Michael Peverett

Berrow Gold: Rarities

2012-02-02T12:08:00.001Z

[Going through my old posts putting in the labels, I ran across this, a forgotten draft from a sunny 1st September 2009:]

past, the resemblance, the fluttering face of my life
B7 B7 B7 trouble and strife

The man in the ten-gallon hat and the crossed cartridge belts.
Was striding the streets of Laredo or was it Brean Vill. [(-age.)]

These two deaf old ladies are in the corner. Ones of comes back from the bar and says: It's just some cunt from Westerham

Epic Soundtracks and Nikki Sudden, the Godfrey brothers, are gone. I can't remember how many Beatles are still left. There are gaps in my teeth.

The flag of St George is at its very best near the coast, defying the Welsh. And hey! Remember Dunkirk. Gibraltar. Midget Submarines. Dresden Style.

That whippy creation of mere air, Agrostis, and tender, nibbled banks - F. ovina...

Charlotte Brontë's supposed sense-of-humour-failure.

2012-02-01T22:25:00.002Z

Stevie Davies' excellent introduction to her selection of the Brontë poems begins with "First, their names have become a kind of sentimental public property, and interest in their nature as opposed to their work takes on the character of an assault"; and she goes on to evoke the crowds tramping through Haworth parsonage. But, she then goes on to demonstrate rather convincingly how commentary on the work benefits from thinking about the nature.

Take, for instance, Charlotte's mislaid sense of humour, the one she had as a child but which goes missing in her novels.

It's an additional burden for people with singularly unhappy lives that they end up being accused of being humourless as well. But we have the materials, Charlotte being a writer and all, to look into this a bit more deeply.

First, let's point out that the transformation - because there certainly is a transformation - is gradual. The Angrian books, and notably late ones like Stancliffe's Hotel, are often pretty funny. The Professor has humour too, especially in the person of the hero's sarcastic friend (I'm sorry, I've mislaid my copy), but now this is pushed to the edges of the novel. "I was glad of it": there's still a pertness in the young Jane Eyre. Compare this with the deep personal misery manifested in her poems around 1845, when things went wrong with M. Heger. By the time of Villette, Charlotte had suffered a trio of bereavements that together had torn out the heart of her home, certainly all its gaiety. Yes, it's the gaiety that goes, not the humour. Stevie Davies shows that this transformation is also the upsurge of a terribly restraining Reason.

But even in Villette she could still portray the lively give-and-take between Lucy and Ginevra (that vitally leavening presence). Lucy Snowe is as cold as her name, in many ways; the book is largely in her control, she possesses the author because in large part she is the author. But she isn't one-dimensional, and moreover she doesn't have absolute control. "Leave sunny imaginations hope" - isn't there, even in those last lines, a certain humour of contrariety, though it is coloured black?

crushed data cube gridmap - spring-cleaning

2012-01-30T15:37:00.002Z

So, after a mere 8 years on Blogger, I've finally begun to use Labels. This was yesterday, when I found someone - Kirk apparently - who could give me some code to insert into my ancient G1 Blogger template so that it could display a list of labels.

It was only when I'd started to use them that I began to grasp their full potential. Yes, I'd already foreseen that labels could eventually replace the painfully manual list of Botanical Posts. But what I now perceived, glimmeringly, was that they might also eventually supply a future for the Brief History, currently wrapped in the cloak of an ancient format that is difficult to update or consult or read.

Yielding to the power of Labels is also, I know, just another small step towards total compromise with the information-based nature of the Internet. I hope to make up for it in some other ways.

I've also been through my recommended links. Some sites, regrettably, have disappeared since the last trawl (notably, Charles Freeland's - it contained non-comprehensible fictions). I dropped some other links because I decided I was no longer as interested in them as I used to be. And I've added a few that ought to have been here ages ago.

* (Later the same day)

Curses! I've realized that replacing the manual botanical index with labels just isn't going to work, because there's a 200-character limit on the total length of labels per post. And some of my posts might talk about seven or eight plants, plus I want to give the vernacular name as well as the Latin. So I guess I'll be maintaining the index after all. Great for you; not so great for me!

january wood in west swindon

2012-01-29T12:51:00.003Z

Wind pruning.

Wind damage.

Beneath a bird perch.

Deer print.

(Above and below x 3) Marbling of young plane trees, presumably London Plane (Platanus x hispanica).

from my notebook

2012-01-28T11:52:00.002Z

Broad-leaved Dock leaf (Rumex obtusifolius), or what's left of it when it's been food for something, presumably larvae of the Green Dock Beetle (Gastrophysa viridula).

(Above and below) The great pine of Brislington (outside Hartwell Jaguar showroom), as much admired, on weekday mornings, by commuters with nothing better to do while they're queuing to get through the Brislington bottleneck into Bristol. It's more pleasant to see it on a Saturday, from the convenient Subway on the other side of the road, which was constructed purely to allow a more leisured contemplation of this magnificent tree. It is a Corsican Pine (Pinus nigra var. maritima), a variety of European Black Pine, so-called because the tree tends to look blackish from a distance, even though the foliage is green. Corsican Pine has a neat arrangement of level branches, unlike the more scruffy upswept habit of Austrian Pine (Pinus nigra var. nigra). By pine standards it is fairly resistant to air pollution, but when I first noticed this tree in 1991 it was evidently finding the conditions of Brislington Hill a challenge; it looks much happier now.

only one word

2012-01-25T10:39:00.001Z

though the sky is written with vapour at sunset
and later the pointed laws of the stars,
though the barracking rain /
drills three or four-decker damp novels in love-letters
into the pipes and the lane

and the toilet / lino / is starry with regrets
and the cell wall is furrowed with curses,

though everywhere round me is harrow and surface /
roughened inscribed and defaced
with a million impossible words
in a million inscrutable senses,

but lay these aside, / some thousands of terms still remain
with the power to shine in the dark and explain;
there are words / whose knowledge is positive gain I suppose.

So how could I choose?

Is it choice, is it what you can choose, can you choose, when your life
is already within you on tape, it is already drawn round the pins
of your body, your mind and opinions recorded, precorded, precociously corded, pre / recorded?

When the gates of the dark
and the freedom of nothing to do
and the vaporous Oliver, Charlie in nappies, and Hamid, Olivia, Lacey
lie still in their cots
when the blanket is busy the crochet in furrows
all drink laced with foam and the marvellous winking horizon full up with all mother

I'd take a deep breath / and know what to say

tis distance lends enchantment to the view

2012-01-24T13:50:00.007Z

Thomas Campbell, again.

This well-known line appears near the start of The Pleasures of Hope (1799).

At summer eve, when Heaven's ethereal bow
Spans with bright arch the glittering hills below,
Why to yon mountain turns the musing eye,
Whose sunbright summit mingles with the sky?
Why do those cliffs of shadowy tint appear
More sweet than all the landscape smiling near?
'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.

(The Pleasures of Hope, Part I, lines 1-8.)

OK, so the quote is much more fertile when it's taken away from the context of that poem and can breathe and develop its powers on its own.

Along with Hazlitt's remark about how we perceive natural creatures as species rather than individuals, this is about the only bit of aesthetic philosophy that I've ever taken on board. However, I do think about both of them extremely often.

This morning, for example, because (in the office): the sudden stink of decay alerted me to a brief resumption of my sense of smell, for the first time since before Xmas. Perhaps it was the smell of my own trainers. Soon afterwards, we trooped along to the canteen on a tea-break - such an assault of smells. The jar of tea-bags smelt. The hot water smelt. The fridge made me feel like choking, and so did each of the separate distinct odours of the mouths of my friends.

Five minutes later, the system had all shut down again; I couldn't smell anything at all. This Brobdingnagian enlargement of sensory data is too much, too up close. In the circumstances, I loved it all, but this was not "beauty". "Beauty" in our present state of culture seems to require a desensitizing filter.

The remarks by Hazlitt come from the Lectures on the English Poets (1818), specifically the lecture on Thomson and Cowper, which Hazlitt concludes with an excursus (springing from Rousseau at Annecy) about love of Nature. He says:

"That which distinguishes this attachment from others is the transferable nature of our feelings with respect to physical objects; the associations connected with any one object extending to the whole class."

He gives an example about foreign-ness:

"I remember when I was abroad, the trees, and grass, and wet leaves, rustling in the walks of the Thuilleries, seemed to be as much English, to be as much the same trees and grass, that I had always been used to, as the sun shining over my head was the same sun which I saw in England; the faces only were foreign to me."

A closer botanist wouldn't perhaps experience that; Lucy Snowe in Villette, more sensitive to the distinction of a continental climate, restricts her sensation of "English-ness" to the moon. Still, Hazlitt is on to something.

"The same principle will also account for that feeling of littleness, vacuity, and perplexity, which a stranger feels on entering the streets of a populous city. Every individual he meets is a blow to his personal identity. Every face is a teazing, unanswered riddle. He feels the same wearisome sensation in walking from Oxford Street to Temple Bar, as a person would do who should be compelled to read through the first leaf of all the volumes in a library. But it is otherwise with respect to nature. A flock of sheep is not a contemptible, but a beautiful sight..."

"This nature is a kind of universal home, and every object it presents to us an old acquaintance with unaltered looks..."

It's because I don't believe this to be wholly true or invariably true that I'm always thinking about it. I think Hazlitt's sense of the class of sheep is an accident of point of view; a shepherd would look at sheep differently. In that respect Hazlitt is himself a walking illustration of "Tis distance lends enchantment to the view".

As it happens, Hazlitt is fairly scathing about Thomas Campbell. That may be right, but when he notices these lines -

Some hamlet shade, to yield his sickly form
Health in the breeze, and shelter in the storm.

- notices them, in order to assert a failure in the antithesis (the shade brings shelter, but it does not bring health: the breeze does), I don't think most readers today will feel the force of that logic; I think they'd reckon Campbell's lines to be rather improved by the failure of the antithesis; it makes them rangier, more comprehensive.

Londres

2012-01-19T15:42:00.001Z

I made a flitting visit to London yesterday to see Kyli and stay overnight at her no-longer-very-newly-moved-into gaff in Hackney; and I met her flatmate and old uni pal Aelia for the first time. We were all late - Kyli's journey from the City, and my car journey along the A501, were both disrupted by the same overturned car; Aelia just missed her stop. Anyway the evening got foreshortened, but we went down to Cirrik's and had a nice meal featuring olives, aubergines and tempranillo, then back home, I went straight off to sleep at midnight and woke up five hours later to begin the journey back to Swindon in hefty rain.

So I was only really {in London and not driving and not asleep} for about four hours, but what a wealth of images: I feel like a camera whose shutter opened on the lunar surface, and has now come back to earth carrying one photo to be analyzed for months by scientists. Yes, there is that much caffeine still swilling around the system; mainly due to Heston's Costa. But this indeed marked the end of my different-planet experience, and the resumption of normality. London driving had necessarily involved switching off the car stereo, I needed all my concentration to take in my surroundings. Now, back on the M4, I could switch it on again, and complete yet another listen to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, then a bit of country, and then some Kings of Leon (Because of the times - Xmas present from Kyli, who is my chief source of info about what's going on in modern music).

workplace blogs

2012-01-18T13:13:00.001Z

Busyness is threatening my record of blogging nearly every day this year. Also, as I've got more interested in the diastic method I'm updating my previous post because it doesn't make sense to split this material over multiple posts. Probably daily blogging is a bit too often anyway - Dan Silliman posts 2-3 times per week and I regard his blog as definitional.

But I do want to share this link (via Vincent) : Attitude and Pepper Spray, workplace blog written by a US prison guard on shift. Here's a bit of it:

---

It's been close to an hour since I got home and I think my earlobes are just now starting to come back online. It was the kind of cold that felt like someone was running a frozen chainsaw up and down your legs, even through the long johns.

As usual when we are running the chow line, there were officers inside the chow hall and some outside doing pat searches and watching the yard. I was worried that they guys outside were getting too cold and I kept running out there to make sure they were okay and then running back inside to make sure things were going well in there.

I'm sure it was mildly amusing to watch.

We had a good crew out on the yard tonight. I had the Fireman and Gray Ham and Snack. The Fireman and Gray Ham are both old yard dawgs and know what to do without me getting on to them. Snack is young and fairly new but has a pretty good head on his shoulders. He'd gone up to watch the med line and I ran up to make sure he went inside and warmed up when he needed it.

The Fireman was inside calling the houses and checking with me about the timing and Gray Ham was out in his insulated bibs wandering the yard watching the movement. He wouldn't have gone inside if I had told him to so I didn't bother.

---

Some of my favourite blogs are workplace blogs. For around five years I've been the avid reader of a private blog (circulated by weekly email) from out of the world of aggregates/tarmacing - I've often wanted to ask my mate if I could quote some of it here, but I still haven't got round to it.

Mac Low's diastic process (in Gale Nelson)

2012-01-16T23:07:00.013Z

Most people know of the diastic method in connection with its inventor, Jackson Mac Low, but my encounter with it came via the poem "Modern Forgery" in Gale Nelson's 1991 book Stare Decisis, which I touched on before.

The basic idea is that you take a generating word, phrase or sentence, which is known as the "seed text" - in this case it's Genesis 48:16 -

The Angel who has delivered me from all harm may he bless these boys. May they be called by my name and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac, and may they increase greatly upon the earth.

The actual poem is generated by sourcing words (typically from a pre-selected reservoir known as the "source text" - in this case the source text is HD's Trilogy), each of which contains a letter of the seed text, beginning with the first and carrying through to the end - and the letter, furthermore, must appear in the same position within the chosen word as it appears in its original word within the seed text.

I'm not describing this very well. But as an example, the part of the seed-text that consists of "bless these boys" generates the following:

          ....bed

     clock she herself
     moon-shell thinking thought

     the herself instead
     beside hood eye-lid
     talisman ....

No? Still puzzled? Here it is again, this time with the generating letters capitalized:

          ....Bed

     cLock shE herSelf
     moon-Shell Thinking tHought

     thE herSelf instEad
     Beside hOod eYe-lid
     taliSman ....

Got it now? OK.

It's a fascinating technique. Meditating on it over the last few months, here's a few observations:

1. The method is submerged.

The traditional technique to which the diastic method is most closely related is, of course, the acrostic. The acrostic aspect of a poem can't be heard, and as readers of Geoffrey Trease's Cue For Treason will recall (oh no, more children's lit), it can easily not be seen, unless the acrostic letters are emphasized in some way. Traces of the diastic method are even more submerged. It's difficult to see them even when you know they're in front of you. Have a go at finding them in this passage:

     Hermes indicated
     papyrus
     atmosphere good
     Presence

     spectrum-blue strangely
     remote
     wilful

Even with the seed-text to hand, it proves quite elusive. (It was
[incr]ease greatl[y].)

If you used the diastic method in a poem and you didn't say that you were doing it, it's a safe bet that no-one but a codebreaker would ever find you out.

2. It is stringent.

What I mean precisely by stringent is, again, best shown by example.

Mark's round at my house looking for a pair of boots he left behind, and I need to tell him where they are.

First, I'll try heroic couplets:

Look in my bedroom if you want your boots;
They're in the wardrobe, underneath the suits.

Piss!

Now, I'll try the diastic method, using the seed-text weather report for january seventeenth. (As it turned out, I only needed up to the letter s.)

Well, get ready. Foot thither thither. Reach bedroom; explore into wardrobe, intently. Ferret, boots carefully jutting way long thru beneath estuary estuary suits.

The trouble this caused me is what I mean by the diastic method being stringent. Its rules are so prescriptive that there is very little scope for choosing the words you would actually like to say. I even had to resort to the feeble expedient of incorporating obvious nonsense ("estuary estuary"), hoping Mark would know to ignore it.

3. Elimination of individual expression.

Of course, this is not how, or why, poets use the diastic method. Mac Low's idea was to restrict his own scope for individual expression, replacing it by programmatic generation incorporating chance collisions.

You don't use it to convey information or to "express yourself", and you don't take your words from just anywhere (as you do when you're speaking), but from some specific wordhoard - such as Whitman or HD (in Gale Nelson's poem), or e.g. Djuna Barnes in Mac Low's well-documented case.

Mac Low used Charles Hartman's computer program DIASTEXT (1989) to generate the drafts of Barnesbook: Four Poems Derived from Sentences by Djuna Barnes; however, he then edited these drafts to a certain extent, in some cases even rearranging and discarding words. As Mac Low reflected, chance can never be the sole agent in poem-generation: "The very devising of methods must involve the author’s taste at certain points..."

Indeed, there's nothing wrong with using the diastic method in a subordinate role, perhaps for only one stage in the process of composition, as Mac Low did in "Sleepy Poetry" (2001):

The streamy steeds
Still murmur at their íll-fated charges.

Our fright has musical arms:
Our great    friend’s    head
Is feeding-space’s ever-jaunty thorns
From round mere lóvers’ noughts.

Imagination shall for the poet be shade
(Over and off).

That thirsty spánning man
is toil’s   precious   faller,   parting the chariots
When blushingly all thus friendly couch.

At one stage, Mac Low tells us in a note, the diastic method was used to shuffle the words (out of Keats' "Sleep and Poetry", of course), but the final text has been so over-composed that it's now impossible to see diastic traces. Here it supplied the merest of biscuit-bases for Mac Low's toweringly fluffy dessert.

4. Automation

A program is definitely the most painless way of generating diastic text. I strongly recommend eDiastic, though I don't know if its source code is in any way directly derived from Hartman's historic piece of C coding. Here's something I've just generated using it -the seed text is a sentence from an imaginary guidebook to the Pyrenees, and the reservoir is the post about Swallows and Ammazons that I wrote a couple of days ago:

That's the tremendous
which five dangerous wood landing original landing
a islands because mate friend adventure
is and water below
the character about less suddenly
some and looking slower handy
water calm less that suddenly because
are Captain relationships usually realism
terms the are
the write loaded heavily Garner gunwale suddenly characters character

It would be interesting to know if Gale Nelson used a program for "Modern Forgery" or not. (Composing a diastic poem manually wouldn't be all that laborious.) Nelson's poem is composed of two diastic outputs that are not obviously edited. But if he did use a program, he must have tampered with the output. That's the only way to explain why, in the quotation above, both of the words "eye-lid talisman" have their seed-letters in the wrong position: a program wouldn't make those "mistakes". (What do you mean, you didn't notice?!)

5. Some regular features of diastic output are unlike normal prose.

It tends to produce continuous sequences of long words. This occurs because if there is, say an 8-letter word in the seed-text, it requires embodiment in words that are at least 5,6,7,and 8 letters in length - often longer and never shorter. (Likewise, short words, when they do appear, are often clustered together.)

It tends to produce word repetitions ("estuary estuary", "characters character", etc), because often the same word comes in handy for embodying successive letters of a word in the seed-text.

After reading diastic output for a while, some common words or starts-of-words in seed-text, like "the", become rather noticeable in their embodied forms:

terms the are (me, above)
thinking thought the (Nelson, above)
the the Amen (Nelson)

So perhaps it doesn't need a codebreaker after all!

6. The acrostic does not have a particularly exalted reputation in traditional verse. I've probably forgotten some obvious exception, but on the whole the hallowed canonical poetry of western tradition does not contain acrostics. It has always been a gimmick, a piece of fun, at best an elegant sort of ornament or knack, the kind of thing Elizabethans liked - Jonson's introductory poem to Volpone exemplifies that. Diastic verse, by contrast, drops all claim to ornament, though not perhaps fun; but its method serves the serious business of randomizing text and of eliminating the continuities of prose statement.

*

So far as I know or believe, none of the other poems in Stare Decisis use the diastic method. But the texts, however derived, are like "Modern Forgery" in as much as they forcibly assert that they are patterns that exclude being read, in any but the slightest degree, as prose statement.

the biggest numbness

2012-01-14T21:47:00.001Z

Farting along the river at night I was bold and breathy, I dragged over gates and held on to my toe-caps through dewy white sex-fields of peed and bollock, jutted on bitten stabs and went in among the elders. They did not think that anything was wrong. Howling among the elders sand in hand to the meadow I came to a deck and stank deeply. Then I was cold enough to puke. Beth was the full moo, swimming rough the nipples as I meant to for several hours and I suddenly felt terrific at the lone breath I plunder the ranch like a wong winkey.

a cold and frosty morning

librivox.org - Balzac's Sarrasine - Jekyll and Hyde

2012-01-13T16:03:00.004Z

When I was writing yesterday about Swallows and Amazons, I originally started my piece with some buffoonery about it forming, "of course", the subject of Roland Barthes' S/Z. (I also speculated about the origin of Amazon.com).

It can't be a coincidence that, though I didn't know it, I was actually in the middle of listening to the text that really does form the subject of Barthes' book - Balzac's Sarrasine, as read by Chip, a librivox.org volunteer. (No wonder Barthes was interested, it's a very striking story.)

How all this happened, was that since I moved back to Frome (but still work in Swindon), I felt the desire to make some use of those 2.5 hours of driving every day by downloading some more audio books, a service formerly provided by Frome library. "Formerly" is unfair; they still do offer the service. The difference is that you can't get the audiobooks on MP3 any longer, but on some other format which is copy-protected. And that's no good to me. My car stereo will play MP3 off a USB key, but nothing else.

So I went looking for free audiobooks on MP3 and eventually turned to Project Gutenberg and found MP3s of some dismally ancient but well-loved favourite authors. All the ones I've heard are supplied by librivox.org, a volunteer organization. They vary a lot, but they're generally fascinating. The other one I've heard in total is R.L. Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, read by Londoner David Barnes. Could a reader go wrong? Certainly. Barnes doesn't attempt doing the police in different voices, but he reads beautifully, gives us perfect atmosphere and pacing. As for the story, it opens more depths on depths every time I hear it.

Chip's Colorado Sarrasine is good too - better in some ways - more gusto, livelier drama in the dialogue - and the tale carries a punch like a horseshoe. Balzac's manner of (apparently) gushingly over-writing is at first alarming, but it's a huge trick. And at the end of the story, you look back over it and you realize that, once again, he's always been several steps ahead of you, and you smile in chagrin and in delight and total admiration. But how many readers it must have lost him! Not many people, at any rate, have downloaded Sarrasine from Project Gutenberg, - and perhaps even those who do are nearly all studying S/Z in their theory class.

Swallows and Amazons

2012-01-12T22:47:00.002Z

Well, I ought to write a little about this, but only for five minutes. It really is incredibly impressive because it was so original. It's obvious Alan Garner learnt from Arthur Ransome some of his most important techniques: painstakingly complete realization of physical action and making character live through dialogue in action.

Imagine a book with six characters in which there is no change in their relationships, and you cannot say of any one that they are the particular friend, still less the enemy, of any other at any stage. Imagine a book in which the terms of adventure are essentially and watchfully guarded, as in fact is usually the case for children. And yet, because of the realism, this is exciting and feels dangerous: the dangers are those of nature, e.g. the tremendous storm or the night-sailing among the islands, which nearly goes so wrong.

