Why I Like Poetry

Of course, I don't like all poetry any more than I like all Northern Soul, all horse racing, everything about Scotland or Jacob Rees-Mogg. If I had to choose between books and music, I'd probably get it wrong and say books because eventually, I'm sure, I'd miss music more. But if I had to choose between music and poetry, poetry has no chance whatsoever. It's just that, at its best, poetry is a very wonderful thing, made only of words, on a page and/or heard aloud. It doesn't need an orchestra, amplification, paint, canvas and brushes or anything more solid than language. And language is not always a very solid thing.
Having been at various times, and in a low grade, footballer, cricketer, bike rider and other things to an even less exalted standard, poetry is what I'm left with, my output as frugal as it ever was and not much of it to be found these days beyond this website. I don't mind that. The answer to the question I was asked at a university interview in 1978 - 'Who do you write for- an audience or for yourself?'- is obvious now, it is for myself. And so as long as I'm happy, that is all that matters, except, on those rare occasions when I read my own poems, it can sometimes seem completely dreadful, sometimes look okay and then, once in a while I remember an apposite line, wonder who wrote it, realize it was me and then feel inordinately pleased with myself. The only real confirmation one gets is from a review or if someone takes the trouble to say that a particular piece struck them as being worthwhile. So, thanks to those that have ever done that.
But, poetry is not always a good thing and there is a misconception that calling something 'poetry' is an endorsement. While it might be meant that way, the fact that something is poetry is no guarantee of its worth. I don't mean Pam Ayers and the like. Pam is fine by me and I hope her teeth are now well maintained. I recently bought the Collected William Empson, a poet whose work I was sure was exactly my sort of thing, a book I possibly thought I already had before realizing I didn't and one of the few poets whose Collected Poems is shorter than mine would be. But I don't like it at all. Stiff, mannered and unrewardingly difficult, it might have been the fashion once but it's no surprise to find it isn't any longer.
Which makes me think of the vibrant, latest generation of poets that were born into a world of allusive cleverness. While they are admired for their individual 'voices', the new ways in which they see the world and all the benefit that many have accrued from their Creative Writing courses, so much bewildering variety, inventiveness and studied style eventually amounts to a sameness. Oh, no, don't tell me that this one is 'different', 'new' or somehow invigorating. All the others are like that, too.
The problem with poetry is that it is very precious- and rarely more precious than it is to its author. I'm not usually a fan of haiku in English but the late Brian Wells wrote one about a poetry reading at which every poet privately thinks their poems are the best. At least Brahms had the decency to destroy some of his music because he thought it didn't compare with Beethoven. But before this turns into 'Why I don't like poetry', here are some examples of why I like it.
Thom Gunn is the example that made me want to be a poet in the same way that George Best made me want to be a footballer. I find it hard to believe that anybody suddenly takes to any activity without the example of a precursor. The loosening of Gunn's attitude from existential, separate protagonist, through masterpieces like My Sad Captains, to his later poetry of empathy, community and sharing, reflected in the way he moves between strictly metrical and free verse and stations in between ended all the stand-off debate about whether poetry should rhyme and scan or not. Because there was one who did both consummately.
Poems like Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden by Julia Copus, Martin Mooney's Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (amongst others), Muldoon's magnificent Incantata, the whole idea of Rosemary Tonks and much of Elizabeth Bishop, and, of course, Larkin in An Arundel Tomb and in any number of other places, were and remain ideals of some sort of artistic zenith with no other means of support than ideas exquisitely realized. But, to quote some lines, which I'll do from memory and only then check, the ending of Latinists by Sean O'Brien, his evocation of a schoolroom and the teacher of that dry, old, exhilarating essential language, explains the non-plussed with chiming erudition,
When the stare you award me
Takes longer than Rome did 
To flower and vanish, I notice
The bells are not working in heaven today.
And I very nearly got it right. There won't be many others who have the choice between checking it in a copy signed, 'Hull June '97' or one inscribed as 'Sean's reading copy' that I saved from e-Bay. Because I don't regard poetry as such as 'something I like' but rather something without which I wouldn't even be me. It isn't my own poetry I like that much, I still think I should have been a journalist, something even less reputable. No,
The great thing about poetry is that it was always the finest thing in school, university or ever after, to do whatever you wanted to do, be whatever you wanted to be and associate yourself with whoever you wanted to because even if a good many poets were reprobates, mavericks, ne'er-do-wells or even deeply conservative types of a religious disposition, it was 'homework' or 'culture' or highly respected and it is Shakespeare and so, somehow, one is credited with having the moral high ground. And, as Ken Dodd would say, 'they couldn't touch you for it'
And so, that seems like a good place to end Why I Like. I hope you've had at least a small fraction of the enjoyment I've had writing them if you've been reading them.
The illustration here is The Poet by Fernando Botero (1987). 

