between them the two opposing managers of her last match hadn't managed to ensure that the two teams wore different coloured socks.

What does a racehorse have to do to get on the news these days? Galopin des Champs had earlier retained the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the most prestigious prize in jump racing, which very few winners of it prove capable of doing.

Times Radio is a fine thing but its sports reporting is awful, as if written by someone with no knowledge of sport and certainly not proof read by anybody who does. Many of its presenters are very good at what they do and yet the other night a presenter who shall remain nameless here didn't know what monogamy and polygamy are. One might have thought 'O' level English Language would be a prerequisite of such a position in journalism and maybe he has it. Perhaps it's not his fault. Maybe such words are by now considered above and beyond the standards of such education but, dear me.

 

Education is, of course, never over and the lad now knows those words. And I now know Mosaic, not in terms of a picture made up of small tiles, but as in 'pertaining to Moses'. It occurs in Catherine Nixey's book, The Darkening Age, more of which in a few days' time and took me by surprise. A first look at the internet suggests that there is no connection between these identical words. It would not appear to be the case that Moses was an adept at the art form that looks as if it is named after him.

Unintermittent and other stories

 Sometimes one word stands out in a sentence, in a paragraph or maybe poem. It's best if it doesn't do it so much that it distracts from  all the others too much but occasionally it works perfectly as part of the whole and one just thinks, wow.

One such word occurs in Stephen Hero when that main character is sitting in his Italian lesson, just before he sees Emma passing, out of the window, and makes his excuses to chase after her,

He followed his Italian lesson mechanically, feeling the unintermittent deadliness of the atmosphere of college in his throat and lungs, 

How well do I recall that feeling, most vividly from 'A' level History but other lessons, too. The negative construction is one of the things that Larkin took from Hardy and some of us lesser mortals have attempted since. It can work very well, the vividness of the thing that isn't there being made even more so by being heard even in its deleted condition. As in 1984, somehow 'doubleplusungood' it is mostly all good things but it is turned bad by the negative element. The 'deadliness' of the college atmosphere could have been descibed as constant but that's not as good as it not being intermittent.

 

It's hard to know how good a book Stephen Hero would be if it hadn't been modified into the Portrait. It would surely be very good but as 'art' it isn't quite as good as the final version. It's similarly hard to say how good second-rate songs by The Beatles, Stephin Merritt, Carole King, the Motown Hit Factory and all are because they are overshadowed by their better siblings but second-rate Beatles would be Tremeloes or Dave Clark Five and there's a term for second-rate Motown - Northern Soul and that is well worth having. If Stephen Hero wasn't the first draft of a James Joyce masterpiece it could have served as a very fine novel by some other inheritor of the tradition of George Moore and Turgenev.

--

While it is customary to preview Cheltenham here, I don't usually review it.

There are always good stories and there are always many of the best horses but with Mr. Henderson's horses not well and either absent or uncompetitive, a few too many odds-on chances in sometimes relatively small fields it hasn't felt completely Cheltenham throughout. It seems churlish to sound a downbeat note but only 46000 there on Wednesday suggests it might not be quite what it once was.

Tuesday could hardly have gone better for me but while it is possible to enjoy sport for its own sake - like a good test match in cricket or that distant memory of Emma Raducanu during lockdown- horse racing is a balance sheet, it's accountancy and it's the stock market. One takes part entirely to what extent one wants to and your plus or minus is your scorecard and your reason to feel good or feel bad alone. 

However, the stone cold solid Galopin Des Champs retains the Gold Cup which precious few have been able to do - the loose horse was my main concern - and so we got in and got out in one piece, possibly the price of a pint to the good. And although I have a small interest in the next two races, that hardly matters. They'd amount to one more pint and eventually one can have seen enough horse flesh for one week.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 While it is a fine thing to have a variety of interests one can't do everything at once and so progress on the bookpile slows dramatically during Cheltenham. Concerts, too, have to move down the priorities. It's a shame that Chichester Cathedral always seem to have a good one this week but it would have to be exceptional to be more important than the Champion Hurdle, the Arkle Chase, the Supreme Novices and the day on which all still seems possible.