Here, they are bringing firewood from the mainland:

....

"It's a good thing it's so calm," said the mate, looking at the water, which was not very far below the gunwale.

Sculling over the stern is slower than rowing, but in the dead calm Swallow moved easily, heavily loaded though she was, and no water came aboard, though some nearly did when Roger suddenly changed his mind about the side of the boat he liked best.

"We'll take her to the old landing-place," said Captain John. "That's a good place for landing a cargo, and we want the wood handy for the camp."

"It would be a dreadful business carrying it all the way from the harbour," said the mate.

.....

birds singing at night.

2012-01-11T11:59:00.003Z

It was Dec 22nd when I first heard it, at around 3 am, i.e. around 5 hours before sunrise. It was a sleepy sort of hushed chorus of low tweeting, evidently a whole treeful of birds and of several species. It was twittering more than it was a full song. At one point even a crow chimed in, possibly saying "shut the fuck up".

And I've heard this middle-of-the-night singing several times since I moved back to Frome, where my bedroom backs onto waste ground with trees and a railway, always at around 2-4 a.m. Perhaps it has always been there but I never noticed it until I moved back from my six months sojourn at a house in West Swindon where there was practically no birdsong because there were no trees near my window. (I mean, VERY near, as in 100 yards. West Swindon, I want to emphasize, is on the whole a distinctly treeish place.)

The RSPB tells us dull things about light pollution and robins (but this is definitely more than robins). I prefer to think that Marcellus was reporting a genuine midwinter phenomenon:

Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairly takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

The other noises I often hear are foxes barking (e.g. last night around 23:30) and the whistling of Little Owls (but generally not at this time of year). The trains make loud shrieking and grinding noises, which I usually sleep through. At some time between 05:45 and 06:30 my Polish neighbour drives off in his van, so that I begin every day feeling like a lazy git.

Oxford horse-chestnuts - St Leonards-on-Sea shingle

2012-01-10T15:49:00.003Z

Yesterday evening, feeling gloomy, lonely and tired, I plunged into a book drawn randomly off the shelf; it was a selection of Gerard Manley Hopkins' Poetry and Prose. It was the prose I read, mainly; though before going off to sleep I read a little of the "Deutschland" and after the light was out listened for a while to my brain sponaneously constructing gibberish in Sprung rhythm, which it appeared to manage as sure-footedly as blank verse. But mostly I read the prose.

The most engaging piece, for me, was the early Platonic Dialogue on the Origin of Beauty, written 1865. This is unfinished, and it's basically a slow trainwreck, because it gets more and more bogged down in detail and ever less likely to successfully resist "de gustibus non est disputandum", which is what the Professor of Aesthetics is trying to do. But the early pages are enjoyable. He and his two pals begin with the horse-chestnut leaf, said to be at its most beautiful when it has seven leaflets, not six. (The Professor is working towards a fairly uninteresting insight about variety within uniformity.) The tree Aesculus hippocastanum has between 5 and 7 leaflets. You would expect Hopkins to be a close observer and he is, just as later in his journals writing about oak foliage. The only odd thing is when the Professor talks about Vesica Piscis (i.e. a lens shape), suggests that they are inferior to the Horse-Chestnut shape when it comes to making fans, then makes a fan of lime leaves to prove it. - But after all, lime leaves are unsymmetrically ovate/cordate, not lens-shaped at all! And of course it is not right to compare a (lime) leaf with a (chestnut) leaflet, but Hopkins seems to be unaware of this distinction.

Hopkins was passionately interested in his own apprehensions of nature, and yet he never seems to have been interested in learning the botanical words (like ovate or cordate) that would have made things clearer for him. Instead he preferred to be at the forefront of his own research with its own terms, fretty quains and all the rest. The same perversity comes out in later life when he firecely asserts, (but with suspicious repetition) that he doesn't care about not being able to read much or write much or publish anything at all.

The dialogue moves on to oak trees:

"We were speaking of the chestnut-trees, of their unsymmetrical growth. Now is the oak an unsymmetrical tree?"

"Very much so; O quite a rugged boldly-irregular tree: and this I should say was one of the things which make us invest it with certain qualities it has in poetry and in popular and national sentiment," said Hanbury.

"Very observant. You mean of course when it grows at liberty, rather than when influenced by confinement, cutting and so forth."

"Yes: what I say will of course be truest of the tree when uninfluenced by man."

"Very good. Now have you ever noticed that when the oak has grown to its full stature uninfluenced, the outline of its head is drawn by a long curve, I should think it would be that of a parabola, which, if you look at the tree from a little way off, is of almost mathematical correctness?"

This matter of being uninfluenced by man is almost the wrong way round. Before man, almost every oak tree was confined in dense woodland. It is the standard tree, carefully preserved in the isolation of parkland, that develops the parabola. Yet the parabola is part of nature, of course. (The horse-chestnut illustrates this even better. The few wild populations, in the Balkans, look very different from the handsome tree we are familiar with - small, tough, and crowded. Like other tree species, notably the Monterey Cypress, it seems to have ended up becoming trapped and hanging on in an ecological niche that doesn't really suit it.)

The other thing that stood out for me, reading Hopkins' letters, is mention of Campbell, alongside Milton, as one of the two masters of style - an idea that Arnold originated, I think. This is (presumably?) the Romantic Poet Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), who regarded the following as his best poem. Well, I like this poem too, but that's because of the feeling of excitement that comes with the thought of striding beneath the Marina in that blessed spot, scene of such significance to my own life.

Lines On The View From St. Leonard's

by Thomas Campbell

Hail to thy face and odours, glorious Sea!
'Twere thanklessness in me to bless thee not,
Great beauteous Being! in whose breath and smile
My heart beats calmer, and my very mind
Inhales salubrious thoughts. How welcomer
Thy murmurs than the murmurs of the world!
Though like the world thou fluctuatest, thy din
To me is peace, thy restlessness repose.
Ev'n gladly I exchange yon spring-green lanes
With all the darling field-flowers in their prime,
And gardens haunted by the nightingale's
Long trills and gushing ecstasies of song,
For these wild headlands, and the sea-mew's clang --

With thee beneath my windows, pleasant Sea,
I long not to o'erlook earth's fairest glades
And green savannahs -- Earth has not a plain
So boundless or so beautiful as thine;
The eagle's vision cannot take it in:
The lightning's wing, too weak to sweep its space,
Sinks half-way o'er it like a wearied bird:
It is the mirror of the stars, where all
Their hosts within the concave firmament,
Gay marching to the music of the spheres,
Can see themselves at once.

Nor on the stage
Of rural landscape are there lights and shades
Of more harmonious dance and play than thine.
How vividly this moment brightens forth,
Between gray parallel and leaden breadths,
A belt of hues that stripes thee many a league,
Flush'd like the rainbow, or the ringdove's neck,
And giving to the glancing sea-bird's wing
The semblance of a meteor.

Mighty Sea!
Cameleon-like thou changest, but there's love
In all thy change, and constant sympathy
With yonder Sky -- thy Mistress; from her brow
Thou tak'st thy moods and wear'st her colours on
Thy faithful bosom; morning's milky white,
Noon's sapphire, or the saffron glow of eve;
And all thy balmier hours, fair Element,
Have such divine complexion -- crisped smiles,
Luxuriant heavings and sweet whisperings,
That little is the wonder Love's own Queen
From thee of old was fabled to have sprung --
Creation's common! which no human power
Can parcel or inclose; the lordliest floods
And cataracts that the tiny hands of man
Can tame, conduct, or bound, are drops of dew
To thee that could'st subdue the Earth itself,
And brook'st commandment from the heavens
For marshalling thy waves --

Yet, potent Sea! alone
How placidly thy moist lips speak ev'n now
Along yon sparkling shingles. Who can be
So fanciless as to feel no gratitude
That power and grandeur can be so serene,
Soothing the home-bound navy's peaceful way,
And rocking ev'n the fisher's little bark
As gently as a mother rocks her child? --

The inhabitants of other worlds behold
Our orb more lucid for thy spacious share
On earth's rotundity; and is he not
A blind worm in the dust, great Deep, the mall
Who sees not or who seeing has no joy
In thy magnificence? What though thou art
Unconscious and material, thou canst reach
The inmost immaterial mind's recess,
And with thy tints and motion stir its chords
To music, like the light on Memnon's lyre!

The Spirit of the Universe in thee
Is visible; thou hast in thee the life --
The eternal, graceful, and majestic life
Of nature, and the natural human heart
Is therefore bound to thee with holy love.
Earth has her gorgeous towns; the earth-circling sea
Has spires and mansions more amusive still --
Men's volant homes that measure liquid space
On wheel or wing. The chariot of the land
With pain'd and panting steeds and clouds of dust
Has no sight-gladdening motion like these fair
Careerers with the foam beneath their bows,
Whose streaming ensigns charm the waves by day,
Whose carols and whose watch-bells cheer the night,
Moor'd as they cast the shadows of their masts
In long array, or hither flit and yond
Mysteriously with slow and crossing lights,
Like spirits on the darkness of the deep.

There is a magnet-like attraction in
These waters to the imaginative power
That links the viewless with the visible,
And pictures things unseen. To realms beyond
Yon highway of the world my fancy flies,
When by her tall and triple mast we know
Some noble voyager that has to woo
The trade-winds and to stem the ecliptic surge.
The coral groves -- the shores of conch and pearl,
Where she will cast her anchor and reflect
Her cabin-window lights on warmer waves,
And under planets brighter than our own:
The nights of palmy isles, that she will see
Lit boundless by the fire-fly -- all the smells
Of tropic fruits that will regale her -- all
The pomp of nature, and the inspiriting
Varieties of life she has to greet,
Come swarming o'er the meditative mind.

True, to the dream of Fancy, Ocean has
His darker tints; but where's the element
That chequers not its usefulness to man
With casual terror? Scathes not Earth sometimes
Her children with Tartarean fires, or shakes
Their shrieking cities, and, with one last clang
Of bells for their own ruin, strews them flat
As riddled ashes -- silent as the grave?
Walks not Contagion on the Air itself?
I should -- old Ocean's Saturnalian days
And roaring nights of revelry and sport
With wreck and human woe-be loth to sing;
For they are few, and all their ills weigh light
Against his sacred usefulness, that bids
Our pensile globe revolve in purer air.
Here Morn and Eve with blushing thanks receive
Their freshening dews, gay fluttering breezes cool
Their wings to fan the brow of fever'd climes,
And here the Spring dips down her emerald urn
For showers to glad the earth.

Old Ocean was
Infinity of ages ere we breathed
Existence -- and he will be beautiful
When all the living world that sees him now
Shall roll unconscious dust around the sun.
Quelling from age to age the vital throb
In human hearts, Death shall not subjugate
The pulse that swells in his stupendous breast,
Or interdict his minstrelsy to sound
In thundering concert with the quiring winds;
But long as Man to parent Nature owns
Instinctive homage, and in times beyond
The power of thought to reach, bard after bard
Shall sing thy glory, BEATIFIC SEA.

at a boot sale

2012-01-09T14:22:00.001Z

I bought a Penguin omnibus of Jane Austen's seven novels (Seven? Yes, they included Lady Susan), because the guy only wanted 25p for it. I'd read them all, some quite recently, and re-visiting Austen-land isn't especially high on my agenda, but it just seemed a nice thing to have. Also, for 50p I bought Andrea Bocelli's album Sacred Arias, because I thought it would introduce me to a hitherto unexplored bit of popular culture, which it has.

Then there was Ivanhoe, in the hardback Regent's Classics format that I owned as a child, though I think I never managed to get much beyond chapter 1, and what I mostly remember about it is Gurth and Wamba. But I did gaze at the illustration on the cover a lot, and I marvelled at the name Brian de Bois-Gilbert. The memory of that book must have had a lot to do with my subsequent devotion to Scott. The stallholder wanted a quid for it, which by now seemed far too much.

Finally, I got a Teach Yourself language course "Complete Finnish", with book and 2 CDs (£3 for this one). The girl asked me, did I ever go to Finland. I said no, then corrected myself, I had been there for about two hours once.

This was in 1998, when we crossed the Swedish border at Karesuando, more or less at the top of Sweden, and then drove westwards along the Finnish side of that border until we dropped into Norway. My memories of Finland are of a lively trucker's cafe and of endless flat bog and stunted trees, making me feel like I was truly getting close to the tundra. It was a dark afternoon up on this slowly rising plateau and I took no photos, hence Finland escaped being memorialized in F O T O. It would have been between nos. 24 and 25.

I confess, my practical ambition so far as Finnish is concerned was to be able to pronounce names and titles with reasonable accuracy. But now that I'm listening to the CDs, I think, why stop there? Why haven't I ever been to Porvoo, or lived the Year of the Hare? Truly, I've wasted my life.

Villette

2012-01-08T21:24:00.002Z

Sunday being a day of rest, I'm posting what I've written thus far about Charlotte Brontë's Villette:

Villette (1853)

More Penguin Introductions, this time by Tony Tanner, who specializes in psychologically-informed criticism, but is reliably boring, and fails to avoid such critical clichés of the time as “appropriately” and “serves to”.

I’m sorry to keep coming back to this thing about CB explicitly turning her back on the Angrian inspiration. That was a statement of intent, but the inspiration was evidently too powerful, because Villette returns to it. It is a book full of Angrian tricks.

Everyone remembers the final page, in which CB (in deference to her father, apparently) does not quite say what she so direly hints at – and, of course, reminds us that all is fiction.

But the performance in the open pages is equally “worked”. Lucy Snowe, girl, is the observing narrator; but as page follows page and the story of little Paulina and young Graham proceeeds, we become ever more uneasily aware of something missing that we expect to find. It is the complete absence of any account of Lucy’s background, parents, family or even age. (Graham is sixteen, Paulina is six – we will eventually infer that Lucy in these opening chapters is 14 or 15.) With the beginning of Chapter 4, Lucy returns “home”. This, then is surely the expected, if delayed, account of “I was born in __shire, my parents were poor but genteel,” etc. No – instead all we are given is a trickily evasive metaphorical account of generalized disaster, clad in maritime terms. The storm and the wreck appear, and the storm reappears later in the same chapter, when Miss Marchmont tells the story of Frank; all this foreshadows the storm, wrecks, and non-return of the lover in the novel’s Finis. So this active, tragic but occluded material supplies both the book-ends for the novel proper: Lucy is offered as a character without no known past or future. Rather as the indifferent Graham sees her, in fact; as society generally will see her. It’s striking, impressive, and rather artificial.

We are often told that it is a great and all too prevalent sin to read the Brontës’ novels as autobiographical documents, but I think it is quite right to read Villette in this way, and that’s one way to make sense of its artificial, pointedly un-naturalistic structure. I am not referring so much to Charlotte’s memories of her two stays in Brussels, I am referring to the much more recent catastrophe of losing her three lifelong companions in short succession. The occluded and secretive Lucy Snowe makes sense as a mouthpiece, to express it as crudely as possible, for giving vent to Charlotte’s sense of alienation, her resignation to having no clear future, and her consequently extremely critical and judgemental view of the life around her. Such story as Villette possesses is, I won’t say of secondary importance, but it is “worked” in a somewhat offhand manner (very Angrian, this) in pursuit of other more personally pressing goals. Do you think, reader, that this place Villette is truly a solidly wrought fictional scena possessing a sober truth in sharp contrast to those unreal heather moors and cities off the coast of Africa? Well, I do not. This Villette with its spectral nuns, its bejewelled hunchbacks, its fanatic priest, and its undisclosed Graham Bretton the first person that Lucy meets? Or what do you make of Madame Beck, a wonderfully elaborated image of surveillance and respectable selfishness who is constantly built up as if to play a part in some plot, yet is never really given any plotting to do? The naturalistic novel does not seem the best model for this disorientating waywardness.

in Somerset

2012-01-07T21:58:00.004Z

[Above: The Cheese & Grain, Frome, drawn this morning while stallholding at the Collectables Fair; note lava-lamp in foreground.
Below: Scenes from the Bay View Cafe, Burnham-on-Sea, on an overcast New Year's Day.]

Parrett Estuary / Bridgewater Bay

Morrisons Car-Park

The Quantocks

Laura

Also in a Somerset groove, tune into Brenda's charming Bristol Channel, but you've only got until Friday. Swedish Mik may possibly be me. I hear it will be returning as a blog in due course; I'll post the link when I know.

playground

2012-01-06T13:20:00.008Z

Blogs are dead, everyone's moving on! This vigorous meme continues to circulate in literary circles, Chris Goode (on closing down Thomson's) noting with something like surprise that Dennis Cooper's DCs is still so vigorous. (Great and alarming blog, but not necessarily one to browse in the workplace, as I found out to my cost yesterday.) And today Todd Swift is taking a break from his long-running Eyewear, using very similar rhetoric about there being more elegant and quicker ways to reach people. (Chris and Todd might not agree about a lot else, I'm thinking.) Perhaps I'd better wait. Todd tends to shoot from the hip, and many's the time that I've spotted the first few lines of one of his tastier posts on "Blogs I Follow", only to find that by the time I get there the post has already been pulled.

Mark Scroggins, it must be a couple of years ago now, also lauded the potential of Facebook and Twitter - but Mark still maintains his blog, and even writes good things on it, though never enough. But I just don't think Facebook has the potential that's claimed for it. (I subscribe to the now equally vigorous meme "What a waste of time and evergy is Facebook, I'm moving on".) I think it's quite good for vaguely staying in touch with the more shadowy outer circles of your acquaintance, and that's it.

But surely blogs themseves move pretty fast? Last autumn's targeted attack on Todd and Eyewear by the Barque crew Sean B, Frances K et al was so Swiftly tidied up that most people missed it, even if they were watching. Like a tussle in a disco, its 10 blurry seconds revealed a lot more about all the participants than anything that clear-minded literary historians compose.

It would be better to celebrate the democratization of literature, The Blog's gifting of an expressive outlet to such a various and surprising crowd of lay people - admittedly, not a representative bunch in global terms - but a large number of people, nevertheless, who might otherwise never have found writerly expression in any form. If many of the resultant blogs are quite generic, though in ways that might not have been predicted - e.g. the workplace blog - yet The Blog is also a container that can be used in many ways, most of them not discovered yet.

I am resisting the impulse to yet again list my favourite blogs. Most of them are in the list of links to your right, but it does need a spring clean.

*

The collaborative blog Montevidayo definitely needs to be on there, and it might be another demonstration of The Blog's developing vigour. Johannes Göransson is one of the people I listen to most attentively, and the way he's writing on recent posts about the Plague Ground (Playground) - e.g. this one, tracing implications of Joyelle McSweeney's original idea :

Welcome to the plague ground: There is still "too much" American poetry

- is typically beautiful with the beauty of clarity and pragmatic as a toolbox. Along certain lines the Montevidayo way converges with my own relativistic views of literature and artefacts generally. I'm not really talking about the detail, I mean the submersion in processes of decay and rebirth; artefacture as waste.

It so happens I'm reading Göransson's translation of Johan Jönson's Collobert Orbital at the moment. A fantastic book I will certainly write about some time.

*

CAMBRIDGE-POETRY-RELATED DREAM (dreamed last night).

I am reading the editor's preamble to a poetry magazine associated with the Cambridge School. The Editor tells us that this time he has, for pressing reasons that I forget, included a number of poems by both men AND women. He is well aware that, contrary to his usual practice, this flouts the principle of "NIcarnation" (in the dream I specifically noticed that this was an anagram of INcarnation). He then rather helpfully explains that NIcarnation means, of course, the separation of the sexes in poetry. His magazine usually prints either poems that are all by women or poems that are all by men. The heart of NIcarnational practice, as cultivated e.g. by Simon "Dionysus Crucified" Jarvis, is that a poem written by a male author should never refer in any way whatever to women, likewise a poem written by a woman should never refer in any way to men.

I'll resist interpreting this dream, at any rate publically, but I ought to say that as of today I haven't ever read anything by Simon Jarvis. (Maybe I will now, if only because I'm curious to find out whether his work does in any respect aspire to NIcarnation.)

*

"I made a suggestion once, but I didn't get any response, so I re-submitted it. Then I did get a response. It said, Shut up, we heard you the first time."

"Oh, that was the old suggestion scheme."

"The old suggestion scheme??"

"Yes, there was a suggestion scheme in Bob's time, but it got chocker with ideas so they killed it off."

*

AUTOMAGIC - Expression used by the UNIX community to explain things that happen on a computer that are clearly the result of some piece of automated stuff but no-one can remember exactly what it was.

*

YOUNG LENNIE'S KNOWLEDGE OF MALE SINGER-SONGWRITERS.

(L Sings a line or two of "The One I Love.")

L: "I expect that's part of your set-list, isn't it Mike?"

M: "To be honest I'm SO old that I really think of REM as newcomers. I was never that into them. Because I'd been around for Neil Young and The Band, that was 15 years earlier, I thought I'd heard it all before."

L: "Neil Young. Yes, don't tell me, he went to sixth-form college in Ipswich."

M: "Toronto."

L: "I'm sure it was Ipswich."

M: "We're talking about two different Neil Youngs. I'm talking about the internationally famous one, and you're talking about your mate down the pub."

L: "I do get mixed up. Was he the one who sang Rhinestone Cowboy?"

M: "No... - who was that ... can't remember"

Terry: "Glen Campbell."

L: "Well, I'm sure he wore rhinestones. Oh yeah, (illumination) I'm thinking of Neil DIAMOND."

M: (Illumination) "Hot August Night! Yes, he was a bit like Glen Campbell."

L: "Maybe it was PAUL Young."

M: "who -"

L: "- who went to Sixth-Form college in Ipswich."

M: "Wherever I lay my hat."

L: "That's it."

M: (hoping to sow more confusion) "And then there's Paul Simon."

L: "My God yes. But I do know that one. He's the one with the recording studio in Box."

Terry: "..No, that's Peter Gabriel! Remember he did "Solsbury Hill", that's a hill just outside of Bath."

M: "The one they ran the by-pass down after it was a hit."

M: (later, reluctant to miss an opportunity) "Talking of towns that end in -wich, did you know that it means a Roman salt extraction site..?"

The January wind

2012-01-05T13:02:00.005Z

There's been a lot of it, for the last three days. Laura accompanied a frail pal by bus to Wells. After waiting twenty minutes at the busstop they were drenched. The bus was unheated. The journey went on a long time. First there was a fallen tree in the road, then near Shepton the bus went through a flooded bit that was so deep the water ran over the floor. In Wells, Laura spent £2.50 on a pair of too-skinny jeans from a charity shop just so she could step out of her sodden rags.