Why I Like Jacob Rees Mogg

The star of the BBC's documentary series, The House of Commons, has been the MP for North Somerset. He is known in parliament as the 'member for the C18th' and I've rarely seen anybody happier in their work, gleefully filibustering to deliberately subvert the work of the democratic process, glorying in arcane procedure and checking his speeches in the draft of Hansard to correct any errata and re-enjoy the flow his own 'mellifluous' prose. Although apparently very self-conscious, he is either blissfully unaware of the absurdity of it all or, more likely, he relishes it.
Jacob Rees Mogg might be regarded as a throwback to a bygone age but which age that exactly was is hard to say, and perhaps there has always been a vogue for fogeyism that he would have followed whatever age he had lived in. If you think you've seen him somewhere before, it might be Cuthbert Cringeworthy you are thinking of, the swot in The Bash Street Kids. 
Of course, I'm not a devoted fan and I'd be reluctant to vote for his euro-sceptic and other right-wing principles if there was a sack of gravel standing against him but his quaint demeanour, intense desire to express himself in carefully considered, grammatically correct sentences sets him apart from his colleagues, the sinister Michael Gove and the equally unpleasant George Osborne whose role seems to be to make David Cameron look statesmanlike. And they do.
I was lucky enough to catch an old Have I Got News for You on Dave last night and I was impressed by Jacob's performance. He remained demure and unflappable in the company of Jo Brand, Hislop, Merton and Kevin Bridges. He raised his eyebrows a lot, looked about a little nervously but, honestly, it didn't look as if he knew what Jo was talking about most of the time. He might not know much about gangsta rap but he knew all the stuff about Westminster. He is infinitely preferable to the bluster and bombast of Boris and his innate sense of entitlement inures him against any criticism of unworldliness, Old Etonian privilege or downright weirdness. That is all a part of the act. And it is probably not even an act, not a bit of it.
The BBC programme highlighted the great ovation accorded to Ed Miliband by the Conservative members whenever he enters the Commons, it being their way of indicating that he is their greatest electoral asset. The Labour Party could do worse than reply with posters featuring Gove, Osborne and Rees Mogg if the election campaign is to be as negative as expected.
But Jacob's devotion to Westminster and the political process is likely to mean that we don't get to see enough celebrity appearances. He is probably not going to follow the populist strategy of Boris, for who (and Jacob would say 'for whom', I dare say) any and every publicity stunt is the air that he breathes. Both model themselves on classical templates but from very different positions. Jacob's studied antiquity is a fine and elegant thing whereas Boris is boorish, muddled and incoherent. And so it is unlikely that, if I were to become controller of BBC1, I could realize my ambition of replacing the dull, ex-pro pundits on Match of the Day with a panel of Jacob Rees Mogg and John Cooper-Clarke.

