The Saturday Nap

I'm not Long Run's biggest fan and so will only watch the Chrlie Hall Chase at Wetherby.

There is no need to think too much tonight, though. If At Fisher's Cross (Wetherby 3.00) is anywhere near fit- and Rebecca Curtis had a winner to follow a lot of seconds and thirds in recent days- then he should signal that he is on his way to the World Hurdle. If you can get even money then take it while it is there.

But I will add a Tuesday Bonus to the Saturday Nap and suggest we include Cue Card in the Haldon Cup at Exeter in the project.

View from the Boundary

There are few less amenable types of people than the disgruntled punter.

I know that there are one or two readers who are following the Saturday Nap, more out of casual interest than in the hope of making themselves rich, but I'm almost glad there aren't more than that. It won't help if I explain that, actually, you are in expert hands but it just hasn't gone quite right in picking one horse as the nap. It wouldn't prevent a hostile crowd from accosting me in the street if I explained that, actually, 8 out of my last 9 single win bets on horses have won, since last Thursday. In fact, it would probably make it worse.
But we will try to focus on Saturday and get it right. Rebecca Curtis has the great At Fisher's Cross entered at Wetherby. Let's hope that her recent litany of seconds and thirds become a win with the stable star. In the meantime, if you really want to know, and if you don't mind taking odds on, then the routine novice hurdle winner from a big stable in midweek tomorrow should be Dispour in the first at Sedgefield or I'll eat my hat.
That is the hat made out of pizza that I'll buy just in case.

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Walking on Water only reached no.19 in Amazon's Free Poetry Download chart in its 5 days as a free kindle and so perhaps it is time to give up on being an overnight sensation after 35 years of having poems in print and return to my place in the underground. But Alan is now working for David Green (Books) and doing a wonderful job.
There is an inevitable tension now within the company between a natural marketing man and me who only really wants to write a poem once in a blue moon and then make the best of them available to anyone who wants to read them. But, don't worry, it is all about me, not him, and I can sack him whenever I feel like it even if it would be a foolish boss who fires a technical genius.

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I had a great evening with Lou on Monday, playing the lesser known Velvet Underground albums as well as a couple he released under his own name later. I hadn't played them for years but could understand how at least R.E.M. could have been listed among the many bands that critics said were 'influenced' by the Velvets without John Cale. On the other hand, whichever dogsbody expert it was who turned up on the wireless to say that U2 were a beneficiary needs to be given 100 lines to write out. How did Lou ever equate to Bono.
It must be one of those failures of the liberal Humanities project in which no answer can ever be marked wrong if there are people let loose on the airwaves allowed to say that.
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And so, my notes towards a shortlist for the very unprestigious and prizeless award of this website's Best Poem and Best Poetry Collection of the year must be nearly complete and ready for my discerning consideration. I have missed books in the past that would have at least made the shortlist although I don't think it has affected the choice of the eventual winner and so, if you know of a book of poems that I ought to read in the next few weeks then please let me know.
For obvious reasons, The Perfect Murder is inadmissable although in the same way that I'm sure parents like their own children more than they like other people's, I love it. If I hadn't written it, I'd love to meet the author.

How disappointed I would have been.

Colm Toibin - The Testament of Mary

Colm Toibin, The Testament of Mary (Penguin)

