Sickert in Dieppe

Sickert in Dieppe, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, Sept 29th.

Only until October 4th, I'm afraid. I was a bit late getting to see this exhibition but thought it could wait to be visited along with the concert below. In all the years I've lived here, I'd never been to the Pallant House Gallery before, hidden just off the main streets of Chichester's city centre. Who would have thought that it would be quite so comfortably busy towards the end of an exhibition's run but there was a lecture going on for those intent on bettering themselves, the cafe doing some brisk trade and more of the well-heeled, leisured classes interested in the bohemian painter than one might imagine.
The main room in the gallery is a collection of eminently forgettable pop art by Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Colin Self and others. It has to be somewhere, having been significant in its time but I'm not sure it is lasting very convincingly and these are by no means the finest examples of it. The Sickert exhibition is in a humber of rooms off the central one, organized by period and thus also by theme.
Although Sickert is primarily associated with Whistler, it is Degas that is most brought to mind by these paintings, produced while Sickert was based in Dieppe from 1898 to 1905. The church of St. Jacques is captured repeatedly from the same perspective and the architecture of shops, the hotel and churches is a substantial record of the place and time. More compelling, though, are the pictures of theatre and vaudeville. My favourite Sickert, Brighton Pierrots, is in the Ashmolean in Oxford and doesn't qualify for this selection but there are several that recall that atmosphere of louche showmanship.
Paintings of gamblers at baccarat never show the faces of the players, for purposes of discretion but also suggesting the clandestine nature of the entertainment and the dangers seen in the ironically entitled The System, a study in despair similar to that in Ennui, where the old man's gambling strategy has clearly not worked. That the same despair can be induced by gambling addiction here and by domestic circumstances in Ennui is a telling parallel in two paintings.
Dieppe Races (pictured) looks like Goodwood with the countryside set out panoramically but fixed behind the flashing, impressionistic colours of the passing race in the foreground. The sky has a feel of possibly oppressive heat, a different oppression to some of the closed-in worlds captured in other of these pictures. Again, of course, Degas painted a racehorse or two as he did theatre performers and one could wonder if while in France Sickert was doing what French artists did. While some of the brushwork is sketchy, deliberately so but still sketchy, the best of these paintings are an impressively perceptive and compelling account of Walter Sickert, who, with Alfred Sisley, represents the English contribution to Impressionism, which was a significant one if never to be the headline act of the movement.
And that, coming home in that choicest of weather, early Autumn sunshine, brings to a close my days off for the season, a bit of a rehearsal for retirement, one might think. But now it's late September and I really should be back at school.

Fujita Piano Trio

Fujita Piano Trio, Chichester Cathedral, Sept 29th.

My brief early Autumn tour of lunchtime cathedral concerts ended today at Chichester. The Fujita sisters are widely travelled since being formed into a trio in the 1990's. It looked to me as if the eldest is the pianist, the middle one the violin and so I wondered when it was that the youngest realized she would be the cello. However, it is not third choice in my book because the cello is just about my favourite instrument.
Their programme of Mozart and Smetana offered an obvious contrast in styles, Mozart being the more popular choice, one might think, but it was the Smetana that was most memorable here.
The Mozart Trio in C, K 548 begins with all the Allegro playfulness expected of the boy wonder but was more affecting in its limpid slow second movement with the trio in close concentration on each other's playing, without scores. The difference between the two composers is of course in Mozart's decorum and perfectly formed classicism, which was given superb expression here, compared to the more impassioned and changeable temper of the Smetana.The Trio in G minor, Op. 15 begins with great urgency before moving into lyrical passages of some tenderness and the piece continues to alternate between the two regularly with some pizzicato phrasing shared by the stringed instuments. Perhaps the Smetana favoured the strings more, with the cello given the main theme at times whereas the Mozart featured the piano more prominently but the point of a trio is for all three players to take a significant role, otherwise it would be a sonata.
The Smetana was a great success, rousing and emotional, the notes on the CD telling us it refers to the loss of a daughter to the composer, aged 4. Gladly, and perhaps not surprisingly in the circumstances, it is ffeatured on one of the discs they had for sale, which I didn't need any persuading to buy, especially when the trio were on hand to sign a copy. I hope the marker pen doesn't wear off.
Last year in Chichester I arrived about half an hour before the concert started and was a dozen or so rows back. It looked to me that the long, narrow space might mean late arrivals sitting near the back might not get much of a view or hear too well. So I was in place earlier this time although perhaps didn't need to be, but the seats were filled a long way back by the time the music began. So, you can't be too sure but I wouldn't advise leaving it too late before taking a seat here because the enjoyment was enhanced by being on the second row.