Why I Like Scotland

I don't like whisky, I don't like bagpipes and I didn't used to like Billy Bremner but I like Scotland. I used to like haggis very much before becoming vegetarian although was less impressed at a Bed & Breakfast place that the vegetarian option was fish pie.  There is such a thing as a vegetarian haggis but that seems to miss the point.
Of the tiny fraction of my life that has been spent outside of England, inevitably the most visits have been to nearby Wales, France and Scotland and I found no evidence for the racial stereotype of parsimoniousness north of the border and was met with the most generous hospitality each time. I'm not much of an admirer of nationalism of any kind and it would be better to define Scotland by its Scottishness rather than that it is 'not England' in much the same way that UKIP might benefit from celebrating the United Kingdom, by which many seem to mean 'England', rather than just 'not Europe'. But if the Nationalists don't want to be part of the UK, perhaps they could be re-branded as South West Norway. If you follow the lines of Loch Ness and the highlands one can see that geologically, the North Sea is a mere aberration in what would otherwise be a coherent land mass.
But I always had the impression that Scotland had a more rigorous education system, a clearer setting out of certain laws and a culture in which being a poet, a 'makar', was not something that needed excusing or regarded as marginal but was naturally a part of their lives. In England it is treated as 'highbrow' or a bit different and there would be a difficulty in assimilating the idea that Pat Nevin could appear on a quiz show about art while also being a professional footballer.
It's not all scenery and photogenic landscapes although even the cities have a doughty authority, from Arthur's Seat and the well-mannered architectural design of Edinburgh where Miss Jean Brodie speaks a finer English than anyone in England, or Glasgow's imposing necropolis. From the kingdom of Fife and the lilting accent of Kirkcaldy, one can move up the coast to the historic glamour of St. Andrews (sadly, to their slight demerit, the Scots are credited with the invention of golf) to Inverness, which is a hidden treasure, not far from where I picked some of the best food I've ever had, their raspberries. Down the west coast, Oban is an impressive gateway to Mull and the Western Isles by the formidable Caledonian MacBrayne ferries, to the haven of Iona, the legendary Fingal's Cave and all those places like Benbecula from the shipping forecast.
I believe that now the long, last stretch up to John O'Groats is economically not viable and is mainly there for cyclists and other End-to-End travellers to have to cover before arriving to find the John O'Groats Hotel is boarded up and there is a postcard shop and a small fleet of fishing boats in the harbour.
Scotland wouldn't be the only country with a romantic view of itself, nor without an abrasive element that finds itself a little too proud of being who they are. I was at Hampden Park for the match that marked the opening of the refurbished stadium when World Champions, France, were the guests who turned up with Thierry Henri, Laurent Blanc, Lilian Thuram and those casually took the hosts apart by two goals to nil. It was just my luck, having heard all the stories about the friendliness and sporting Scottish supporters to sit next to the only two exceptions to the rule. The racism, bile and hatred that came out of the little vermin and his girlfriend can't be repeated here but at the end, he turned to the French people sitting behind us and offered some kind words of congratulation. But for 90 minutes we had been invoked to stand up if you hated England, heard repeated choruses of how Edward I had been sent back 'tae think again' some 700 years earlier and Kevin Keegan was advised to cheer up, to the tune of Daydream Believer, despite being England manager.
But the storm-lashed islands that look so idyllic in better weather and the dreich cities on rainy days are home to an admirable resilience and clarity. On arriving in Edinburgh once (it might have been Glasgow) we were walking through a shopping precinct on Friday lunchtime and a man came flying backwards out of a pub door. Nobody seemed to mind. By 1 pm, it wasn't easy to find a spare table in the pub. It was hard to say if the weekend had begun early or if the previous ones had never ended. Nobody seemed too concerned that such a session followed by a Mars Bar in batter supper resulted in some English advice that life expectancy in some areas was less than 60. And I admire that attitude.
I admire the Old Man of Hoy; the last inhabitants of St. Kilda; Ochilview Park, home of Stenhousemuir FC, with its eponymous view of the Ochil Hills; Don Paterson, James Macmillan and the Jesus & Mary Chain.
On a coach excursion in Austria, the tour guide had to go through the bus checking the nationality of each of our party.
'Are you English?' 'Yes.'
'Are you English?' 'Yes.'
'Are you English?' 'No. I'm Scottish.'
Well, exactly.