An aluminium can rolled around the garages all night, temporarily drowning out the incessant flapping of a plastic sheet that was pinned under a car's rear wheels.

The wind is like a burglar wandering round the human premises and amusing itself by throwing everything about.

Paper plates, dried egg noodles, crisps, tacos, poppadoms, lettuce, rocket, lollo rosso, prawn crackers, meringues, tuile biscuit curls and other fancy rubbish are fair game. A 3-pack of sponge-scourers paws at a downpipe. A luxe bridal veil soars over the estuary. A draft novel that has been disposed of in bulk becomes separated into a stream of migrating pages, each of which makes better reading than the whole book. They encounter food-packets and till receipts, and a clutch of those unloved leaflets that (we now know why) are commonly known as flyers.

The wind is beginning to pry into our strongholds. The rain, hurling itself at every surface, is beginning to infiltrate our strongholds.

Another tree comes crunching down in Little Keyford lane, taking a large bite out of a stone wall.

dear diary

2012-01-04T12:56:00.005Z

A tree shattered on the ground, from yesterday's stormy winds: horse-chestnut I think. I was out driving late last night. I listened to Exile on Main Street, and decided that maybe it wasn't so very like Villette, after all. Then I listened to a country compilation, which happened to include someone's rendering of the Patsy Cline song I Fall To Pieces - or rather, the first verse of it - (this is one of those country compilations that costs £1 in Dr Barnardos, so you don't ask too many questions) - but of course that made me want to hear Michael Nesmith sing it, and I remembered I had Loose Salute in the car, so I listened to it for the millionth time, and after that I couldn't help going back to Magnetic South for the two millionth time. I compared my experience of this brace of albums with Exile on Main Street (from around the same period) and wondered if an album I was discovering so late in the day could ever acquire - for my brain - the ineffable burnish, the singular communicativeness, of these albums that I'd known for thirty years. [They should have been the first two vols in an extraordinary Star Wars-style triple trilogy, but it foundered after four volumes. The others were Nevada Fighter, the last of the First National Band trilogy, and Tantamount To Treason (the only release with the 2nd National Band). Since I seem to be in a senile phase of picking up my early life's dropped stitches, perhaps it's time I went in search of the never-heard-by-me Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash.

Then I listened to Joan Davis' Promiseland, and even after all this it still sounded fantastic.

I've now remembered that the first trilogy was meant to represent tradition, the second trilogy the present-day and the third trilogy futuristic. This was one of those impossibly grandiose schemes that artists love to project, like Spenser's 24-book Faerie Queene, Wordsworth's Recluse, etc. They remind me of the usually-sensational unbuilt buildings that form such a large part of most architects' legacies. I'm waiting, not very stoically, to find out if Catherine Daly's and Richard Makin's trilogies end up being composed partly in the irrealis.

Of course most people find lost works, like lost sheep, unreasonably intriguing. (Who ever bothers to talk about Smile now?) That was why one of my regular conversations with Mutti was about the Swallows & Amazons books that WEREN'T on her shelf, The Picts and the Martyrs, and Great Northern?. I think perhaps she hadn't cared for them as much as the others, but anyway she didn't mind responding to my irritating questions.

close on me now.

2012-01-01T22:09:00.005Z

Bit of a hiatus, but not of deep artistic, or any other, significance. It's been Christmas, and then before that it was moving home, back from the leafy walks of 2.4 West Swindon to the steeps of Frome (or as I prefer to think of it in limestone terms, from the Upper Jurassic to the Carboniferous).

Somewhere in the middle of this, I finished my essay about Harry Martinson and Chickweed Wintergreen and Karin Boye and Swedish popular song, and put it on Intercapillary Space (in a rudimentary form, it has been coming to birth here on this blog since August). I think I've managed to blend enough matters of acute personal interest into this essay to more or less defeat the well-intentioned interest of any other person on the planet.

Another great blog has come to an end, or to put it another way (because I'd like to see this in a celebratory rather than elegiac spirit), has been triumphantly completed. This is Chris Goode's Thomson's Bank of Communicable Desire. Does anyone ever read completed blogs, though? You should read this one. In principle, I am against blogs coming to an end. Death comes soon enough, so why forestall it? That's why I don't like themed blogs. Let your blog be anything, let it change and grow.

I am reading something you might not expect (or might you?): Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, the first of a long sequence of books for children written in the 1930s. Since I'm being opinionated, let me say that it usually makes me sad to see grown-ups reading books for children. The reason I got to this place was that I accidentally discovered that these books had been read not only by my grandmother (who lovingly collected them all), but then by my father and his brother, and then by my sister. As for me, I remember the books very well, as impressive physical objects (they are early, though not first, editions). As a child staying at my grandmother's house, I often used to linger over the maps in the endpapers, and I used to ask Mutti what the stories were about and I enjoyed her telling me and talking about which ones were her favourites. But I'm now certain that I never read them myself; the only page I recognized was the first one. I liked books, I was a bookish child, but it turns out that often I only dreamed over these family treasures. (In the same way I recently discovered that I never had read the whole of Selma Lagerlöf's Wonderful Adventures of Nils.) To read these books now is to be re-admitted to secrets of my own family history. I discover, for example, where my father learnt to fill a kettle from a lake; Ransome is very informative about sailing and camping. And I discover one constituent of the ideal of a family that my father had in his head; he had to find it where he could. I asked him if he and his brother ever got the chance to make use of all this sailing lore. He laughed wryly. Of course there was no possibility of that, there was no money at all. (But at some stage the boys found out that their estranged father, Mutti's ex-husband, had gone and bought himself a boat; it rankled.)

Around Christmas I also finished Villette, one of the few nineteenth-century classic English novels that for some reason I've missed out on up until now (most of the others I read in university days). - Perhaps I should qualify this by saying that I'm referring to the acknowledged list of classic novels as represented by the Penguin English Library, circa 1977. And even so, I can think of quite a few others: Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda, anything by Thackeray or Disraeli or Reade, Wives and Daughters, Jude the Obscure... But anyway, Villette's reputation was HUGE, even though a lot of people hadn't actually read it. Anyway I'm fitfully writing about Villette for the Brief Hist. (And, thanks to my other sister, finally listening to Exile On Main Street in the car, another masterpiece that I missed first time around and that I somewhat associate with Villette in terms of reputation, obscurity, sprawl, over-ripeness and a feeling about it that is half awed and half queasy.)

When You're a Guest

2011-11-24T19:15:00.000Z

The trouble with being a guest, is you basically have to behave yourself,...you can't speak out of turn, and you are extra polite,...at least that's the way I was brought up. However, do you know what I mean when I talk about the other voice?...You know the one that wants to say all the things that you know are going to upset the whole evening and turn it into a battle of opinions etc?...How come we are so polite? Or maybe you aren't, but tell me honestly, do you really and truly say the truth?

Maria :)

bunches

2011-11-14T14:51:00.006Z

If you go up on Cotswold along of Jenny Lind
You'll hear the same old melodies a-singing in the wind.
It's still the ancient pattern, and you hardly know it's there,
You say it is grey weather and the swinging of the mare.

The Prime Minister of England, Mr Cameron by name,
He lives upon the Cotswold, and his family does the same.
And Rupert Murdoch's editor, she lives on Cotswold too;
And when they're riding side by side they talk about the news.

I used to work the saw horse, I don't touch it any more;
My son does all the sawing, when there's anything to saw.
And when the plain of Cotswold is all supercharged with fogs,
He runs me up a trailerload of beech and cherry logs.

The crowns of winter woodland decline into the mist
I've got a shotgun but I only use it when I'm pissed.
The only thing I ever hit's a global activist.

The larks were high in frothy June, when eyes of heaven burn;
We gate* to watch the cardinal balloons of high Colerne.
The rocks of Box and high Colerne are made of little balls;
And ladies still at smart motels traverse those golden vestibules.

*dial. "stand by the garden gate"

to be sighed off as "partially complete"

2011-11-08T11:18:00.005Z

When the Kurfürstensonaten were published in 1783, they were said to be the work of an 11-year-old boy. But Beethoven was then 13, so perhaps their prodigious claims were a little exaggerated. They are three piano sonatas - No 33 in E flat, 34 in F minor and 35 in D. (These numbers are conveniences, simply appending them onto the end of the 32 piano sonatas that people usually talk about.) You can listen to them in Jenő Jandó's rendition on Naxos (Vol. 10 of the complete Piano sonatas).

Keith Anderson's sleeve-notes say: "Their interest must lie in hints of the composer's later development and even in suggestions of themes that were to appear in other mature compositions."

For the relativist, the word "must" is inadmissible here - this, as mentioned several times on this blog, involves assumptions encoded in the word "juvenilia" that are almost universally held but are impossible to defend. And in fact, what could be more self-fulfillingly dreary than to listen only for hints of the future?

*

(Camille Saint-Saëns, giving a recital, age 10, offered to encore by performing any one of the 32 from memory.)

melodies for eva

2011-10-26T10:57:00.007+01:00

A little album recorded last Monday evening, to celebrate my mum's recent birthday party where some of these were performed.

My musical creations are rather in the spirit of Leevi Lehto's "because I'm not meant to be allowed to do this", in particular the Preludes - I'm now more than half-way through my sequence of 24. The only other set of Preludes for guitar that I know is by Mexico's great composer Manuel Maria Ponce (and it's really good, even if partially reconstructed), but I'd love to hear about others.

01. Små nära ting (Kurt Foss and Reidar Bøe / Ture Nerman)
02. Melody for Eva (loosely based on a rather more famous guitar tune...)
03. The Holy Ground (19th C sea shanty, in its settled form celebrating "The Holy Ground", red light district in Cobh, Co. Cork, but in the oldest versions it was Swansea Town)
04. Prelude in B flat
05. Waltz in D
06. Whiskey in the Jar (Irish traditional)
07. Prelude in E
08. Danny Boy (i.e. the tune "Londonderry Air", Irish traditional)
09. Små nära ting (English Version)

Much more about the song "Små nära ting" in this post.

the mainstream of british poetry

2011-10-12T09:59:00.007+01:00

I've been taking part in a current discussion at the British-Irish-Poets Forum (the title is "Forward for RFL"), of which the general theme (at least as far as my own contributions to it are concerned) is meditations on two recent awards of poetry prizes to poets that are usually considered distinctly alternative (R.F. Langley and Giles Goodland); also the vexed term "mainstream" (in a UK poetry context) and whether it sheds more heat than light.

On the latter topic, I wrote this:

"I accept, of course, that to use a generalization like "mainstream" involves inevitable fuzzy edges, that specific assignments aren't empirically provable, that the accusation of an undue sureness is probably just (though I don't indeed feel that sureness very securely, and I'm sorry if it sounds as if I do).

And certainly the word "mainstream" often implies a strongly pejorative opinion, at least in a context such as this forum. But it has not always been so used. I recall that the first time I really became interestedly aware of the word was in the context of Morrison and Motion's 1982 anthology of Contemporary British Poetry - I forget exactly what the back cover said, but it was something along the lines of "twenty fantastic voices from the mainstream of modern British poetry". I didn't share their tastes, in fact felt uneasy about that anthology in many ways, but I don't have a problem with the meaning of the term in the way they were using it and I'm not yet ready to dispense with it. To have a working conception of a mainstream seems to me necessary in order to have a conception of the non-mainstream - an innovative poet perhaps doesn't need it in order to write poetry, but if I'm going to give some order to my thoughts when I'm writing about modern poets, I do find it pretty useful.

And I'm aware that it covered at least four, largely overlapping but not identical, ideas: 1. the kind of poetry that could be found in High Street bookshops and was published by the larger presses, Faber Cape and Oxford at the time; 2. the kind of poetry that is most bought and most widely distributed, e.g. for school use (according to Wikipedia, in 2007, two-thirds of the UK sales of poetry books by living authors were by Seamus Heaney); 3. a sociological structure that embraced e.g. the published poets who read each other's work, the many enthusiasts and amateurs who read the published poets, particular ways of reading and thinking about and talking about and generally doing poetry, an implicit canon, the associated institutions, magazines, competitions, radio programmes, etc. (a structure that, on the whole, innovative poetry communities markedly distanced themselves from – it’s perhaps in this area, above all, that I share Mark [Weiss]’s sense of a very distinct boundary); 4. a particular style or bundle of stylistic features typical of the aforementioned. To which I should now, perhaps, add 5. widely held conceptions of the above, as much discussed (often, though not always, in a hostile spirit) by people who discuss poetry - accurate or not, those portrayals are now themselves part of the history of literature.

So I guess I will carry on using the term, despite the perennial risk of being interpreted as merely hurling mud at someone. And it will be apparent that I consider poetry competitions and poetry prizes as historically typifying the mainstream (in sense 3) and historically not typifying alt-poetry communities (Peter [Riley]’s view of such things, I’d guess, would be shared by many). "

And, re the origin of the term "mainstream":

"Looking at the OED, there is indeed a riverine background (=principal current) but it’s probably not very present in most users’ minds today.

Nor, regretfully, is the notion of “mainstream jazz” – originally a fifties style between big band and modern jazz, approximately. But evidently still in use, e.g. on the cover of – contrived excuse for a plug - Joan Davis’ magnificent album “Promiseland” (2005).

You can see the metaphor in development in Arnold: “Byron and Shelley will be long remembered‥for their‥Titanic effort to flow in the main stream of modern literature.”

Ford Madox Ford (1938): “The very considerable influence that Mr. Pound‥exercised on literary mainstreams.”

What the OED entry doesn’t really show is how the word exploded in use around the 1970s (?), mainly in the sphere of mass media and culture, then extended in every direction (politics, economics, cinema...) . That, no doubt, is the direct source of its reintroduction into the poetry world.

At some stage around the 1950s, the idea developed of identifying yourself with the perennial outsiders, and consequently conceiving the mainstream in intrinsically negative terms. I think (though I can’t really prove this right now) that this was a pretty significant change in common conceptions of culture, and it happened in all sorts of cultural fields at around the same time.

1958, E.Crispin: (in Best SF Three 9) “Main~stream fiction‥has been almost uniformly catatonic in its withdrawal from environment.”

Yet Arnold’s idea of a mainstream not so much as a nasty conventional style but as the desirable and natural destination for any original artist who hopes to truly engage with her/his society still remains relevant.

There’s a pretty good discussion of this two-sided aspect of “mainstream” here (in connection with black and Asian British film):

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MCc0DbyLaq0C&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=mainstream+OED&source=bl&ots=-gjvQnuQVV&sig=eIWbZkVR6md-7Jfi3mHu2A5laec&hl=en&ei=1aeWToarJcqO8gOR0si4BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mainstream%20OED&f=false "

The whole wide-ranging discussion is worth a look (and that's probably the only way to really make sense of it) - it also touches on Guido Gozzano, Ivor Novello, Nabokov's lepidopterism (Polyomattus blues), and William Barnes' "My Orchet in Linden Lea", among other things.

This link will take you there.

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A1=ind1110&L=BRITISH-IRISH-POETS#10

(For some reason my own contributions seem to appear in the list with the writer's name mysteriously withheld.)

*

Mainstream Rock

In the US, there's a Billboard rock chart begun in March 1981, which has had several names:

Top Tracks (1981)
Top Rock Tracks (1984)
Album Rock Tracks (1986)
Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks (1996-03)

Essentially this is a chart of music played on mainstream rock radio, more recently known as heritage rock. The chart is no longer published, though it's still compiled; and in the dark days of its senscence even includes alternative rock, whereas the original point of the chart was that it excluded anything that had any kind of punk heritage. The change in names is a chart in itself: a chart showing the decline of rock's cultural centrality.

notebook

2011-09-28T22:25:00.005+01:00

Copies of old watercolours found in Hastings Old Town. (Above: by me; Below: by Maria)

brief hist / IS - Better Than Language review

2011-09-26T10:47:00.003+01:00

My review of the 2011 UK Poetry Anthology Better Than Language, which gradually emerged from within one of the posts below (they tend to go on spluttering like Darwinian ponds long after initial publication), has now achieved enough fixity to be relocated to
Intercapillary Space.

card by Ebs

2011-09-17T10:42:00.004+01:00

Tree - length of tree lichen, Usnea species.
Leaves - spikelets of Cyperus species, probably Pale Galingale (Cyperus eragrostis).

specimens of the literature of Sweden - jamjars

2011-09-15T22:48:00.007+01:00

SYLT
BLÅBÄR

Ingredienser: Socker, blåbär, förtjockningsmedel: pektin, syra: citronsyra. Fruktmängd 45g per 100g sylt. Sockerhalt 62g / 100g.

Also translated into 15 other languages. The English translation is "blueberries", but that's inaccurate (though a literal rendering of the Swedish name). The fresh fruit which is sold in the UK as blueberry is one of a number of North American species, such as Vaccinium cyanococcus (American blueberry). This, on the other hand is the European species Vaccinium myrtillus, which as a wild plant is usually called Bilberry or Whortleberry. It is very common in Sweden and is an important ingredient in Swedish cuisine - the right to pick bilberries everywhere (except from nature reserves and private gardens) is encoded in law.

Bilberries are difficult to cultivate, so all gathering is from the wild and is manual, using a bilberry fork, which looks a bit like a metal dustpan with extended tines; you use it to comb through the small shrubs and pop off the berries into a rear compartment with a raised lip. Significant manual labour is involved in the 45g of fruit in this jar. Though all country-dwellers pick bilberries for their own use, it's unusual for Swedes to pick for industry, they aren't usually in the economic bracket that is attracted by this sort of work and besides have neither the refined skills of a pieceworker nor habituation to long, repetitive labour. The gatherers were formerly Poles, now more often Lithuanians and Russians. The pickers live out in the forest, moving from site to site. When I was there in July, just before the season began, the fleet of shiny new campervans drawn up by the road in Bispgården looked very impressive. The chief crops in our area are successively cloudberries, bilberries and lingonberries.

Finnish: "mustikka". French "myrtilles", as per the Latin name. Portuguese: "uva do monte" (mountain grape).

In Swedish "bär" (berry) is the same in singular and plural, like English "sheep". Is this because it was rare to want to talk about a singlet of these things? (a farmer will always specify a ewe, tup, lamb etc.)

"Sylt" (jam) : apparently first recorded in 1755 and related to "salt" (i.e. an analogous method of preserving food?).

SYLT
KRUSBÄR

Ingredienser: Socker, krusbär, förtjockningsmedel: pektin, syra: citronsyra. Fruktmängd 45g per 100g sylt. Sockerhalt 62g / 100g.

This one is gooseberry jam.

The dictionaries suppose that "gooseberry" is derived from Fr. "groseille" which is derived from an old German word "krausbeere", which, of course, also connects to Sw. "krusbär". That's all quite persuasive, but not the original meaning of "kraus" which they suggest is "crisp" (Latin name Ribes uva-crispa alludes to this).

If any berry could be described as crisp then gooseberry would be a good choice, but "kraus" in modern German (and "krusig" in modern Swedish) means "crisp" in a very specific sense, i.e. "crisped" like the leaves of parsley or "frizzy" like hair. (e.g. kruståtel = Wavy Hair-grass (Deschampsia flexuosa), kruskål = Curly Kale, krushårig = frizzy-haired)

So I suppose the name originally referred not to the texture of the berry but to the funny little hair-like projections on its surface.

brylcreem tea

2011-09-15T15:05:00.005+01:00

the street is jumping & I'm desperate
I'm going all out with constant noise

Hole in her stocking and she keeps on rocking

I'm in the shop looking in the old cages,
steel pen behind the ear, I'm flattening
out an old, crumpled newspaper, kneeling on it.

Phoebe with younger sister Cora
at Liverpool
eve of world tour

lady with "Gib", an anaconda

Michaelmas term

I don't like things too fast.
It's starting
No it's stopping again, like the drink.
Early afternoon sherbet

to summer and the pines
gael maisie and the rat

It was that pissed-off look in the lane:
no-one was good enough.
It was a secret message,
it made you good enough for me.

But you could have had mine.

And there was the
big floppy book, E-K.
I tried to look up someone
but this bird has flown

as I roast in my sunset

dale farm, basildon

2011-08-31T13:11:00.005+01:00

Is it right that people should be evicted from land they own

because there is no permission to live on it?

- after all, it was a car scrapyard.

Planning refused because it's a green belt. Excuse me? the preservation of pristine greenery? In Basildon? In a scrapyard?? Not to mention, next door to a legal site?

Planning is a tool to implement social control

i.e. a weapon against difference.

"Planning Law is the same for everyone", they say in justification, proposing an argument of equity: it's only fair, we all have to suffer the same restriction of liberty. But that's a meretricious argument. The self-righteous oppressors and their supporters do not want to live on pitches in scrapyards. This equitable law is a way of legitimizing some lifestyles while making others illegal.

That's why The Times (Leader, 14th Sept 2011) in claiming that "the best protection for ethnic minorities is the rule of law", then has no explanation for why, on the contrary, so many communities routinely set out to live invisibly to executors of the law of the land.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11039/

Tim Black argues that the focus should be on ridiculous planning law, not on victimization of traveller communities. I have sympathy for his view. To focus on the ruling itself being absurd and indefensible is (was?) the best chance of overturning it.

And to accuse the councillors themselves of being prejudiced against travellers is to move away from the overt wrong to an ungracious guess about the inferred motivation. Maybe.

But at the same time, prejudice against travellers is hardly irrelevant to this debate. As always, the Daily Telegraph provides a rallying ground, if you want to witness that prejudice in full cry.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/8733560/Dale-Farm-travellers-cock-a-snook-at-authority.html

Ones does not need to be personally prejudiced to be swayed by the existence of prejudice, not when it comes to decisions in which the public take an interest.

links

2011-08-23T11:44:00.002+01:00

to a couple of poems by Lee Lally that took me by surprise today.

http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2011/04/lee-lallys-these-days-terence-winch.html

Another link that I clicked on from Mark Scroggins' Culture Industry took me to the Library Edition of Ruskin's Works. Ah Time, time! But this being the modern world, I've read only one page, the first poem, Ruskin's lament for missing out on a Lake District trip in his 14th year.

SONG

I WEARY for the torrent leaping
From off the scar’s rough crest;
My muse is on the mountain sleeping,
My harp is sunk to rest.

I weary for the fountain foaming,
For shady holm and hill;
My mind is on the mountain roaming,
My spirit’s voice is still.

I weary for the woodland brook
That wanders through the vale;
I weary for the heights that look
Adown upon the dale.

The crags are lone on Coniston,
And Loweswater’s dell;
And dreary on the mighty one,
The cloud-enwreathed Scawfell.

I had not realized he was such a Lake District fan.

According to the editor, the second line of the last stanza was originally "And Glaramara's dell". Now that makes a lot of sense, referring to Combe Gill, the hanging valley which is indeed thick with lone crags. Besides, Glaramara is geographically very close to Scawfell and Coniston.

