Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 I hope The Woman in White wasn't the best book I'd never read. I'd hope to find a better one in due course. By all means it's a good one and one has to admire how it's organized with its multiple narrators and immense detail, the unambiguous delineation between goodies and baddies and the happy ending. But it's 'genre' not only in its shock-horror themes but how it becomes a detective story. While detective stories in real life aren't always conclusive, we are fairly confident that, in Maigret and Midsomer Murders, they will be. Not that it's out of the question that anything 'genre' can't be a masterpiece. Hamlet is such.

But Wilkie Collins was maybe a bit longer than required. At 600+ pages, you might think Elvis Costello is, too, except if he was just fulfilling a publisher's plan for a memoir he could have handed in 200+ and collected the advance. Don't start him talking, he could talk all night. He was always wordy but in a good way and you can pick up Unfaithful Music and put it down again as often as you like without having to keep the complex relationships of a novel in mind. It flips about between stories about his musician father, later career with Dylan and McCartney, childhood, This Year's Model, Liverpool and London. One can't lose the thread of a narrative when there is so little of one.

Almost too smart for his own good, there's never been as much for me in what Declan did after his first three or four albums as what he did in them. But, as per the word count of his memoir, he's a productive sort of artist and not given to frugality.

There's no big rush to finish that. I could start something else alongside it but remain in fear of Eugene Onegin and now also the Tractatus of Ludwig Wittgenstein, so I'll look at a few more chapters of The Best of Jazz by Humph before leaving it with my father at Christmas. Readily readable, Humph is an enlightening guide to this whole, old world I know so little about but can see how good it was from the evidence of the Larkin's Jazz CD's. 

 

I had some words ready here regarding Sean O'Brien's recent pamphlet - some say 'booklet'-À la Carte (New Walk) but I veered even further from the path of what might be called a 'review' than I usually do and it's not long to wait until The Bonfire Party, the more major collection, in January when I can, perhaps,

       perform repeats of all the stories

you've heard before in slightly different versions

except À la Carte resonated more than any new poems I've read for some years. Not that I read many new poems by now but it still would have done if I did.

It caught the feelings of the visit back to Nottingham and my own past like a variation on the 'objective correlative' and I found good use being made of a title I had in mind- 'The Past'- but found no words to put underneath it.

There are poets whose poems 'speak to you' - some would say - and others that don't. Sean's regularly do to me whereas Ocean Vuong's don't. It increasingly doesn't take a great deal to be my favourite living poet by now but, again, Sean O'Brien could still be that if lots of others were still alive.