Why I Like Astronomy

The Sun is 400 times bigger then the Moon and also 400 times further away and that is why a total eclipse is as remarkable as it is, the Sun blacked out by the dark side of the Moon, which we otherwise couldn't see, but still the fiery corona visible, lashing out from its surface.
I was a junior astronomer with my plastic telescope that cost 3/6, having had my dad explain the Plough, Orion and Cassiopeia on dark winter nights in Nottingham. I was taken to a department store to see Father Christmas, aged 5 or 6, and was told to think of what I wanted for Christmas because that was what he would ask.
I said I'd like some books on Astronomy.
Well, ask him for that, then, I was advised. But I knew he wouldn't have any and I felt a bit embarrassed about it, either on my own account or for him, so when the moment came, I just said I'd like some books. And when I unwrapped it, it was a pop-up book of Cinderella. I was disappointed but it was my fault. But Father Christmas did bring the Observers Book of Astronomy and another one called  Stars, both of which I still have as well as one I authored myself at school, called Space.
There is less point in stargazing now, living in the city, whose lights don't shine but glare. Anything below a second magnitude star is barely visible and so once you've looked at the main constellations, and checked if any planets are about, that's it. But it is still a minor thrill to follow the tail of the Great Bear down to find Arcturus, alpha Bootes, which was always my favourite star. I thought I'd once seen Antares, in Scorpio, and even Fomalhaut, low down on the horizon, not usually very easy to see from our latitude but the days of comet Halle-Bopp were probably a highlight, in the 1990's, a smear of light over in the East for a few weeks.
Betelgeuse, in Orion's shoulder, is likely to come to the end of its life soon, which means any time in the next million years. It would be a supernova, visible in the day time, for a short while before disappearing from sight. It would be odd to see Orion with Betelgeuse suddenly missing and in a way I hope I don't live to see that, although it would be quite an occasion. It's unlikely we will see that, none of us, no human at all.
Because all the speculation about space travel and properly colonizing any other place in space is absurd. It takes eight minutes for light to get here from the Sun, over three quarters of an hour from Jupiter and 7.8 years from Sirius. It does seem amazing that it is only just over 100 years since the Wright brothers achieved any sort of flight and sixty years later men had flown to the Moon and back. And, thus, if such progress could continue exponentially, perhaps we could fly at the speed of light and reach nearby stars in a decade but they might not have suitably accommodating planets to land on when we got there.
The length of time we have been on this planet is a microscopic fraction of the time the Earth has been here and there is every chance we might not last as long again into the future. We will have come and gone in a blink and our chances of being here when any passing visiting aliens arrive are thus very slim indeed, never mind any chance we might have of finding anybody else out there.
We speculate and imagine ourselves the measure of it, measuring everything, quite naturally, in terms of ourselves. But we are not clever enough. A chair isn't clever enough to know it is a chair and that it was made by a carpenter and the same applies to us, we are not meant to know why we are here, and can't.
And so, rather than resort to existential anxiety, it is preferable to look and enjoy. All the stars that make up the constellations are in our galaxy, the rest of the galaxy being in the Milky Way, the blurry band of light that is our view of the spiral of stars that we are somewhere towards the edge of. The Arcturus that we see is Arcturus 37 years ago, but the Andromeda Galaxy we see is the Andromeda Galaxy of 2.5 million years ago, and the furthest known galaxy is apparently 13 billion light years away, so, realistically, travelling at the speed of light for 13 billion years, we are not going to get there, are we. According to much science fiction, if we did get there, we would find beings living there that looked like highly magnified locusts or mosquitoes. I don't think we would. I just think that shows the limits of our imagination, based as it is on things we have seen.
But whether one enjoys the glorious pictures of such things, wonders if one could do a good time trial on a bike with the 1000 mph winds on Neptune behind you, or just appreciate the art work of a little Nottingham schoolboy from the 1960's, I will always be grateful for the nights out in the garden when my dad showed me the Plough.
The other good thing about Astronomy, of course, is that by studying the stars, you know what is going to happen to you every day, or you can just look it up in the paper. I'm a Libra and I've just looked up my horoscope on horoscope.com and it says,
Obstacles may arise in the course of your chores when machines break down and interfere with your efficiency.
And, there you go, that proves it. The stars know what the computers are like in our office. Although, to be fair, they could say that every day.

Why I Like Northern Soul

Originally, the subject of this piece was going to be Why I Like Pop Music but that is not a very good theme since everybody likes pop music, don't they. The only question is which pop music, tellingly whether one means Queen or The Velvet Underground. 

