Eureka and After

John Southworth's Shakespeare, the Player, was a major find (as below) if only for its very useful dating of Shakespeare leaving Stratford exactly when I wanted him to. I've not seen anybody else do it and he does it with such good reason. He continues to be original throughout, often dismissing traditional anecdotes and replacing them with commonsense explanations based on evidence and circumstances although he is reluctant to question the idea of Shakespeare as uxurious which looks to me highly dubious.

It is a life based on the theatre, though, via detailed scrutiny of cast lists and tour schedules and the main thing that brings out is that much of the life was spent on the road and less in London that might be usually imagined. He would have been familiar with Ipswich, Gloucester, Bristol and other places in the southern half of England.

The other main  'revelation' from this close reading of the parts in the plays and the actors available is how Southworth matches them up and, most tellingly, makes Shakespeare a major player, with Richard Burbage, rather than the bit-part Ghost in Hamlet or older men elsewhere that most credit him with. He is, in this account, a player-manager, often on stage at the beginning of plays and at the end and overseeing the drama he has devised at first hand, like a harpsichord player directing a baroque orchestra.

I don't know to what extent the author claims to establish his findings as facts but, as with so much Shakespeare biography, it succeeds or fails in proportion to how credible it is and it rates among the very best of Shakespeare biographies for scoring highly on that.

To most readers it will be how the theatre groups worked that will be of most interest and Shakespeare leaving Stratford in 1580 won't matter to them quite as much, interesting though it is on its own account, but it matters to me and I haven't been so grateful for anything for quite some time.

Eureka Moment

On Tuesday I picked up Shakespeare, The Player, a Life in the Theatre by John Southworth in the ever worthwhile Oxfam Bookshop in Chichester. It's not as if I don't have plenty of books on Shakespeare biography already but one never knows what might come out of the next one. In this one, the life as an actor is pieced together with the usual makeshift methods of applying conjecture and supposition to a few established details but Southworth has a healthy disregard for some of the myths, legends and hearsay and has done more of his own original research to support his version of events. He has the dates of which theatre companies visited Stratford and when as well as noting a number of echoes in early Shakespeare plays from parts in Marlowe and Thomas Kyd that might have crept in from lines he had learnt.

All such work depends on the reader accepting the author's reasoning and many won't if the theory doesn't align with what they want to believe but some authors come with more credibility and cogent case-making than others and Southworth is more persuasive than most. I don't ask for much more than I already have in life but one thing I have been in search of is 'evidence' or something like it that Shakespeare wasn't in Stratford in 1584 at the time he needed to be to father the twins his wife gave birth to in February 1585. And this account has Shakespeare joining up with Worcester's Men, aged 16, and thus touring with them for an apprenticeship that would last seven years.

While he necessarily has William in Stratford when he needs to be to be because he assumes he is Hamnet and Judith's father, that is only because he thinks it is necessary but it is getting Shakespeare out of Stratford so early that is significant. It's what I've always wanted. It's nothing to do with poaching deer or going to teach in Lancashire, it's the move into the theatre with enough time to learn all about the business before beginning to provide the industry with plays of his own. This is very much the missing link required by Strange Fowl, the essay that has been so long a work-in-progress and a few paragraphs inserted will make it look so much better.

Of course it will not convince those who don't want to be convinced. It is a theory, not even originally my theory, but I can't find fault with it and nobody else has yet successfully done so either. This 'discovery' feels very like that significant jigsaw moment when a crucial piece fits in and it makes me much happier that it perhaps ought to but it is like finding something that one wasn't even sure was there to be found. I will return to Strange Fowl in due course with renewed enthusiasm. As with poems, or music, it matters less what anybody else makes of it - one can't help that- but I am the boy who got just what he always wanted. 

Simone Tavoni in Chichester

Simone Tavoni, Chichester Cathedral, June 25

Some concert programmes are themed, either loosely or very specifically, while others are apparently not. There is a game of Only Connect to be played in which a possible option is that what the pieces have in common is that they have nothing in common. Simone Tavoni's set today comprised 13 pieces by 5 composers, taking the sonata as three movements, in about 45 minutes and provided a wide-ranging miscellany rather than any discernable unifying principle. Unless, of course, anybody found an answer that was beyond my ken.

