Alternate Title

It's Oh, Babe, What Would You Say, really, but I thought I'd take my title from the Monkees' American naming protocol for Randy Scouse Git.

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama has achieved something that many other books never did. I had to put it to one side to read Patrick Hamilton's Monday Morning and Don Paterson's The Poem. Needs must sometimes.
The house is not quite strewn but intermittently ashamed of its unfinished books. Not always ashamed. Sometimes you wished you'd never started and from time to time I wonder whether to get myself a Collected John Ashbery but fear that it might be twenty minutes of amazement followed by however many more years there are left eyeing it nervously.
But I've gone back to Six Four, sometime admirer of Japan with special reference to prose fiction as I am, and I will make it to the end. Apparently, not all noir is Scandinavian. I am much more Midsomer Murders than I am all that fashion for endless darkness. Having been less than impressed with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, somebody gave me a fiver for it. They could have had it for nothing but you admire a man who stands his round or pays his way. I sat through the first series of Marcella, for no better reason than Anna Friel because there is no better reason, but I think there was a second series. Oh, come off it. Eventually one needs to know. Suspense is a fine thing but I'm not prepared to wait forever.
But I am persevering and we will see now the complications of Six Four, which is a 'police procedural' with missing, sometime dead young girl, rivalry between the machinations of departments, something to be got to the bottom of, work out. It is to be hoped that nothing essential needs reading for another week or two. Please, Danny Baker, don't surprise us with any more unputdownable memoirs just yet. Or, let me put that another way, please do.
--
The TLS. What can you do.
An e-mail from them saying how sorry they are I've left, please have another introductory offer.
I haven't left but it is as if they are reading my mind. Perhaps the internet is more sinister than I thought. It would be great if they would just keep sending it but not charge me for it but it's not the money.
It's the self-regard.
It remains of interest in places, sometimes even in the bath. For instance, V.S. Naipaul hardly had a good word for anybody. Let me put that another way, he regularly had a bad word for a lot of people. But one writer he liked was Maupassant. And then you think he might have had a point.
All these old curmudgeons-  not so much the young ones- it would be great fun to become more like them. I'll try my best.           

Aretha

Pastiche

This seems to me very close to being completely the business, which rather underlines the implications of Whatever Next below.
We know too much. You can make almost, almost perfect T. Rex out of the recipe Marc, and Tony Visconti, left behind.
I haven't seen Jurassic Park but I imagine it to work on a similar principle.
And the odd thing is that, temporarily at least, I want to listen to how good a pastiche this is rather than Get It On. That can't be right. 

It reminds me of the story of when Neil Innes and/or Eric Idle played the songs from The Rutles to George Harrison,
Oh, it's a bit close, that one,
by which I'm sure he meant With a Girl Like You and If I Fell.

Well done, sir.

Whatever Next

One of the many thoughts provoked by Don Paterson's thought-provoking book, The Poem, was that if we now understand so much about how poetry works perhaps we know too much.
While on the one hand, we don't believe in magic, on the other we don't always want light to be let in on magic if any such illusion is conjured. The Don has gone a long way to explaining away all the tricks, nuances and effects that poetry, whatever 'heightened form of language' it is proclaimed to be, has. Whatever brilliant line you thought you'd come up with out of your sublime inspiration, it turns out to be textbook zeugma, metonymy or else Prof. Paterson will have a phrase for it. All the poet can do is concatenate and assimilate all their niceties into a coherent unit.
By now we know too much. Keats was happy enough as long as he was swooning transcendentally; the Gawain poet, or classical poets, had appointments with sophisticated metre they couldn't afford to miss; some C20th after-the-fact adventurers delighted themselves by self-styling themselves against an orthodoxy they perceived for themselves and the likes of Housman, Hardy or Larkin just got on with it. Now, though, I could understand how, after reading The Poem, a poet could despair of what to do next. It doesn't bother me. I wasn't going to write any because I already didn't know what to do next.
Are the universities to blame, the industry full of academics and students all needing a point to make and paid to do so, ruining it by their more, or less, rigorous analyses and worthwhile, or passable, ideas. In order to achieve her degree in Pop Music Performance, the girl with who I'm so pleased to share a songwriting credit was encouraged to bottom out how pop songs worked. I'm not sure how much influence such courses have had on the product now offered to pop-pickers but it does appear, at least to old heads of my generation, that everything from Elvis Presley, through The Beatles, Motown, David Bowie, reggae, punk and all else has been incorporated into a homogeneous recipe that has resulted in a sterile, post-apocalyptic synthesis.
I regret having to produce quite that sort of banal sentence to describe it but what can you do.
It's probably a good thing it's all downloaded now because they'd need a lot of plastic to serve the demand for Ed Sheeran records and it's great that young people (if they are mostly young) have the same sort of mania for his music that we had for T. Rex. But it's a shame he is targetted by more than his fair share of copyright holders who think he's used their template. Also that the Marvin Gaye estate are quite so litigious.
And, of course, it isn't going to stop here. Even I will recover from The Poem. It was very enlightening and I'd run into a lacuna of my ownmaking anyway. I worry that eventually every possible chess game will have been played and, mathematically, there are only an immensely vast but not infinite number of viable 40, 50 or 60 move games that are possible. It is the same sort of neurosis that provides the material for thinking that every worthwhile poem will eventually be written. But we need to have faith in both the 64 squares and 32 pieces on the chess board, the much greater potential for variety offered by language and the fact that the time left to us is finite and there is nowhere near enough of it remaining to need to fret over using up those particular natural resources.
It must have seemed to every successive generation that they were the unfortunate inheritors of the end of the line. But soft, what light from yonder window breaks - some new kids on the block who are now going to all do it their way. Good for them. I'll leave them to it.