It is more a matter of which genre. I could have picked reggae, Motown or glam rock but I'd most like to write about Northern Soul, how I was deprived of the Wigan Casino and how, at this late stage, I like to think I belatedly keep the faith.
At our school, among a troupe of sullen 14 year olds, it had dawned on me that the rock music orthodoxy was not the right answer. I realized that I didn't care if Deep Purple were the loudest, Judas Priest the most satanic or who was credited with the longest scream. I simply didn't know who was the best guitarist and as we dutifully sloped off to see Led Zeppelin's film, The Song Remains the Same, I knew deep down inside that the other kids who bought Motown Chartbusters albums, watched Colour My Soul with Jimmy Helms and knew about Bob Marley before we did had it right. I thus spent the year of the third form listening almost exclusively, it seems to me, to Beethoven and Shostakovich, before re-emerging to buy Al Green cassettes, Soul Motion and a few Motown compilations.
I can't claim to have been any part of a Northern Soul scene, which is probably a mercy because that dour 14 year old, wrapperd up in his Shostakovich String Quartets while reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn wouldn't have been fit for the flamboyant exuberance of the back flip or any other of the requisite dance floor maneouevres. At that stage, I was aware of Donnie Elbert, Tami Lynn's I'm Gonna Run Away From You, and Archie Bell & the Drell's Here I Go Again from the UK hit parade but obscurity being the point of northern soul classics, one wasn't supposed to know about Frank Wilson's Do I Love You (Indeed I do), now widely regarded as the most sought after masterpiece, and thus one didn't. But I'm glad we do now.
I have long cherished the search for the rare, non mainstream classic whether it was in progressive rock, folk, baroque or any other genre. To list among your all-time favourites a few things that nobody else has ever heard of has traditionally been an especially recherche type of oneupmanship but in northern soul the discovery of rare 1960's Detroit records was the whole enterprise. These are heartfelt expression of love, but more commonly heartbreak, that were once a hidden cache of pop music treasure and the northern soul movement made it its business to find them. A quick check on just how good they were can be made by comparing Doris Troy's I'll Do Anything (He Wants Me To Do) with the cover version by Lenny Gamble. Lenny Gamble was Tony Blackburn and the point often made that a cover version needs to add something to the earlier version was rarely better made.

Northern Soul was a tribe and we all needed a tribe to belong to in those days even if it was only the tribe of maverick outsiders and so one can only admire it from the outside and in hindsight. There was nothing the least bit pretentious about the music because it had all been and gone and been forgotten once. It wasn't being produced with its new audience in mind. Many of the singers couldn't be traced for 'where are they now' purposes. It was dance for dance's sake, a celebration of the music and artists who, rather than traverse the USA in their own jet aeroplane to bore stadiumsful to a standstill with their status, antics and dull, self-indulgent doodlings, had simply turned up and done a turn before returning to their day jobs. Why would anyone buy a Coldplay album when you have Linda Grinder's Goodbye Cruel Love. We will only find that out when someone cares to write about Why I Buy Records Even Though I'm not Interested in Music.

Because for all the energy and athleticism of the dancing, and not all the songs were about the boy-girl relationship in crisis, the main theme for me was dancing on your own spectacularly 'breaking down the walls of heartache', because what else would you do, the greatest of them all being Timi Yuro's show-stopping It'll Never Be Over For Me. 