Baldassare Galuppi's Sonata no. 5, T27, required a light touch and was tidy and decorous. His dates were 1706-1785 but he's more Mozart than Bach. Fame is a fickle thing, pace Andy Warhol, and where some become household names others have to wait until I reach, erm, late middle age before I've heard of them but in his case I'm glad I eventually did.

Immediately dreamier and lingering were the Trois morceaux poetiques, op. 42, by Moszkowski, moving up a couple of gears for the momento giojoso which I'm surprised to find the internet translating as 'wonderful moment' and not 'playful momentum' which is what it also was.

A proper change of mood, though, came with the heavier resounding of three of Rachmaninov's  Études-Tableaux, op.39, which were, as one might expect, bigger in every dimension, rumbling and tumbling as if it were not only a different pianist but almost a different instrument one was hearing. Two of Chopin's Four Mazurkas, op. 33, were more subdued than he sometimes is and led into Almeria from the Iberia by Albéniz in which one was invited to provide one's own pictures, possibly of wide-angled panoramas, the surrounding landscape behind the moorish fortress and, I dare say, some nostalgia under big, starry skies.

A further Chopin Mazurka was carried over into the encore to complete a programme which brought out both the piano and the forte, Simone here providing more of the former which, even in the light of the grandiose Rach, seems to be his forte. As it were.   

Inspīrātĭo Ensemble

Inspīrātĭo Ensemble, St Mary's Church, Hayling Island, June 23

Moving on about a hundred years from the baroque recital in April, Inspīrātĭo today were Mikhail Lezdkan (cello) now joined by Béla Hartmann (piano) in what is a flexible collective of musicians. A proper summer's day outside and plenty of air circulating in the attractive indoors of St. Mary's made for an ideal place to be with gorgeous music and Piers Burton-Page's debonair commentary for company.

Beethoven's 7 Variations on 'Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen' are not the monumental Diabelli set but still find space enough for variegated moods, from jovial to reflective, regular interplay between the duo and Béla bringing forward the original spirit of Mozart into the piano part.

In his announcer's role, Piers covered both some musical history and some appropriate Shakespeare readings among which was a brief summary of largely obsolete instruments, the point of which was the arpeggione that Schubert's Sonata D. 821 was written for. Its Allegro Moderato was convivial with Misha's cello velvet and smooth, its charm extending into mischief; the Adagio necessarily broader with a tinge of regret about it but then the Allegretto quickened into a snappy riff with Béla almost like a cinema accompanist to Misha's on-screen capers.

In the second half, Mendelssohn's Sonata no. 2, op. 58, led me to wonder if his reputation might be yet higher if he wasn't quite so cheerful so much of the time. Perhaps one needs to be essentially tragic to be taken more seriously. His first movement here was all vivace, really, with Béla verging on the flamboyant in a piece that I'm sure he had many more notes in and was at least an equal partner. Misha was pizzicato in the Scherzando and Béla decorated the Adagio with what, my investigations found out, were 'arpeggiated chords' and so I'm grateful to have learned that new thing today. There were even more notes in the Molto allegro e vivace finale with Misha's cello at times seeming to conjure the bumblebee from elsewhere in the repertoire.

Some rest after those exertions was provided by some rich, deep waves of sleep in a piece entitled Traumerei as an encore and I enjoy a quiz. Probably Robert Schumann, possibly Brahms, I thought, but maybe I vaguely knew it anyway. I wish I could have had a go on the BBC's old masterpiece of a parlour game, Face the Music. I might not have been Robin Ray but I could have been a contender.

That was an idyllic afternoon in every way I can think of. Anybody who expects more out of life than that is ever likely to be disappointed.

