Racetrack Wiseguy

As Rod so memorably sang on the other side of Maggie May, 

I still look to find a reason to believe 

and, having got myself comfortably in front in early January and thought the cash machine was back in order, it isn't. All one wants to do is survive. We all know it's a mug's game but we refuse to believe that we are the mugs so it must be all the others. And they are, I promise you they are.

One is pleased to see the lengths they go to to save important races these days. It deflated last Saturday that Cheltenham wasn't possible but we now have the Cotswold Chase at Sandown and the Cleeve Hurdle in Yorkshire, at Wetherby. Who ever heard of such a thing.

 

It isn't entirely acceptable to caring vegetarians to say there is 'more than one way to skin a cat' but it isn't quite so bad to say that one might solve a horse race not by liking one horse but by not liking all the others.

Even given the hard uphill finish at Sandown, I still don't see a mere 3 miles as being far enough for Santini to be in front at the end. If the classic distance of long distance horse races over fences was more like 4 miles than 3, Santini would have been Arkle but it isn't. They are all tremendous horses and I would love to see any of them win but it's not a race to put money on when in a position like Fulham's and trying to find a sensible way back before it gets hopeless.

I'm not in the least bit surprised to see Hitman (Sandown 1.50) take over as favourite for the Scilly Isles. He was only bettered by a brilliant performance round there by Allmankind last time and he had us worried for most of the way. Paul Nicholls seemed to think he could reverse that form next time. I know he always says that but Hitman takes its place in how we do it tomorrow.

Many of us were impressed by, and grateful for, what On The Blind Side (Wetherby 2.30) did last time and one doesn't desert one's friends when one can't see any other friends one would rather have despite desperate figures, by his own high standards, in the last 14 days. They apply to the stable rather than the horse and the stable are still trying.

It is best to stick to the big races sometimes with horses that you like to think you know something about. At least then you know it's your fault that you lost.

2021 will show a profit or I'll make sure I don't lose. It's early days yet. This hardly matters.

Donald Trump will forever be remembered as a loser and we all saw how much that hurt.

All we have to do is decide how to allocate the modest cash across two selections to both safeguard our position if only one wins but put ourselves in front if they both do. It's jump racing. There is no such thing as a certainty. 

Maybe by 2.40 we will have had two losers but we can live with that. We won't keep insisting on Steward's Enquiries when we quite came 10 lengths back in third.

Stile Antico - Josquin Des Prez

 Stile Antico, The Golden Renaissance, Josquin Des Prez (Decca)

Last year it was hard to miss that it was 250 years since Beethoven was born. This year one might need to frequent slightly more niche places to be made quite so aware that it is 500 years since Josquin Des Prez died but there's plenty of it to be had for looking.

Whereas Beethoven is readily identifiable sounding halfway between Mozart and Schubert, it is less easy to be sure it's Josquin one is hearing because being halfway between Ockeghem and Palestrina doesn't make him sound much different to any but the most finely educated ears. Even then, those that are supposed to know aren't always sure and it is said that he wtote more music after he died then when he was alive as the questionable attributions flowed towards him in the hope, presumably, of selling copies of them. 

Quite why I need yet more of this repertoire is hard to say but one feels one ought to take part. Josquin was the biggest name in Europe and deserved to be if only on account of his Lament on the Death of Johannes Ockeghem which, for 4' 43, stops traffic. I didn't immediately order this recording despite the very convincing selling point of the Ave Maria because I thought the Missa Pange Lingua sounded familiar and I already had it. But checking the shelves I found that Pange Lingua is the name of the ensemble that recorded Presque Josquin, a collection of pieces attributed to him which contains two further versions of the Ave Maria which must be why that did sound familiar. It can become a complicated business but that is possibly the most sublime piece here when one takes such rapture as a given thing,

Josquin - Ave Maria, Virgo Serena  

For better or worse, the Mass is 'interpolated' with motets and chansons. It doesn't matter much to me except that perhaps if a mass was written in five sections, they should be heard together in that order. It doesn't matter to me because I often prefer not to know what the words mean, such as,

Tell, tongue, the mystery

of the glorious Body

and of the precious Blood,

which, for the price of the world,

the fruit of a noble Womb,

the King of Nations poured forth. 