The reference to Loweswater, found in the 1850 edition but not in the MS, is harder to explain. By Lake District standards it is not a very craggy place. It also doesn't scan, though it's a metrical irregularity with quite a conventional tune and might perhaps have seemed attractively acceptable even in 1850.

ly

2011-08-22T11:32:00.005+01:00

lying down in the sun
beneath rubble
half-bricks, tarmac biscuits
purple butterflies at the armpits
deliquescent macaroni in the prostate
lungs amazed by the film forming
sand under the piles, creeks;
everything swallowed and turned outward.

Strewn along the ground in the sun
is the print of a cloud.
Flashing
saucers, shards, tiles, grains of
burst glass,
steel-capped boot of a sunbather breathing dust.

it came over me that there is corruption
it came over me that there was corruption
pleased with fancy words
I talk of me not "us"
rhinestone jackets
an ash-wave flung into the sea and bobbing back
a wave in which suspends
baby shoes, stink jelly, wrinkled hose

lit ephem aug

2011-08-15T11:38:00.077+01:00

DOMESTIC BLISS

This is a piece that is partly about the Swedish poets Harry Martinson and Karin Boye. It's also partly about Trientalis europaea. I suppose I ought to call it "On Chickweed Wintergreen", but, more pickiness, I don't like titles that begin with "On".

Robin Fulton's new translation of Martinson is called: Chickweed Wintergreen: Selected Poems. (It's a bit unfortunate that though this essay owes so much to Fulton's book I'm not really going to be writing about it or even quoting it, but it's a pretty absorbing book, that is, if you feel interested in Swedish working-class sailor-poets who write about nature and space travel. Let's hope that, with Tranströmer being awarded the Nobel Prize, Fulton is posting some healthy figures elsewhere.)

Chickweed Wintergreen is one of those translation-titles, like Scott Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past, that proclaims a certain robust independence from its source-text. Yes, there is a poem in the book that is titled "Chickweed Wintergreen", and yes, this is a translation of a poem by Martinson that is titled "Duvkullorna", which is one of the Swedish names for the species of plant (Trientalis europaea) that in English is named "Chickweed Wintergreen". But flower-names, espcially within poetry, are about a lot more than denoting a species. Rarely are they merely a word, such as "tulip". The metaphors within them, usually, are far from buried. Most names are, or seem to be, wholly or somewhat descriptive. "Chickweed Wintergreen" being a case in point: great name for a book: zany, fresh and popping with images.

But this is an effect that owes little to Harry Martinson. The title strikes the imaginative reader precisely because, in Britain, the plant is not very well-known. The sad truth is, Trientalis europaea has always been too scarce to make much impression on UK culture. Quite why that is, isn't altogether clear. There seems to be plenty of the kind of thing that it likes (moss, moor, open pinewoods), yet it's always rare in England (the north, E. Suffolk), and only locally common even in Scotland.

Which explains the background to the English name "Chickweed Wintergreen", not exactly an academic name but clearly a plant-hunter's name rather than a traditional folk name (the oldest OED reference is 1760).

Imagine the scene: intrepid botanist wandering through an ancient Scottish pinewood, around midsummer; a place distinguished by members of the wintergreen family (Pyrola, generally rather local in Britain); botanist suddenly notices some leaves that seem a bit similar (i.e. oval-ish) but, behold, there's a flower on top that looks totally unlike Pyrola, but does look a bit like a chickweed (Stellaria). That, or something like it, must be how the name arose. I mean, taking into consideration that not only is the plant unrelated to either chickweeds or wintergreens, but it isn't eaten by chickens and it isn't green in winter!

Well, this is Martinson's little poem, which was published in the collection Passad (Trade Wind) in 1945.

DUVKULLORNA

Skogsstjärnorna frodas aldrig.
De bara reder sig
med karg nätthet i mossan.

De är spensliga,
men veta ingenting om den söta vekhet
    du vill tillskylla sommaren.
Det spensligas bestämdhet
är inte mindre än ekens.

              THE DOVEFLOWERS

              The Woodland Stars never luxuriate.
              They just manage
              with sparse elegance among the mosses.

              They are slight,
              but they know nothing about the tender softness
                   you associate with summer.
              The determination of the slight
              is not less than the oak's.

I am not one of those who believe that poems don't state things; I think it's more interesting to see poems as principally statements, though sometimes rather complicated ones. Accordingly, I'm going to begin with the plant. In Sweden, it's common everywhere except in the far south, though (as Martinson points out) not luxuriant. It's a matter of a single plant here and there, growing among other species on the forest floor. Here it is:

Photo copyright Kristian Svensson, but I don't know how to contact him for permission!

It's one of those plants that doesn't exactly shout to us (small white flowers usually don't), but once it's noticed it's quietly striking. Along with Twinflower (Linnaea borealis), it was a favourite of Linnaeus. In Flora Lapponica (1737) he wrote: "I don't know any other flower whose grace so fascinates the eye; the spectator becomes almost bewitched! Maybe this is due to symmetry, the mother of all beauty."

Maybe. There are certainly two features that attract attention: one is the curious whorl of differently-sized leaves: a sort of assymetric symmetry, I suppose. The other is the flower itself, partly because there's usually only one flower, and partly because although the number of petals varies the favoured number is seven, which is uncommon to say the least. (The Icelandic name Sjöstjarna and the Dutch name Zevenster both refer to this.)

Martinson doesn't say anything about these features: he relies on the reader to do most of the evoking. All he tells us by way of description is that the plant is "spenslig" (slight, or slender), and this stands in for all the rest. Of course there are a great many plants that could reasonably be called slight, at least in comparison to oak trees, but perhaps there is a particular appropriateness in applying it to this one, where it glances both at the parsimonious production of flowers and at the plant's tendency to appear as isolated individuals rather than profuse stands.

In fact, these plants are not really isolated individuals. They are connected, beneath the woodland surface, by long lateral growths that throw up superterranean extrusions at rather lengthy intervals. That is the main way that Trientalis europaea spreads (or should I specify, the DNA of T. europaea): it puts most of its energy into securing its presence in a good habitat, and not much of its energy into the chancy business of colonizing new sites; few flowers, and even fewer seeds. Hence it never turns up in new woodland, but is a reliable indicator of old woodland. "A good competitor, but a poor colonist," comments the BRC on-line atlas.

Martinson has the reputation of being a poet who grasped science, and I suppose this poem confirms that. When he says:

The determination of the slight / is not less than the oak's

he is not only right about the specific case of Trientalis europaea, though that's still worth emphasizing. Modest and isolated as the plant appears in a European context, it is certainly a successful species, with a circumpolar distribution through the boreal regions of the Old World, and also in Western North America (in the east, it is replaced by the related T. borealis). But the general case applies too. Perhaps he had heard of the Dane Wilhelm Johannsen's genotype-phenotype distinction (1911), which has proved such a fertile ground for later writers. Perhaps his conclusion also amounts to a recognition that determination is the preserve of the genotype, and the success of a genotype has nothing to do with whether its phenotype happens to be an impressively mighty oak or some unattended unicellular organism, a reflection that will be commonplace to readers of e.g. Richard Dawkins.

Nevertheless, the poem does not quite come to rest on this scientific meditation. After all, taken at that level of generality the human connotations of "spenslig" / "slight" lose their validity altogether. But the poem clings on to them: great determination there must be, but the slightness is not dispensed with. It becomes a defining quality of the particular determination with which the poem is concerned: it intends to praise slightness. It's time to think about the context of the poem.

Like many of Martinson's nature poems, it appears at first glance to contain no human context whatever: there are no figures in the landscape, it is alienated from human concerns. And that is intentionally a challenge; an assertion that nature cannot be known if framed or tamed by the quotidian and human. This is a game that Martinson played from the off. Coming to poetry after a youth on the oceans, he repeatedly brought his public up against the realization that he was no stay-at-home, that he had un-domestic experience that his readers didn't share with him: for example in the famous poem that begins "Have you seen a steam collier" (1929) - he means, after a storm at sea - and draws all its energy from the unmistakable implication: No you haven't, but you know that I have. "Home Village" (1931) had framed the "silent lie" of tranquil village life through the eyes of one returning from "the brothel alleys of Barcelona".

Yet a nature poem such as this one does, lightly, intrude an awareness of a domestic context. Though the plant in question is not exactly commonplace, we've seen that a tradition already existed, among reasonably sensitive observers, of appreciating its finer features ("I don't know any other flower whose grace so fascinates the eye..."). Domestic bliss, Swedish style, tends to involve not just the home but its extension into the trees and the borders of that everlasting wood, where one is always roaming about, if only to find a good spot to fling out the washing-up water.

There's a further clue to this context in the two Swedish names for Trientalis europaea that appear in the poem. I've translated them literally; unlike the English name "Chickweed Wintergreen", both were evidently folk-names rooted in long tradition. But the one that Martinson uses in the title (Duvkulla - "Doveflower") was evidently a local name; it is certainly not much used now, and the only Google reference that isn't talking about Martinson's poem comes from a 1923 article in the provincial newspaper Dalpilen. It was the other name (Skogsstjärna - "Woodland Star") that was, then and now, in general use; and doubtless it turns up in the poem's first line in order to ensure that the reader knows exactly what plant Martinson is talking about. The local name in the title amounts to a confession: it is the poet's own name for the plant because it's the name he grew up with, in a countrified provincial locality, long before he set off to sail the world.

The poem then, implies the limited rambles of a child close to home: domestic surroundings. The defiant praise of slightness, in this context, amounts to a sentimental, perhaps desperately sentimental, defence of the limited horizons and quotidian activity of an unassuming home. Martinson had no particular reason to be sentimental about his own childhood; at the same time he was a popular poet, both working with popular sentiment and inevitably yielding to it, at least in respect of its thought-forms.

*

Taking refuge in small things was a sentiment that lay deep in popular culture. I don't want to reduce Martinson's poem to its popular substratum, but at the same time it's important to understand the substratum.

I want to approach it by way of the hugely popular pan-Nordic standard "De nære ting" / "Små nära ting". The composers of the melody, Kurt Foss and Reidar Bøe, recorded the song in 1951, both in Norwegian (June) and Swedish (September).

There were numerous subsequent recordings and, as is the way with standards in Sweden, a host of drinking-song parodies. I'm taking most of my information from Enn Kokk's interesting blog.

The original Norwegian lyrics were composed by Arne Paasche Aasen (1901-1978), a strongly left-wing politician, activist, journalist and poet. As a populist poet his work graded into song lyrics: rousing labour movement songs such as "Vi bygger landet" (based on an earlier Russian anthem), but also sentimental songs like "De nære ting". Norwegian and Swedish are so closely related to each other that translating from one into the other is a doddle, and Ture Nerman's Swedish version is sometimes almost word for word. The main difference is the inclusion of the word "små" (small); the Swedish title means, literally, "small near things", but you can't put that into idiomatic English without becoming wordy: "the little things close by", or something of that sort.

D       F#6
Din längtan flyr vilse
G
så vida omkring.
Em
Det är som du glömt
A4       A
alla nära ting.
D       F#6
Det är som du aldrig
G       B dim (or Gm)
fick lugn en minut
D       E7
till någonting annat -
A7       D
du jämt vill ut.

               Your yearning heart wanders
               so far and so wide -
               it seems you've forgotten
               the things by your side.
               It seems that you never
               one moment sit down.
               To some destination
               you're always bound.

Du tycker din dag är
så fattig och grå.
Vad är det du söker?
Vad väntar du på?
När aldrig du unnar
dig rast eller ro,
kan ingenting växa
och intet gro.

               You think that your days are
               so empty and grey.
               What is it you're seeking?
               What do you await?
               If you never have
               any fun or repose,
               then nothing develops,
               and nothing grows.

Gå in i din kammare,
liten och trång -
den gömmer vad hjärtat
höll kärast en gång.
På ropet i skogen
får ingen ett svar.
Finn vägen tillbaka
till det du har.

               Go into your parlour,
               so little and close -
               it hides what your heart
               used to care about once.
               The cry in the forest,
               it gets no response.
               So find your way homeward
               to what is yours.

Den lyckan du söker
bak fjället i brand,
den har kanske alltid
du haft i din hand.
Du skall inte jaga
så rolöst omkring…
D       E7
men lära dig älska
Gm   A   D
små nära ting!

               The treasure you looked for
               in far mountain lands,
               perhaps it was always
               right here in your hands.
               You don't have to struggle
               so hungry and high,
               just value those little
               things by your side!

Ture Nerman (1886-1969), like Arne Paasche Aasen, had begun as a communist and was later a social democrat. But the song-lyric is solidly conservative in intention, intrinsically dubious about ambition and idealism. It may not be relevant to point it out, but they were no longer young men.

"Små nära ting" is a classic consolation-lyric, like that other song from 1951 "Cold Cold Heart" (Hank Williams, Tony Bennett), and such countless predecessors as the Irish standard "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen" (in fact composed by an American, Thomas Paine Westendorf, in 1876). "Små nära ting" is less obviously aligned to the heteronormal male subject / female object format than either of those songs; in fact the most-remembered recording is probably Monica Neilsen's, if it isn't Anna-Lena Löfgren's.

Nevertheless, it shares the in-built tensions of the consolation-lyric, e.g. that if the unconsolable could be consoled by whatever the consoler is saying, then s/he probably wouldn't need consoling in the first place. The consolation-lyric is both heroic and doomed: heroic because in performance the song boldly offers itself as the resolving turning-point in its own narrative; doomed because every time the song is re-performed it turns out that the consolation is still needed. The singer continues to brood "why can't I ease your troubled mind and melt your cold cold heart"; the singer reiterates the ever-unfulfilled promise "I'll take you to your home again"; and here, the singer urges, yet again, the sweet simple advice about the little things in life that the poor distracted "wandering wanderer" finds it impossible to be satisfied with. (That Misty in Roots classic is apposite, as is this more recent lament:

You've wandered so far
from the person you are.
Let go, brother, let go.

- which gains an extra frisson from its singer being not the reproving composer but, as we suppose, the very wanderer that Tim Rice-Oxley addresses. Battle is pretty much a big village.)

*

When Martinson built his poem towards that assertion about "the determination of the slight" he was, I believe, recalling another short poem published ten years earlier, by Karin Boye. Recalling it unconsciously, perhaps: he does not use the same words, but the shape of the clinching line surely betrays a kinship.

EN STILLHET VIDGADES

En stillhet vidgades mjuk som soliga vinterskogar.
Hur blev min vilja viss och min väg mig underdånig?
Jag bar i min hand en etsad skål av klingande glas.

Då blev min fot så varsam och kommer inte att snava.
Då blev min hand så aktsam och komma inte att darra.
Då blev jag överflödad och buren av styrkan ur sköra ting.

     A STILLNESS SPREAD

     A stillness spread, gentle as the sun-filled winter woods.
     How was it, my will grew certain and my path obedient to me?
     I bore in my hand an etched bowl of ringing glass.

     Then it was my steps became cautious and would not stumble.
     Then it was my hand became careful and would not shake.
     Then I was suffused and borne along by the strength of fragile things.

(From För trädets skull (For the Tree's Sake), 1935)

Elsewhere, Boye had reacted defiantly to the national vein of cosy, domestic quietism. Indeed her famous poem "I Rörelse" ("On the Move") is the classical rejoinder in Swedish:

Den mätta dagen, den är aldrig störst.
Den bästa dagen är en dag av törst.

              The day of satisfaction is not best.
              The better day, that is a day of thirst.

But (as is always the case) the defiance conceals an awareness of the contrary pull, i.e. towards domestic peace. What takes her by surprise in the poem about the glass bowl is, perhaps, exactly a feeling of momentarily being at peace with her surroundings. And, of course, they are domestic surroundings: passing between a main house and an outhouse, and taking care not to trip on the ubiquitous birch roots.

The observation, a brilliant one I think, is that the fragile object so long as it exists unbroken is indeed a show of strength; it takes all the object's strength not to fall apart. (No-one calls Boye a scientific poet, but she is just as scientific as Martinson, and her poem too deserves to be taken seriously as a statement.)

And this strength is what is communicated to the carrier who doesn't drop the bowl; her own tensed poise, being patently required of her, is accordingly manifested, and it reveals her capability to herself; not only her capability either, but the deep peace of having a nurturing role, and fitting it; the nurturer is dependent on her charge. A deep peace, for as long as it lasts.

BFor both poets these restfully optimistic poems constituted swimming against the tide. There is a cry of desperation in their restfulness. In winter 1941 Karin Boye, anguished by personal distress as well as the war, took a walk into the snow from which she did not return. Harry Martinson, product of a broken working-class home, his health ruined at sea in his youth, grew steadily gloomier through the later part of his poetic career. The last straw, perhaps, was winning the Nobel Prize in 1974; or more particularly, the barrage of adverse comment that it induced (mainly within Sweden itself). The prize was shared with Eyvind Johnson, another working-class writer; both were now members of the Nobel committee, so the award was certainly a bit naïve. In 1978 Martinson attempted to commit ritual suicide by disembowelment (seppuku) with a pair of scissors. He was horribly injured and died a few days later.

*

[Information about Trientalis europaea from Den virtuella floran.]

*

Then I'm determined to get around to Gale Nelson's Stare Decisis. Nelson teaches at Brown and while he doesn't seem to have published much poetry recently but he's evidently still active. Stare Decisis was published by Burning Deck back in the early 90s. My way into it really began because the book has a poem writing by the diastic method (Jackson Mac Low's invention), which is a fascinating thing. But then this opened up the whole book, a book in which every word and every letter is functional. Typically the poems are twenty or so pages long but each page contains a lot of white space, with the minimal text in the centre, something like this:

Or eat again.

The white space is functional too, it makes the eye pause in the right places, undisturbed by what's over the page. But naturally you see two pages at once, so I ought to quote the other side too:

Spinning weals advanced.
Modesty shorn, we look
again. Common foam laces
through the body.

That double-page is part of the opening and formidable "Pose Proem", which also contains:

Creation tempered by unison.
Revolving test proves
strength. Five hundred
generations of rice eaten
at one table.

*

Here previously appeared the birth-pangs of a review of the 2011 UK poetry anthology Better Than Language, now relocated to Intercapillary Space.

*

I've been spending stray hours reading Jenny Allan's two blogs:

http://intermittent-voices.blogspot.com/
http://andinfall.blogspot.com/

These exemplify the blog-as-complete-literary-text, and they are very complicated objects. I've printed them both out, because I can't read properly on the screen, but then which way up do you read them, back-to-front? (It also means I lose all the hyperlinks). Whichever way you tackle it, this is amazing writing.

In reaching bottom rock, where underside astounds, giving away any attempt at tempt. It is here that curios collect, with a stark rarity of reaction. Those moments in miniature that pool and band together for our own story’s sake, can climb out at any time and shake off excess sentiment.

(and, in fall May 2007)

a fine mist… fading at the mouth ahead of a mirror that holds our residue, we lean over, there we witness our multiplicity, lost in the turn of following deep down, down in search of earth to pile around our words and all of a sudden send up the appearance of nowadays

we perceive little else apparently, little else that others between us show signs of, they possibly appear everywhere, but we distrust their might and upset their looking for

and perhaps they don’t exist these stifled elementary images… pointing for so long at the same spot, at times we lose sight of its presence and doubt altogether the world, nothing that we know is untouched by living the unnoticeable

(from "extracts from tomorrow" Intermittent Voices April 2009)

*

talking of great blogs, Tom Clark is excelling himself in recent posts, and I just had to link to this:

http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/elvis-undercover-you-must-be-kidding.html

"Presley indicated that he thought the Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit. He said that the Beatles came to this country, made their money, and then returned to England where they promoted an anti-American theme. The President nodded in agreement and expressed some surprise."

more flowers from Jämtland

2011-08-08T22:00:00.012+01:00

.. but not from the mountains this time.

Cirsium heterophyllum (Brudborste - Melancholy Thistle)

From long rhizomes seventeen long rods
flare slowly in the warm, damp air; but not for us.

I saw them ―. pleading in colour like the mouths
of baby birds, or a mouth flushed for a kiss.

(F O T O 18)

Hypochaeris maculata (Slåtterfibbla - Spotted Cat's-ear). I included this photo because it was so miraculously in focus, enough to show the three tiny beetles living in the middle of the flower. But don't be deceived by the greenery beneath; that's a young rowan, not part of this plant.

Lilium martagon (Krollilja - Turk's-cap Lily). We were very excited when we happened on this plant on a roadside in the endless forest east of Östersund, several kilometers from any dwelling. However, it's a reasonably common introduction (native to Central Europe and Asia), and is hardy even in the far north of Sweden.

Cirsium arvense (Åkertistel - Creeping Thistle). A species that looks very different in Norrland from the way it looks in the south of England: the leaves are less stiff and wavy, the spines much less fierce (detail below). And hence (to me at least) the plant arouses none of its habitual connotations: neglected wasteland, scruffiness, overgrazed pasture, etc. Here it makes neat (though still extensive) stands where roadsides border fields.

Noon: the greygreen globes bristle with mauve;
the bees come, thousands browsing, on every roadside

the sugar of summer grows tautly, walls of it
shimmer across the valley where a seed strayed.

(F O T O 88)

But the plant that I supposed was hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium), despite its small and rather greenish flowers, is really a different species, Heracleum sibiricum (Björnfloka). It's a nice plant, but to be honest it lacks some of the drama of H. sphondlylium, partly because it lacks the large petals around the edge of the umbels. (This is the UK wild flower that most regularly amazes me.)

Hypericum maculatum (Fyrkantig johannesört - Imperforate St John's-wort). Apparently subsp. maculatum, though I didn't know the details to check at the time. This is the "other" St John's-wort, differentiated from H. perforatum by black spots on the surface (not edges) of the petals, four (not two) stem-ridges, and usually no translucent dots on the leaves - features variously referred to by the names above. Also blunt sepals. It prefers damper (and non-calcareous) locations. (Also common in much of the UK, especially Wales, but more local than H. perforatum.)

crippled by gentility

2011-08-04T10:27:00.009+01:00

There is class war on the internet as everywhere else. And I'm as implicated as everyone else, and (thinking of myself as a player here, because I've now written so many literary pieces) I keep noticing common literary/journalistic expressions that I just would never use, because of personal snobbery and because I want people to see that I've got more class than to write crap like that (which really means that I'm not being told what to write by paymasters, because no-one gives a toss about what I write).

1.