Eva Doroszkowska at the Menuhin Room

 Eva Doroszkowska, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, June 22

The Menuhin Room isn't playing it safe, bringing the music of Grażyna Bacewicz amongst others to its Saturday lunchtime series. Eva Doroszkowska's programme led us in gently with Lūcija Garūta's Meditation which soon became expansive but after that there was no hiding place. Her 4 Preludes were, as one might have expected, banned by the philistine arbiters of Soviet taste but technically demanding music that demands to be listened to as well as played properly can bring proportionate rewards with it. They were staccato and uneasy but with rapturous high drama, too, and Eva's impassioned playing set the tone for what was a closely themed set of C20th music by female composers from the Baltic states and Poland.

Ester Mägi's Three Sea Tableaux surged, rippled and glittered, often up and down scales, and gave the house Steinway one of the more rigorous workouts it's been given recently and revealed it in all its glory up to its busy finish. If we sometimes go to sit and gaze at the timeless movement of a languid summer share of the sea, this was not that sort of sea. None of this concert's music is likely to be heard on Classic FM's relaxing Calm Classics.

Mägi's The Ancient Kantele to finish was more mystical and mysterious perhaps but not lessening in intensity, ending on the widest span between crossed-over hands that I've ever witnessed.

Before that, though, the Bacewicz Sonata no. 2 was possibly the main attraction. There is so much going on in her music that one never feels one has got to the bottom of it, the first movement as unresting and ardent as all else if not more complex. The Largo was sepulchral and without becoming dissonant still wouldn't allow itself a clear conscience until the 'neo-classical' finale was exactly that, with recognizable elements of traditional toccata given cubist, abstract or other C20th treatment until its theatrical climax, all of which Eva delivered with panache.

The Menuhin Room broke no box office records today but it was heartening to see very fair numbers attend for such adventurous repertoire and the generous reception it was given convincingly made the case that quality of appreciation is as worth having as quantity.

Sometimes an encore isn't quite appropriate however well-deserved it might be but Eva's Rameau Le Rappel des oiseaux was an excellent idea, as if to return us back home to safety, order and everything in its place. It makes me think now of the ending of Brief Encounter,

You've been a long way away. Thank you for coming back to me.

Sport

I understand there's something that's almost compulsory on the telly right now. However, I was always of the maverick tendency and didn't like to go along with the herd instinct. I understand 4% of Scotland are in Germany and at first thought it was hilarious that they got Rosemary Tonked 5-1 first time out but that is to miss the point. For such devotees, although winning is allegedly the preferred option, it's being part of it that matters more. It is instead of church.

On the bus on the way back from Waitrose ( ! ) there were a number of young men in evidence making their way to pubs in their England shirts, gladly foregoing any attempt at expressing individuality in their apparel but adopting the uniform. I'm sure Roland Barthes or Claude Levi-Strauss would have made short work of the semiotics and anthropology of it all and equally understand the non-conformist in me that instinctively rebels against uniform. Not only was sports kit subverted as far as possible with socks often rolled down in pre- compulsory shin pad era and shirt untucked but wearing any other trousers than denim jeans when they were de rigeur for the student classes. That last bit was based on the gospel according to Rod Stewart in an interview in Sounds circa 1977 where he said he didn't own any such things. And then, about 30 years later, there he was wearing them on the video of Have You Ever Seen the Rain. You simply can't trust anybody.

 

There was a time, certainly into the 1990's, when I knew all about the football, the test match, then the snooker, the Tour de France, the Derby and most recently mainly the jump racing but I won't be taken for granted as anybody's captive audience if I can help it. A favourite line, whether with regard to Fulham FC, Notts cricket or any other professional outfit that my interest in was diminishing, was, well, I never saw any of them at my poetry readings. I retain some residual regard for amateur or Corinthian sport but not England.

I was very lucky to be English. It was never going to be anything else. One is either born, against very long odds, or is not. You were either going to be you or you weren't going to be anybody at all. It sometimes seems like a close call which one would have preferred but nationality is nothing to be proud of.

Recent difficulties with one of my bookmakers, as below a week or two ago, have even served to undermine the last vestiges of involvement with sport I had, there being little future in the gradual accumulation of small profits from horse racing if such firms are going to make it too difficult to transfer them out into the bank for onward spending. It's the industry's last ditch defence against anybody who dares to consistently beat them at their own game. They don't like it. Subservience, but mainly your money, is what they expect from you while conning you into thinking you are enjoying yourself.