Not Quite a Revelation

One can't go knocking out Letters to the Editor every time something dubious appears in the paper. I've had to stop reading Oliver Kamm's column on grammar in The Times on Saturdays because his relentless discovery and debunking of the grammatical pedant is just as pedantic as theirs. It only needs saying once, yes, language is as it is used and not a matter for textbooks on usage. If, indeed, 'decimate' now means 'obliterate' then so be it, it no longer means 'reduce by one tenth'. And, a big favourite in our office, 'literally' is by now simply an intensifier and doesn't any longer mean 'actually', as in,
he has literally just disappeared 
(Serena Brocks, Portsmouth, circa 2003)

That was fine although my friend Alan and I didn't think so at the time. But once Prof. Terry Eagleton had explained it was an intensifier and, in this case, the person only had to have gone elsewhere very recently, we were disabused and eventually relented from our literal linguistic interpretation. Thank heavens for that.

I did e-mail in to The Observer when their television reviewer said that Christopher Jefferies, in The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies, was listening to a Bach concerto in his flat. No, it was one of the cello suites. But I realize that nobody likes a smartarse and nobody's grateful, it's not big and it's not clever.
So I restrained myself this week when Robert McCrum credited James Shapiro, in the new Shakespeare book, 1606, The Year of Lear, with the 'revelation' that,
the age-old thespian fuss about 'the Scottish play' was actually a Victorian invention, the work of the incomparable Max Beerbohm.

So, what is a revelation, then. Is it when something is revealed to the world or is it when something is revealed to Robert McCrum.
A few years ago, a lady in our office asked me where all the superstition came from and I explained there were a number of stories of deaths among cast members during productions of Macbeth, that The Globe had been burned down during a production of Henry VIII, that it was a play about witchcraft and that a certain sort of camp, theatrical type thrives on this kind of old baloney but I wasn't sure it had any real foundation. And then, only a couple of weeks later, an edition of QI devoted to questions on Shakespeare revealed that which James Shapiro now reveals again, which is apparently news to Robert McCrum.
So, then, of course, I had to scuttle round to the other side of the office the next day, 'Oh, Veronica, your little lad that's doing Macbeth at school, can you tell him.....'  
  

Witnessing the Genesis of a Book

I wonder if anybody was there when Geoffrey Chaucer sat back from his desk, stood up to stretch his legs, looked out of the window to see an April shower piercing the drought of March to the root and said,'Yes, I know, I'll do a set of stories told by different characters on a pilgrimage to St. Albans.'
Obviously not all great works turn out as they were originally conceived.
Or perhaps someone was with John Donne when he batted off a fly and remarked that the next person it landed on might be one of his many girlfriends.
I don't know if I've ever been anywhere nearby when the idea for a major work has occured to an author. Perhaps an idea was suggested to Sean O'Brien, Anthony Thwaite or one of the other luminaries when I was on the same train as them coming out of Hull in 1997 but in Oxford in 2006, I might have witnessed the very first inklings of a major book that is now due out shortly.
At the first British and Irish Poetry Conference, held at St. Anne's College, one of the big lectures was Prof. Jonathan Bate's at the end of which he took questions. One of the questions made reference to Ted Hughes. Prof. Bate moved thoughtfully about the stage, remarked that he had never written on Hughes but mused upon the possibility and seemed to think it was not out of the question. And now, next week, Ted Hughes:The Unauthorized Life is published in all its glory. So that's how long it takes for such a book to grow from the merest passing thought to a big, fat 672 page book.
Hughes is already well served by Elaine Feinstein's excellent life and the generous helping of letters, which are as entertaining as they are grim. There is something about the tragic, dour Yorkshire shaman that is a little bit comic, perhaps mostly to those of us who take Larkin's side in any debate about gentility, but much of the ribaldry is in the letters where we see his endless money-making projects and obsession with horoscopes and all kinds of superstition. But it's probably not going to be possible to not read Prof. Bate's account.
Amazon's blurb - I don't know if the publishers have had the nerve to put it on the book- says,
A magisterial life of Ted Hughes – identified recently as the only English poet since the First World War with a claim to true greatness
It's a big claim, and somewhat arbitrary. I wonder who did the identifying.
But perhaps this book is required to balance the account in the biography department because Larkin's already had three. 

