Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 There's been some discussion about abandoning books on the wireless in the last few days. As usual, I'd like to contribute.

The Ambassadors by Henry James was a recent abandonment for me after he had flattered with his shorter novels only to deceive as I ploughed on through some longer ones. Before that, The Letters of Basil Bunting were overtaken by more pressing concerns.

My first attempt at Proust, forty years ago, got as far as finishing vol. 1 of 3 but I returned to it in lockdown and rated it very highly indeed. Also, I went back to Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks with some success. The first book I gave up on, I think, was My Childhood by Maxim Gorky at school. I didn't pursue Bleak House at university but struggled through it thirty-odd years later. I have Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time and Captain Corelli's Mandolin in common with many others as being unfinished. There is no virtue in reading things dutifully and without pleasure or understanding if you don't have to.

I don't know if I've wondered it here but I've often wondered what percentage of words ever printed are ever read. I buy The Times on Saturday and I'm sure I don't read anything like 5% of it although I read some of the crossword clues any number of times.

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The Upside-Down World is still a great book as I re-read The Best Books in the House but I suspect it's not as good as Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer and so that short list might be due some amendment. Benjamin Moser features a bit more in his own book than one ideally wants and his ordering of chapters front loads his account of C17th Dutch Art with Rembrandt, Vermeer, Carel Fabritius and Pieter de Hooch so that it loses some impetus, certainly with Frans Hals for who he makes a strong case but his group portraits of society men aren't anything I'd want on a wall of mine. There are, nonetheless, some very worthwhile observations on both the painters in question and art in general.

Even Vermeer might have to wait, though, because an order is due at the weekend- What's in a Name? putting together the reasons for allowing Shakespeare his own plays, the latest McEwan and the Sebastian Faulks memoir rather than the new novel. First up, I will be back on the Shakespeare trail. Dismissing the claims of Marlowe, Bacon, Oxford and the increasingly absurd list of challengers to the authorship- which is none of their faults- isn't difficult work. The hard part is ridiculing those making claims on their behalf enough to shame them into shutting up about it.

The reason for spending more than £35 on new books was to save a couple of quid postage on a battery.

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Equally absurd episodes in my recent day-to-day life have included referring to the manual to put this replacement computer together, not making much sense of it and eventually realizing it was the manual for the boiler. I'm increasingly beset by such problems when only trying to function at a basic level and get by. Perhaps I just need to concentrate harder on practicalities and not spend my time wondering if the Archduke Trio quite brings time to a standstill in the same way that the Shostakovich Viola Sonata the Schubert Quintet do.

 

But perhaps it's not all over yet. Tesco Mobile took not much interest in advising how I should download photos from the new, very basic, mobile phone to the computer. So I came home and found out for myself, following their advice to 'keep trying'. And thus now I can show you the action from the Copnor Road last Friday when I witnessed a car on fire in the morning and saw the burnt out remains in the afternoon. 

And I've been able to send a poet a picture of her poem featured on a no. 2 bus.