Tuesday did nearly all that was expected of it for me so I'll still be a going concern by the weekend. Then, once we get past the National meeting and Cheltenham in April, my main attention with unusually be on football as an idle few bets from last summer on the English leagues comes to push and shove with me sitting pretty at present on Arsenal, Top 4, and Leicester, Derby and Wrexham for promotion. Mr. Coral would buy me off for a perfectly reasonable profit but I'm sticking with it for the time being.

Something that can be missed, though, is orders that don't turn up. One supplier, I noticed, hadn't fulfilled a request from some W.F. Bach keyboard music and now haven't reacted to my choivce of some Busoni as a replacement. Edna O'Brien's book on James Joyce is delayed beyond reasonable doubt, too. But a favourite pastime, having piled up a number of options, is deciding what to read next. Some weighty volumes, mostly Joyce-related, will take me much of the way to the Gunn biography in the summer but rabid and radicalized as I've become as an ardent naysayer to the Christian church, the arrival of Catherine Nixey's first book means that might jump in front of them.

--

Before that I'll be very thrilled to have my Rosemary Tonks- Philip Larkin essay in the Larkin Society journal and feel part of the gang of Rosemary followers. The Larkin Society conference is underway in Hull right now but it's a mighty long way whether in Cheltenham week or not. Then perhaps the dog days of summer might inculde some time spent improving upon another essay intended for them.

It's been a good, productive period recently with also a well-received evening at Portsmouth Poetry Society introducing the work of Michael Donaghy. But things move on. Dick Francis had an annual schedule by which he produced his stream of cliff-hanging, turf-based thrillers and I assume that Ian McEwan, Sebastian Faulks and all of them don't take long between seeing one book through the presses before embarking on the next. One ought to look forward more than back and I was intending to finish by reporting on a success with the much-vaunted Brighterdaysahead at Prestbury Park but, as can happen with these reputations that consist more of talk than proven achievement, it was not to be so I'll return to the form in the book with Galopin des Champs in the Gold Cup tomorrow and, either way, finish not much ahead of or behind where I started the week. The Saturday after Cheltenham is not usually a day to be glued to the racing. One has seen enough by then. It would be a really good day for Chichester Cathedral to move its Tuseday concert to, if only they knew.

Stephen Heroic

I waited about 47 years to read this book. I simply didn't get round to it until now. Stephen Hero is less a novel than an inventory of young James Joyce's ideas, mainly on aesthetics. Portrait of the Artist is the work of art that came out of it but this is a different thing. I could see it being heavy going for anyone not interested in Joyce's ideas about writing, poetry and art but luckily that's not me.

Like Stephen Daedalus, the book is a bit too obsessed with itself. Joyce was nothing if not precocious but he's self aware enough to present his alter ego here as such. It's not easy being told you're a bright teenager because at that age one tends to believe it and there are pitfalls involved for anyone who believes their own hype. Joyce is in on the joke, though, and ironic distance is an essential part of his art.

Ever since being lucky enough to have Portrait as an 'A' level set text, Joyce has occupied a special place among prose writers for me and he has lasted the distance. Why, only a couple of weeks ago I was maundering on at a choice literary event about 'Classical' and 'Romantic' but here it is,

The romantic temper...is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures...

The classical temper on the other hand, ever mindful of limitations, chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered.

Hallelujah. That's not bad for a kid.

And, on taking part in life itself, Stephen replies to his mother's insistence that his father had hoped he would take up a sensible, worthy occupation with,

- No, no, no. But it may not be my ambition. That kind of life I often loathe: I find it ugly and cowardly.

 

We are always likely to prefer those sort of books that we think, or would like to think, we find ourselves reflected back to ourselves in and, even with Stephen's obvious self-regard factored in, there are few characters in literature I'd like to identify with more.

