The Godfather Pastiche and other stories

I've been watching The Godfather in instalments, not being much taken up by films but thinking one ought to know about a reputed masterpiece. 50 years on, it's hardly its own fault that it looks to me like a parody except that it is the thing that such parodies are based on.

Wendy Cope, in her 'other prose' reports how she,

sat and wept with laughter at the beginning of a programme called 'A Cornishman's View of the North East' 

for five minutes before it dawned on her that she wasn't watching Monty Python and thus The Godfather looks like a hilariously well-observed pastiche of The Godfather, Brando brooding and mumbling. Sadly much of its appeal is likely to be for the sort of men that are thrilled by guns and gratuitous violence somehow being a necessary part of their way of life.

I am enjoying it but not necessarily for the right reasons.

 --

Cheltenham couldn't possibly have been expected to continue at the same level as Tuesday and peaked too soon, great moments and great horses though there still were, and are still to come.

It really hasn't, though. My mug punter Pop Music Theory outdid the usually more profitable appliance of science when You Wear it Well won the Mares Novice Hurdle ahead of Luccia.

But that's sport for you and there's no such thing as a cert. We done okay and got out ahead of where we started which is more than what most bookmaker's clients will have done. The plan works fine but it's in the long run, a percentage game, not usually in a one-off smash-and-grab.

But rather than be a New York mafioso without much of a sense of humour, we can do it for fun and without gunning down the opposition in restaurants.

--

I went up the road to Tesco Express yesterday morning and wondered why One Stop had them queueing out of the door. They were still lined up ten back when I was on my way home but my new friend, Ash, who works there was in charge of supervising the queue so I went over and asked what the big attraction was.

Prime, she said but could see I was none the wiser. It's a new energy drink. Once it's gone, it's gone.

Oh.

Those in the queue didn't look like athletes to me. The genius of it seems to be whoever has persuaded the public that they really must have yet another flavoured sugar water confection, whether it be Coca-Cola, Lucozade, Irn Bru (in Scotland), Lambrusco or specifically this latest one. I'm a Pepsi Max supporter myself.

--

I don't know what Dr. Johnson would have made of such folly. Well, I do. He'd have been as non-plussed as me.

I'd left Rasselas aside from my Dr. Johnson programme, suspecting it of being a bit like Candide, I suppose. But, given that the next options were Phil Spector, a book on Donne that can wait and a  biography 'by' Cliff Richard that hardly needs reading but can provide a few pages of anodyne ghost-writing at bedtime, I took it up.

Oh, me of little faith. Of course it's brilliant. It says Samuel Johnson on the cover and that is as much of a guarantee as those things that are by J.S. Bach, Handel or Mozart. I'm not sure who else can be so confidently included on such a list.

Candide is a cartoon and an extravagant satire but Rasselas, right from the start, is written by someone who can't help but be a great writer. Lines, or paragraphs, that make you want to stop and note them down or read them again pile up and say that which you knew you knew but were not so able to so well express. It's a very short 'novel' and so might be re-read immediately and possibly be the first book for absolutely ages, if there were ever quite such a thing, that I'll carry around with me. Not to Tesco Express or One Stop, that would be madness, but when I'm going anywhere further.

I've been reluctant to do that in recent years, well aware that however far one travels, you can't help but take yourself with you which is a Johnsonian sort of conundrum. There is no escape. One can listen to Bach or Bowie but you can never quite become them. Lockdown was the perfect alibi to stay home, read books and be insular. But that cover has been blown, as it inevitably is being for those self-serving spivs we were unlucky enough to have in government when the plague was visited upon us. And now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.

My diary has never been fuller. Concerts, race meetings, walks. It's what you must do. I like the idea of the hermit disdaining the world and all that happens in it but you can't. If you're going to do that, you might as well believe in God.

Not Single Spies

 Claudius observed how,

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

And Wendy Cope noted how men are like buses in that having waited a long time for one, a few turn up at the same time. I might add that, not having written a poem for six months, I'm very suddenly surfeited with them and aware that 'surfeit' is an exception to 'i before e except after c' so there's another torpedo in the Bismarck of those who like rules.

One poem was earlier in the week, two were this morning, two more ideas have a few lines towards making a start and a sixth is only so far a title. The example below might be doggerel but such ephemera isn't going anywhere else and so the faults in the last stanza can stay like that.

The other one completed this morning is an old idea I never got round to but was I prompted to finally knock it out because it's in the same spirit of one poem suggesting others that link the three I'm yet to attempt which are related by all means but, oh no, not a dreaded 'sequence'. It is Derrida Re-Reading 'Re-Reading Derrida on a Train' on a Train, a very 'in' joke implying the infinite possibilities of 're-reading' had I somehow miraculously seen Jacques Derrida with a copy of my 2000 booklet, Re-Reading Derrida on a Train.