Well, no, not me, I never lost control. You're face to face with the man can see precious little reason to care anymore. 

Brief Book Notes

It's hard to keep up, or even know what the 'day job' is, at present.

This is 'David Green Books' but you wouldn't think so. It looks more and more like David Green Music in the same way that the Third Programme was once BBC Classical Music Radio but by now Radio 3 readily shifts into musicals, jazz, 'world music' and anything else it sees fit to. And why not, we might ask. Because we'd like somewhere to go where it will be orchestral, chamber, choral or solo music by mostly old German men in wigs, thank you.

But I was glad of a tip for Paddy Kitchen's Gerard Manley Hopkins which served its purpose perfectly, not over-burdened with detail, footnotes and more than one really needs to know. It perhaps wasn't such a dark and desperate story as one imagined but that is to his credit given the welter burden of Jesuit teaching he submitted to. 

That such spirited, charged poems came out of a life so overawed by piety is almost a miracle in itself and it's hard to imagine how such righteousness could reduce us to such servility and yet, in other forms, it still does.

I was surprised how often the poems quoted were so familiar, Hopkins having been regarded as significant and avidly read at a formative age and so those lines are baked into whatever it is that constitutes any 'sensibility' I have, for better or worse. For better, I still think.

A re-read of Businessmen as Lovers by Rosemary Tonks revealed it as very 'forward' and 'frank' for 1969 when you think how soon it came after the lifting of the 'Chatterley ban' but that's not really the point. I've tried and failed with Jane Austen a few times, probably mostly because I can't tell which bits are the social comedy and which Jane thought were perfectly normal. I'm better off with Rosemary who is more contemporary and thus less evasive, perhaps less subtle, too, but rarely less than devastating. It's Rosemary 3 Jane 0.

And then, today, still returning to my own library back catalogue because that's what it's there for and there'd be no point living in a house this size were it not in order to contain the books and records, I read chapter 7 of The Return of the Native in Chichester Cathedral while waiting for the concert. It is Hardy's essay introducing Eustacia Vye, including,

To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow:

and in many ways it is perhaps Hardy's darkest book, Jude notwithstanding, and with it not being among those I read first from fourth-form Woodlanders onwards when I read on after bedtime so very taken with it, it is becoming almost my favourite.

Of course one reads things all the time but not all of them are all-time classics and it is great to go back to seminal, eternal, maybe even sempiternal, things to remind oneself why one read books in the first place.

The reason why this is David Green (Books) was that it was originally intended to be about my books and poems but there weren't enough of them and they're not of quite such sempiternal interest and so it diversified.

However, the very last DG book, using the last ISBN issued to the imprint, is set up and ready to go. Sixteen poems, not all masterpieces but just about worthy of print if all the others were.  Romanticism is ready to go to the printers but I'm not convinced I'm sufficiently excited about it to send it so we will have to see. We could wait another year or two and see what else turns up to be included.

Oliver Nelson & Julian Jacobson at Chichester

 Oliver Nelson & Julian Jacobson, Chichester Cathedral, June 18

Cliff Richard didn't have much of a case when asking why the devil has all the good music. He didn't and the massed ranks of composers who wrote Christian music have plenty of powerful ammunition on their side. However, the violin has been associated with demonic powers and long before Paganini was thought to be possessed, Guiseppe Tartini dreamed of the diabolo playing to him something out of this world and tried his best to recapture it in the Devil's Trill Sonata so it was very open-minded of Chichester Cathedral to host a recital of it. 

The Sonata in G minor, as it is otherwise known, opens graciously. One needs to be a real connoisseur to differentiate between Vivaldi and all the other Italian baroque composers in an age when individuality hadn't yet been identified as anything devoutly to be wished. More acrobatics and agility were to be had in the Allegro energico with its unresting, driven spirit given fluent expression by Oliver and that was carried forward into the finale until then it happened - the cadenza unleashed the thrilling trilling and extended scorching pyrotechnics. It's a great thing to realize that one is risking disappointment by taking such audacious billing at its word and then not be.