Pure Hustle is a gem of book ... (Jo Shapcott on Kate Potts' debut collection for Bloodaxe.) BTW, since we're taking potshots, the worthy but ancient Bloodaxe website desperately needs a facelift. Can you imagine, you can't even browse the books, there's no samplers? So all Kate Potts has got to promote her is two worthless blurbs, Shapcott's heartwarming "gem of a book.. pure gold..." and Jen Hadfield's woolly stab at a more surreal style ("this assonance-jellied, beetle-drawer of a pamphlet..."). That's really not good enough. Contrast, of course, the Shearsman or Salt websites: you can really discover a whole lot about, say (pause...), Sascha Aurora Akhtar's The Grimoire of Grimalkin.. Hey, I like this a lot - that wasn't in the script. I thought Salt had stopped publishing my kind of books. Anyway, you see what I mean? That's what a publishing website needs to be. It needs to publish.
[You can read about Kate Potts' book here, though: http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2011/08/guest-review-woodward-on-potts.html]

LET'S LEARN TO USE CLICHE!

"This gem of a book" - most appropriately used of debut collections: attempting to suggest a cherished personal discovery that one has hugged to oneself for ages before coyly, earnestly, almost reluctantly, feeling impelled to speak of it among friends.

The more generalized expression used by both these blurbers: "This A of a B" now appears to survive only in the provincial world of books, long since discarded from more fashionable media worlds (who used to say "this colossus of a performance", "this determined beauty of an anti-single" etc). More distantly, it makes me think of:

A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

Essentially all these expressions are about asserting (creating) value, i.e. they attempt to propose a heroic scena in which swords are magic and heroes can hold up stone bridges. Used in reviews, this transmutes into a heroic/commercial nexus, i.e. in which you can BUY THE ACTION: bucklers, bridges and all.

2.

IN DEFENCE OF RELATIVISM

Yup. That's it. No, I mean, that's one of the things I would never, ever write: an article entitled "In Defence Of" something. But lots of people do. Try Googling "in defence of" - anything. Modernism, moral imperialism, moral absolutes, mothers, monarchy, moderate aesthetic formalism, model-based inference in phylogeography, Morgan Tsvangirai, and that's just the MOs.

Gillian Beer in defence of rhyme (Guardian, Jan 13th 2007): "Rhyme is often dismissed as conventional, old-fashioned and childish. Not so, argues Gillian Beer, who believes its potential to persuade and surprise should not be underestimated". That's the subEditor, with his brisk "Not so". What follows is often intelligent, not at all original, and eventually sinks under the oppressive discomfort of trying to pretend to be a perky topical must-read: "One difficulty in discussing the effects of rhyme is that these are manifold and diverse," the author laments helplessly.

Bit of a soft target, you're thinking? I know. The fact is that I've lost contact with the original article that inspired this snobbery - I can't even remember if it was about poetry or not.

So why are people so fond of titling their articles "In Defence of X"? Because it vaguely reminds them of other articles they've read. They think it's a clever quote from something, was it Shelley? (No.) Even if it was a clever quote, I would despise it because it wasn't a cleverer one. "Post-Structuralism and Its Discontents" (Globalization, Simulation, The Single Currency) identifies you as on just the same beery level as if you write "The Great British Barbecue" (Pudding, Christmas..).

But the real reason why we don't use it is this. Consider the scenario: you use it to stand up for something that is, in your opinion, under attack. In other words, you tell the world that you're going to come on a bit reactionary; obviously, you're saying it oh-so-knowingly so as to prove that you're not REALLY a reactionary. (Keston Sutherland could possibly get away with that, but absolutely no-one else can.) But it won't work. The title proves exactly the opposite. It proves you have a taste for sitting among reactionary furniture, so probably you ARE a reactionary, it's just that you're so reactionary that you don't even realize how reactionary you are. Actions speak louder than words. (And it is a safe bet that though you're finding relief in giving vent to some of your reactionary views, you're still holding back on all the worst ones.)

But, doesn't it make a difference WHAT you're defending? No, not really. Never defend. It's A. defensive behaviour B. A lost cause. C. Suggests the puzzled blinking of an owl in daylight. D. Proves you're in denial.

And by the way, the perhaps exemplary object that you've set out to defend is now, thanks to your own bungling, stained by association with such reactionary attitudes.

You think I'm joking. Well, take Michael Pollan's big-selling "In Defence of Food". Main assertion, that there's no point taking any nutritional supplements because you cannot reduce food, which is so chemically complex, to a small number of active principles. OK, this is an argument that's worth having: though I can't help noticing that the same argument would seem to condemn all medicine or pharmaceutics, it asserts an obfuscatory integrity of nature and makes experiment or investigation as impious as to question the ways of God. Interesting argument, nonetheless. But hold on! Soon the author is complaining that people don't even sit down together to a family meal these days! And if you want to know what real food is, then it's whatever your grandmother would have recognized! .... The author together with his cherished damsel (defended object) are equally betrayed from within by these mindless DailyMailisms.

There's a more important reason than any of that. Attack and Defence are like Good and Evil, they tend to reduce the complexity of nature to the ancient binary system, always more or less inaccurate, that humans are apt to fall back on when they're under stress.

3.

"oft-presented".

Now that's nasty, isn't it? Evidently, the word "oft" is a poeticism and has no idiomatic existence today, if it ever did. Nevertheless some people love to use it when they're writing. Well, I don't. Oh but surely this is just about personal taste? No, it's about class struggle. Middlebrow huxters write things like "oft-denied" or "oft-imperilled" in order to demonstrate, as they suppose, that they have some culture about them, that they're at ease with public writing. Highbrow huxters would be ashamed to do the same, because their secret conviction is that their writing is sufficiently commended by its own essence to obviate the need for pathetic decoration with such faded blossoms as this.

[This pallid eviscerated UK poetics-related whine is a stub. You can help Mikipedia by expanding it.]

hot cherry plums

2011-08-03T09:13:00.002+01:00

I added yesterday's photos to this earlier post:

Prunus cerasifera and spinosa

Date-sensitive posts aren't always the way to go. Sometimes it's nice to gather seasonal contrasts within a single post.

in the clouds

2011-07-27T21:39:00.018+01:00

We went up Åreskutan (a mountain in Jämtland) in the cable car, which takes you to about 4,000 feet, only about 200 short of the summit. This was on a rainy July 18th, the first day for weeks when the mountain happened to be in thick cloud. It was cold, windy and wet, with visibility down to about 20m.

The view from the restaurant. The flags, L-R, of Finland, Jämtland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Same people.

Fortified by an 11 am lunch of grillad korv and gulaschsoppa we managed about ten minutes outside before being ported back down to our world. Here's what it was like outside (and that's my mum, more sensibly dressed than I was).

During those minutes I took a few snaps of plants growing near to the cablecar station, and later I looked them up in Fjällflora, Sten Selander's Swedish translation of the classic book by Olav Gjærevoll and Reidar Jørgensen with illustrations by Dagny Tande Lid (1952 and many later editions). Be assured that, blurry as they are, these were the best ones. And there's something wonderful about them, at least to me.

Saxifraga rivularis L. (Snöbräcka - Highland Saxifrage)

Gnaphalium norvegicum Gunnerus. (Norsknoppa - Highland Cudweed)

Juncus trifidus L. (Klynnetåg - Three-leaved Rush)

Salix reticulata L. (Nätvide - Net-leaved Willow)

Saxifraga stellaris L. (Stjärnbräcka - Starry Saxifrage)

Eriophorum scheuchzeri Hoppe. (Polarull - "Polar Cottongrass", not found in the UK)

Polygonum vivipara (L.) Ronse Decr.* (Ormrot - Alpine Bistort). Also a very common plant in the lowlands of N. Sweden, but there, because of the hot dry summer, it had finished flowering. The mountain plant was less advanced and looked very different, because entirely viviparous (spike consisting entirely of bulbils, no flowers at the top).
*This means that Linnaeus originally named it Polygonum viviparum, and Ronse corrected his grammar.

Alchemilla glomerulans Buser. (Källdaggkåpa - a Lady's-mantle which is also found in the UK but, like many of the species in this critical genus, doesn't have a recognized English name)

Sagina saginoides (L.) H. Karst. (Stennarv - Alpine Pearlwort)

(Above and below) Poa alpina L. (Fjällgröe - Alpine Meadow-grass)

Oxyria digyna (L.) Hill (Fjällsyra - Mountain Sorrel)

anne brunty

2011-07-26T11:15:00.009+01:00

Reading Anne Brunty's Agnes Grey last night, because I couldn't sleep, and a chap from Nidderdale - I'll fill in the name when I get home* - complaining about Charlotte's undervaluation of both her younger sisters' writings. Which certainly is striking, and painful. Does anyone accuse Charlotte of having destroyed the Gondal writings? I feel almost certain of it - until I speculate that Emily, sufficiently rattled by Charlotte's publication of her Gondal poems, might on her deathbed have asked Anne to get rid of the rest. But he tells us as a certainty that at any rate Charlotte did destroy the manuscripts of their published novels, so I suppose that is authoritative, though I don't know on whose authority.

[Brontë - I know, they changed the last name like u creatively re-spell a first name today, Erykah. But "Brontë" is difficult to type into Blogger when you're in a rush.]

*[Arnold Craig Bell. An enthusiast from outside the universities, he lived in Nidderdale at Folly Lodge. Between 1950 and 1992 he wrote studies of Alexandre Dumas, Handel, the songs of Schubert, as well as Anne Brontë.. -- all published by small presses, e.g. Merlin Press in this case. Also several volumes of poetry, which were published by Outposts.]

Writing about Anne Brontë is almost inavariably about REPUTATION, because of her unusual situation, for a novelist, of being always damagingly compared with two more famous sisters. Not that you find many people explicitly stating that Anne is a lesser author than the other two. That is, as it were, a judgement that doesn't need to be spelled out. I suppose it is a judgement secretly felt - and thus made - even by those very people who are very fierce in her defence. Bell writes about reputation for pages. The Internet, as regards authors, is always boringly obsessed with this theme. I am thoroughly weary with hearing about George Moore. Subtract that theme from writing about Anne Brontë, and what else are you left with? That Agnes Grey is a powerful statement about governesses. That The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful statement about debauched behaviour and a wife's right to escape it. All this is true, but it's not very exciting or original. I should want to say something else, but I too feel the blankness, the - What to do with this text? What to do with this babied Anne, whom we must refer to by her first name?

Yet, after all, when we entered the lofty iron gateway, when we drove softly up the smooth, well-rolled carriage road, with the green lawn on each side, studded with young trees, and approached the new but stately mansion of Wellwood, rising above its mushroom poplar-groves, my heart failed me, and I wished it were a mile or two farther off.

(Chapter II)

This is Agnes, aged 18, arriving at the Bloomfields. "Wellwood" is one of those names that might in earlier fiction promise a Jonsonian image of abundance and moral strength. Here the symbolism is replaced by realism. Of course they would give it a nice name; they have a nice name themselves. "Lofty" and "stately" are staples of idealistic description, words later used in tourist literature. But somewhat complicating this is the daylight clarity of the estate's newness; those studded beginnings of a park, and the "mushroom poplar-groves". The adjective refers not to shape - these might well be Lombardy Poplars, widely planted after 1800 - but connotes "sprung up in a night" (poplars being all fast-growing trees).

Agnes' feelings are, naturally, aroused from the weary journey into active fear at the thought of meeting strangers and having to rely on unaided powers as never before. But this sentence also describes the dwindling of fancy into fact - not alarming fact, but specific, and different from what could have been imagined.

Her thoughts on education are about to be severely shaken up.

Whatever others said, I felt I was fully competent to the task: the clear remembrance of my own thoughts in early childhood would be a surer guide than the instructions of the most mature adviser. I had but to turn from my little pupils to myself at their age, and I should know, at once, how to win their confidence and affections...

(Chapter I)

Ideas beloved of authors and romantic poets, ideas supposed adequate, still, by most parents. In a family, buttressed by instinct, affection, and the child's utter dependence, they work out all right, a lot of the time. Agnes did not go to school herself, she was taught within the family. But now she is to find that the governess's role places her in the family but emphatically not of it. She is repulsed by these children, and all thought of identifying them with her own younger self is immediately blown away.

Relativism values All literature, in a way that is supposed to be unsustainable, like an economy with roaring inflation. Every instance of destroyed literature is thus equally regrettable, whether it's Anne's 4-volume Henry Sophona sensation or Byron's diary or the business papers drafts and junk emails that we destroy every day. In principle.

But ignoring those, what we might well excuse to ourselves on the basis that their composers probably have copies, and ignoring also our own writings, which we may feel are a special case that we are allowed to destroy without compunction - perhaps even meritoriously - we do sometimes end up being the sole possessor of papers with a little more relevance to the Gondal analogy - dead and not widely-remembered creative people who sometimes wrote things that looked like poetry. Sometimes I glance at those papers (e.g. when moving house) and I think, no-one cares whether this exists or not.

Or our children's drawings, how many boxes of them will we hang on to?

Selection is everywhere, tidily scissoring and sometimes leaving a bleeding lobe.

i drift

2011-07-16T17:25:00.002+01:00

Skönheten & Odjuret

Tjena
avslöja – disclose, reveal
samhällets avskum
*
Klia katten Pelle
Jag ska lata mig i Norrland

Nothylla
Poäng
He’s a musician, an urbanite through and through.
The ants work through the night.

Shakespeares En Midsommarnattsdröm Skogsfolk
TepÅsar Köksrulle Plopp
guldstolpar
Myrica gale
Ulv / split logs / Telia

The last few odds and ends

2011-07-08T11:04:00.007+01:00

These are some books on the floor beside my mattress (I'm in the middle of moving house; this is in the old gaff, which I continue to occupy as a janitor for the absent Lordship Myself.)

Århundradets Ordmusik - this is a collection of 20th Century Swedish poetry, all part of getting myself in the mood (not that it's hard) for next weeks' trip to the north. A second volume was planned - this is the first one, featuring poets who came to some sort of prominence before 1960: the big guns are Österling, Boye, Södergran, Björling, Martinson, Lagerkvist, Forssell... The real delight for me is the lesser-known names, same way as it's the spruce-shadows that will draw me into the forest next week. A handful of poems by each, with enthusiastic commentary by the editor (whose name, I'm afraid, isn't to hand) and illustrations by 20thc Scandinavian artists: what could be lovelier? I am the humblest of poetry readers in Swedish, I'll take anything on offer. A comparable publication in the UK would provoke my scorn, I fear. Still, things are different over there. Poetry sits close to popular culture. And this is a beautiful volume. And as an outsider I don't see the conflicts and the choices that, here, would stare me in the face.

Rob Roy (Scott). I liked this better than ever.
[I didn't like my note about it - this must be about the oldest bit of writing in the Brief History, and it nastily shows its age in certain late-70s-university-era litcrit pertnesses: "Failure" indeed! "Challenges him" - oh, really? "Explore" - oh, spare me! (..I hate that idea of writers "exploring" like some combination of redneck colonialist and pre-school infant.) Well, if I am honest, not so much the idea as the word - after all, this is mainly a fashion thing, both the would-be smartness and the belated cringe.]
This is a novel I've now read three or four times. It's fascinating to me how my imagination of the setting changes. I think this is the first time I've read it since passing through the Highlands north of Glasgow, and some of the visual memories from those car journeys (I was being taxi'd to Loch Linne to pick up the boat to Glensanda quarry on the Morvern side) have now penetrated my reading. Compared to my previous reading, Fairservice and Jarvie have returned to joyous prominence.

Byron's complete poems and dramas. Big cheap paperback - this is the book to ensure that, however long before I'm reunited with the rest of my library, I'm definitely not going to run out of reading. In point of fact, I'm still in Hours of Idleness (1807). This is not so absorbing as The Corsair, the style is not so developed, but Byron's honest bad faith is already something to conjure with.

Lisa Samuels, Tomorrowland. And this is the go-to book when I want something with a bit more, well, challenge and modernity to it. When I first heard that LS had written a long poem (sequence of poems, really), I imagined something like a narrative and I worried that the flashing, kinetic impenetrabilities of her two previous collections might get a little diluted. I needn't have worried. I haven't got my head round it yet, but I know it's formidable.

John Gilmore, Head of a Man. New release from Reality Street, a novel, not quite actionless nor quite characterless, but nearly, written in minimalist paragraphs. A very beautiful - desolately beautiful - book. I finished it some time ago, but I want to go back over it more combingly. With the thought in my mind: "Something definitely happened there, but what?" The reader is a detective, too.

Dictionaries (Swedish and Spanish), plus book "Spanish in Three Months". That estimate was based on a world without the Internet - I'm getting near the end but it's been more like five years.

the leaves darken

2011-07-05T10:14:00.004+01:00

I have a new piece on Intercapillary Space, which touches on books by David Wevill, Jeremy Reed, Giles Goodland, Hanne Bramness, Lars Amund-Vaage, María Baranda and Carrie Etter.

Makin and Philpott must have read my mind. Anyway they've been too quick for me (not that this was difficult), and now that Dwelling is about to be published in Reality Street Editions, have adroitly withdrawn its ur-text St Leonards from public display at Great Works. Foreseeing this, I had vaguely planned to take a copy of the text and self-appoint myself as a Makin "scholar" with access to materials denied to the public at large. I'm glad this plan went wrong. You can still go there to read Makin's earlier Work in Process (though the first couple of photos have gone missing). And you should, every day.

Talking of long-deferred plans, I'm bitterly disappointed to discover that Great Works has now ceased trading - I had a quiet but profound ambition to get something published in it. In personal compensation, the final tranche does include a new poem from one of my fave poets, Catherine Daly, which is grand news - all publication activity from her seeming to have dried up for the past four years or so, unless that's a transatlantic illusion. Anyway, Great Works remains a great site for discovering things. Long pause while I go off to dip more deeply into Paul Holman's The Memory of the Drift. And to look up "grimoire" (book of magic), a word employed by both Holman and Makin.

In other news, Daithidh MacEoghaidh heartily detests The Littlest Feeling, for all the right reasons.

The four fish

2011-06-28T22:39:00.003+01:00

The four fish snagged on a birch twig
and that weighty expounder the priest,
the rim of the net resting against the shed
& the sun as sharp as a thimble
               dropping
behind grey veils of the hill. Dusk!
& my father is weary & happy
but hardly listening
just the occasional grunt
as he polishes
   prepares   & packs   repairs
and reviews split hooks & spooled line
     in the shadows of the veranda
               & the toolshed
     comes & goes
          in a meditation so practical
no-one can speak it in words,
     but it ends in "coffee".
And still as we play cards
          sit round the table joking
his spirit moves in the dusk
     his spirit moves back upstream
               to the troutpool.

Love is Metaphysical gravity

2011-06-28T22:22:00.005+01:00

flit

2011-06-24T10:29:00.004+01:00

The soaring buzzard with grey mirror underwings, -
the Bat-Signal surmounted
every megapol street and stone-cast lea in the ground-out basin;
gulls wicker
and a jackdaw hunches on a sloping roof.
The path pens heavy dour of a white shrub.

He has often witnessed those empty stairs and bannisters,
The stair-carpet with an indifferent stain,
above their heads a bulb without a shade, or socket without a bulb,
the entrance-hall marked with a big splodge of paper.

They are dead to us, (the corner children shout and the frilly borders nod and the office of fair trade confirms).
Dead to us;
long live the corn harvest and the Mahotella queens;
they are gone far away;
singing or dead maybe,
singing or dead.

on the move

2011-06-17T09:30:00.004+01:00

Silver as palaces iced in the grass,
browan as the rown's young fruit,
turnpike silver-like oats at the glass,
brown as the silver swan's foot

and the mouths of the June-lily brown,
in spunlight diffusing the sky,
when pattering rainsnorts silver as down
and the chestnrt house's eye;

the pony's sad brown eye as he grafts
brown miles of Walcheren-cress,
the silver dog slinking between the shafts:
the cream of wedlock in a lane's green dress.

the evening walk

2011-06-04T22:30:00.007+01:00

A couple of favourite plants on my evening walk through the Ind. Est. (Photos taken yesterday.)

First, a rather spectacular colony of hawkweeds (even more spectacular when the sun is high and the flowers are fully open). Judging from the winged petioles of the basal leaves, and the clasping stem-leaves, this should belong to the introduced Hieracium sect. Amplexicaulia, though Stace says this is "very scattered".

Rat's-tail Fescue (Vulpia myuros). Probably native, but always found in man-made environments - an increasing species. Typically, as here, with drooping inflorescences.

Finally out into the countryside. They've just bagged the silage.

[I didn't notice this until a week later, but just the other side of the path from the hawkweeds was a plant I'd never seen before, Pepper Saxifrage (Silaum silaus). Hardly where you'd expect it - but anyway the moral to botanists is, keep a close eye on your local scruffy Ind. Est.!]

Famous Plays of 1931

2011-05-27T08:44:00.012+01:00

From a series of compilations published by Gollancz, beginning in 1929 with Famous Plays of Today, then continuing more or less annually until 1938-39 (and, anomalously, 1954).

1. The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier. The scene is the same throughout: as the author archly remarks in the headnote, this comedy took place in Elizabeth Barrett's room in 1845. It portrays her long-postponed meeting and romance with an irresistibly buoyant Robert Browning, the recovery of her health and spirits, and finally her escape from the repellent emotional blackmail of her ultra-disciplinarian father, an almost-insane Victorian paterfamilias whose relationship with her late mother, it's eventually revealed, had declined into long-term marital rape (Mr Barrett is the decendant of characters such as Soames Forsyte in The Man of Property (1906), and the Reverend Gregorius in Hjalmar Söderberg's Doktor Glas (1905)). This was Besier's only hit. Film adaptation in 1934. (Above, Basil Rathbone as Browning, in the 1933-34 tour of Katherine Cornell's US version, which converted Besier's five-act structure into a more convenient three acts.)

2. The Improper Duchess, by J.B. Fagan. Set in Washington D.C, and concerned with oil negotiations with the imaginary kingdom of Poldavia during the "next" presidency. The sprightly and resourceful duchess, mistress of the King, uses her charms to overturn a plot to wreck the negotiations by invoking puritanical US laws. (The King's hunting forest is sold as a valuable oil concession, apparently to the joy of all; a story-line that today can only prompt sombre reflections on Ecuador's unprecedented negotiations to try and preserve rainforest from the oil industry.) Film adaptation in 1936.

3. To See Ourselves, by E.M. Delafield. Caroline's marriage to Freddie, papermill owner in Devon, has gone stale; a visit by her sister and fiancé, themselves hoping to avoid the same dismal prospect, shakes it up. E.M Delafield was a prolific novelist who touched on social and feminist issues; upper-middle class, unconventional, entered a convent in her youth but eventually rebelled, still slightly remembered for "Diary of a Provincial Lady".

4. After All, by John van Druten. Play about the generation gap, in widely-spaced scenes covering a six-year period. Mr and Mrs Thomas have tried to bring up their son and daughter in a liberal and confiding spirit, but are dismayed to find that each feels stifled by the family home and is intent on leaving the family home. By the end of the play (the parents now dead), the younger generation are showing signs of reverting to respectability, at the same time discovering that their parents in earlier times had also been forced to make a stand for freedom. Anyone now who reads the first two acts would take it for granted that young Ralph, like John van Druten, was gay.