It's madness, I know, but if Paul Muldoon can get away with what he does these days we might as well all indulge ourselves howsoever we choose.  And 'light verse' did Wendy no harm at all.

The prompt came from thinking there could be a poem, called Reading a History of Writing, based on reading Steven Roger Fischer's The History of Writing. I thought of Writing The History of Reading but before doing that, surely one ought to have written The History of Reading, so that's the third idea. But, here's the kicker. That could be the history of Reading in Berkshire. I know it's a bit late to be so avant-garde and ludic but, like so many of them, it's only myself I have to please by now.

So exactly what comes of this boom in creative activity very much remains to be seen. It might not generate a 'personal best' but something satisfying there is in producing anything that isn't abandoned.

--

The wireless played this this morning,

 

and, had I been on Face the Music, I could easily have jumped in thinking it was Beethoven's Grosse Fuge. Tortelier, Casals, Stern et al is a superstar line-up to rival that brilliant Menuhin-Oistrakh Bach double concerto. Such things seem to work in collaborations like this whereas a football team including Pele, George Best, Cruyff, Gullit, Cantona and Maradona surely would not. Neither would a pop group with Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Dusty Springfield, Ronnie Spector, Gladys Knight and Candi Staton. But this works fine.

I can't see D.956 on the shelves whereas there are two Grosse Fuge's. Momox can send me a disc of this that, with some compensation Amazon insisted on awarding me, will arrive for 71p.

I know that Amazon are tax avoiding rascals that exploit their employees appallingly but they treat their customers will much ingratiation. A couple of shirts I ordered recently were made in Nepal, dispatched from Leipzig and promised for Saturday delivery having only been clicked on on Friday. And because they missed that ambitious promise and only got them here by Monday, I was compensated. It didn't matter. I've not had the occasion to wear one yet. I only hope the compensation doesn't come out of the poor courier's paltry pay but it would come as no surprise if that's how Amazon works.  

Time and other stories

I'm not entirely against the way that some novels mix up time so that one isn't told everything in strict, linear, chronological order. There can be reasons for it. 

Time might not be quite what those of us who think we're trapped in it think it is but there's more reason to believe in it than there is, say, God.

But, on the other hand, while I can deal with some flashbacks, a bit of back story and a certain amount of shifting about, Maggie O'Farrell's After You'd Gone splinters time into such small fragments that it risked blurring into an eternal present.

Maybe that is the point but I will always remember reading the blurb on Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, in the 1970's, that (something like) not a word was wasted. That is certainly what a good poem should be like and there's no reason why a novel, which is also a piece of creative writing shouldn't be so, too. While After You'd Gone is rich in well-observed circumstantial detail, it's not obvious how the axototl that John keeps in a glass tank contributes to the story.

We are told that you can't mention a gun in a story unless it's going to be used or, I dare say, significantly not used. So, what does the axototl (pictured) do apart from cast a mournful eye on Alice like an unwitting harbinger of doom. Again, maybe that is the point but it's not for the reader to justify everything the author throws in, it's for the author to justify it to the reader.

I don't want to become a 'critic', it's an awful word that implies fault finding and I only want to enjoy good books and good writing. Maggie O'Farrell brings as much convincing 'life' to this book as she does to those others recently mentioned even if The Marriage Portrait remains the top recommendation.

Such a shortfall of redemption comes far too late and is less than we are offered in King Lear. Is that the point, or is it more straight-forwardly more like Romeo and Juliet in that there, but for foolish loyalties, could have been a genuine and credible attempt at 'love'.

Not all of us believe that 'what will survive of us is love' and it was most gratifying to read Wendy Cope, among all her other homespun wisdom, writing to D. M. Thomas in 1985 that,

What will survive of us will be quoted out of context.

 

I dare say we will all continue to believe in what we want to believe despite all evidence to the contrary. It might have seemed to me I found evidence that After You'd Gone wasn't a good novel but it still worked. There's a bit more to it than applying rules to such things. That's not how it works at all. 

Poetry Biographies

 The majority of Poetry Lives, I think it's fair to say, are biographies written by those acolytes or academics who see fit to do so. They aren't always approved of by their subjects' admirers and can suffer under a burden of detail, speculation, partiality and interpretation.

Not so many are written by the poets themselves and, although first hand, they risk being equally limited by their specific point of view.

Wendy Cope's Life, Love and The Archers doesn't make any claim to be an autobiography - it's 'recollections' - but it's as much as we need, or possibly want, to feel we know her well enough. She's not one to make great claims for her own significance but that's also very much part of the story and so she is better fitted than most to tell her own story in short essays like these.