Oh Babe, What Would You Say

In the corner of Mr. Huddlestone's classroom where we did our 'A' level English was a cabinet in which he kept some poetry books for the furtherance of our appreciation. I don't remember much now of what I found in there but I will always think of a Louis Simpson poem which said that 'if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all'.
I was very taken with the thought, aged 16 or 17, not knowing any better than that literature was an almost divine thing, a gift from the gods that ordinary mortals weren't really capable of. That was possibly due to the way we wrote essays, always thinking that if something was by Shakespeare or Thomas Hardy it must be brilliant and it was thus our job to find reasons why. It seemed sacreligious when Mr. Bradford said that he thought Milton was something you cleaned your teeth with but Mr. Bradford was diabolical anyway.
But eventually I came to realize that I didn't think poetry necessarily came naturally and Oscar might have had more of a point when he said it was nearly all perspiration and not much inspiration. And so here's another scale on which to place poets, and then any other genre of creative artist. To what extent does the work pour out of them in a natural flow or how much is it a painstaking process. And when we say 'painstaking', does that mean 'taking pains' os 'staking pain'.
I'm sure it varies from poem to poem rather than from poet to poet. It's possibly best when a generous helping of a poem has arrived spontaneously but perhaps only the author can be sure how it happened. If you choose a rhyme scheme and a metre it's very unlikely that you think in iambic pentameter and an ABAB CDCD EFEFGG rhyming pattern and so some engineering is going to be necessary. But some poems looked too forced and if the syntax and prosody suffer for being mangled into a tight-fitting form, it may not look so clever.
My ongoing attempt to write The Perfect Book, a poem to give the title to my next booklet (provisionally due for publication on October 17, 2019), is coming not as naturally as getting blood out of a stone. When it finally becomes clear that nothing you can do will ever make these awkward lines look graceful, it is time to abandon it. But then, it struck me that two abandoned poems might be merged in some miraculous nuclear fusion to make a satisfactory one. No, it had to be admitted, they couldn't. But if you wait long enough, one day an idea comes along that looks as if it's in the right area. Oh, I see, perhaps I don't want to write about the perfect book but a much less than perfect book and then.... well, there's four years to go before it needs to be in print but there are few things more exciting than having a stanza and a bit to go with and see what happens. It might be a magnum opus or I might be back at square one before we know.
--
Although this year's Best Poem and Best Collection awards look like producing almost the most competitive shortlists since I began this most insignificant of prizes, the Best TV award must have been settled in favour of Cradle to Grave in its earliest stages. It is a treasure for anyone who was more or less formed by the 1970's. This week, though, stretched it a bit. Although hugely entertaining and beautifully done, I'm not sure I believed it verbatim in the same way that I had taken the rest of the series thus far as a precise re-enactment of the Baker teenage years.
Of course, others have lived more remarkable lives than I and Danny Baker would be one of them, who accepts in the book that things just happened to him, always for the best, and all he had to do was take advantage. Perhaps it would be like that for all of us if only we had the capacity to take every opportunity that is offered. I'm sure the majority are too dull to even notice an opportunity when it presents itself.
But Danny's school football team, of which he was captain, get to the final of the cup. In pouring rain, many are calling for the game to be called off but it continues, the referee gets injured, the anything-but-impartial coach of Dan's team takes over as substitute ref, knocks in an extra time header himself, then awards the goal and blows up for time.
But winning the cup is nothing compared to what happens to Danny next. Having been angling to get into the dark room with the somewhat nubile teacher who runs the photography club, he subsequently does. There might be legal reasons for wondering if such a story could be broadcast if it were true. I had at first thought the programme was misdescribed as 'sitcom' when it looked to me more like autobiographical drama, but perhaps we are safer with 'sitcom'.
--
Just the briefest word for pop-pickers on the new album by The Libertines, Anthem for Doomed Youth. It remains to be seen if this reunion album contains many things set to join the admirable top bracket of their repertoire but the gigs were tremendous, there are a couple of songs worth attention in You're My Waterloo and Gunga Din. Like Morrissey, the Kinks, Squeeze, Blur and I'm sure many other English pop acts, Doherty loves his retro English culture which includes the way that he assimilates so much of the classic elements of punk with the white boy's reggae references and delivers such laddish bonhomie, sometimes, it must be said, in memory of some of those who didn't last as long as he has managed to. It works on stage, it works on record and he is genuinely one who can be appreciated by an age group who might have thought such records were behind them by now. This is one act that would always have found an audience through talent alone, as could happen in the 70's. Just how much that still happens is another question.
--
And the highlight of this week, and last, was luckily, accidentally but joyfully finding that SKY Arts are showing some Buster Keaton films. I know that 'luckily, accidentaly and joyfully' = serendipitously but having just written, above,
Doherty loves his retro English culture which includes the way that he assimilates so much of the classic elements of punk with the white boy's reggae references,