One might, if attempting the world record for curmudgeonliness, say it is virtuosity for virtuosity's sake but Oliver even accommodates that by not even making it look bravura or excessively showy but the Chichester faithful sensed they were in the presence of something extraordinary.

It was hardly any fault of Julian Jacobson that he could have gone virtually unnoticed as accompanist in that but he was more conspicuous in the Prokofiev Sonata no. 2. The Moderato was more soulful and the Scherzo-Presto again demanding as if to suggest that maybe Oliver enjoys a technical challenge with some quasi-Tartini moments in the violin's skittering over glittering piano. The Andante evoked evening and fading light before the Allegro con brio was Prokofiev at his most Shostakovich, Julian providing piano both spirited and elegant to complement the same on the violin. It has sometimes seemed to me that Prokofiev was over-shadowed in life by Shostakovich and in death by Stalin who died on the same day and thus obliterated all but the most necessary mention of his passing from Pravda but there's every reason to pursue more of his perhaps lesser-known music because of course he's a major composer and on this evidence will reward further investigation.

I'm not at all surprised to look up Oliver and find the Ysaye solo Sonatas among his repertoire, music that I put on again recently after a long break and was re-astonished by and so any opportunity to hear him play some of those, especially alongside the Tartini, should be taken full advantage of. It's getting mighty crowded at the top end of my lengthening short list of this year's highlights. I don't want them to stop coming but not everything can be chosen as Event of the Year.

The Artemisia Ensemble at St Peter’s

The Artemisia Ensemble, St Peter’s Church, Petersfield, June 16

The benefits of Music in Portsmouth were never better demonstrated than when I noticed this event there yesterday, just in time. Petersfield is on the outskirts of my local orbit - anything further away is classified as a holiday - but it was unquestionably worth risking Sunday public transport for, which was fine.

I've been thinking for a while that string quartets are something I've been missing out on but a quintet is even better. With two cellos, much more is possible.

Ethel Smyth's Quintet in E is opus 1 and it's a struggle to think of another composer that arrived so complete. Even more extraordinary that the idea of a female composer capable of such a broad vision generated from the theme of the opening Allegro was in her day regarded as a curiosity. Its confidence and pastoral evocations were augmented by Artemisia's faultless performance in rewarding acoustic surroundings.

Still airy and outdoors, cello led into the next movement with violin and Suzanne Evans, ever the cohesion in the midfield holding role on viola, following until it accelerated into dance. The Adagio is lachrymose and sorrowing before the Allegro finale and, however much Smyth had in common with her nearer contemporaries, Brahms and Dvorak, that was for me more Bach and whether or not this Ensemble play this piece again in the area, it's a certainty to be added to the CD shelves here.

That was a rare treat but this concert was tremendous value with that 35 minutes followed by Schubert's 50 minutes of Quintet in C, D. 956, contrastingly being from the end of his short career rather than from the beginning of Ethel's long one. The immaculate sound was carried forward into Jessica Garner's pizzicato cello under the serenity of the other quartet who introduced a hint of 'sturm' if not 'drang' before, in what was a captivating performance throughout, the Adagio stopped all the clocks in what had to be the highlight if highlight there had to be. Jessica provided the bass while Sara Deborah Timossi's violin and the sustained vln, vla and clo of Catherine Lett, Suzanne and Helen Downham made for the most affecting and gorgeous meditation. They are every bit a 'unit', each contributing beautifully to their shared achievement.

...from which we were awakened by the rumbustuous, tutti high spirits of a scherzo, presto shindig that bracketed a reprise of the gravity as if to suggest that Schubert knew all along what lay beneath such levity. The Allegretto to finish was orchestral and vivacious and it's a shame that, if in doubt, standing ovations are issued sparingly. This was borderline but it sometimes seems to me as if on such occasions some of the audience might be advertising their appreciation too much and I wouldn't want to do that and so I generally don't. But that was high quality and will remain in the memory long after many other very good things have faded.