The panel on the Booker Prize Preview Show spoke highly of how well-written, how impressive and, just as importantly for me, how short it was and so I ordered a copy.
I took a break from reading a much longer book late on Sunday afternoon and by early evening had finished it, not only because one could and because it might be best done that way but mainly because it was impossible to put down.
Colm Toibin maintains the spare, hard-eyed, insistent language of Mary with an economy that soon becomes hypnotic. She is sorrowful but undeceived by the events she reports of her son's later life, last days and death. She tells of being watched, being followed and of a political murder.
Her son has gathered some misfit friends and their long discussions, she can tell, are increasingly led by him. But she is aware of sinister intimations surrounding him.
The detached narrative of events become more passionate and desperate as the dangers become more apparent but she is powerless to prevent the inevitable. Escape is not an option until she has witnessed the grim crucifixion and all but his harrowing last moments. His family,
watched helplessly as their brother grew easily towards death in the same way as the source for a river, hidden under the earth, begins flowing and carries water across a plain to the sea. 
I can't see why it should be particularly controversial but there again I am not religious, not Catholic and no theologian. Thus, if there is some heresy in an account like this then perhaps it doesn't help that has been done so well. The stories in the gospels are compelling however much, or little, credence one is prepared to give them, written several years after the fact without much verification of detail (and apparently with several other accounts that didn't fit the early Christian church's version omitted) and Colm Toibin's words for Mary here are powerful in very much the same way.
She is hugely dignified, even glorious in her Stabat Mater here, tougher than 'dolorosa' would suggest, as she concludes,
I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say it was not worth it. It was not worth it.
Is that the world or the redemption that wasn't worth it. I don't think we need to ask.
I don't care whether it won the prize or not. By my very rough calculation, this might be less than 30 000 words long and a novel, I have seen it said, is at least 50 000. So where do categories begin and end. The prize brought it to my greater attention and it was two hours well spent reading it and so prizes, as far as that goes, are a useful thing. The book wouldn't necessarily benefit from being any longer. Toibin gave us it as he saw fit. And giving it a prize wouldn't make it a better book.

Lou Reed

We were only wondering when it was that we saw Lou Reed in Portsmouth Guildhall when we were in there on Thursday. Subsequent research found that it was 14/09/2000. Some idiot near us kept shouting Perfect Day so that perhaps I secretly hoped Lou would do a characteristically curmudgeonly thing and not play it but it was the second encore.
At the time, Portsmouth Guildhall was having a brief but ambitious spell that included gigs by Bob Dylan and The Who as well which are acts somewhat above their usual fare. Of those, it would always be Lou that I would want to see the most.
The famous Warhol banana LP The Velvet Underground and Nico is a favourite, a genuine favourite because of the music it contains rather than any critic's hipster acknowledgement of its 'influence'. It is surely better to be 'any good' than influential. It mixes the low-life, bohemian themes of sado-masochism, New York streets and dark self-indulgence with the rare beauty of the pharmaceutical daydream of Sunday Morning, and the Nico classics I'll Be Your Mirror and Femme Fatale.
Transformer was the commercial success in the early 70's that Bowie worked on but I'm not sure who was learning more from who in that symbiotic relationship and Bowie songs like Queen Bitch suggest that the Dame took a fair bit from not only Lou but the whole Warhol Factory milieu. Well, we know he did.
Lou Reed was one of those pop songwriters that could be realistically termed a 'poet' if any such cross reference were felt to be useful. With a recognizable world view, coming from an early career on a hit production line, modernist sensibility and a life that provided all he might have needed to reflect back the tawdry downside of urban style, gloss and glamour, his most memorable aside in the Portsmouth gig was, 'after the first kiss, it's downhill all the way'.

The Saturday Nap

It's a shame Handazan let the nap down last Saturday- I'm afraid he didn't look like the winner from a long way out- but the main story was always going to be The New One (pictured), a very big favourite with me, and he won every bit as well as could have been hoped and I added some 5/1 to the 10/1 I already had for the Champion Hurdle next March.
It has been a tidy little week with Pendra winning yesterday and Wonderful Charm today. These good novices from top stables in weekday races, a shade of odds on if you like, are the bread and butter of this, the best time of the year to set about putting money on horses. I only wish we could have had the nerve to unleash obscene sums on The New One and Wonderful Charm because confidence was enormous, defeat unthinkable and they won as routinely as they should have. But it is horse racing, you see, and things happen. The penury and disaster lying just around the next corner for the unwary gambler are a part of the louche glamour of it and so you don't just go whacking on unseemly amounts at odds on, you take great pleasure in seeing performances like The New One and you look forward to what might come about at Cheltenham next year.
But if I'm alright, Jack, then level stake followers of the nap so far are not and so we must set about remedying that unfortunate state of affairs.
One thing we could do is go for the 4/1 about Aidan O'Brien's standard issue entry for the Racing Post Trophy at Doncaster which this year is called Century. It is almost too good a price, really, and we will have to swerve it at the risk of some heartache by 4 o'clock tomorrow afternoon.
Shutthefrontdoor looks solid enough at Aintree where A.P. goes to ride for Jonjo, which partnership advertised their good form with winners at Carlisle yesterday but the exchanges are only showing 7/10 in a 4 horse race and we must do better than that.
The Paul Nicholls machine is moving smoothly into action and although Potters Cross would have won me money two weeks ago but for jumping badly at two of the last three hurdles and was marked down as one to back again, let's hope he doesn't quite get it right tomorrow either because Caesar Milan is the nap in the Chepstow 3.35