Why I Like Horse Racing

For many of us 'of a certain age', our interest in and first knowledge of sport came from Grandstand on Saturday afternoons. This might have been more of a boy thing then than a girl thing, too, but however much progress has been made in women's sport of all kinds (and I have seen more live women's football than men's in the last few years), there weren't many girls who played football then but hats off to Rosamund Lane in Nottingham and Caroline Cresswell in Gloucester.
Grandstand made it seem normal to be watching motor-cross, the indoor athletics from RAF Cosford featuring the great Ray Smedley, or a mudbath entitled Rugby League which was usually Featherstone Rovers versus Wakefield Trinity but you couldn't tell which was which.
It was the horse racing, however, that most grabbed my imagination, included then among mainstream sport rather than the esoteric specialist subject it has been hived off into since. It was the numbers shown on the screen before each race that in some mysterious way were portents of what was going to happen that was first so beguiling. I liked numbers in those days, I was a mathematician before I was ever interested in words. One horse would have changed from 3/1, through 5/2 and then be 9/4 whereas another had started out at 7/2, briefly been 100/30 but then gone back to being 7/2, and Bar had changed from 25/1 to 16/1 but there were two fewer horses listed.
My grandpa, who liked horse racing, explained to me about Bar but I didn't quite get it. And it was he who took me to my first race meeting, at Stratford circa 1974. I slipped away to have a few shillings on a race, unsure if I would get told off or if the bookie would take the bet. I backed two because I wasn't sure. They were called Seldom Daunted and Straitjacket and at the second last hurdle, I think it was, one of them in second place fell and brought the other one down. That wasn't enough to put me off and over the next 40 years, more of my money became bookmaker's money. We lived next door to a bookie at the time. He had a Jag and we had a Hillman Hunter. I never quite took the point. It is an article of faith and as long as it doesn't become a ruinous addiction, it is a pastime that can sometimes pay you to do it. It is a good feeling to see your horse is going ominously well, the jockeys on the others starting to get more agitated, then you put in a good jump at the last and you can start working out how much you are due as the gap between yours and the rest stretches out into a satisfied feeling. There is nobody more smug than them that said what would happen and then it did, and you are a meaningless amount of money better off.
Because, increasingly, it has been the winter game that I like, the novice hurdlers spotted in the Autumn that will make their way to Cheltenham in March, and we will see which of them will mature into the top hurdlers of their generation and which were only really doing their apprenticeship towards a career over fences. There are goodies and baddies, which is a shame because I'm sure that all the horses I take against are wonderful animals to know. But sentiment mustn't overide science and just because you want The New One to win the Champion Hurdle, one can't jeopardize this year's profit so far when Faugheen has until now looked nothing less than a machine.
The louche, dodgy side of the industry is part of its dark glamour. Just because Barney Curley is not so much in evidence that doesn't mean there aren't plots being hatched. There is money involved and it's a professional sport so there is no point imagining that it is all Corinthian, healthy and good for you. And since I am against hunting, shooting and fishing and later this evening will add another animal charity to my direct debits, yes, in an absolutely perfect world, we might not make horses race against each other. But, without wanting to veer off into a moral debate, those horses are bred for racing and most are well cared for. I have nothing at all to do with the industry that breeds animals for eating. As a vegetarian for twenty years, I no longer understand how one can put a fellow animal in one's mouth, chew it up and swallow it. I'd rather eat my own foot. But I don't know how that could be explained to a carnivore, like a lion, for instance.
No, virtually all other sport has fallen off my agenda since I stopped being a footballer, a cricketer, a runner, a cyclist or a pool player in some low grade of amateur involvement. If I go to the cricket, it's the crossword that really needs looking at; I didn't even know Fulham were playing Forest this week until I saw the result; if Ronnie gets knocked out of the snooker I lose interest very quickly and I try to keep up with the cycling partly in case anybody asks me about it. But horse racing is a different matter. Not much gets in between me and the telly of a Saturday afternoon from October to April these days and with tomorrow's Cheltenham meeting due to show us where some top candidates for the festival are, it should be better than usual.
If Peace & Co gets beaten in the first then I will be temporarily distraught but when the odds shrink to the likes of 4/9, it's not about the money. I only want to see his price for the festival contract further because I have a good value ticket for the Triumph Hurdle in my account. Surely, Dynaste  (1.50) must win tomorrow. Heaven knows, he deserves to.

Why I Like Handel

Several years ago, if asked (and I rarely was), I would have said that if 'classical' music was the Derby then Bach is the winner by 5 lengths, with Handel just ahead of the rest of the field. I don't think much is going to affect my idea of the winner but perhaps the winning margin has narrowed a bit.
This set of New Year discourses is not meant to be about my favourite things but things I like. Of course I like Bach, and admire him beyond just about anything else but, in the same way that one perhaps admired David Bowie but loved Marc Bolan, you can feel something different for Handel without questioning Bach's towering superiority.
They sound very similar, don't they, but whereas Bach is more profoundly Protestant, German and flawless, Handel is brighter, shinier and more glamorous and I think that is because he spent some formative years in Italy, brought Italian operatic style to England and was writing music for the box office more than the church.
Bach appears to have been capable of falling out with other musicians but Handel probably just outdoes him on anecdotes relating to their respective reputations for difficultness and repartee.
Auditioning one singer, presumably in the rehearsal room in the house in Brook Street, Handel's dissatisfaction reached such a level that the singer threatened to trample all over the great man's harpsichord, to which he replied, 'well, at least it will make a better sound than your singing'.
A man of gargantuan appetite, the record showing no trace of vegetarianism, modern biography inevitably has to mention that there is no trace of romantic involvement whatsoever. None of the lady singers he regularly employed and none of the men either are ever suggested as candidates for intimacy, which is unusual. That presumably leads many to assume some carefully guarded, clandestine homosexuality but I believe Isaac Newton was genuinely not interested in such diversions either and the fact that Handel was not possessed of the angelic good looks of Vivaldi doesn't mean he wouldn't have had the chance because Bach was no oil painting either(although he was, actually) and he produced nearly as many children as he did Cello Suites, Violin Sonatas and Partitas put together.
But Handel made fortunes and lost them, abandoning opera in favour of oratorio when the fashion changed, recycled a useful tune from an old work when he needed it for a new one and even managed to fall out with the librettist of Messiah long before Lennon & McCartney, Fleetwood Mac or the Everly Brothers ever thought of it.
Why I like Handel, however, is for his confidence, the dignity and the elegance that comes from that Age of Enlightenment (for those who could afford it), for the inventiveness of the interplay in the duets in the operas. I don't know if there is something English about it- he was as German as the king really, but I don't mind if, for once, my scepticism about patriotism is compromised if it is. I like standing up for the Hallelujah Chorus, which sounds fine coming from me who, forty years ago at school, dared not to stand for the National Anthem hoping against hope that the headmaster wouldn't notice a boy not standing in the fifth row back in the third form.
I don't know that my redeemer liveth and doubt if I have one but that doesn't detract from the aria and one really needs to go to a Messiah once in a while to be reminded what a ready-made album of Greatest Hits it was.
And Handel is one of a few things I like to think I share with or inherited from my mother. It seemed to be something one knew about when she was young, or it was for her, but I'm not sure it is quite so much an essential part of the culture now. That is something to be regretted.