Joyce's essay differentiating the lyric, epic and dramatic is rehearsed  here in among his disdain for nationalism and catholicism and so one can't expect much more than that.

Monitoring the progress of my modest investments at Prestbury Park, Cheltenham, is preventing me from scorching through it in quite such rapid time but one can't do everything at once. I'm glad I caught up with this essential text eventually.

Catherine Nixey - Heresy

Catherine Nixey, Heresy (Picador)

People believe what they want to believe, don't they? In what remains a liberal democracy in the UK today, we'd like to think,  even here there must be some people who believe what they believe because they have to, or perhaps because they can't see beyond what they've been told and some of them might not want to. It's already more complicated than I thought and I'm no better than any of them. There might be any number of contributory reasons why I, like Bertrand Russell wasn't, am not a Christian. And then a book like Heresy comes along and preaches to such a heretic. I must try not to uncritically accept it at its word as if it were gospel but that's difficult because it is exactly what I wanted it to be and it's brilliant.

For many years I've taken A.N. Wilson's biography of Jesus as my text. He says there that there were any number of prophets, preachers and teachers at the time and Jesus was simply the most successful but now Catherine Nixey provides the detail from those obscure times. There wasn't just 'the Word', there were many words, much of Christianity is replicated in other traditions but Emperor Constantine's conversion in the C4th brings the Roman Empire in on Christianity's side and that is a powerful weapon with which to suppress all opposition.

Asclepius and Apollonius were comparable figures. Raising the dead, curing the incurable and turning water into wine were regular party pieces performed by such men and the difference between magicians and the divinely gifted is not clear. Hocus pocus itself may, or may not, come from 'hoc est... corpus meum' and in those early centuries there was no shortage of those ready to question such articles of faith as the Creation. God's omniscience is immediately suspect when he apparently doesn't know where Adam is. Being the son of  a god is hardly an innovation because the likes of Hercules had been as much.

While saying that she takes no sides in these issues, Catherine's sardonic observations and the fact that her previous book was a similar demolition job on Christianity would indicate that she's not a devout Catholic, or not any more because she was brought up as one. Perhaps there's nobody as zealous as a convert but she has seen it from both sides now.

It is best not to be overly passionate in dismantling the case of one's adversaries. Being cross rarely wins a debate. Of resurrection stories, like those of St. Peter, she quotes M. R. James who finds them 'implausible' rather than perfectly understandably condemning them as absurd or ludicrous. Gentle understatement is a more effective strategy than bombast when undermining such blatantly silly 'miracles' and Catherine has a consistent line of gentle but firm scepticism that provides at least entertainment and often genuine laughs. But at the same time she is scholarly and has read the ancient, arcane texts she refers to because Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are very much the party apparatchiks, a fixed jury, as those selected to give evidence in The Bible. We knew that, of course, but one result of Christianity being on the winning side of history is that the many alternative accounts are much harder to find.

John Chrysotom, the 'fiery' believer, is against the ideas of curiosity and investigation because,

'where there is faith, there is no need for investigation'

which is a fragile approach to research and an unsound basis for education. It is redolent of all such tyrannies afraid of what their critics might find, from Julius Caesar through Henry VIII to Marxism, Trump, Putin and the more comedic, brief premiership of Boris Johnson but the Soviet Union, Hitler and such enterprises came and went in short order compared to Christianity which has so far been a reich that has lasted over 2000 years.

Like any of them, it presents to the world a credo of goodness and fine principles but a good proportion of ordinary people do good because that is in their nature. These powermongers achieve and maintain their positions not by goodwill but by whatever brutality and bloodshed it takes. Christians were undoubtedly persecuted in the first place but, as Catherine cites de Ste. Croix, 

it had been 'Too little, too late'. Christianity persecuted, too - but it was far, far more effective. 

And, reading Augustine, she can only conclude that,

the Church persecuted less from a love of righteousness than a love of real estate. 