5. London Wall, also by John van Druten. Set in a lawyer's office, but focussed on the admin staff rather than the lawyers; in particular, registering the relative novelty of women in the workplace. The innocent, pretty Pat manages (just) to escape the sexually-predatory Brewer, the office manager. Meanwhile Miss Janus, after ten years in office-work, still unmarried and at the desperate age of 36, walks out to a life of freedom, insecurity and loneliness.

6. Autumn Crocus, by C.L. Anthony. Wistful Alpine romance in which for 24 hours Fanny, a lonely teacher in her mid-thirties, snatches at Life (in the form of the warm-hearted innkeeper Andreas, unfortunately already married) before reluctantly giving way to the sad compulsions of practicality, realism, respectability, etc. Sentimental, yes; yet perhaps I won't be the only reader to be reminded, just a little, of Káťa Kabanová. Light relief supplied by Alaric and Audrey, a hearty Kraft-Ebbing / Slade School couple who earnestly inform all the other guests about their non-marital relations. This was Dodie Smith's first play and it was a success; her pseudonym was soon cracked by journalists ("Shopgirl Writes Play!"). Film adapation in 1934. Like Fanny, Dodie Smith came from rainy Manchester. In later years she wrote (among other things) the fondly-remembered middlebrow novel I Capture the Castle(1949) and a children's story called The Hundred and One Dalmatians(1956).

These six popular plays build a fascinating picture of a moment in history, perhaps even a unique moment. Every one of these plays, even Fagan's Duchess, reflects and contributes to society-wide debate about the role of women, emancipation, a new model of relationships, family and society. A subsidiary theme in most of the plays is registering a plea for LIFE from (or at any rate on behalf of) dreary, Life-starved existences - women's lives, principally. Well, I said a unique moment. One key date is probably this: in the UK, universal suffrage for all adults over 21 years of age was not achieved until 1928 (1918 introduced votes for women, but only those aged over thirty, along with other restrictions). Another is the screening of Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail in July 1929 - the first British talkie (though like most transitional films the sound was added later). There remained a timelag before the social impact of sound movies really started to erode areas recently occupied by theatre. But inexorably it happened. Today, the most direct line of descent from such plays as these, i.e. combining broad popularity with social debate, leads to EastEnders.

Chekhov complained about the difficulty of avoiding the pistol-shot. It's interesting that in these plays there is not a single death from any but natural or accidental causes. Detectives, policemen, mystery crimes, are entirely absent. That may be an unrepresentative curiosity of selection (perhaps Gollancz only went for relatively high-minded plays), but it's striking in contrast to our own cop-sated schedules.

Speaking of Gollancz prompts another observation: these plays were evidently, in part, intended for reading, and were read. Descriptions of scenery are elaborate; the physical appearance of the characters is described; stage directions are often novelistic rather than functional, aimed at a reader not an actor. Rudolf Besier describes Elizabeth Barrett's room by quoting one of her letters. "C.L. Anthony" even suppresses the usual cast-list with its names and explanations of relationships, instead referring enigmatically to "The Lady in the button-up boots", etc. This seems to be for the reader's benefit, i.e. because the usual sort of cast-list would give away too much of the plot.

In contrast, movie screenplays have never sold particularly well in book form. I suppose this is partly because it's easier to see a new film than a new play; Gollancz could anticipate a provincial market for these volumes. But the main reason is that moviemakers, from their silent outset, invented fluid narratorial styles that were not so dependent on language. And linguistic high-jinks went off to the musicals.

el túnel, de nuevo

2011-05-27T08:20:00.002+01:00

assisted by Google translate

A Gabriel Miró

Has logrado a disminuir el jefe al puente.
Combinando y luces, es prenda de mis ancianos.

y la mano, y la botella, vagas onduladas del mismo
día justo, día arreglado cuando tu mi corazon - hubiese sin afán
otro día

los túneles, las montañas sombras luego arroz poniente, este día llegue encima desdichoso

pero
no por eso fue
manchas ambas
desengaño pintadas rosas, yo distinguí lo mezclados crecimientos de olor

gaberdina vestida, estuvó lloviendo en aquella calle de color gasolina
vengo, entrelaces,
sumetidos en balde, destacados, por detenernos y ponernos

querriamos quedarlos

***

You've managed to reduce the head to the bridge.
Combining and lights, is a pledge of my elders.

and hand, and the bottle, rolling the same vague
fair day, the day fixed when your my heart - would no eagerness
another day

the tunnels, mountains, rice shadows after sunset, the above unfortunate day arrives

but
that was not
two spots
disappointment painted roses, I distinguished the growth of odor mixed

gaberdine dressed, it was raining on that street of gasoline color
come, interlocks,
then handed in vain, highlights, and stop and get

wants to just stand

frogs jumping over mosaic

2011-04-26T08:39:00.007+01:00

shimmer sleeve notes (2).

He squatted on a flat rock, his feet in comfortable but well-polished shoes standing on flat pebbles. When he dropped his weight into the shoes a faint rise of the lake ringed the pebbles with wet.

He didn't want to meet the visitor. Albert touched the clandestine bell that rang in his study, he jerked awake from reading about a choir festival in Gamla Stan, he raced down the stairs, out of the side-door and down the sloping meadow thick with clover through the spruces and down here to the scallop shore. Here he would stay. He had only a light coat on, but on this day there was next to no wind.

Across the scribble of islands the Norwegians and the Swedes had danced, retreated, advanced, stubborn with pike and plume. A heave-ho for thee, maid of the mountains! For the honour of Jämtland, Jämtland's fair flower. They bled in the water.

He had left his pipe. Midges danced above the shore in sparkling snow-melt air. No, he simply had to have his pipe. He crept back to his study. There was silence in the house and it sounded like the danger was past, but now he had promised himself a real snorter of an evening pipe.

On the way back from the house he glanced again. He had filled his soul with this view! From the higher reach among the scrambling clover, as the sun lowered into a barrier of mountains at the far end of the enormous lake. There was a tough range, do not risk the back of that one! In earlier days he might have liked to try it with Bertil, mop-haired Bertil.

Brushing the last alder he said - addressing the lake without self-consciousness - Well, Old Fellow, here I am now. Immediately a raven croaked, flying over. He didn't bother to look up. He was a big man. He stood like a barn door, a bit warped perhaps, a barn door that didn't quite close.

As if it were possible. I am not accustomed to account for my decisions.

That is how he had begun with Albert. But later, he had condescended to explain that did not wish his home to acquire a connubial air. He did not, in short, wish it to be domesticated.

Later still, he had become emotional.

I am not married, so why must you marry?

He had grovelled basely. And Albert, splendid fellow that he was, had come good - again. It was not the first time this painful subject had arisen, but he hoped - he felt he had reason to hope - that now it was the last. A chink of afternoon sun came through and the lake stilled.

*

It's just nonsense!

It's what's happening all the time nowadays.

What is his meaning, to make an army band perform Clown music!

An insult to the Fatherland!

No, Herr Professor!

As if we weren't on our knees already!

Does he think we're a troupe of shepherds?

And that --- chromatic wail --- in the Allegro.

Dafnis and Kloe!

He'd have us playing saxophones if he dared.

Get the boot-polish out, Willi.

Some of the sting had gone out of their outrage, now they had managed to express more than they felt. Carrying their bandboxes, they clattered into a cellar at the corner of the street.

A glass, gentlemen?

They all had a glass, but Karl hadn't got any money.

That Lübecker, eh?

Karl blushed.

She'll eat you alive.

That's all nonsense. A man needs to relax.

He didn't care if they believed him or not, so long as they didn't find out where the money was really going.

In the summer afternoon a wave of golden scent lifted out of the avenue.

Holly (Ilex aquifolium)

2011-04-13T22:24:00.006+01:00

Holly (Ilex aquifolium) - flower buds. (April 9th)

And a female Holly Blue (Celastrina argiolus), looking for a good place to lay eggs.

The Well-Tempered Clavier

2011-04-12T08:55:00.005+01:00

Drive-to-work question, while listening to The Well-Tempered Clavier.

Q. Why is the eighth Prelude/Fugue specified as "E flat minor / D sharp minor" ?

I appreciate the two keys are equivalent but Bach must have scored it with either six flats or six sharps. Mustn't he? Anyone know which?

*

A. Apparently the Prelude is scored in E flat minor, but the Fugue is scored in D sharp minor.
This is used as an argument by some for the hypothesis that Bach wrote for equal temperament, not just for well temperament, but this argument can't be sustained, in my opinion. If a keyboard sounds in tune for D # minor, by whatever means, it must sound just as in tune for E flat minor.

Well-temperament (which allows all keys to be playable, but includes some subtly different intervals between notes) would make keys sound different in character and this could perhaps be connected with the impressions of key-colour that some enthusiasts have recorded. (E.g. Christian Schubart on D sharp minor: Feelings of the anxiety of the soul's deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depresssion, of the most gloomy condition of the soul. Every fear, every hesitation of the shuddering heart, breathes out of horrible D# minor. If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key.

Personally I don't think this has a lot to do with tuning, it has everything to do with mass psychology and there are other key-characteristics that could equally well provoke the imagination to such flights.

For example: familiarity and (relative) unfamiliarity. The fact that that first piano piece you learned was in C major, not in B major. The fact that the tunings of open strings on violin, guitar, etc direct the beginner toward the keys with a small number of sharps. And then the literature that follows from this, and the body of associations that develop.

And after all, well-temperament would only have applied to keyboard instruments, not to melodies played on the strings.

Finally, if well-temperament were an important factor then people would no longer have have ideas of key-colour, but of course we do; not experiencing the historically-bound romantic notions of Schubart's vehement fancies - very much the product of their era - but certainly recognizing the softness of A minor(Schumann's piano concerto) or the solidity of E (Chopin's prelude) - pick your own associations. In my own case - not having perfect pitch - I am certain I only experience key-colour when I know exactly what key I'm listening to.

[This post is really a belated follow-up to this earlier one on the 24-keys prelude form.]

Scriabin experienced key-colour more literally. His synaesthesic impressions appear to match the visible spectrum sequence VIBGYOR as you go through the cycle of fifths. For him, his own cycle of preludes would begin red in C major, then turn orange (G), yellow, green, blue, deep-blue (F sharp / G flat), purple, violet, flesh, rose/steel, deep-red (F) ....
So the first bit follows the rainbow, and the second, briefer bit (from A flat to C) tones from violet back to red along a different path.

Info from here.

amelanchier

2011-04-07T10:30:00.002+01:00

kriolita
a bigger long haul; the nose of cairo;
solstor
أكبر المدى الطويل، والأنف من القاهرة؛
amelanchier

لوحة التحكم
kyrenaica gravel

en större långa, näsan i Kairo
shield

shell filled with blood;
lax as I am, bloor homes
swilled concrete

blocked out ragged avenues to the skyway.

as it
doily dries
alive, alive
control-tower

ripstop leaves

whose eyes have sprouted poplars, alone with the jam-spoon, poplin Mollie

Ill Frackemby

2011-04-05T11:42:00.009+01:00

Been there (nb, that's Ilfracombe) for a few days of walking in wind and sun among those disorientating slate cliffs.

I saw all of spring in flower, long before (perhaps not that long before) it gets to Frome: wild strawberry, red campion, cow parsley. Odd effect. Travel changes time, everyone knows that.

I also saw three-cornered garlic (Allium triquetrum, above, showing curious junction between stem and pedicels, and withered spathe), and a wonderful Prunus 'Shirotae' outside Ilfracombe Museum (below).

(Below) Great Woodrush (Luzula sylvatica) - flower, barren stem, progressive growth on old leaf-bases... A common enough plant in acid woodland, but as is often remarked we don't get much acid in Frome...

I worried about why common scurvygrass seemed to vary so dramatically in size, behaving like two different plants, the small kind (which looked the same as in other places) and the big kind, which looked like a different plant I hadn't seen before.

Took photos of the common garden tree/shrub known as Juneberry (Amelanchier lamarckii). Sometimes called Snowy Mespil or Snowy Mespilus, but these names may also refer to other Amelanchier species, such as the sole species native to Europe, A. ovalis. A. lamarckii is not known as a native in the wild and is assumed to have arisen as a true-breeding hybrid of two American species.

I was reading Molière. The Misanthrope is a masterpiece, but is so unlike his other plays, or any other play of the period, that it gives us a sense of improvisation. It struck me that it's his Brat Pack thing, and also a bit like "The Only Way is Essex". Fly-on-the-wall is the right way to see life in Célimène's house, very splintered and unexplained, eg. those letters -we don't ever really find out who either of them is addressed to, or whether what anyone says about either of them is true. In this case observation of the unities creates a slice-of-life that is distinctively open-ended. So far as the play is a portrait of Generation X this all works out. But it leaves Alceste a bit out of the picture, and Philinte too.

Considering how tolerant Philinte is, his judgment of Célimène is a bit damning. He's jealous, don't you think? Philinte's sanity is attractive, but he doesn't get everything right. For instance he credits Arsinoé's virtue, but we see that she's an interfering old bat, even if we're also aware she doesn't quite deserve all the payback that Célimène delivers with such relish (and to our delight). Philinte is a bit too in with Eliante, who can also be sharp-tongued against her cousin. A sort of tacit distance lies between Philinte and Célimène. He is never the object of her satire. He never says anything exceptionable to her, but he listens to those who do.

(If you think you'd do better with a less informal account, forget it. Wikipedia needs a step change on its canonical literature articles. I've seen two recently - one on "The Misanthrope", one on Joyce's "The Dead" - that seem to have been written at the back of the class by someone who didn't understand the story. Wikipedia's methods of cross-improvement based on certain ground-rules - e.g. full references, objectivity - don't apply well to literary interpretation. If someone thinks it worth while to tell us that Oronte's reaction to his sonnet being criticised reveals his low self-esteem, you can't exactly dispute it as not true; more that Oronte's character just isn't the point here. If someone claims that Gabriel fails at first to recognize his wife on the staircase - well, I feel perfectly certain that this isn't what Joyce means us to understand, but how could I objectively demonstrate it? In each case what is being revealed is that the writer isn't inward with the kind of work they're describing, not because they haven't read it but because they don't belong to the traditional literary community that the text in part projects and that in part has slowly developed through centuries of polite criticism. But is that wrong? Does one need to belong to some sort of informal club of informed readers, i.e. informed of what is loosely called the critical context, to be qualified to write the Wikipedia entry? It seems that that's in fact my level of expectation, but the grounds for it are open to question.)

"Tartuffe himself is a titanic creation, one who makes our own 'Heap of Infamy' seem by comparison a mere cringing shadow" (John Wood). Strange remark. I really have a problem with seeing Tartuffe as a titanic creation. A part that doesn't appear until Act III more or less cedes any claim to be a protagonist. All we see him as is a conventional seducer. His power as a hypocrite is known only indirectly, and deceives no-one but Orgon and his mother. Wood's allusion dates him - he means Uriah Heep. I heard the David Copperfield music sounding strongly in Ill Frackemby; in fact I nearly bought it in a charity shop. (There wasn't much else to buy, we're a long way from a university here, the bookish graduates have not moved here, the stocks of retirees from more literate generations have run dry, - a bit better book-choice than Swindon, but less than Frome..)

Psalms 69:12 They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of the drunkards.

Verse 12. They that sit in the gate speak against me. The ordinary gossips who meet at the city gates for idle talk make me their theme, the business men who there resort for trade forget their merchandise to slander me, and even the beggars who wait at men's doors for alms contribute their share of insult to the heap of infamy. (C.H Spurgeon, Treasury of David).

The influence, if influence there was, ran from Dickens to Spurgeon not the other way around. But David Copperfield does have a surprising number of phantoms of biblical allegory (not my idea, I read it in a book somewhere); impressionistic, not evidently significant allegory (unlike the symbolic patterns in Tale of Two Cities and Little Dorrit). The names David and Uriah being notable examples - too close together to pass altogether unnoticed, yet the point is - what? I would associate it with the unconscious depths that the author allowed himself to stir up in this book. Things that, if we are honest, meant more to him than us. The book amazed him when he re-read it. Nevertheless the atmosphere of its programme is distinctive and heady. It's the Dickens book I least often think about consciously.

We discussed our total failure to hear any perceptibly Devonian accents; the origin of the saying "green around the gills" (inconclusive; apparently jocular piscification as per "stewed to the gills"); whether Ilfracombe Art College is just a normal secondary school in disguise; fused double/triple dandelions - usually early in the saeson? ; whether motorway services cause accidents; why some clifftops make you feel vertiginous, others not; the eagerness of llamas to meet people; the 650-year-old lighthouse keeper's memory for cakes; millwheels ceasing to turn when the water is too low. And from the cliffs we saw peregrines courting in flight, with little squawking cries.

Happy new Year

2011-03-25T14:56:00.004Z

It's Lady Day.
This is because it is nine months before the birth of Jesus (25th Dec), therefore the day that Mary conceived (Annunciation).
Some have also claimed it was the date of the first Easter, i.e. Jesus' resurrection (March 25th AD31).
Also, more or less, the vernal equinox. (Bloody ACE!!)
Mothering Sunday this year is 3rd April (4th Sunday in Lent). One of many Mother's Days around the world, with classical or pre-classical antecedents, tending to take place around the vernal equinox. Simnel Cake in the UK, for long traditional on Mothering Sunday, but the 11 disciples (marzipan balls) rather suggest an Easter connection originally.
(Does any of this have any connexion with Lady Day? Probably.) Anyway, back to Lady Day.
Traditional English quarter day, and originally New Year's Day (until 1752), when we went from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar.
(Vernal Equuinox is still the start of the Iranian New Year.)
Origin of the Swedish word for what we call waffle (in Sweden eaten on this day), :- Våffel - Vår Fru (Our Lady).

more seedlings

2011-03-22T11:13:00.010Z

I'm still compiling and completing the previous brief-hist/literary/cultural post, but I thought I'd better begin another one because it was getting pretty long.

R.F. Langley died recently. I don't really know what it was that prompted me, but in a £20 splurge of extravagance I've bought all his books; they turned up today and I just had time to read "Mariana" (which fascinatingly wipes over Tennyson) before I left for work.

Meanwhile I'm reading Giles Goodland's What The Things Sang. It's been well reviewed by Alastair Noon in Jacket, and Steve Spence in Stride; some of what they say I will inevitably repeat when I inevitably write about this for IS. It's an overwhelming book; one of those poetry volumes you definitely can't read through at one sitting. I'm about a quarter of the way through and nowhere near collecting my thoughts.

I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm very excited to hear there's a Bob Cobbing Radio 4 programe online:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zlbl5

!WARNING: SPOILERS FROM THE OFF!
Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy. Abridged audiobooks, read by Martin Wenner. Wenner is evidently bilingual, and my greatest pleasure when listening to this was probably his pronunciation of the Swedish names and placenames. He has quite a lot of fun. When Blomkvist and Salander are in London speaking English to English characters, they suddenly develop strong Swedish accents. In the Australian scene Wenner switches between Swedish-English (Blomkvist), Australian-English (Jeff) and Swedish-Australian-English (Harriet). Clever stuff.

Having got to the end, I am now re-listening to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The title in Swedish was Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women), which says a lot more about what the book is. The abridgement contains about a fifth of the text; satisfying listening (compared e.g. to the disembowelled 2-CD Villette I heard recently) but naturally not much good for detailed textual queries. (For example, I've only just discovered that there's an enigmatic prelude to The Girl Who Played With Fire, it's not in the audiobook.)

With that caveat, I think this first vol is the best of the three books Larsson managed to complete, from most points of view. Because here he drew most enquiringly on his knowledge of far-right groups and his witnessing of violence against women; here his wonderful Salander's mixture of feelings is more intuitively portrayed than later; the violence is more scary; and the Vangers are more credible than the buffoonish Niedermans and doddery Section professionals that take up space in the later books. Credible in a way. Martin Vanger's diseased woman-hating psychopathy has just horribly shown up in Swindon (formerly claimed to be the most crime-free town in the UK) - but it seems unlikely the Swindon killer is the CEO of a large company.

Astrid Lindgren, Elizabeth George, Dorothy Sayers, Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid. Why does Blomkvist read only female authors? (I reckon it's fully as ingeniously planned as the "Leviticus" murders.)

In which future volume did Larsson intend to bring Camilla forward? (Lisbeth's sister, who remains resolutely unspoken about in the three completed volumes.) Larsson uses a technique of selective consciousness-reporting. Thus in "The Girl Who Played With Fire" the whole slowly developing mystery about Zalachenko is only sustained because until Larsson is ready he tells us not a word about Salander's father. Even though, in other respects, we spend a load of time inside Salander's consciousness. Is this "cheating"? While consciousness-reporting is always selective (though novelists tend to create the illusion that this is not so), are certain conventions of disclosure to be obeyed, are authorial silences about germane matters something we should think about? Not, I mean, because of rules of whodunnits, that's neither here nor there, but perhaps because the reader has been manipulated into spending a lot of time thinking about something that isn't worth thinking about, a mere manufactured puzzle (I'm remembering C.S. Lewis complaining about Chapman's Shadow of Night). Maybe that's not the question to ask. Is it also about plausibility - people would be bound to demand answers about Camilla at various points in the books. (From the mythological point of view it seems relevant that Anita and Cecilia Vanger are also twins.)

I am also reading: Moliere's The Misanthrope; Home Run (book about escapes from Nazi Europe); John Steinbeck's East of Eden; Chris Goode's blog (recently talking about poetry as a window or a wall, analogies that deserve further examination).

thirsty coast

2011-03-21T15:03:00.006Z

honk, fru-grains
steel, repeat the dose hammerswift flies

Why so low, and budding? And that thing; so wide and fruitless?

There are more stars tonight, a special kind; blotting stars; grains of steel.

Pull my head down, out of the wind, like you did before.

spectacular
road;

Honk if you desert bumped.

*

estuary akka, when geese bumbed; skinny
and libya from the air made an exhibition
aluminium with the super moon on their wings

March in pink

2011-03-13T22:18:00.006Z

Above and the two below, Prunus cerasifera 'Nigra'. Contrary to what I've read in Alan Mitchell, this seems to come into flower at exactly the same time as the even more common Pissard's Plum (Prunus cerasifera 'Atropurpurea') but is instantly distinguishable, especially from a distance, because the blossom appears deep pink, in contrast to the very pale pinkywhite of Pissard's (not to mention the pure white of the species tree - see previous post).

Of course, some of the pink in these pix is artfully photo-enhanced (due to the bastard crappy camera playing up), but not as much as you might suppose.

Above and below, Prunus 'Accolade', the lower pic showing the long sprays of blossom on the end of bare branches.