 

It is not my recent reading about Shelley that has re-inforced my devout atheism. A year into the plague now I would be interested to know what the glorious redeemer is doing about it and what the power of prayer amounts to when presumably many have been said only to see the statistics get worse. Maybe we are the virus or maybe religion is.

It is nonetheless possibly to enjoy the human achievement of music like this and the cathedrals and other religious buildings that these Renaissance composers, above those of other periods, built the musical equivalents of. One of their big advantages is the non-use of the organ which to many of us brings with it all kinds of associations of futile, morbid bombast. Religion is made up and is, thus, literature and some of it is pretty good as such.

I'm not prepared to take sides and say which of the several groups currently offering a continuing stream of music like this. I've seen the Tallis Scholars a few times, and The Sixteen, and some bits stand out in the memory. Once, if and when, we get to move about a bit a concerts are on again, I will make any reasonable effort to see Stile Antico.

I think gradually we are getting beyond use of the term 'Early Music'. It had begun to look as if 'authentic performance' was encroaching so much closer to the present day that we might have to reconsider principles of, say, Shostakovich. Maybe somebody did. But 'Early' is a relative term and things can only be 'early' compared to something else that was later so it was never obvious why something, which might have been Beethoven, was considered 'not early' and thus made music written before his an entirely different, strange category.

The word for it must be 'Renaissance' and it's good to see Stile Antico's first of 'a trilogy' of records call it such.

Josquin's music is architecture, as I'm reminded in the last of the motets here, with its elegant spires in the top part reaching above the harmonies of the lower parts.

And one is always glad to welcome new composers to the shelves and so, not being entirely Josquin, the disc having 3'23 of Hieronymous Vinders and 9'19 of Jacquet of Mantua at the end is a bit like  bonus tracks and I'm not sure that, at over 82 minutes, it's possible to fit much more on a disc. One can't complain about being short-changed on any part of the deal, especially when Amazon make a point of e-mailing to say it was £3 cheaper when they sent it out than when I ordered it.

But Hieronymous Vinders almost steals the whole show with his tribute to Josquin, O mors inevitabilis, 

O, ineluctable death, bitter death, cruel death, 

when you killed Josquin Desprez,

you took from us a man who,

through his music, adorned the church.

 

It contiunes a rich tradition of acknowledging that we all, at most, stand on the shoulders of previous giants, if we can even claim to do anything like that. That Old Hieronymous can communicate the same thought from 500 years ago quite so gently and only religiously in a second-hand way, is a thought that is worth thinking.

Monetarize

What have I done?

Whereas the likes of Dylan, Bowie and all sold off the rights to their own songs for millions, and I understand that Michael Jackson once owned Lennon-McCartney, all I've unloaded is other people's work printed onto plastic. I would surely never, ever sell off whatever rights accrue to my own work which, such as it is, isn't likely to pull in any income anyway.

There is, surely, no proper relationship between cash and art although you wouldn't bloody think so seeing what Banksy and Damien go for.

I have no use for a million quid. My three horses at Warwick today didn't do so bad but none of them won and it doesn't matter. The filthy cash I got today in exchange for all that long-gone record buying means I won't be going to a cash machine for a couple of weeks but, in exchange for that I can no longer say I'm the owner of Exile on Main Street, Desire, three memorable Chic albums, all those T. Rex label singles that were second-hand when I bought them, the Sex Pistols singles I rode into town to buy after school as soon as they were released, not even having heard them, the early Jesus & Mary Chain masterpieces, notwithstanding those items that were presents from other people, and such things that have been updated to CD like Blue, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, The Velvet Underground with Nico, and any amount of Yellowman and fondly remembered reggae that I was never going to play again in that format, at least.

But the angst and the agony will last for some time. Not so much whether I got the right price but whether there is a price at all that can be put on the historic artefacts that have been lying about unused for what is, by now, one third of my life so far.

I am no longer the owner of a copy of Do You Believe by Home T4 but I can still listen to it, like here, for instance,

 

 

 

Goodbye Vinyl and Cassettes

There was an advert in a local magazine, you see.