BSO's Pictures

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Vedernikov, Rachmanninov, Sibelius, Mussorgsky, Portsmouth Guildhall, October 24th.

The BSO's programme last night was titled Musical Pictures. We wondered what the Sibelius Violin Concerto was a picture of and I still haven't found an answer but it's never a bad thing to have a concerto and so we didn't mind.
Rachmanninov's Isle of the Dead broods quite benignly with its riff in the cellos and bass and elsewhere before reaching its climax. Its gloom isn't too sinister and it by no means reduces the composer's high standing in my regard, whose range goes from those lush piano concertos to the Russian Orthodox Vespers.
On a night dominated by Russians, I hope I wasn't taking a short cut by finding Sibelius at his most Russian-sounding in the concerto. There could have been traces of folk song in there that owed something to Finland's overbearing neighbour. Nikita Boriso-Glebsky was technically dazzling and perhaps at his best when delicacy and deftness were required but it took a while for the performance to gain authority or momentum. It finished well but I was surprised to find that for a second time in recent years it was the Sibelius piece in a concert that was the slight disappointment. That is not what one expects will happen.
I don't know if it was Nikita or me that felt more at home in his encore which was a movement from a Bach partita or sonata but it retrieved the situation and then some as one wondered if it was only one violin or a duet but the solo includes its own accompaniment when the bow is on the appropriate side of the strings to play the required notes. Brilliant.
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was a teenage favourite of mine in both the piano version and Ravel's orchestration. Many of my generation would say Emerson, Lake & Palmer and I'm not too snooty to acknowledge that, too. It's just that I didn't repeatedly listen to that in those formative years. I generally preferred the piano version on the grounds that less is more but hearing the full orchestra from the third row made clear the difference between listening to its full range of sound textures in the flesh compared to a recording on a small cassette player. The brass were tremendous, but the woodwind were superb as well in their lively parts, the percussion is prominent, there are two harps, saxophone and everybody gets a turn. I hadn't realized quite what a good job Ravel had done on it.
Alexander Vedernikov is an entertainment in himself as conductor, at one moment leaning on the rail of the rostrum and waving the baton nonchalantly in the general direction of the orchestra but then apparently engaging in bad dancing like a maestro buffa, and next imperious in a bucolic pastiche of a Karajan or Klemperer. But he got a performance out of the BSO, who are a great orchestra anyway, and for only the second time in my life I added my own 'hurray' to the applause almost involuntarily. It is a monumental piece of writing and orchestration in a performance like that and, as we always do from these concerts, we went home in fine spirits.

Walking on Water kindle edition

Walking on Water, my booklet from 2006, is now available as a kindle on Amazon but hold on until tomorrow or the next day by which time it should be into its five days of being free to download.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Walking-Water-David-Green-ebook/dp/B00G05NTMK/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1382459538&sr=8-2&keywords=david+green+walking+on+water
This follows the success of The Perfect Murder which reached  number 13 in the Free Kindle Download Poetry chart over the weekend. This is the same chart position achieved by Because of You by Dexy's Midnight Runners, Crying by both Roy Orbison and k.d. lang and I'm Coming Out by Diana Ross.
It would have been nice to have a top ten hit but the excitement of being in a chart at all was plenty thrilling enough.
The possibility of adding further titles from the back catalogue is being investigated.

Thanks to all those who downloaded The Perfect Murder.