Prunus cerasifera and spinosa

2011-02-28T22:53:00.018Z

February 27th, in Trowbridge. Prunus cerasifera (Myrobalan Plum, Cherry Plum), a haze of thousands of green-creamy buds. (Click photo to see it better.) This is the earliest semi-wild Prunus to make a showing, and these trees are earlier than any of the others in my area, probably because they're growing in a sheltered spot over water (the River Biss).

Within the crown a few sheltered blossoms had already decided to go for it. Some of these early ones have six petals, like the one on the right (below).

Being particularly incurious I have never wondered before what "Myrobalan" actually meant. I just assumed there was probably some part of the world called Myrobal or Myrobalia where this plant originated. Not so. The tree is native to large areas of Europe and Asia (though not the UK), and the general etymology of "myrobalan", according to something I read on the web, is : "Obsolete French mirobolan, from Latin myrobalanum, fragrant oil from seeds of the horseradish tree (), from Greek murobalanos : muron, perfume + balanos, acorn." Eh? Well, as far as I can make out the name became attached to a number of small tree species (e.g. the tropical fruit tree Phyllanthus emblica, commonly known as Myrobalan) and then ended up becoming applied to the cherry plum, referring to the smallish globular fruits. Or did it go in the other direction? To add to the confusion, the word was inevitably conflated, in many people's minds, with "mirabelle". This history of promiscuous re-attachment is fairly standard for non-scientific plant names (and scientific ones too, if they get half a chance).

*

(A few weeks later, in West Swindon)

Mid-March, now smothered in blossom. A very common tree along the busy roads here.

By this time P. cerasifera is starting to overlap with early-flowering blackthorn (P. spinosa). The latter is never a tree, but the former is often a shrub, so it's quite common to find the two species entangled, as below (blackthorn at the front, cherry plum further back - note the emerging leaves).

Cherry plum sometimes has an occasional thorn, but anything that looks like the above is definitely blackthorn.

(Above). Blackthorn buds, snapped in mid-March. (Below) Blackthorn in flower a week later.

The flowers are the most similar things about the two plants. The one above is P. spinosa, the one below is P. cerasifera. You'll just have to take my word for it. The cherry plum flowers are a little larger, on average. (OK, so this blackthorn flower happens to be a six-petaller, but those are equally frequent on both plants.)

(Below.) Photo - it's P. cerasifera this time - to show that when the corolla is six-part, then so is the calyx.

*

(beginning of August)

The blossoms of P. Cerasifera may be very uniform, the fruit are surprisingly varied in size, shape, colour and flavour - but they're usually delicious. This is an abundant wild food around towns, for those who care about it.

seedlings of brief history

2011-02-14T11:45:00.027Z

These are seedlings that I'm germinating here, to be potted on if they show any sign of maturing.

Che Guevara, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War.

This, along with his manual of guerilla warfare, used to be published in Pelican Books, Penguin's remarkable series of informative books that was finally discontinued in 1990. Yes, even before the Internet, there have always been means by which information-hungry people have been able to access the world in one form or another. And let's face it isn't reading a primary source a lot more "access" than you can get from any amount of Wikipedia ruminations on Che's iconic hyperreality and influence on Hollywood (The Motorcycle Diaries). But perhaps debate about his supervision of post-revolutionary executions cannot so easily be dismissed as trivia. I'd only remark that most victorious revolutionary struggles have in fact required executions. Oppressive regimes do not suddenly lose all their threat overnight when a new state is formed. Oppressive regimes pay well and have foreign well-wishers. The new, insecure, authority cannot immediately assume the benevolent tolerance to opposition that characterizes an old entrenched powerbase. (But old entrenched powerbases naturally benefit from portraying revolutionaries as bloodthirsty savages. We don't want that kind of thing over here.)

Duque de Rivas, Don Alvaro, o la fuerza del sino.

This is my latest challenge in reading Spanish, and it's great. It is one of the key dramas in Spain that signalled the triumph of romanticism over classicism. The Duque was a political radical, in later years a more moderate liberal. In the anglo-zone, where we never experienced a triumph of romanticism (not in the theatre, anyhow) - it was somehow aborted by the pre-existence of Shakespeare, - the play is best known as the source of Verdi's opera, The Force of Destiny. The superb variety of scene and location is what impresses now.

Galdos, Fortunata y Jacinta.

Thomas Robinson, The Life and Death of Mary Magdalene.

Coming across this previously unknown Early English Text Society volume, you might reasonably assume (as I did) that you're about to read a medieval, Catholic, saint's life. All three of these assumptions are wrong. TR (otherwise unknown) wrote the poem in around 1620. It is in the Protestant tradition (Mary's story is essentially an allegory on the redeemed soul) and is post-Spenserian in manner. It rather defies generic classification - "religious epic" (The Spenser Encyclopaedia) doesn't seem to press the right buttons, but might make a bit more sense to me if I'd read Giles Fletcher, perhaps. Sacred epyllion might be more like it, but imagining (if you can) an epyllion that's thoroughgoingly allegorical.

This excellent poem survives in two mss, but was never printed until Heinrich Sommer's EETS edition in the 1880s. EETS, like the Vatican, thinks in centuries not years, and no-one has yet seen fit to replace (or merely delete) Furnivall's inadequate notes, which are based on radically false assumptions about the date and author.

William Congreve, Love for Love.

A Lover of Unreason (biography of Assia Wevill, by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev).

This retailed at £20 when published but is currently available (guess the price) in your local branch of Poundland - Get down there now!

Assia was Ted Hughes' partner, the second one to commit suicide by gassing herself. (but Assia also gassed their 4-year-old daughter Shura.) I'm only intermittently interested in Hughes and Plath as poets, but even if I wasn't interested at all I'd still be enthralled by Assia's life, which has so far moved chaotically from Russia to Berlin (Nazis coming to power), to Pisa, to Tel Aviv in British Palestine - and she's only just had her first kiss.

Family, It's Only a Movie (1973).

I've had it in mind to write this piece for ages, and perhaps I never will, I've got cold feet. The truth is I'm not particularly happy with my writings about music. For that matter I don't particularly like anyone else's, either. Which is odd in a way, because in my youth I thrilled to Barney Hoskins, Richard Cook, Ian Penman, even The Boy Looked at Johnny. But the most precious thing about music I ever possessed came from a few years earlier. It was a feature length restrospective interview with Roger Chapman and Charlie Whitney, just after Family had announced their farewell, and it talked through the band's whole turmoiled history. I can't remember who published it, and you can't read it online. You can read a 1994 interview with Chapman though, and that's interesting too, but different. At the time of the earlier retrospective they had still been friends and working together. They had spoken more warmly about the spirit of the band, and more embarrassedly about the psychedelic gimmickry of - what then seemed so far off, all of five years before - Music in a Doll's House, their debut album. In 1994 Chapman, after 12 years as a solo artist, could take a cooler view. From this vantage point all of Family's work sounded equally of-an-era. He evidently never forgave Whitney for ending their writing partnership, in 1979-ish; he just forgot about it and moved on. (Christian theorists please note: forgetting ISN'T the same as forgiving, indeed can be vengeful.) It's one of the mysteries of rock what Whitney, who had briefly been one of our greatest guitarists and songwriters, did to earn his keep after that. He was barely forty and could hardly subsist on Family's royalties, you'd imagine. Rock is of course long since dead (yes it is), and all its best mysteries are of the "Whatever happened to.." type. The most intriguing of all, I think, is Tim Harrison, erstwhile genius of Evesham's The Dancing Did. It's impossible to rest satisfied with the idea of TH as a magazine designer with no further musical involvement (Wikipedia) - a highly dubious story, what are these magazines, why aren't they named? Why does a visionary mythmaker in the Alan Garner class not even have any internet presence? Obviously the true story is quite different: he went off into the greenwood, or took to the roads in a painted wagon, as was always supposed at the time. One day I believe I'll run into him, not in an office. (What does strike the authentic Dancing Did note is that the Wikipedia entry carries a warning that it may shortly be removed for failing to meet the criteria for music notability.) Anyway mention of the Dancing Did says everything about why Chapman-Whitney, in any form, had no future in the IK. The Dancing Did epitomized the new primitivism that was suddenly - no irony here - imperative. This was folk music gone feral, no MBE for services to industry (such as Martin Carthy's) remotely in prospect. Punk had arrived and the world had swung off its axis. Family had no US audience to fall back on, and their fanbase here was a highly elite segment of the rock audience (much too discerning to be taken in by Pink Floyd, e.g.) , - exactly the kind of listeners who, when 1976 happened, promptly deserted their own past heroes and embraced the new radicalism of punk. Heavy Metal and Prog-rock behemoths could ride out this storm and eventually return to a sort of ghastly esteem as Widow Twankey parodies of themselves. But for C-W there were really only two possibilities, dwindle into total obscurity (Whitney) or set off, as Roger Chapman did, to forge a new and very respectable career in the land that punk forgot(Germany).

But I'm trivialising the issue to imply that C-W were too principled to debase themselves, or that Family's legacy was somehow undebaseable. After all, Streetwalkers (the band they formed around 1975-77) had been at best an unambitious operation in the Vertigo tradition, even before they became merely rubbish (Vicious but Fair). It was a dumbing-down comparable to the way Thin Lizzy developed from Shades of a Blue Orphanage to Jailbreak, shedding braincells by the year. But Lizzy, of course, triumphed. There was more than this to why punk was so especially destructive to C-W, a fundamental discord of imaginative visions.

A suppose the easiest way of seeing this is as age vs youth. Within the new ethos of punk, youth was violently asserted. Musicians should really be twenty or under. They should have no history, except of doing college covers of Communication Breakdown.
(An excuse to make my second reference to the music of Evesham: Paul Rencher's brilliant memoir of Satan's Rats).

But drill back a few years to the late 60s and you see something else, a kind of exploratory reaching out for age, or agedness, or agelessness : at any rate, the opposite of whatever youth implied. Where it started I'm not sure, maybe John Wesley Harding, or the folk revival generally. You can associate it with hairiness and bulk (Beach Boys ca Friends), or The Band's songs from The Weight onwards. Anyhow, the thing is, there were no old rock musicians at the time (now, it's the opposite). If anyone had been really old, that would have complicated things. Instead, a vision of timeless mythical agedness fascinated the young musicians who wanted to break away from the limitations of youth-contents. That image of age represented an intention to conjure with new elements of history and culture that lay outside the everyday props of youth. In the UK, think of Led Zep's Hats Off the Harper (Robert Plant as an ageless troll), or the persona of Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson, or the sleeve of Stackridge's Friendliness. Or of course the completely ageless voice that Roger Chapman had astonished with, ever since the opening notes of The Chase in 1968.

Johannes Wallmark and the Wildflowers, Akron OH.

As often happens when I do these miscellanies, this turns out to have a mysterious link with the above. Johannes Wallmark and his band make a kind of American-style preppy melodic rock (kind of a bit like Shaun Mullins) and they do it pretty well. This album (his second one - the first was called 69 Oakdale) is completely American-flavored and JW's stateside connections (he went to a US university) are in a sense the angle he's selling - a marketing concept carried right through to the album's title. (All the songs are his, apart from a cover of Tom Petty's American Girl.) But what's funny and pleasing about this piece of vintage Americana is that JW's market is in fact exclusively Scandinavia and Germany. So you actually have to switch it all round in your head and see it as an authentically Scandinavian product, or rather, as a typical postmodern product, genuine by dint of not being quite authentic anywhere at all. Johannes writes melodic heartfelt songs; the lyrics often partly autobiographical, so we feel we know something about the woman on the sleeve who is carrying a child - we sat beside her reading an in-flight magazine - and it may be that the song to a loved one who's died (can you tell me what heaven is like, eventually running out of words, and into a majestically sad swans-beat of a riff) is connected to the sculpture on the sleeve "To the Memory of Our Daughter". At any rate the album lets us into a life that has known some heartbreak but the tone of the songs is radiantly youthful and optimistic; there's no edgy darkness wanted here. The best songs are the first one, irresistible, Falling Down (loud bleach-pop Byrds Bach chord progression) and the last, crackly-vinyl piano, hung-over-but-in-love At Brady's. I said "radiantly youthful" but youthfulness itself has nuances, and is as hyperreal as anything else. Youth lasts so long. This particularly brand of youthfulness is the youth of youngish parents, people with established jobs. (Obviously, the archaic musical style - rock? guitars? - would be fairly irrelevant to most very very young people i.e. under 25).

James Joyce, Dubliners (finished in 1907, but not published until 1914). You can perhaps imagine why I am currently motivated to read (or, as in this case, re-read) classic short story collections! It seems vaguely paradoxical to describe Dubliners in that kind of way. As if one forgets about it, a literary-historical phenomenon that indeed goes right back to its delayed publication (by which time Portrait was already being serialized and Joyce's early stories already seemed of minor importance). But in another way Joyce feels too big an author for the curiously friendly and democratic atmosphere of the short story genre (in which e.g. "classic collection" tends to suggest Milk Tray). What am I trying to say here? That while there are few literary experiences more intensely stisfying than the greatest short stories, yet in a way the short story genre does sometimes feel like a diminished, popular art, or even craft. Like ships in bottles, say. The milestones of cultural history always seem to be GRAND. But I believe it's a good, healthy thing that almost any writer whatever their main genre can also write a good short story or two. Yet there are a lot of things you can't do in a short story. It's interesting to press against the glass.

Joyce was twenty-five when he wrote these stories, and his command, for example of the social and economic detail of Dublin, is already so comprehensive it leaves me at first awestruck, and then puzzled. I am also jealous of, for instance, the second of these sentences:

Old Jack raked the cinders together with a piece of cardboard and spread them judiciously over the whitening dome of coals. When the dome was thinly covered his face lapsed into darkness but, as he set himself to fan the fire again, his crouching shadow ascended the opposite wall and his face slowly re-emerged into light.

Still the short story, like the novel, involves some sleight of hand.

So, in "Clay", the divination episode referred to in the title is included to make an epiphany in which Maria's rather patronizing friends are all very fond of her. We are supposed to think that Maria does not know what the change of atmosphere in the room is all about, but how could she possibly not? We are also perhaps meant to believe ourselves that the clay is prescient, which is cheap, considered rationally. Un-rationally, we understand that the short story needs its cliches and must even be granted its atavistic, supernatural atmospheres. It is factitiously topped off, but this is what allows it to be a great story.

In "A Painful Case", Joyce covers so much ground that the active relationship between Duffy and Emily Sinico is dealt with in a couple of pages. Years later, Duffy's successive reactions to the newspaper story are portrayed brilliantly. But why, after all, did that relationship end the way it did? How can Duffy's obvious loneliness be squared with his churlish behaviour? His dismal rectitude doesn't really fit with his patent pursuit of Mrs Sinico, however much Duffy claims to dislike underhand means. How can he be "very much surprised" by her response? (presumably Joyce intends us to infer some internal posturing here, but in view of the upshot Duffy must be at any rate surprised). As others have pointed out, this part of the story has seemed to lead very directly to a romantic conclusion, so that Duffy's sudden rejection of his friend is affronting to us. It really needs to be so. If Duffy had lost interest in Mrs Sinico after a couple of meetings, had never offered more or permitted more than his rectitude seems to require, he could hardly implicate himself in guilt for her death. That he is not the only guilty party does not excuse him. He behaved revoltingly - Joyce's description makes his behaviour revolting - we infer, as elsewhere, the powerful Dubliners theme of casual damage done by men to women. (He soon begins to excuse himself, by feeling relievedly alone, freed of the spectral voice and hand; though this irony of a selfish "alone" is not the only meaning it carries.) The story does not make it possible to fully understand Duffy's rejection, or the impact of that rejection on Mrs Sinico, or the causes of her reported intemperance, which is the other affronting event in the story; i.e. it does not seem to fit well with what we think we know of Emily Sinico. Here, as with Duffy's chilly rejection, we find ourselves scraping around for psychological "clues", which are present, but too feebly to be conclusive. You can speculate, (oh if Emily spoke so readily to a stranger perhaps she was already incontinent literally or spiritually; Mr Duffy's epigram suggests he is really homosexual by inclination..etc) and sure, you can find reasons (Mr Duffy does) why Emily might comprehensibly decline into intemperance, but you can also see a good few reasons why she probably wouldn't and doesn't really seem to be the type. The shock is a shock, in other words. It's indeed our lack of full comprehension that allows the story to roam powerfully in our thoughts. Mr Duffy, for example, though he affects us unpleasantly at various points through the story, also betrays his origin in an imaginary fancy about brother Stanislaus. And indeed in being the author (or brotherly reader?) of Joyce's own translation of a German play. There is an underlying fondness for Mr Duffy that his actions do not quite seem to deserve, and this is the other pitying meaning of "alone", the last word of the story, the author protectively wrapping the night around Mr Duffy as if he was a rather fragile child; though this wrap of solitude is also his fate. Duffy's conviction that Emily died for him (absurd - or true?) connects him with Mrs Conroy in "The Dead", hence with that Galway reminiscence of Nora Barnacle's old flame, and there is, faintly audible, strains of the same sort of mournfully romantic music that Joyce was always drawn to.

Arto Paasilinna, The Year of The Hare (1975). (Translated by Herbert Lomas).

This is one of Finland's most popular novels, and also one of the rather few novels it has struck me as a privilege to read - an odd sensation, like when I first read Alan Garner's Red Shift. The second half is a miracle of controlled acceleration, as Vatanen, once a journalist gone wild with a hare, develops like a pupa and eventually jailbreaks forth into godlike stature. But it wouldn't have any of its power without the comparatively quiet and idyllic earlier chapters. In Paasilinna's vision, the attachment of this man to this wild creature produces a feral hybrid that is lovely and innocent, rough, humiliated, lawless and inevitably on collision course with civilization.

Fallen Leaves, photocopied pamphlet, 32 pages, no publisher, no date, by G.E.B and M.W.B. I would guess it was put together in about the 1980s, though some of the poems might be much older; a purely domestic collection, for circulation to friends or to boost the church organ fund. G.E.B (a retired teacher, as I imagine) is heady with verse and the language of verse, nothing modern of course, but some of these concoctions are lovely.

Across the lake where shallops glide
With seated couples flouting ballads wide
Beneath the willow trees and the glycines
And wide meadows strewn with capucines
Where time flits with the aroma of thyme...
("Chinoiseries")
nb glycines, capucines:- the French for wisterias and nasturtiums, respectively.

The most impressive perhaps are "The Skylark" (unbosomed rush of words, domesticated Shelley), "Love Rejected" (pastoral dialogue between idealistic swain and earthy maid), and "Three Blind Beggars" (well-handled tale in Chaucer's easiest vein). This has given me abundant entertainment for the 50p I paid for it in Save the Children.

I've written a piece for Intercapillary Space about the excellent though long-neglected poet Charlotte Smith (1749-1806).

I was almost-alarmingly thrilled to see Colin Herd's review of The Littlest Feeling, for 3:AM Magazine. (Highly recommended magazine, btw. In particular, S.J. Fowler's "Maintenant" series of interviews, now more than 50 of them, is a totally essential education in the flourishing of experimental poetry worlds outside the UK and US spheres. Each interview comes accompanied with a small sample of the interviewee's work. I suppose a format like this will only tend to attract anglophile and established interviewees, i.e. well-published writers who can speak English well enough to be interviewed and who pass through London occasionally. Nevertheless, it's great to see Cia Rinne, UKON (Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson), Yuri Andrukhovych among the recent clutch.

The title of Colin's review, Ceci n'est pas un roman, is as oblique as the titles of my stories, but is evidently a quite well-known phrase in some circles who are better educated than I am - for example Charles T. Downey used it for one of his posts on Ionarts. At the moment my best guess is that it originated with André Breton's Nadja (1928) and is generally used in the context of Surrealist writing - with further reference to Magritte's famous painting "Ceci n'est pas une pomme". Still I feel I'm missing something, a whole cultural debate perhaps, maybe around the Nouveau Roman or Oulipo, and I'd welcome enlightenment!

my new book

2011-01-11T21:54:00.005Z

As you can see, I have published a book. I began writing these pieces a few years ago, and I didn't think anything much about them, I just posted them here on this blog. The mysterious origin of them was in part un-mysterious. I had acquired a blog, and I needed to fill it with something. I began to be interested in the dimensions of a blog post and how it is read, and I wondered if it could seem to contain a story, or at least the suggestion of a story. I didn't rationalize, I just wrote. Then, about two years ago, this impulse suddenly dried up, as mysteriously as it started. Or, perhaps, as unmysteriously. My life had changed, I was simply too busy. I'm not going to say anything more about the contents of The Littlest Feeling, but only about what happened next and how it ended up being a book, and perhaps this will be interesting to other potential self-publishers.

Now that the story-writing impulse had died, I began to wonder idly about what I'd got. About a year ago I found time to go through the tedious process of tracking down all the most story-like posts and pasting them into a Word document. I was surprised how many there were. I showed this document to a few people. It was a collection with no title. I think it's fair to say that no-one who saw it was unduly excited. The effect must have been boring and overwhelming at the same time. It's one thing to read a blog post, another to cope with a deluge like this. I was pleased, I felt I was in the zone.

It wasn't until a couple of months ago that I had a bit more time to think about this. I thought of trying to place some of these stories, but I didn't get far with that. The world I knew about was the poetry world, and I had a hard time persuading anyone, including myself, that these pieces were poems. I hadn't realized before how many poetry outlets explicitly exclude prose fiction from their list. On the other hand, I felt all at sea in the prose fiction world. I didn't have contacts, didn't know the scene, and to be honest I didn't feel much fellow-feeling with the micro-fictions that I found there. I didn't find the kind of writing that I liked, nor (I inferred) the readers that I thought would be interested in what I wrote. Perhaps I didn't look very hard.

There is also, perhaps, an experimental fiction scene, I should clarify. I haven't really found it. But for example, the books in the emerging Reality Street Narrative series. I certainly AM a fan of this writing, e.g. Richard Makin's forthcoming and amazing Dwelling, which is strictly non-narrative. Still, one of the reasons I'm a fan is precisely because I couldn't possibly write anything like this. And besides, I'm in awe of Reality Street. That's like, I don't know, Faber or something, in my eyes.

So I got bored with the idea of "placing" my work pretty quickly, and instead I thought I'd play around with LuLu self-publishing, with the result that you see. I don't expect to make a living from the sales, but it's a thrill to have an ISBN number, and it doesn't really cost anything. The rest of this post is about technicalities.

Lulu can publish eBooks or paperbacks (or hardbacks). I'll probably make an eBook version at some point, but the paperback option seemed the most friendly one for my potential reader. I imagined - indeed I knew - that the book wasn't very easy reading. I fancied my reader would need to pick it up and put it down quite a lot, and generally have it lying around, which is also the way I like to read poetry. Besides, I found it easier to model the product on something I knew, and the model I had in mind was a cheap trashy genre novel. That's why the format is pocket-sized and the font is fairly small.