John Burnside - Ruin, Blossom

 John Burnside - Ruin, Blossom (Cape)

What I hadn't realized when finding out that John Burnside had died was that there had so recently been a further book of poems. Such a leavetaking seems almost too appropriate, his poems having long inhabited a region that isn't this world but can't believe in the mysticism his words evoke to think there is any other.

The words 'snow', stars' and 'shadow' recur regularly throughout Ruin, Blossom. Burnside would never have been anything quite so prescribed or prosaic as a mere 'symbolist' but those words insist on being noticed and so invite interpretation. In the first section, Apostasy, we have to take its title as a hint and a shift from the language and rituals of Christianity to the deeper, more natural Paganism might be an idea. The snow is often melting to reveal what was beneath it, as if the world was being divested of its lustrous covering to show what was beneath it. But that is far too superficial a reading to suffice as anything like the whole story.

Some poetry collections are so loosely themed that what the poems have in common is that they are those the poet has written since their last book whereas others, like this, ask to be read in relation to each other. One can make the 'shadows' into doubt and the 'stars' into eternity, fate or revelation but poetry worth its while benefits from not being having meaning pinned quite so firmly on it. It's possible that some poets might not be aware of how often certain words occur in their work and they are subconsciously revealed by their 'semantic fields' but it's unlikely that John Burnside and his editor didn't notice such topography.

The poem Apostasy begins,

At one time,

when there might have been a God,

before being illuminated by 'the sway of matter and a hint/ of distance',

in Bedlam Variations,

      all our gods have vanished from this house

and,

No one believes in heaven anymore

and we can take the hint that Burnside is celebrating something more vital and luminous,

things seen, as I am seen, and things unseen,

absolved of what I once mistook for rapture 

or,

      like forgiveness for the sin 

of being, but not being what was asked.

Those in Bedlam have a more acute insight into the unfathomable like the epigraph from Corinthians 2 where 'the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal'.

 

I'm often suspicious of poems that regard themselves as so 'free' that they can leave one word to a line or spread fragments of lines across the page. I'm not convinced it's much more than affectation but John Burnside has an innate music and seriousness that convinces above and beyond recondite typographical effects. Free verse can still be verse when generating authority enough not to divert attention to its formal niceties but it needs to be doing that first, not hoping that dispensing with ostensible form and metre somehow is its own justification.

While looking as if it is at least flirting with mysticism and 'the great beyond', Burnside's poetry was dealing with someting very real, something that led Carol Ann Duffy to suggest that poetry was 'the music of being human'. I was reluctant to give any credence to what sounded nice but didn't mean much but John Burnside might have provided her with what she meant, or me with a clue to what she meant, by it.

Giulia Semerano & Filippo Di Bari

 Giulia Semerano & Filippo Di Bari, Chichester Cathedral, June 11

There is more four-handed piano going on than one might imagine but that might be because there aren't many venues that have the luxury of two pianos. On the other hand, as it were, one keyboard is enough as long as the composer remembers not to direct both players to the same part of it at the same time.

A check of the shelves in Chichester's Oxfam Bookshop on a regular basis is a good idea and today I opened Cardus on Music at,

...a critic is constantly under a necessity to overhaul his catechism to avoid living on fixed ideas.

Indeed, but I need one more run out for my customary comparison of Brahms with Beethoven, this time with reference to their facility for piano variations. Brahms went as far as ten On a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 29, rather than the thirty-three Diabelli and yet still went from the calm exposition to a kaleidoscope of moods, adding more notes to make the second and third before the sombre footsteps of the fourth with Giulia in the engine room and Filippo playing the top lines.

Robert Schumann is credited with 'discovering' Brahms who presumably already knew he was there and his Pictures from the East, op. 66, offered a similar range of short pieces, and the opportunity to use the German dictionary.