Why I like Vermeer

You make your way through the streets of London, making sure you are not lost yet and know where you are going, finding a way not only from one place to the next but also through the crowds. This is a tourist and commercial place, that's why it's here, and the people who aren't there to be farmed for the cash in their pockets are those that are out to get it. These are still the streets of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair but they are no longer the cartoon mountebanks, charlatans and cutpurses but mostly less colourful, downgraded but nonetheless real, and in your way.
You can't really appreciate the architecture or the history you might be walking through because when you need to cross roads, they are nearly as dangerous as the pavement and so you check the cycle lane, the flow of traffic and any traffic lights are just about to change. So, you can get to Trafalgar Square which is forever full of teeming humanity which is why it is a favourite place for street performers and drama students who perform their statue acts in exchange for what I imagine is a lucrative payday, the latest acts being to apparently hang in mid-air held up only by a walking stick. There might be steel drums or a reggae backing track just beyond a violin student doing Bach partita and good luck to them.
In The National Gallery, you still need to pick a path through aimlessly wandering gatherers of cultural highlights, make sure you don't step into anyone absorbed in a Poussin and wait your turn if you want to read about what it is you are looking at. You might not want to see Van Gogh's swirling mental distress, roomsful of portraits of proud C17th dignitaries or all those dark Romantic landscapes of mountains, seas and moonlight. Deep inside the National Gallery is a small room with some also small C17th Dutch paintings by De Hooch, or attributed to Carel Fabritius or by their contemporaries and the greatest of them is Johannes Vermeer van Delft. It is usually quiet in there, the still, calm centre of a busy, noisy city and the serenity comes out of the paintings as much as the fact that not so many find their way this far in. At last, time can wait. It doesn't matter any more. The light comes from one side of the room, and spreads both illumination and shadow across it, and a girl is standing, or indeed sitting at a keyboard instrument. The texture of the fabric of her clothes or the upholstery on the chair are sublime and notice the spectacular detail of the silver tacks against the dark blue on the side of that sensational chair. It's not just that, though, because you know those paintings on the wall and on the virginal are hinting at a narrative and there will be a bit more to it than solitary leisure indoors on a bright, Spring day.
At the exhibition in 2013, Vermeer and Music: the art of Love and Leisure, there were only five Vermeers in the show but on entering the room they were in they immediately stood out. They were perhaps in one's eye-line anyway but they weren't given preferential lighting. Their exceptional radiance is due to a layering of paint (apparently) and the sort of painstaking work that makes the best things special, not least for the knowledge that the artist went to that trouble possibly for your sake.
In the 1990's, the most canvasses that could possibly be brought together from the mere 35, is it, acknowledged Vermeers were as close as The Netherlands and considerable thought was given to going there for the event. It was clearly at least a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity if not one never to be repeated. I didn't go and still sometimes wonder if I should have, the consolation being that I don't really know much about painting (as some might say applies to literature and music, too), I'm just one that 'knows what I like'.
It isn't some version of a New Age cure against tension and distress. I'm not convinced that art alone could prevent neurosis, anxiety or madness but if art plays a significant role in one's life then the very best of it takes on some magnificent status because most of the time one is looking at, listening to or reading things that aren't quite as good. And here is a girl who quite rightly is wondering why someone wants to paint her while she practises her sonata by Sweelinck,
pale and beautiful, at once
balancing calm and distress
as if played by Emma Thompson.
(There is no prize but a special mention could be made of the first person e-mailing in that identifies that misquotation)
Most of Vermeer's paintings are of quiet interiors, one with an artist sitting with his back to the other painter sitting behind him, whose painting we are looking at, and one with a possible reflection of the artist's face, that have the possibility of some self-reference in this most unknowable of artists, about who genuinely almost nothing is known. However, the cheap print that has been on my front room wall for all the 17 years I've been at this address, is the less representative House in Delft that still manages to include a woman indoors doing her needlework and one involved with less glamorous domestic chores but the architecture and brickwork makes a geometric pattern and you glimpse the life inside. It is very ordinary, and immacuately ordinary, somehow a bit like my own modest, terraced house except that not much needlework gets done in here and not many domestic chores either.
No, I don't know much about painting. I might be having a look at Whistler shortly having seen something to follow up recently but any list of my favourites would be an incoherent jumble that added up to no meaningful aesthetic but, at its best, not only for the silence (also available in Hammershoi's even quieter interiors, but also sometimes for the movement, the energy and the colour, it can be better than the relative clatter of music or words. But it is the equanimity, the understatement and the radiance that makes Vermeer the greatest painter, and, yes, then there's the torrential power of Maggi Hambling. But that is a different story.  