Don Paterson - The Poem

Don Paterson, The Poem (Faber)

Before I went to University to play pool, attend pop concerts and write some terrible essays on poetry, I had imagined seminar groups poring over poems identifying dying falls and suchlike. That never came about as such and in the forty years since I have heard little about dying falls. Don Paterson here provides one paragraph and two examples on the subject as a section in his chapter on ‘Closure’. They are commonplace, not really of great interest per se, and so that’s that.

The Poem is not for the faint-hearted, it’s not a primer or a guide to reading or writing poetry and there are a lot of other things it’s not. For long stretches it is more about linguistics and neuro-science than it is about poetry, like the idea brought forward from his book on Shakespeare’s Sonnets that three seconds is a natural length for the human brain to take in a line of poetry and thus the iambic pentameter, that lasts that long, lends itself to being the most viable line length in English. This looks to me like the book that Don Paterson wrote more or less for himself and if it’s of any benefit to anybody else, all well and good.

It is not quite exhaustive and readily admits it can’t be quite regularly. Paterson, who can be scabrous when he feels like it, kindly signals to the reader when they can miss out the next fifty pages if they don’t feel up to it. But, being diligent and not wanting to miss anything, I wouldn’t dream of doing that. He recaps and apologizes for deviation when necessary, has plenty of long footnotes that are often well worth not skipping over and finishes with Endnotes that are essays in themselves that I chose to wait for rather than read when directed to them.

And it can be exhausting, mainly in the second section, on ‘Sign’ – the book is sub-titled Lyric, Sign, Metre – and more than once one is tempted to wonder how much we really need to be thinking about aeteme, syntagm, quale or metonymy when reading Goblin Market and I’m not sure Don expects us to but if we want to know how poems work, at a deep level, this is his account of how he thinks they do and hats off to him for throwing the kitchen sink at his theme. Never knowingly unaware of what he’s doing, he does at an early stage accept that this sort of analysis is like dissecting a frog – you find out how a frog works but it dies in the process.

If almost anyone, never mind how high-minded in their pursuit of poetics, might find themselves challenged by the relentless specialist vocabulary of section two, or wondering why the third part, on metre, takes up nearly half the book – although I might agree with the implication that rhythm and music have such a degree of importance in poetry- The Poem is never far away from being hugely entertaining (to its target audience) in its apposite use of anecdote, example and attitude.

In the TLS, William Wootten expressed reservations about Paterson taking a ‘mainstream’ position as the bane of the avant-garde. I would hardly think that of Don’s poems. He makes entirely worthwhile points about the self-serving nature of avantism, using a story about Gaelic speakers using Gaelic to talk about speaking Gaelic, which seems to me exactly what those old-fashioned experimentalists are still doing. The fad came and went, nobody’s saying it wasn’t interesting once but by now it’s like playing old albums by Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.

The examples used in the book, often understandably from Heaney or Donaghy, led me to look up poems by Richard Wilbur and George Mackay Brown amongst others. I particularly enjoyed the verdict of Sorley MacLean on the latter when he thought about it before saying,

Lovely poem.

What?

That one he always wrote.

There are worse things than having that as your epitaph.

The significantly larger third section on metre makes it clear that there’s more to it than stressed and unstressed syllables. The salient point is how lexical stress diverges from metrical stress. Paterson has a sophisticated set of symbols to perform his analyses, with values, punctuation marks pressed into his own usage, arrows and tables but even his decisions are still open to discussion. Having done so much work in pursuit of the final analysis, it might have saved us much time and effort just to have said, ‘it is what it is’ and ‘if it feels good, do it’. Rhythm and music are inevitable in language, even in the poetry of poets who proclaim themselves to work against such traditional effects. While damning them for their foolishness, Paterson is ever open to experimentation which is inevitably absorbed into the dreaded mainstream if it is anything more than a trivial gesture.