Lebhaft was exactly what it says on the tin with its running rhythms and Nicht schnell und sehr gesangvoll zu spielen was a gorgeous miniature perhaps haunted by the ghosts of Bach, Mozart and Schubert. By the time one gets to Im Volkston it's possible to think you've always got a chance of guessing German but it was a military and triumphant sort of 'folk style' for me. The 'Chanson Orientale' was gently redolent of the Faure Berceuse but, to return necessarily to my 'catechism', another Lebhaft and a Reuig andachtig left me not for the first time taken with the sanity of Robert Schumann's music compared with the torments he suffered in life.

This was all finely-tempered Romantic klavier given sympathetic, nuanced expression by an impressive and highly likeable double act that served to show that not all C19th music took part in a project to blow the doors off. 

Why, it was only last night I checked out next season's Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra programme in the hope of finding Brahms 4 and, although it's eleven months away, it is there. Before that, though, the remainder of Chichester Cathedral's Summer season of Tuesday lunchtimes looks all but unmissable and a double bill on the weekend of June 22-23 brings together some more enterprising repertoire in the Menuhin Room and Inspiratio Ensemble on Hayling Island so,

           I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I 

can lay my fixed ideas to rest in the dog days of July and August.

No More Mr. Wiseguy

 It is with some regret that Racetrack Wiseguy's glory, glory days have been brought to an end by dodgy bookmaker, William Hill.

They want proof of identity, having paid me out a few hundred over the last 18 months, are never satisfied with what I send them, won't communicate in much other than automated ways and so my account with a certain amount of cash in it can't be accessed.

I've said, look, just pay me that and I promise not to take any more off you but, hey, lord, they don't answer questions. It's hardly worth pursuing for all the heartache but it's an insight into the industry that's been serving me well for over a decade of consistent if not stupendous profit.

Understandably, perhaps, they prefer customers who lose consistently but it's them that chalks up the odds. There is no point winning money if it can't be transferred to my bank and horse racing is of much reduced interest if one is not thus involved so it looks as if that avenue of entertainment and modest income is curtailed which is a great shame.

 

The original William Hill was one of the shadier operators, according to his Wikipedia page, in what has always been a shady business, which was some of the glamour of it, and maybe my trick has been uncovered. My trick was being any good at it. So, the obvious answer -as with anything that ceases to have a point- is to get out of the game and walk away. It doesn't seem right but I don't like to be a righteous sort of bloke.

I've been telling anybody who's interested about when I went to a flapping track to see greyhound racing with my grandad in Gloucester on Boxing Day, 1977, I reckon it was. It doesn't get much more suspect than that. My pound on Macbeth @ 3/1 was acknowledged by a flip of the brim of my new trilby and the bookie said, 'by the hat', no ticket was issued, but he paid up okay so it's a shame that such establishments as Hill's are less honourable than a wide boy at such a meeting but what can you do.

Recent leaders of the Western world and Prime Ministers of our own country have been proved to be liars, fraudsters and self-serving incompetent scoundrels so one can hardly be surprised if business takes its moral compass from our elected representatives. In the past such things were decided by the no less scurrilous Catholic Church, as evidenced not least in the Prologue to a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins I've just begun.

So maybe that's that. I'm not interested enough in sport to pay for it, I'd rather it paid me. It's fine for those who nurture emotional attachments to their chosen teams and participants but I'm afraid by now I don't. I suppose I'd become a 'take-out merchant' in the very smallest of ways and that's nothing to be so proud of and it's not obvious how to stay in the game.

It was good while it lasted. The last decade or so by no means made up the losses of the several decades that came before it when I was a very welcome customer at any bookmaker's but sic transit gloria mundi.

Just walk away, William Hill,

You won't see me follow you back home.    

Boyd Up

I am usually a ready recepticle for the disposal of worthwhile books and so was the grateful recipient of William Boyd's Trio. It's no more than two days' worth of reading, not only because it goes down easily but because one wants to get back to it but it is 340 pages. In Graham Greene's differentiation between literature and entertainment, it might not quite be literature but it's high quality entertainment.

It deals in not-quite 60's stereotypes. Its claim to be 'art' might depend on it being about an actress making a film in Brighton about an actress making a film in Brighton which gives it layers but, as the title serves to emphasize, there are three stories going on and I dare say they will be brought together in the denouement.