I don't want to overstate my claim for a place in Pseud's Corner.
I don't know how much trick photography was available in Keaton's day but the choreography of the visual jokes in these films is sensational. I don't imagine I'm the first to have noticed that. But, isn't it remarkable how, as soon as something is invented, like moving film pictures, there just happens to be someone in place to realize more potential in it than could ever have been thought.
I don't know if my tiny but very choice collection of DVD's should be without Buster Keaton for much longer.

 

How to Win Betting on Horse Racing

The last few weeks have seen a steady flow of cash from the bookmaker to me. I've rarely had such a good time of it and I've certainly never been this far ahead in a calendar year. Roadie Joe won at Warwick today, including the gift of a starting price of 9/4 when I'd happily taken 7/4 last night but Guaranteed Best Price is a wonderful thing as the turf accountants fall over each other in pursuit of the mug punter's business.
This is not making me rich, you understand. Gone are the bad old days of trying to make it through to pay day, and often failing, with some would-be shrewd maneouvres. Nowadays it is okay to have a few modest investments, where it doesn't matter if they lose but becomes an interest that pays interest if they win often enough.
Of course, all good runs come to an end and it is dangerous to let light in on magic but I thought I might see if I can demonstrate how it's done by looking through tomorrow's racing and see what we can find.

Tomorrow there are flat meetings at Goodwood and Redcar, jumping at Perth, flat in Ireland at Naas and then an evening all-weather meeting at Kempton. I am mainly interested in jump racing so look at Perth first. And we start by looking at the novice, juvenile and beginners races, the hurdles followed by the chases. As a general rule, these races are more likely to be won by the best horses on the day and are easier to assess. We might have a look at the handicaps later but those are much more difficult, more likely to be bookmakers' benefits and we will bet on what we want to bet on, not be lured into a race with lots of angles to it just because we can have a much bigger price but then get beat.
The 2.20 at Perth is a Novice Hurdle. Miss Dinamic (pictured) will be a short price but she has proved herself, might not have much to beat even though she must give them a stone in weight and whereas, for as long as one could remember, the booking of A.P. McCoy to ride such a horse was significant, he's retired  and so Richard Johnson is the most significant now. There is too much to like about Miss Dinamic not to back her, she's coming over from Ireland for this little race.
We need to think about the 4.40 a bit more. Trainer John Ferguson and jockey Aidan Coleman have dominated the summer jump racing with their classy ex-flat horses in this sort of race. There is no need to do your own homework with the form book, Oddschecker provides two summaries of each race as well as the latest prices, indicating which horses are shortening up in the market and which being offered at bigger prices than previously. You don't take the verdict of the tipsters at face value but read between the lines a bit. One of them isn't that impressed with Hadfield's debut win at Worcester and, having won, has to give 7lb to Impulsive American, trained by Pipe and ridden by Scudamore. It doesn't seem that long since that meant Martin Pipe and Peter Scudamore but horse racing is as dynastic as any sport and now it's David Pipe and Tom Scudamore.