The piles of old LP's, singles and cassettes upstairs hadn't been played for twenty years maybe. Some research into the price of an original PiL Metal Box or a Sex Pistols bootleg confirmed what I thought, that they can be worth a few quid but that assumes neat condition. I invited them round, the 'collectors' which, of course, means dealers. I'm not daft.

The sentimental value doesn't count for that much in the end but I couldn't let the pristine 1968 White Horses by Jackie go and I held onto I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman by Whistling Jack Smith. I'm not yet sure how much of an emotional wrench it will prove to be but somebody somewhere might soon be the new owner of an extensive selection of 1980's Gregory Isaacs.

My biggest worry is that some old demo by me wasn't taken out or that some paperwork of some private nature was still in amongst them somewhere but I did my best in the time available to remove any such.

One thinks of how much one spent on those records but then one thinks how much further use they were going to be. I got twice what the old man was offering but the lad was keener to do the deal. 

One has to be able to let go. Perhaps somebody else will play Drive-in Saturday. I wonder if they'll sing along to the repeated line, 'it's a dri-i-i-ve -in Saturday' or the 'yes, sir, yes, sir' that goes over the top of it.

 

Percy per se

 Midway through the Shelley biography it is one of the best biographies I've ever read or thereabouts. Many of the biographies I've read are those of poets. They would be well over a yard's worth of shelf space if all kept together but the likes of Ezra Pound were from the library because I don't want a copy contaminating the house. Another contender is Donne by John Stubbs.

Richard Holmes is both scrupulous and scholarly and his sources being first-hand and hugely detailed make it vividly alive which it needs to be because disbelief would otherwise not be suspended for long.

He begins with the proviso that,

There will always be Shelley lovers, but this book is not for them. 

 

But it is for anybody who might enjoy the most lurid Hammer horror schlock, a Rabelasian tale of astonishing self-indulgence or the definitive answer as to how poets and poetry got their bad names.

At halfway, it is 1816, Shelley is 24 and still has nearly six years to live. So far he has run up debts and absconded from many of them, lived itinerantly in many parts of the British Isles and into Europe, enchanted teenage girls with tragic consequences and imagined an assassination attempt that might just have been a burglar.

The good side of him which would be reason to admire him is a revolutionary spirit ahead of his time that is genuinely moved by hardship, vegetarian and devoutly atheist but that comes at some cost and that which he's famous for - his poetry - doesn't really stand up to our latter day scrutiny and one doubts if it ever will again, having been so fashionably of its own time.

Holmes reports that the painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, found Shelley hypocritical,

'Shelley said he could not bear the inhumanity of Wordsworth in talking about the beauty of the shining trout as they lay after being caught, that he had such a horror of torturing animals it was impossible to express it'. Haydon felt this compared badly with the pain Shelley had caused in his own domestic life.

 

His concern for Harriet Westbrook's suicide might yet bring him to some maturity but that will be too late. As such, his dependance on others to sponsor his gloriously idealistic principles isn't something he seems to acknowledge or be grateful for but previous influential prophets of their own manifestos of superior ethics and generations of middle class campus Marxists since have enjoyed the luxury of espousing their high-mindedness while being indulged by others. If Shelley's legacy was to damage the reputation of poetry for the next two hundred years that wasn't much compared to the effect the charismatic rabble-rouser did in the Middle East two thousand years ago whose glib goodness was written up by his followers and caused almighty wickedness. A.N. Wilson's more balanced, and hugely informed, account sees it in more credible terms.

But Richard Holmes, from 1974, provides an impressive read which could be taken at face value as the gothic horror that it is but can't help also being a cautionary tale and warning against the excesses of the Romantic individual who, despite what he preaches, is effectively no more than an advert for himself. 

 

Racetrack Wiseguy

 Never missing a chance to promote the sport or their coverage of it, ITV Racing are always keen to read out any e-mail that says Thank Heavens for the racing, it is keeping me same during lockdown. And, yes, there is a lot like about it from the comfort of one's own home, seeing your old mates, as long as it doesn't start costing too much. Sky Racing's better in many ways, though. The main one being Alex Hammond.