Without being a roman a clef, we might well see elements of Diana Dors and Donald Sinden in two characters and one is taken with the novelist, Elfrida's, project to write about Virginia Woolf's last day even though she,

sat down on a bench and began to read 'To the Lighthouse' simply to pass the time but recognizing, a few pages in, that she'd forgotten how much she actually disliked the novel, with its footling detail and its breathy, neurasthenic apprehension of the world, all tingling awareness and high cheek-boned sensitivity.

 

And, yes, maybe. There is almost always the other point of view and nobody's untouchable. I've mostly always thought Virginia was a tremendous writer without that meaning I took her whole life and personality as in any way heroic and one does need to listen to the case against.

If the case against William Boyd is that he's not Julian Barnes then that's not so bad. If he can write books that aren't quite unputdownable but are so readily pickupable then he's doing fine.

 

It is consummately professionally well done, for what it is, and after 15 novels and a lot of stories, you'd hope so but one knows one is safe in his hands. The same applied to the film on telly the other night, Lie with Me (Arrête avec tes mensonges), 2022.

I'm no great watcher of cinema but saw a few wonderful French efforts in the 1990's with the likes of Depardieu and Emmanuelle Beart at their best. It seemed to me that France were a class apart at doing such things - with all due respect to The Remains of the Day - and so it's good to see that they still are. It's almost a formula, the past revealing itself after so many years in changed circumstances, but it works and I only wonder how much French cinema I've missed out on in the interim because these days neither the telly or any local arthouse seems to provide them any more. 

John Burnside, and other stories.

It's not always good news one finds on the poetry-related internet. The death of John Burnside was marked by Martyn Crucefix or else it could have been a long time before I knew. He was one of the few remaining poets whose new titles were essential, one of those rare writers who could be called a 'poet' because he did more with the language than accumulate some of its constituent parts. And he was rewarded with a fair share of the major poetry prizes as well as this website's Best Poem of 2017 when I read enough new poems to have some good ones to compare.

Mistaken for a Unicorn seemed like a very special poem until I realized John Burnside conjured the same sort of semi-mystical magic on a regular basis the like of which I haven't found in any other writer. It becomes simply what he did but remains virtuoso, in a class of its own and not to be replaced.

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At the end of Ellman's James Joyce I feel I've done as much as I can but, as in the Wake, having done it all find myself only really at the beginning of Joyce Studies. 

I was much taken by his diatribe against summer and anticipation of October although I'm happy with September. Also, of local interest, was him spending the summer of 1923 in Bognor and doing early work on the Wake there. He was visited by Eliot but, checking on when Eliot was in Bosham, maybe that was in 1917 but it adds significantly to nearby sites of literary interest. Bognor awarded the place a blue plaque.

Portsmouth is where  Dickens was born but he didn't do much else here and Conan Doyle is claimed with more justification. Not too far up country, near Petersfield, is Steep - which it is - and some very recognizable Edward Thomas country. Not far East is Warblington where the grave of Rosemary Tonks was eventually to be found and then Bosham where not only Eliot stayed for some recuperation but Dylan Thomas was there, too.

On his voyage to Italy, Keats stopped off to visit a friend at Bedhampton and a plaque in Chichester records where he began The Eve of St. Agnes. Chichester Cathedral has a book signed by John Donne and a tomb written about by Philip Larkin. I'm sure there's more than those things to know about.

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Hindemith has proved quite a success on my turntable with the three volumes of viola music preferred in their number order if only on the basis of less being more, the solo viola being vol. 1, with piano 2 and with orchestra 3, which is not to say there isn't plenty to like about all of them. As with Shostakovich, its the right amount of dissonance not going overboard into modernist mannerism.

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And, as an idea for a project, why not my own anthology of English poetry all gathered into a pdf. By no means any sort of educational tool or canon, just an extended favourite poems with personal notes by way of commentary. The equivalent effort at pop music stalled midway eventually but neither job needs finishing.