But I notice that Hadfield is a Sea the Stars gelding, who would have been the superstar horse of a decade or more had the freakish Frankel not showed up a year or two later and outdone everything in living memory. Impulsive American is marked up at 11/4 in the early evening, with Hadfield generously 5/2 with Bet365. Persiflage appears to be coming over just to keep Miss Dinamic company in the horse box but is only 4/1 so obviously somebody thinks better of her than the bare form of her first run. We'll watch the market on this race to see what further hints we might get.
The best race at Goodwood is the listed event over just about 1m 2f. Basem, trained by Saeed Bin Saroor and ridden by James Doyle, is the clear favourite and one reason given for opposing him with Battalion is not as good as it looks,
BATTALION has won over 1m2f and further,

Yes, but Goodwood is downhill all the way for the last few furlongs and not one where stamina is an obvious advantage. There is plenty of blue showing up alongside Basem as his price is already contracting. He could be a solid bet.
The first two races at Goodwood are maiden races, in some ways the equivalent of novice races over jumps but the back-end of the season is not the best time to be getting involved. Good Run, in the 2.35 is a stablemate of Basem but a Godolphin horse that was sent to Carlisle for its debut might not be one of their best so I'll be happy to swerve the odds-on about that and read through the handicaps to see if we can put together a combination of three or four horses for a small stakes speculation which won't matter to us either way as long as the main selection goes in.
Notarised (Goodwood 4.20) rings a bell from somewhere in the past, has shortened in price to 11/2 and comes down from Mark Johnson's Yorkshire stable.
In the 3.30 at Perth, I'll take the point that Bouggietopieces hasn't won over more than 2m 4f and side with Bar A Mine, sent all that way to the furthest north racecourse on these islands from near Cheltenham.
In the 5.45, although a short price, one has to think Epic Warrior is making an even longer trip full of potential, having only been sent as far north as Southwell last time. It's only people who live as far south as Portsmouth that would even think of Southwell as being 'north'.
So, we must make Miss Dinamic the banker bet but we don't have to depend on her completely. Basem and Epic Warrior in a double for half that stake, or a more ambitious yankee including Notarised and Bar A Mine would make another moderate pay day if everything went right for us. That's not very likely, so we don't go overboard and give away cash needlessly on a whim. There will be better days to lump onto horses like Emotionless when we want a proper bet. It's not compulsory and I sometimes feel as if I've won when I don't have a bet and the horses I had been looking at get beaten. Not losing a few quid is, in the end, just as good as winning a few quid.
Now that Paddy's got round to pricing up the Perth meeting, Miss Dinamic is all of 8/11 but what can you do.  The Saturday Nap is due to return on October 10th.