 

It is, of course, a selective account. All history is that. It is not a history of Christianity, it is a survey of the 'heresies' that were swept aside by the orthodoxy of mainly Catholicism. As a devout non-believer, I'm not very interested in the schisms that occurred right from the beginning and I readily concede that good work has been done in among all the horrors by some sects more than others. But it is astonishing what we were told as children and sang about in school every morning about 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', the reverence that such an institution as the papacy, with its hideous back story, is accorded and the extent to which all our lives - not just in the West, because we are just a branch line of it - have been so rooted in this surreal unlikeliness. 

One should never sink to the level of one's adversaries, though. We are better than them and are grateful for the magnificent cathedrals and fine music. Eusebius saw Christians as,

'benighted fools', guilty of 'superficiality and gullibility'

for believing in a 'magician' like Jesus but even if that's what we might think we can choose to be polite enough not to say so. If it hadn't been him it would have been somebody else because we are our own worst enemies and are deeply anxious to be provided with,

Someone to claim us, someone to follow
Someone to shame us, some brave Apollo
Someone to fool us, someone like you.    (footnote)

 

This is unlikely to be made required reading in The Vatican but it's going to take an almighty book to prevent it being my Best Book of this year. I devoured it like a lion that walks abroad seeking what it might. Ms. Nixey's previous book, The Darkening Age, on the similar theme of Christian monoculture and the vandalism it wrought on Classical culture, has been duly ordered.

 

Footnote. David Bowie, Big Brother from Diamond Dogs, 1974.

Recent Poetry Books - Kathryn Gray and Sue Hubbard

Kathryn Gray, Hollywood or Home; Sue Hubbard, God's Little Artist (both Seren) 

Not as much new poetry arrives here as it once did. Not much at all, really. There must be some worth having being published but maybe I'm not looking in the right places. I'm not looking very hard, it must be said. But, one thing leading to another, here's some I found. 

Kathryn Gray read Bournemouth at the Evening with Rosemary Tonks in Soho a couple of weeks ago, imagining meeting the recluse on the seafront. Any friend of Rosemary's is a friend of mine and Kathryn's poem is an evocative tribute, its slow rhythms not like Rosemary's world-weary, often bleary-eyed confessions but after conjuring Dover Beach becomes both intimate and infinite admitting that she is,

           afraid of my own mind.

'Exploring celebrity culture', as the back cover says the book does, wouldn't be a theme I'd expect to be taken with myself so the selection of celebrities comes with some pleasant surprises - the poets, at least - in Dorothy Parker, Roddy Lumsden and Michael Donaghy. One can tell by its reference points that this is one's sort of book.

The Portable Dorothy Parker works a bit like a loose sestina, each stanza using the words 'blood' and 'shot' and most using 'cabinet' and 'gun' but Kathryn's poems are smart casual more than formal, as disciplined as they feel like being rather than insisting on strict adherence to rhyme or metre. Dorothy Parker is, like its heroine, a less deceived tour de force,

                                            When I love someone, I love them more

than they want to be loved. If they weren't already dead they'd sleep with a gun.

There is a Rosemary-like dissatisfaction in these poems, often attended to with a Dorothy-like attitude. For all their knowing worldliness they are most often in search of lost innocence but once lost innocence is not something that can be regained.

The problem with Donald is like the problem with Donald. Trying to speak of the unspeakable is a hiding to nothing and yet one can hardly not say anything. The Trump poem reduces itself to simplistic statements, repeats itself, is chronically angry at its own pitiful limitations and makes empty claims for itself and as such gets somewhere near its subject but more depth could be achieved if its subject was a more engaging character, like Donald Duck, because Trump's complexities are only manifested in his one-dimensional hideousness so the poem is a creditable attempt at an impossible job. Poems from the pamphlet, Flowers, including the title poem about a singer called Brandon whose work has almost entirely passed me by, are included here and I'm surprised to find I have all the Kathryn Gray there is in print. I thought there'd be more but it's a good idea to publish fewer books and make sure they are good ones. 