There are books about other poets that go into more excruciating detail, analysing poems, that leave one feeling as if one knows less rather than more for having read them or perhaps even that one had stopped caring by page 200.  

It's no indicator that Wendy Cope wasn't T.S. Eliot that her poems or her life don't require copious footnotes, it makes the opposite point, if anything. But, no, not everybody can state their case quite so clearly. 

I'm not such a great admirer of Wendy's work but she's a long way above the likes of Geoffrey Hill. Not everybody sees fit to make themselves so accessible but neither are they capable of leaving so much left unsaid while we are left in no doubt she knows it, and she trusts that we know, too.

Absolutely top marks. This is how the Life of a Poet should be presented. It is the sort of book that looks as if it was easy to compile but there are several reasons why I hope I don't try to use it as a template for anything I might do. 

Some things that look as if they were easy to do prove not to be so. There is a lot of art in appearing artless.

I am still, even now, suffering from the late 1970's 'new critisism' orthodoxy we were inducted into at university that the text, the poem, is all there is, the Roland Barthes 'Death of the Author' and the verboten of any biographical footnote or context. I know that is nonsense and just a phase that Literary Theory was going through but my poems, I'd like to think, are artefacts made of sentences and syntax and whatever prompted them to be written can be jettisoned like one of those big, lower parts of a rocket that propelled a capsule towarsds the Moon in 1969.

But, mostly, one needs to be 'somebody', somebody like Wendy, for anybody else to want to read it. It doesn't have to be like that. A greengrocer could have led a more interesting life than a poet but not seen fit, or had the time, to write it down.  

The Fine Art of Cashing Out and other stories

One can hardly complain about the Cash Out facility offered by bookmakers. If you're in with a chance, you can collect some winnings but nowhere near the whole lot and quit while you're ahead.

In the 2015 Cup Final, Arsenal were 3-0 up on Aston Villa in the last few minutes and I looked set to collect at 12/1, or 16's, but kept watching the match rather than go to the computer and cash out 90% of what I was due. Silly, inattentive me. Arsenal gratuitously added a fourth goal in the 96th minute and I collected nothing.

Last night, sure that confident Fulham could beat Leeds, who have other things on their mind, 2-0, I took the 10/1. It went 2-0 with more than half an hour to go, though. I couldn't trust that there'd be no more goals but the cash out offer wasn't tempting enough. I gave it a few more minutes, thought I'd blown it when Mitrovic's header went in but he was offside. Right, that's it. I can't stand any more of this. I cashed out at 7/2.

What I could have done was switch it off and not watch. There weren't any more goals to justify my safety first strategy but at least it relieved the tension and helped the struggling account a little bit. But, what can you do. The problem was 2-0 arriving too early. At 85 minutes, I'd have braved it out.

Fulham weren't that brilliant, I didn't think. Two goals that would have been Goal of the Season in the 1970's were much more the sort of things that happen these days in what is a faster, more highly technical, pinball sort of game. Leeds had more chances but didn't take them. Fulham's passing went astray too often. At 12/1, they are not a bet to win the cup.

It is to be hoped that I've got back to winning ways on the turf before Cheltenham in thirteen days time. Expecting four horses to win at one meeting is asking a lot but Mr. Nicholls uses Wincanton as his local cash point and so maybe we'll gather some ammunition from them.

--

Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand that First Held Mine was a good novel, well worth reading, but not quite the highly recommended The Marriage Portrait.

One can see the two stories gradually coming together. The time shift between two generations is slightly disconcerting with Lexie, Innes and Felix the older, 1960's generation younger than Elina and Ted but that's part of its 'art'. 'Art', as in painting, is also what it is superficially about, namedropping big names from its febrile world, not least Muriel Belcher, proprietor of the Colony Club in Soho, but it's more about family and in particular motherhood. Those parts are especially sensitively written although we might have been spared quite such a vivid description of a baby filling its nappy to beyond overflowing. She remains a joy to read though and I'll move swiftly on to the next, stopping off from time to time to enjoy prose by Wendy Cope.

-- 

Wendy Cope, one might have thought, might have done more if she felt like it. Hugely popular, mostly for being so apparently kindly and accessible, perhaps she's a bit like John Betjeman or Alan Bennett, neither of who were quite as harmless as some of their admirers sometimes took them to be. 

Life, Love and The Archers is recollections, reviews and other prose, of which I've so far only read the early memoirs of family. But it is the very paragon of the sort of book that one can entirely trust in. It's not going to be Nietzsche but in her gentle way she's likely to be a bit subversive, a bit sceptical and very genuine.