Oh Babe, What Would You Say

Since I like to get reviews on here as soon as possible after any new release, I can hardly do any sort of job on a disc that came out in 1995 but neither can I omit mention of Utopia Triumphans by the Huelgas Ensemble. Its subtitle is The Great Polyphony of the Renaissance and it can't be put any better than that.
I got myself a copy having heard Josquin's Qui Habitat on the radio a couple of weeks ago. Why I wasn't aware of that already I don't know but, unlike ignorance of the many arcane laws of the country, it is not something I can be found culpable of.
So this, if you come to this website either in fear of or in search of yet more wordage on the subject of Renaissance polyphony, is the record you want. It begins with a gorgeous and immaculately clear account of Spem in Alium, almost the best I've heard but I couldn't possibly say it's better than the 1965 King's College, Cambridge recording under David Willcocks only the day after the announcement of his death. If it sounds any better in some ways then perhaps that is due to being thirty years further down the line but it captures the same restlessness and turbulence of this sea of sound, surely one of the greatest achievements of the English Renaissance and a piece of music almost in a category of its own.
It is only incidental that I gain one more version of Spem, though, because the Josquin was the point. Qui Habitat is from a generation or two before, a similarly magnificent edifice, if less than six minutes long. It immediately muscles its way onto the very select shortlist of masterpieces from this broad period of pre-baroque music once labelled 'Early' but increasingly unfolding into an essential part of a much longer historic view of music that 40 years ago, we didn't seem to have. It belongs alongside other such unputdownable icons as Josquin's Deploration on the death of Ockeghem, Wylkynson's Jesu Autem Transiens...and the list goes on at intervals throughout the several years of this website.
The Huelgas Ensemble, it might also be said, deserve to be mentioned in any same breath as the Tallis Scholars as I notice they appear on my shelves with accounts of the Eton Choirbook and Cipriano de Rore.
So, forgive me whenever I'm next diverted into an inane discussion of why Queen were rubbish. I'm honestly not trying to be an intellectual snob- I can do that without trying- it's just that there are better things to talk about that must have come from several planets further away than all that loud, camp, pompous posturing.
Everything else on this disc is well worth having, including the Striggio Ecce beatem lucem. I thought for a moment that the Huelgas had known about the Striggio 40-part motet that Tallis took up as his model but, obviously not. Great musicological discoveries don't happen here, I'm merely a devoted fan.
--
 It's a long time since I had as much as two weeks out of the office. Although the last few days have been a joy, I'm not convinced I could keep that up forever.
On first reading Larkin's Toads Revisted, a few decades ago, I barely comprehended the argument that one could be grateful of work. But when the endless days of retirement seem to be foreshortened by routine, if one is not careful, I have suddenly understood why the dreary fight against corporate process can actually be satisfying. Surely there are better ways of filling up one's time. But sadly September doesn't last forever and it's a bit of a wait until it comes round again. The season of lists of books and mellow horse racing is a fine thing but, having begun to enjoy it, who is to say I won't enjoy going back to work to turn the edicts and announcements from senior management and ask, Doddy-like,
What a beautiful day. What a beautiful day to increase your performance by 10%. Okay, then, let's give it a go. But what are you going to do? Are you going to hold 10% more meetings or are you going to do 10% more non-productive talking in the same number of meetings.
--

The Saturday Nap, our Autumn foray into horse racing journalism, will probably return in time for the Dewhurst Stakes at Newmarket if our new hero, Emotionless, is due to run. Horses are the best sporting heroes because, although certainly they can surely be frustrating, at least they don't give interviews and deliver the same old, 'listen...', 'look....' or transparently pathetic excuses that human sportspersons do.
It's been a good summer on the turf, a gentle roller coaster on which one goes up and down a bit but doesn't end up any worse off than when one started. So far, I have avoided the disastrous spell I had through last year's late summer/early autumn.
John Ferguson, taking good quality flat horses from his friends at Godolphin and re-inventing them as hurdlers, has achieved an impressive strike rate but I'm not sure how clever that is or if I've won enough out of them to compensate for the catastrophes. I mean, I could win the local Sunday league football if I could sign Scholesy, Le Tissier, Giggsy and somebody else who apparently retired a few years ago, like Berbatov.
But Penglai Pavilion and Maputo were far too good to be put in the races they won so I'll be very interested in seeing if they can be more than 'flat track bullies' when the proper jumping begins.