I'm not quite such a Sue Hubbard completist. I think it's her first books I have but I lost track of her writing on art somewhere along the line.

God's Little Artist is a verse biography of Gwen John, not so long ago the subject of a major exhibition in Pallant House, Chichester. It's not an easy thing to do but four pages of prose biography by way of introduction provide the story and then the poems are as vignettes to follow.

In Attic, it is as visual as the series of gorgeuosly quiet, pale paintings of that room in Paris, a print of one of which is on the wall over to my left but on that one the window is closed, but at its best poetry is music if it's anything at all and these poems have a gentle music that complements the paintings as well as touch, smell and all the senses that accumulate to evoke the limited but powerful palette of them, too. Again, like all poems worth having, they are better appreciated on subsequent readings than on the first. The phrase 'subtle tonalities' used by Sue to describe the paintings applies equally to her poems. 

Perhaps the highlight of the whole book, though, entirely satisfying as it is, is the quote from Georges Simenon,

'Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness'.

Yes, I dare say gloriously happy people don't stop to brood on their lives in poems, music or painting but it is just as true to say that those things at their best can bring more than adequate consolation which is something the unconsidered life lacks.

Seren has never been less than a highly likeable imprint and these two books only enhance that idea.

 

Ivory Duo ft. Adrian Green at Lunchtime Live !

Ivory Duo ft. Adrian Green, Portsmouth Cathedral, March 7

It's remarkable how many people one has come to know through doing this little website over the years, whether literary or musical. It's a collateral benefit. My very good friends the Ivory Duo are always welcome at Portsmouth and were rewarded with a good-sized audience today.

Lola Perrin's Homage to Debussy was a gentle awakening that lead into some actual Debussy, the Petite Suite which is a happy, playful set of four pieces involving impresssive integrated teamwork from Natalie and Panayotis as they negotiated some mid-keyboard congestion involving at least three of their four hands.

It was a 'game of two halves', changing mood when Adrian Green performed his own setting of Christina Rossetti's When I am Dead, my dearest, a nice piece of work for a 16 year old which wasn't as long ago for him as it was for some of us. The piano provided lilting accompaniment for the sixteen lines of forlorn Victorian weepiness taken from the whacking great tome of Collected Christina but one was entirely convinced by it. While Adrian and, say, Pavarotti are both tenors, that's almost like saying that a gentle fortepiano and a vast cathedral organ are both keyboard instruments. One wouldn't want to be without either.

But the main feature was the Songs of Travel by Vaughan-Williams. We might not think that's 1960's icon, Cilla Black and the man from Down Ampney have much in common but, as Cilla once -oooh -surrounded herself in sorrow, Vaughan-Williams for the most part takes on a yet more melancholy air than she did. Panayotis and Natalie shared the songs between them, presumably astonished to have the whole keyboard to themselves, Panayotis for the opening onward march, the rippling Let Beauty Awake and the plaintive Youth and Love before turning the pages for Natalie on the sepulchral In Dreams, the spacious, wistful Whither Must I Wander and the brief bonus track found in the composer's desk some time later. 

We might have gone home somewhat more pensive than if it had been something more bombastic but the jollity had been in the first half and maybe that's what life is like. 

I probably usually say we look forward to the Ivory Duo returning to Portsmouth and then they do, so my song remains the same.

Nataly Ganina in Chichester

 Nataly Ganina, Chichester Cathedral, Mar 5

Chopin's not a bad idea for a favourite composer. Rich, with great melodies, charismatic and the Complete Works fit onto 16 discs. I can see why anybody might choose him. Nataly Ganina began with an Impromptu, op. 29 no. 2, that was by turns almost flirtatious and thoughtful without being Chopin in top gear.

