These are two extraordinary lives, for sure, but perhaps ordinary lives - if there are such things- would be worth reading if well written. My own has been unspectacular and I have no plans to write it but it was of passing interest to me from time to time.
Perhaps the most mundane life would be of someone who never changed, although the reasons for that might be worth examining. The Jesuit maxim about knowing the adult from the seven year old can only be partially true and is, therefore, false. Some people develop exponentially at a certain stage, most retain some sort of personality blueprint, I dare say, and, if anything, I'd say I regressed from highly promising child to unrepentant under-achiever.
I was a football obsessive to the age of about 12 but by now know only roughly where some of the teams are in their leagues. Sports, like cricket and cycling, came and went and now all I'm left with is horse racing over obstacles, maybe inherited through a grandfather's DNA.
I never tire of re-telling how the 13-14yo me went from devotion to the wilder outskirts of rock music, through a disavowal of pop music to emerge as a born again soul man, almost evangelistic about it. The constant thing in music arrived with Mozart at the age of 11 and has remained essential, perhaps never more so than now.
There was never a time without books, either, but which books has shifted. Fancying myself to be a poet, aged 20 I was pure enough in intention to not want to write anything else but 45 years later I want to write whatever suggests itself and that's not poems very often.
I hardly read a biography until I was 30, thinking that fiction was the 'real' business of literature but that's turned around, as we can see - of course biography's the 'real' business and 'real' stories are much more vivid, relevant and captivating than made up ones.
The Scapegoat is more than 600 pages. It is outrageously brilliant that the library service will lend me such a sumptuous book for a month and I don't envisage it being necessary to renew it.
--
It's been hard times in recent weeks on the turf. From October onwards is my harvest season, supposedly, but this year has been marred by a drought of almost unprecedented proportions. I wasn't doing badly at all for 2024 and was looking forward to 'pressing on' but I've not been the Wiseguy when push came to shove.
The first two favourites going in at Cheltenham today was the last thing I wanted to see with my small-time double being on two of the next three and my theory being that favs simply don't keep obliging. But, as has been pointed out to me, each race is a different event and the outcome of one has no effect on those that follow. The Skelton stable is as efficient as any winning machine once it clicks into gear and L'Eau du Sud and Doyen Quest both won with great authority at God's own sports venue. It's not the money - I need a rattling good spell to restore the plus to where I'd like it - but I'd almost forgotten the feeling one gets when one knows the gamble is landed. One has to stay in profit but it's the endorphins of success I think one does it for.
Endorphin was 15 Across in today's Times crossword. I gladly take my vocabulary from wherever suggests it.
--
---
Four books by Stewart Lee arrived this week, most of his published output if not all. It's hardline 'woke' stuff, or at least committedly anti anti-woke. I like him a lot and it did him no harm that he wrote the introduction to the re-issue of a Rosemary Tonks novel last year.
One assumes that any friend of hers is a friend of one's.
Like with any satirist, it's easy to have targets but what one needs to know is what the likes of Ian Hislop, Peter Cook, Ben Elton or, indeed, Alexander Pope would do if they were in charge. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are not so far making it look easy. I suspect they've not got it right but it's not clear what 'getting it right' would have been. It's possible that Stewart is from the Corbyn tendency. Marxism might have been brilliant at analysing problems but evidence of it ever solving any, apart from the problem of achieving a degree in Sociology, is scarce.
There's good writing to be had from Stewart as he knocks over easy targets but makes a point of setting himself up against the 'mainstream' stand-up industry, too. It's postmodern to distance oneself from what one ostensibly is, referring back to one's art form within its own process like the sort of poems or novels that let you know that they know that's all they are. It offers layers, going beyond irony towards Nirvana.
Nirvana was 18 Down in today's Times crossword. I'm beginning to understand how Stewart does what he does.
That's all very well while being so cutely postmodern remains in fashion but maybe one day it won't be and Stewart Lee will suddenly look as out of date as Jim Davidson or Bernard Manning.
'Woke' was an Obama word that only meant 'aware' and that 'we must love one another and/or die' but it's been made into a crime and Russia won the American Presidential Election by being anything but. As happens these days, the liberal 'elite' lost the vote of those they wanted to help because they failed to make them feel better off.
And that's biography for you. You're great one day, very much in fashion, but then you're not. It happened to Shakespeare, it happened to Bach and so it could even happen to Stewart Lee.
And it also means hard times ahead for our already very troubled world. Which seems to me a good enough way of dove-tailing, as if in a piece of carpentry, the denouement of this piece in Stewart Lee style, having referred both backwards and forwards, brought in both personal and international concerns while maintaining some direction even if that direction wasn't always clear.
Maybe that is what biography, or even life itself, is about, that like Ophelia says, we know what we are but know not what we may be.
I've been Stewart Lee. No. I haven't. I've been David Green. Thank you. Good Night.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.