We sort of know that Wendy could have been more than what she was sold as, with enough acumen to be more than an ironist but her art involves not needing to have been. Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis was such a throwaway poem but one could base an essay on the significance of it being Kingsley Amis, not Larkin, not Eliot, not Sylvia or Ted. It might imply that the unreconstructed Kingsley would have been the sort of husband who didn't make his own cocoa or it could mean that Wendy is modest enough to only make a bedtime drink for a less significant poet.

The feeling we are likely to get from her prose looks like being that that we get from her poems - of some comfort but knowingly so and less deceived. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

I gave up reading Oliver Kamm in The Times on Saturdays quite some time ago, abandoning the self-congratulation I had once delighted in at the thought that I was appreciating informed views on grammatical finer points and no longer able to reconcile the apparent tautology involved in liberal pedantics. I need to arrive at the higher form of self-congratulation of finishing the crossword, and that came early last Saturday, recovering from the early error of mis-spelling 'Lusitania'..
But I saw he began with a reference to George Orwell last Saturday and so proceeded, with care. But Orwell seemed only like an attention-grabber in his first line and none of the rest of his latest complaint had anything to do with either Orwell's writing or the several set-piece ideas that have been lifted from Animal Farm or 1984. But of course, my intellect rates at less than the square root of Oliver's so I may have missed the point.
Certainly, there are some who can't identify the passive voice and charge writers with having used it when they haven't and, by all means, there is much to be lamented about grammatical standards these days, which includes most days on Radio 5 sports reports and further afield at the BBC. But Newspeak wasn't about the passive voice and none of Oliver's complaints are about linguistic misuse either diagnosed or satirized by Orwell. For one who sets such store by the precision of his analysis, he looked alarmingly loose to me last week and so ought not to be finding fault with others. I think he is beginning to struggle and if next week he invites us in by citing Camus, I'll be more wary.
-
The TLS can also seem a bit too pleased with itself and complacent. Wendy Cope expressed dissatisfaction with their survey of the New Elizabethans on the letters page, where anybody worth being appears once- and hopefully only once- in their life, on the grounds that it drew attention to a few at the expense of the many. Well, yes, of course it does, as does any other mention of anybody. It might not be fair, or right, or proper but it is what happens.
I should have read Ali Smith before but I hadn't. The results from their questionnaire decided me to require of a friend a borrow of anything by her and Autumn is confirmed herewith as a tremendous book and Ali is up for paperback bargain-grabbing henceforth.
I'm sure I'd prefer to line up with Wendy rather than the TLS but on this occasion can't.

and I was also grateful to them for their belated review of Rory Waterman's new-ish book of poems, Sarajevo Roses.
It seems longer than it should have been since I added anybody to the list of contemporary poets I'm seriously interested in and, born 1981, he might be the youngest yet. If I allowed it to, I might find the Faber Modern Poets volume that I bought when it was new, featuring selections from Andrew Motion, Craig Raiue, C.H. Sisson, Tom Paulin, Robert Wells and Andrew Waterman (and I'm sure no such exclusively male book could be envisaged now), making me feel older than I want to be because Andrew was Rory's father.
I'm not sure that it does, though, and I enjoy the continuity, which made me try to think of poetry being handed on a generation, perhaps in not such a dissimilar style. Thinking of two or three generations of footballers, cricketers or horse racing people is easy and the Scudamores and D'Oliviera dynasty are ready examples. But if there's Freida, daughter of Sylvia, I reckon I could cause ambulances to come running over the fields if I knocked on the door of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and said that William Davenant was son of William Shakespeare. They don't take kindly to such treason but the only reason I decided against it was that it looks too much like a publicity stunt by Davenant, otherwise I like the idea.
There must be others but books by the Watermans are on their way here and anticipated with some, erm, anticipation. And so with Sean O'Brien's Europa due any day, racing to get here before About Larkin ft. Move Over, Darling, The Perfect Book very grateful for all the politeness with which it is being received, the poetry year, which rarely gets off to a quick start, is underway with some prospects. 

Signed Poetry Books - Wendy Cope

As a bloke poet, faced with the history of Eng Lit in which the vast majority of canonical names are also blokes, one sometimes feels pressured to give special attention to female poets even if 8 out of one's favourite 10 poets, at the very least, are male. (The two are Duffy and Plath, if you really want to know).

The discussion goes on forever about the socio-political reasons why this might be so and I'd like not to involve myself too deeply in that discussion because it's the words I'm in it for, just the words.

So I don't include dear Wendy here as a token, to try to get my quota of lady poets up, it is because I admire her work. She has gained a massive reputation on the basis of a small body of work, much of which one might call 'light verse' and that is quite an achievement. This copy of If I Don't Know was bargainesque on e-Bay and it's a great book even if someone called Tim seems to have tired of it.