Tchaikovsky is more like an entry-level favourite composer. At school, our music teacher told us that Bach was a better composer than Tchaikovsky and I thought, What? Has the man gone out of his mind? What did Bach do to compare with the 1812 Overture? But it wasn't too long before I realized he had been right and I'd been wrong and now that seems more like a matter of fact than of opinion. However, Tchaikovsky remains a representative of the acceptable face of Romanticism and three pieces from The Seasons were descriptive and not prone to excess. The calm Song of the Lark was followed by a short ride in a fast machine with wintry scenery in Troika and more party games and friendship than religious revelation in Christmas.

A candidate for highlight of the programme was Chopin's Nocturne, op. 9 no. 1, nuanced in tempi and timbre and in line with my increasing preference for less than extravagance in piano performance and use being made of the subtler range between piano and forte. The self-evidence of some of my note-taking has rarely been more obvious than when scribbling 'more waltzy' for what was next, a Mazurka but that is evidence that it did what it said on the tin.

Nataly then picked her way through five selected Rachmaninov Preludes that went from sombre and minor to signature Rach rhapsody in the major, then from delicacy to G sharp minor that shimmered with more intensity before letting go into the op. 23 no. 5, which strode purposefully to a larger-scale finish. I'd say 'more Russian-ly' except that isn't a term of approval at the present time.

All of which made for a well thought-out lunchtime repast of these giants of often big-sounding music not quite so unrestrained because any artist worthy of the name needs to be able to do more than one thing and Nataly, never showy and always considered, was the right pianist to do so. Her picture here brings to mind the paintings of Vermeer, a photograph equally well realized. There's a time and place for fireworks and the 1812 but it doesn't hold quite the same place in my hit parade as it did fifty years ago.

 

James, the poem

 Some things just get on your nerves, don't they. We would hardly be human if some didn't.

Obviously Boris, obviously l'enfer c'est les autres, obviously Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, terrible poetry and obviously Christianity.

James is understood to have been the brother of Jesus, that long-haired preacher man from 2000 years ago who was somehow the one out of many who caught on. The Taylor Swift of his time, as it were. Well I doubt it. Faith in some bad translations is the basis of much of much Christian faith, a miracle is something that can't possibly happen and so none of them did but we all believe what we want to believe however much evidence there is to the contrary.

James has been an idea for a poem for a while. It might be better to wait for the arrival of Heresy, the book due soon, but, no, having done the Boris doggerel before, this doggerel in some way satisfies what I set out to say and there might not be much to be gained by making a good poem out of it.

I dunno. But this will do as it is for now,

James

Seasons of ferment and fierce hallucinations,

Of stories told in mistaken translations, 

I was not his brother as is understood 

but a member of the same brotherhood.

Religion, as it ever was, was schismatic 

But he was nothing if not charismatic, 

As volatile as gunpowder would be one day 

That glistened as they listened to what he had to say.

I’m sure he could have sold sand to a Tuareg 

As well as provide healing to a lame leg.
Some of them didn’t take that much convincing, 

So keen were they to have something to believe in.

We’d waited long enough for the Messiah, 

Our hopes ran high, our expectations higher, 

And so the likes of me and John the Baptist 

Threw in our lots with this wastrel idealist.

He was too good at it for his own good. 

He never said he was the son of God. 

He was trouble and crowds are trouble, too,

And they did what he told them to do.

He should have stuck to woodwork except 

He was never a carpenter adept 

At making furniture like chairs or mangers. 

I’m sorry but that is one of the changes

Those who rendered the Bible from Aramaic

Into other languages, as prosaic

As the story needs to be to make it 

Sound as if it couldn’t have been us that had to fake it.

No, he had no trade and no profession. 

All he had was his maniac obsession 

And rulers who rule Empires from elsewhere 

Prefer craven subjugation and don’t care

For rebels or any sign of insurrection.

They dealt with it with things like crucifixion,

The torture represented in art 

That everywhere intends to break your heart.

But it doesn’t break mine if only because

I took over from him after he was 

Disposed of with such unnecessary cruelty

and so, yes, the next one they came for was me.