However often one feels like parodying Paterson’s sometimes highly technical language, he does it for us in an Endnote that quotes a passage from one Judith Butler in which abstraction and jargon has gone beyond useful meaning and reminded us again that satire is hopeless once we go beyond a certain level of absurdity.

Gladly, The Poem sent me back to poems more often that it might have and it is an impressive account of how poetry works except, of course, rules are just as recondite to those that insist on them as they are to those who insist that they’ve broken them and that all you have to do is be any good. It might have put me off writing any more poems for quite some time, feeling overwhelmed by trying to keep all these aspects of the art form in mind at once. But that doesn’t matter. I had no plans to write any anyway.

Oh, Gyles, What Would You Say

If you didn't imagine Gyles Brandreth and I as natural mates - should we not say 'bedfellows' - I wouldn't have blamed you but I have come to not mind, in fact quite like him. Obviosly not Boris despite the Latin, not even the sneaking admiration for Jacob's strange charm, that seems to have evaporated recently, but Gyles is a different matter.
A couple of years ago he said on Just a Minute that he had a Latin master at school called Mr. Stocks. So had I, and am unlikely to forget. So I contacted Gyles to compare notes. It was not the same Mr. Stocks.
But this week, on the same programme, he challenged the assertion that Anne Hathaway was allegedly pregnant when she married Shakespeare. Quite rightly, he pointed out that she was not 'allegedly pregnant' but was pregnant. And, before being challenged, he was just about to explain about Judith.
No, not Judith, Gyles, she was one of the twins, conceived within wedlock. Although alleged by some not to have been fathered by Shakespeare. Me, for instance, although I take no credit for the original idea.
It's Susannah, the name you were looking for, Gyles. You're good but you're not that good.
--
I would like to offer an alternative to the hastily-assembled Top 6 Jews posted in celebration of my newly confirmed Ashkenazi heritage. They certainly are six Jews with whom I have some feeling of affinity but a Top 6, as such, might be expected to include Albert Einstein and Yehudi Menuhin. So, I want to present a, still personal,  

Top 6 Jewish Musicians

Felix Mendelssohn
Marc Bolan
Yehudi Menuhin
Natalie Clein
Lou Reed

I could go on for quite some time here but a tradition grew up in the Top 6 to have a certain other something about the sixth, so, in support of what seems to be considerable new acknowledgement of her talent,

Fanny Mendelssohn

None of which newly proven DNA should deflect attention from the significance of Kurdish and Druze found in our family line.
Now all the impulse to go east rather than west makes sense. 

Patrick Hamilton - Monday Morning

Patrick Hamilton, Monday Morning (Abacus)

Gratititude to Abacus should be unconfined for making this book available, having been for so long unobtainable and other plans to re-issue it having come to nothing.
At 19 years old, Patrick Hamilton had the blueprint for his mature work already in place and this novel is tremendously assured and confidently made. It is his last work, in Unknown Assailant, that is the more questionable, the booze having got to him, the callous treatment of innocence having got out of hand and the prose having collapsed into little more than notes towards a novel.
With the hindsight of knowing all what was to follow, though, Monday Morning is very familiar Hamilton territory, set in the transient world of London hotels, infatuation forever being led on, one suspects, to unrequitedness and, in what is understandably a bildungsroman, first encounters with alcohol culture in theatrical circles.
In many ways it prefaces the later work by having its main character actually differentiate between being 'in love' and 'Love'. His more mature characters, like Bone, the hapless victim of his own sorry devotions in Hangover Square, have lost that level of awareness.
Anthony is delayed, delayed and delayed again in beginning work on his novel, would prefer to be a poet but there is no money in that and is relieved when his applications for jobs in journalism are unsuccessful. In the end, his pursuit of the fickle Diane apparently over, he writes his great poem, two having been printed in Poetry Review, but this inability to forge a career path seems to parallel his blighted courtship of first one love and then another. It is the way in that one so swiftly follows the other that we suspect Anthony of being no more than the 'in love' he regards as not the real thing and not in possession of the Love he mistakes it for.
It is all beautifully done and were we not in possession of the novels that came after, we wouldn't think we could see what's coming. It looks the theme on which all successive variations were based on. But we should be wary of assuming we know as much.
It arrived at about 11 a.m yesterday morning, wasn't begun until early afternoon and was finished by 9 p.m. with only essential functions attended to in the meantime. It's been a long time coming but it was worth waiting for.