11 Days On

 Eleven days is more than the usual time elapsed since the last post here. It's most gratifying to hear from the other side of the world, asking if I'm okay, but I don't think the delay was the issue. For whatever reason, I was 'not available' in Japan by whichever means I was being accessed.

Sometimes one doesn't feel like it. It doesn't seem appropriate. Art might be all there is but not be enough, as one of my favourite poets observed. I've got a lot of time for St. Cuthbert on his remote island contemplating things beyond all this worldly fiddle but, needs must and one has to press on.

For all her levity and party-going approach, Dorothy Parker knew. Today was worthwhile for reading her late play, The Ladies of the Corridor, co-authored with Arnaud D'Usseau but with Dottie lines all the way through. Set in a hotel with superficiality eventually gathering into crises, perhaps the most telling passage is where Lulu reflects,

We were told you grew up, you got married, and there you were. And so we did, and so there we were. But our husbands, they were busy. We weren't part of their lives; and as we got older we weren't part of anybody's lives, and yet we never learned how to be alone.  

It's almost Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill except neither of those were very funny very often.

 

That came after You Might As Well Live by John Keats - a different John Keats, the standard biography before it was said to be improved upon by What Fresh Hell is This? by Marion Meade. We will see. One can't read everything at once. With the Hardy survey left not properly finished, the Shostakovich symphonies requiring another run through, the Prokofiev Piano Sonatas so great, the Sofia Gubaidulina Quartets due here soon, two hefty Shostakovich volumes arriving today and that's not all, I need a committee meeting with myself to establish the way forward among so many projects. 

But later tonight, although I sometimes take a dim view of BBC4's Friday nights of ready-made old TOTP scheduling, we are offered 'another chance to see' the Alan Hull documentary, a labour of love about a singer-songwriter whose work it was easier to love than it seemed he himself was but then Rock Goes to College with Lindisfarne from Essex University, 1978. That would have been on the same tour as when I saw them at Lancaster.

Not all of those I mixed with there shared my enthusiasm for the Newcastle folk-rock temporary sensation because Coltrane, Zappa et al were judged to have suffered more for their art and it was felt we should, too, but not much gets ahead of those first loves, the first records one ever spent one's limited money on and I'll be back there with Lindisfarne, about 99% word perfect.