The most golden of all the rules is don't chase your losses. Once the plan has gone wrong, wait for another day and don't scramble round looking for a way back in the last or at the evening meeting at 

Wolverhampton. That's not how to do it. Just hold a brief memorial service for the few quid you'll never see again and hold on until it's time to go again.

It is most disappointing that Cheltenham's off tomorrow because now that sport is rarely as exciting as it seemed to be for a young boy muchenamoured of it, Cheltenham remains some kind of special place. We will hope to bring back together the Three Wise Men nearer festival time to try to provide some answers but, making the best of what we have for now...

We'll go to Fairyhouse for the 1.58 and hope Gauloise can augment the good work she contributed to the Great Recovery of 2020 and see off the apparent confidence shown in Royal Kahala against her.

At the risk of causing a bilious attack at the Professor's house, I'll suggest making up a yankee by opposing some of the great Mr. Henderson's horses who may or may not be quite delivering their best at present. 

Miranda might overturn the Seven Barrows pair in the 2.05 at the prices; Pat seems to be not the only one that fancies Pat's Fancy in the 2.40 and one can make the case, if need be, that Philip Hobbs has a 25% strike rate with hurdlers over the last 14 days and so 11/2 about Musical Slave makes some sense in the 3.15. The yankee pays over 80/1 on a good day so you never know.

The Day I Met Thom Gunn

Like, the whining school-boy, with his satchel

but not so much the shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school,

is how this week I've returned to some desultory work on the Gunn book. I don't mind doing it once I get started but it isn't going to see print and so isn't worth it. It is my Key to All Mythologies, nominally giving me something to say I'm going whether I do it or not.
He has been my subject since the 1970's, being what I read towards the old 'S' level English, then
would have been the subject of my second year dissertation at university except Lancaster's English
Dept in 1979 didn't consider him a big enough subject for one unit of a degree and so I broadened it out to British Poetry since 1945. A few magazine articles and then the abortive first effort at the book in 1999 have delivered me to retirement age with unfinished business and no excuse to not do it. I
reached 30 thousand words before Christmas and awarded myself a rest. I have now reached 1982 and The Passages of Joy and thus an opportunity to insert the story of when I 'met' him. This is the long version.
-
A friend at Cambridge invited me there for a few days in November 1979 to take in a rare British
appearance that, it turns out, was in the Graduate Centre on the 14th and not, as I had thought, in
Trinity College. I have issue 2 of The Black & White Supplement, 30p fortnightly, to remind of all that
I've since forgotten.
I went down by train, changing at Leeds, on a bright day, reflecting that Prof. David Carroll had told us in a seminar, that he had realized that George Eliot would be his life's work when he first read her and he went on to edit the variorum edition of Middlemarch. I'm not drawing any parallels between that and my meddling in Gunn Studies. Later in the journey I remember Ely Cathedal dominating the fen lowlands, then the view across the lawn in Downing College. We had dinner 'in halls' one evening, if only to enjoy the rarified atmosphere with a few antique dons presiding at top table in front of a portrait of F.R. Leavis.
What I remember of the reading is the poem Bally Power Play about playing a pinball machine. So I
am grateful to the anonymous, dissatisfied reviewer in B&W Supplement for confirming that the poet's
waistcoat was leather and not suede as I thought it might have been and that his trousers were
corduroy. But he saw it as a celebrity appearance that students attended because they thought they
should and that it lacked immediacy. Well, not me, mate. I'd come from nearly the Lake District to see
him. He also says that afterwards they all drifted away, more interested in being first at the bar than the poems they had just heard. Again, not me.
Intrepidly, and admittedly I was the only one, I approached Thom Gunn and asked him to sign my copy of Touch which he very kindly did and dated it '1979'. Perhaps he was glad that at least one person cared as much as that because he offered the opening conversational gambit that it was his favourite of all the cover designs of his books. But could I ingratiate myself by making an obvious reply that they were some of my favourite poems, too.
No, I couldn't. I blew it, starstruck and not being able to think of the most obvious thing to say, I
shuffled away awkwardly and still regret it 42 years later. Any number of poets I've collared to sign
books at readings elsewhere in the intervening years know that I didn't remain shy for very long.