 

Why I Like...James Joyce

James Joyce's fiction takes us from the 'realism' of George Moore or Turgenev, through the modenist revolution of circa 1911 ('On or about December 1910 human character changed', Virginia Woolf), to new frontiers of his own making and finally to a limit from which there was nowhere else to go. It is a passage of literary history that would in most circumstances have taken three writers to achieve but he did it all by himself. One might say as much for Shakespeare or Beethoven but not for many others.
The James Joyce that I admire is that of Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist, the exile, the singer and the prodigious drinker. We were advised not to attempt to write about Ulysses or Finnegans Wake on the C20th Literature course at Lancaster in 1980/81 but that was probably for our own protection rather than from any lack of ambition. The course only put on a lecture on Joyce due to popular demand. But later Joyce, at least, was too dangerous for undergraduates.
The trajectory of Joyce's fiction is that of a stream becoming a river that becomes a flood and then an ocean. Even with Dubliners, it begins with The Sisters, less than 8 pages long, and the stories develop in length and depth before reaching its great consummation in the final pages of The Dead, which itself has grown from ordinary beginnings and through the heart-breaking story of how Gabriel can never compete for Gretta's love with Michael Furey, the young boy who had died for her.
A manuscript in the British Library shows Joyce's dense handwiting pouring out (possibly) Finnegans Wake and then writing across the text in the opposite direction, suggesting a ferocious creativity not only having the work fully formed in his mind but able to get it all down. However, had he lived, it was his intention to return to something more recognizably 'traditional', having taken the adventure as far as it could go. Like Picasso's blue and pink periods, it is not necssearily in the most ground-breaking work that Joyce is best.
Because, for all the complexity and scale of his monumental avant-garde prose, it is in the understatement, the ironic distance, done with such knowing lucidity that Joyce writes the best prose fiction in the language.
Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet.
and
It was well for her that she had not to attend to the ladies also.
are not ambitious narrative sentences but see the character from the outside in words she would use herself. The Dead continues towards its luminous ending, accumulating power through writing where gentleness is more powerful than muscular, strenuous prose,
He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.
Because, as well as this immense tenderness, Joyce, in his highbrow diffcultness and grand overall designs, is more than anything a comic writer, thoroughly Irish but expatriate and in Stephen Dedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom, character is subtly painted, in its imperfection, its naturalness and, most of all, with sympathy.
One never feels with Joyce that one is being served up a theory, a doctrine or being educated. It is convincingly the life, the songs, the dreams and the jokes that his work is made from. He is, for want of a less portentous phrase, the consummate artist, and prose fiction is unlikely to have anybody quite so good as that again.