The first thing you have to do is upload the text as a .PDF file, and the cheap way to do that (Lulu's advice) is to download OpenOffice, which I did. I could migrate my .DOC file into it, save it in OpenOffice format (.ODT), then migrate it to a .PDF file. If you're familiar with MS Word, then OpenOffice is easy to use. That said, to turn the document into something that looks like a proper printed book, I had to learn about quite a few features that I hadn't ever bothered with before. The Help files came to my rescue.

1. I had to create a custom paper size, to fit Lulu's pocketbook format.

2. I had to learn about alternating right and left page styles. This is because it's good to have the page numbers in different positions on right and left pages, and also you need to have a broader margin next to the guttering - i.e. the right margin of the left page, and the left margin of the right page, if you see what I mean. There's probably a way of suppressing page numbering on the preamble pages, but I couldn't work this one out so I just didn't bother. I was fairly perfectionist, but there are limits. This is meant to be fun.

3. I had to learn how to make a table of contents. Don't try and do this manually, it will be a nightmare to keep accurate.

4. When you write a document at home or at work, you normally use the default left-justified paragraph format, and that's fine. But it looks really unprofessional in a book. You want full-justified (text flush to both sides of the page). This was one of my biggest headaches, because it won't work properly unless you have a proper paragraph ending (hidden character) at the end of every paragraph. Because most of my text had been pasted from the web, it didn't have them, so I had to go through the whole text putting them in. (And every time you quote verse, you have to switch back to left-justified.) That took me a few hours. The other thing that took me most time was getting the fonts uniform throughout the book, not just the titles and text but the blank lines in between. Otherwise the titles aren't at a uniform height on the page, and it looks really messy when you flick through the book. (To see all this, I had to buy a first-cut printed copy - it's only with the book in your hand that you can really see what's wrong.)

Apart from the text, the other thing you have to upload is the jacket. There are jacket wizards on the Lulu site itself, but the results tend to look pretty amateurish. So I made my own jacket, using Microsoft Publisher. Lulu will tell you the exact dimensions - they calculate the spine-width based on the number of pages. The jacket is made as a one-piece image, with the back cover on the left, then the spine, and the front cover on the right. You can save it as a .PNG file (portable network graphics) and then upload it. You need to be sure that you select 300dpi - the default is 150dpi, but that's not suitable for a professional-looking jacket.

The back cover has to include the ISBN barcode. Lulu create this for you and let you download it as .PDF file, but getting it from there into MS Publisher is a puzzle. In the end I couldn't think of a better way than opening it in Adobe Reader with the largest possible zoom (while still being all on the screen), then using Alt-PrtScr and pasting the whole window into Paint, then cropping it and saving it as a 24-bit bitmap, which I could then pull into Publisher and resize. (My first attempt was similar, but I made the mistake of saving the screenshot as a small .JPG, and when I got the proof copy I could see that the barcode was a bit blurred, which looks really rubbish.)

Lulu "sell" you a distribution package to make your book available on Amazon - it is actually free at the moment. The only proviso is that you have to buy a proof copy of your own book, and then "Approve" the book for distribution. So software and hardware aside, the actual cost of publishing was about £15 - the cost of buying two copies.

So now make your book too! (And when you do, let me know...)

m u s i c a l

2010-12-21T15:36:00.004Z

I got an auto-tuner, which means I can now be bothered to keep my guitar up to pitch, some of the time. I learned to play Calle Schewens Vals

"Här dansar Calle Schewen med Roslagens ros
han dansar till solen går opp!"
translation here: http://www.abc.se/~m8169/taube/oversatt.html

and Sjösala Vals - This is the one about Rönnerdahl and the flowers:

Rönnerdahl han skuttar med ett skratt ur sin säng
Solen står på Orrberget, sunnanvind brusar.
Rönnerdahl han valsar över Sjösala äng.
Hör min vackra visa, kom sjung min refräng.
Tärnan har fått ungar
och dyker i min vik
från alla gröna dungar
hörs finkarnas musik
och se så många blommor
som redan slagit ut på ängen
gullviva, mandelblom, kattfot och blå viol

Rönnerdahl he leaps with a chuckle out of bed
sun is at Orrberget, the south wind is blowing.
Rönnerdahl he rolls over Sjösala field.
Hear my lovely song, come sing my refrain.
Terns have their young
and are diving in my bay
from all the green groves
is heard finches' music
and see so many flowers
have already come out in the field
cowslip and saxifrage, catsfoot and violet*

*lit. cowslip, meadow saxifrage, mountain everlasting and blue violet (the latter probably dog violet or sweet violet). These are all common spring flowers in south-central Sweden.

These are well-known songs in Sweden.

*

Three of the six CDs I got for Xmas were Swedish too. They were Allan Petersson's Violin Concerto no 2 and his ninth symphony, and Abba Gold. The others were Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits, Shostakovich Jazz Suites and Mahler 5 (Concertgebouw, Chailly). These have all been saved up to compensate for when I return to the misery of commuting. Oh, I also got Stieg Larsson's trilogy in abridged audioformat on 18 CDs, so at least I've got plenty to listen to.

coal orchid

2010-12-01T13:52:00.007Z

Bloodsport
Coal Orchid
The Bodybroker
Fillet

The sun came out and began to heat the mist in the down. Five jet brilliants drew incessantly to the splayed nostrils. Behind the wire fence, a copse of low shrub: fresh green leaves and withered black haws. White roots forked and bulged in the moist, stony ground.

Equine shadow , surface of the shale,

something luminous in the mane, fiber optic

whinnied, snickered and showed her wolf tooth. Josie pummelled the beaten numnah.

Shell-coloured vervain stood proud of the cropped pasture; the ponies wouldn't touch it. This ground was mostly too bare for buttercups. One great ribbon-stemmed thistle bristled on the earthwork, putting out a forest of spines.

The other ponies sidled into the elder field.

She placed her arm around the enormous snaky neck, but she couldn't lean, while the pony's breath came in thick clots.

"I can't leave her."

"In the hanging you can."

"No, it's too risky. I'm calling Sid."

Sid was the knackerman. A silence fell.

"She's not a coddled little miss."

It began to rain. It was Christmas. She walked with steady strides until she was on the Cheeky Chilli. She lit up.

for st catherine's day

2010-11-26T10:27:00.005Z

I am a votary of St Catherine, because this is the day when, perceptibly, my winter blues start to fade away. I guess a scientist would have a stab at explaining that - perhaps it's when, though the days are still growing shorter, this shortening has slowed down so much that it no longer upsets me. Whatever, today is Christmas and spring rolled into one, for me.

So let's write sentimentally about some Christmas songs. Because this year, instead of the usual feeling of misanthropic loathing, I'm really enjoying hearing them as we walk around the lit cities and sparkling shops. Big inspiration, by the way, from this post on Chris Goode's wonderful blog.

Judy Garland: "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (1944). This is such a sad song! It's been getting gradually less sad over the years: even by Judy Garland's time some of the words had been brightened up, and with Sinatra this process went further. Gradually the meaning of the song changed from consolation (take your mind off things and enjoy Christmas, I know next year looks pretty bleak but God willing we'll make it) to celebration (The future's looking good and Christmas is so special). Garland's version catches the song in mid-transformation, hence at its most emotionally complex and open-ended, and her performance is emotionally intelligent in a fragile way, she already knows too much for her own good, but it's a priceless gift for the rest of us. There's a bit where she switches from one melody to another, in the blink of an eye, that still deceives you after a hundred listens, though you've never noticed it.

Three Degrees: "Mary's Boy Child" (1998).

Jester Hairston's great song of 1956, one of the few Christmas carols of modern times to be known everywhere. Hairston, whose grandparents were slaves, studied music at the Juilliard school, was a long-time composer, choirmaster, arranger, services to the TV industry, etc. Also an occasional bit-part actor in a surprising number of Hollywood movies (he's on Hollywood Blvd). In his song as it originally stands (e.g. Harry Belafonte), the message is a warm comfort to all humanity.

The Three Degrees, long-running MOR soul girl trio from Philly, with variable personnel, chiefly remembered for Gamble/Huff hits in the 1970s when they were said to be Prince Charles' favourite artistes. Their album "Christmas with the Three Degrees" is not so well known perhaps, and it's been repackaged so many times that it's difficult to pin down the orginal release date, but I'll go for 1998 because that's what the group's own site says, though when I heard this song I was quite satisfied that it came from their golden era. With its sleek, discreetly funky backing - the kind you could sway to without toppling off high heels, and the marvellous way that the lead (Valerie?) pronounces "Bethleham", this is totally infectious, and so concise as to be nearly disdainful - they don't bother with half the lyrics e.g. so the climactic key change is made, not to celebrate Jesus being born, but to herald Joseph and Mary's rooflessness in a strange town. In this reorientation the song now becomes inescapably about motherhood seen from a grandmotherly distance.

The Fall, "Rowche Rumble" (1979). None of Mark E Smith's ramblings make any sense, we all know that, so this can't possibly be about towns on prescription drugs and global capitalist profiteering in the business of non-cure addictive medicine dished out with legal and governmental backing to vulnerable people. The drums sound like cardboard on the studio version, the song kind of drags and whizzes at the same time, but this is somehow great. If I had to choose between this and the more fuelled-up version on Totale's Turns, ...well I don't. I'm in complete agreement with Robin Purves about the exact moment when the Fall Experiment, until then on a planet-expanding trajectory, suddenly hits its ceiling (in 1981, 3/4 of the way through Hex Enduction Hour). Despite all of the good stuff since, (mainly, it was in the next few years) ambition perceptibly shrank, vision became restricted, the music turned in on itself. It started mining a vein. Purves says it's when the band really did stop being democratic, when Riley could no longer stand up to Smith, when Smith was no longer humbled by Megas Jonsson. You judge the later work in terms of pop music, though sometimes frightening pop music. But the Fall up to Hex was a different thing. Its influence on alt-poetry is massive. [The flip was "In My Area", and is now further immortalized by being mentioned in Richard Makin's Dwelling.]

Marina and the Diamonds, The Family Jewels (2010). Don't lose sight of these prodigious three-minute wedges of disaffection.

I'm a stray cat on the roam
choking on a chicken bone

Happy Xmas!

*

And anyway, I've loved St Catherine since I read her very legendary legend in the South English Legendary, and also read (truly or not) that the tale of Catherine the martyr, inasmuch as it has any historical credibility whatever, is dimly based on a heathen princess who was martyred by Christians. So I think she should be a saint for all of us, and a comfort against persecution by all authorities. [Though I must admit, in her heyday it was her royalty, intellect, and independence that commended her to noble women throughout Christendom.]

*

By the way, Purves' piece also includes a spirited attack on Derek Bailey's improvisational music - exemplifying yet again the surprisingly familiar pattern that when people in the alt-poetry community really want to think honestly about their poetic, they'll more likely talk about music than poetry. This may be partly because we don't want to accentuate differences between each other, we need each other's support too badly; maybe, too, because most of our fundamental ideas about art in fact originated when we were thinking about pop music in our teens. If I can extrapolate from my own experience. (This is definitely a good way to look at Chris Goode's piece, for example.)

run away

2010-11-13T22:26:00.003Z

The yellow flowers poked out among the brambles, miles of them, the sun outside slanting on them already, the window-glass smoked. Soporific smell of the carriage. I watched my beaker of tea, shy of prising off the lid to unhook the tea-bag. A jolt of the carriage during this operation would make me spill it. He went on fingering his left arm, examining an insignificant cut or bruise. Sometimes we talked about cricket, but not today.

"Grumpy as ever, my dad. The heat gets to him now. Expensive day at Lingfield. Had a rant about his firm, too. Have I told you he has a firm?"

"No, I don't think so. What kind of firm?"

"They lease delivery vans. To foodie places in general. He doesn't need to be involved so much, my mum says. "

"You become accustomed to the life."

"That's how it is. He's meant to take it easy. He had some trouble a couple of years ago: prostate. Give up smoking, so he says. It must have been serious."

"This was while you were in Jamaica?"

"Yeh. It was a shock to see him when I came home. He lost so much weight. He was a big guy before. He got upset because he couldn't find my birthday present. The worst thing was when he tried to laugh about it. My mum's eyes said everything. She's a sweet lady, my mum."

I couldn't wait any longer, looking at the tea. I got the lid off all right, but when I opened the milk it spat over my shirt and tie. I poured in the rest of it and mopped up with a tissue. I had the instant thought, I'm already at work.

"Does your mother know about - your friend. I'm sorry, I forgot her name. Leah?"

"Leiah. They did meet her once, around about Christmas time. We went to a bashment on the Isle of Wight, so we stayed a night in Portsmouth. They'd remember her all right, because she got sick in the shed as soon as we arrived. Before I knocked on the door. I was going to clean it up the next day but I slept in and my mum went and found it. So it's clear they would remember her, but they've seen other girls since. They think she's history."

"You couldn't bear to tell them."

"I wanted to. I did. I told Irwin, my brother. They would be sick. But that wasn't the reason. The mistake I made was, I needed to come straight out with it. Though I thought of nothing else on the way down, when the moment came I scuffed it. You drop into patterns. It's always the same when I come home; dinner's on the table, how's work, a toast to my successes. Dad lightens up, gives me the benefit of his advice. He loves that. Mum sits there and glows with pride, runs her hand through my hair, has to have another picture of me for the album. Then father and son. Finally me with Mum, she always makes a protest, says she looks a sight. Giggles. It's what they live for."

"I know what you mean. You had to go in with a serious face if you were going to do it."

"How do you think you would be - if your own son...?"

"I'd be excited. I believe. Yes, I'd be content about it. Other thoughts should come later, but this would be the main thing."

"You are different from my father. They are not well, you can feel the strain for them of just holding it together. And can be..."

He looked out of the window. Units passed by, a flyover with traffic queued all along it. We arrowed between, soporific, to run away with the yellow flowers to the broad sea - well no, only to work again, only to work...

"You mean, if it isn't decided? I thought she told you she made up her mind."

"That's what she said. But she was not in a good state. She was in a rage, she wanted to shit me up. Maybe it depends on me, how I react. I've been seeing someone else and - she's got to go through this too, I mean she's got to tell people. I thought we were finished. It feels very weird, her and me. "

"You need to have a proper talk with her. At once in my opinion."

"I know it man. I will, but she's been away. I'll call her."

I didn't know him. It was ridiculous to have an opinion, but I wanted to say something more; about my other son, the one I never saw who spoke a different language. But why would I have held it in, and then if I told him... The train had stopped. A hundred people surged towards the doors; they'd all have to stand. Those autumn faces like leaves on graves.

I went to work, I went to work, I went to work again. He was not there now, but I thought of him and of this conversation. I understood that there was a part of it that did not "ring true"; it was about my friend's achievements. It was his steady brother, the younger one, that they lived for. His father had an idea of the way a man should behave. I saw that he could tell them about what happened. But he could not tell them and then have it seen, if so it turned out, that he a man could not have control over Leiah if she had an abortion.

I began to understand that they must not know for this reason.

I felt even my own responsible word to be deflected and only to confirm his anger towards Leiah and I regretted speaking it, and I made protestation of my intention but I felt hollow and perhaps it is so when men talk that we must always shake our heads over a woman.

[from the littlest feeling, a book of sixty stories]

email

2010-11-12T10:29:00.002Z

Please note my new email address, effective from right now.

[UK Online, venerable small-time player based in Shepton Mallet, were bought up by Sky in 2005 and they've now decided they're shutting down the mail server, all the addresses are being junked. I hadn't expected this - I supposed it would be easy enough to just maintain a historic mail domain open forever, just redirecting it to another host. After all for many purposes on the internet people's email addresses are used as their unique identities. Anyhow, it's kind of a nice feeling - an enforced clear-out (especially now I've figured out how to switch PayPal across). But I'm bound to lose touch with some people and some mailing lists.

Another observation: an email address you pay for is not necessarily more insured against extinction than a free email address!]

in the city

2010-11-10T12:16:00.009Z

I was in London for a 2-day training course (Citrix Provisioning Server). As usual on my rare visits to central London, I tried to get about on foot - in this case between the training center (near Finsbury Sq in the City) and my overnight gaff, which was in King's Cross. It fascinates me to begin to make a sense (placed, though commonplace enough) of the capital. To stand at Farringdon Rd and see the course of the old Fleet river, which is still running under your feet.

Yesterday morning, on my way back to the training centre, I realized it was right by Bunhill Fields, which I remembered exploring a few years ago during some other course with some other training company - MS Exchange, I think it was. Since I was still making a terrible mess of Pret's famous All-Day Breakfast sandwich, I wandered back in to take another look.

     Now he hath left his quarters,
        In Bunhill Fields to lie...

I forgot to look for Bunyan's tomb, but I did see the monument to Daniel De-Foe, Author of 'Robinson Crusoe', which was erected in 1870 and paid for by 1,700 of the boys and girls of England, following an appeal in the Christian World. And right beside it is the standing slab that passes for the grave of William Blake and his wife Catherine Boucher. It was decorated with a few votive offerings, not very exciting ones this time. No Rimbaud-magenta ostrich plumes or stained manuscripts, just some November-proof objects lined up along the top - one of them a silver bullet, the rest mainly pennies and pebbles.

Woolett's and Strange's works are like those of Titian and Correggio, the life's labour of ignorant journeymen, suited to the purposes of commerce, no doubt, for commerce cannot endure individual merit; its insatiable maw must be fed by what all can do equally well; at least it is so in England, as I have found to my cost these forty years. Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts or to empires that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.

So which empires would those be, then? - the ones that were destroyed, not by invasion or disease or climate change or opium, but commerce? Anyway, why would Blake care a rap about empires anyway? Did he not write

Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field
and let his wife and children return from the oppressor's scourge
look behind at every step and believe it is a dream
singing The sun has left his blackness and has found a fresher morning
and the fair moon rejoiced in the clear and cloudless night
for Empire is no more and now the lion and wolf shall cease

(America, a prophecy)

Why would Blake care about empires? In his ideal politics, not at all: his moroseness merely enjoying the thought of empires being destroyed while blaming commerce for their destruction. But as an anxious artisan, the attachment is there all right. He relied on patronage and he sometimes got it (not always accompanied by recognition of individual merit, however - sometimes it was charitable); he was more connected to the spirit of empire than he knew. But, what he compains of here, he also found in intaglio engraving a "missing link with commerce".

As for his strictures on commercial art, the neighbouring monument to the surveyor De-Foe seemed to make a sufficiently pointed response.

And yet few people afford to be as uncompromised as Blake.

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

I was reading Allen Fisher's Brixton Fractals (1985), twelve of whose poems are distantly conducted by the opening pages in Blake's notebook: "Boogaloo" quotes from this same address on engraving. Often, it is Blake as an economic entity who is uppermost, or rather, inseparable from the poem's realization of geography. Blake's poet-painter shuffle, then odd enough to be mad, has become paradigmatic.

     William Blake makes a tracery of a figure
     binds it to his headache.
     Leaves follow footsteps.   through snow
     perhaps a traveller
     runs away from noise something tearing
     his ankle.   A trembling
     image rises out of darkness:   Blake holds
     his head between fingers
     dry from acid
     Bright work diffuses
     through forms of thrilled consciousness
     becomes apprehensive only to another.
     Gradually the workforce of
     a marginal elite
     burn down hill
     to read latticed recurrences
     in the ice.
     "Oh, constructores, Oh, formadores!"

Blake holding his head in fingers dry from acid is as thorough-going an economic entity as this later visionary: "Then I took my head tenderly between both hands, to make certain it was not coming off or turning round" ("The Finest Story In The World").

It was 08:54, so I left that field of stone and went back to join the noise of the workforce, forming its Moebius strip.

My walk had also taken me past the Betsey Trotwood on Farringdon Rd, hallowed ground in the eyes of one too rural or too lazy to have ever yet made it to Writers Forum.

Resources:

All Blake quotes from a free pamphlet in "The Romantic Poets" series, The Guardian, spring 2010.

http://amycutler.wordpress.com

before the year night

2010-10-26T21:42:00.009+01:00

Photos taken in Cornwall, a fine Saturday in October.

Comma (Polygonia c-album)

the wild lark of util
ity! crone nets

Sea Campion (Silene maritima). A coastal plant, here at Perranporth airfield. Also found inland on ground polluted by heavy metals, such as the lead spoilheaps at Priddy Mineries.

(below) Western Fumitory (Fumaria occidentalis), a Cornish speciality. Probably. I admit I didn't know what finer details to look for, but Eb told me it was a local plant, and it's certainly very robust.

(below) Corn Spurrey (Spergula arvensis). Like the previous plant, seen in fields of Savoy Cabbage.

Sorbus intermedia (Swedish Whitebeam)

2010-10-11T21:47:00.011+01:00

A handsome street tree in the UK, noticeable at this time of year, until the birds eat the fruit. It is native to the Baltic region, including southern and central Sweden, approximately in what is known as the "oak-region", to distinguish it from the vast areas of coniferous forest that cover the rest of the country. In Sweden it is often planted in wind-alleys and along the coast, being notably windfirm. Its popularity in the UK has more to do with its resistance to air pollution. It may have arisen after the last ice age as a natural cross between Sorbus aria (Whitebeam) and Sorbus aucuparia (Rowan) - a similar origin, probably, to some of our rare endemic species (S. leyana, S. anglica, S. minima, S. arranensis), though these are mostly shrubs.

The Swedish name for the tree is "oxel", of unknown derivation, but perhaps from the same root as other ancient fruit-words (such as "akarn" (ollon - acorn)) - the word "oxel" would therefore have originally denoted the fruit only. - as per apple, chestnut, and many other trees.

The name "intermedia" refers to the distinctive leaf shape, intermediate between the entire whitebeam and the pinnate rowan. Though obviously a Sorbus, the shape strikes me as vaguely oak-like, too.

The fruits contain two ovules, which potentially form two pips. Most of the fruits I examined contained only a single pip.

The wood was formerly used to make rulers - inch-rulers in those days (Swedish "tum") - and by woodcarvers to make spoons, spokes, axles etc.

moonset (literary)

2010-10-04T21:21:00.009+01:00

It was the absence of a moon in the evening that made Jupiter shine so brilliantly last week. (On Sept 21st Jupiter was at its brightest for 47 years.) But anyway, here are some moon observations from the Brief History.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), from "Strange Fits of Passion" (1799):

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot
Came near, and nearer still.

Wordsworth wrote the Lucy poems while in Germany.

The moon sets every day, but we don’t often see it do so. Canonical literature, so loquacious about sunsets, virtually ignores the existence of moonsets, except in this poem.

We most usually notice the moon when it’s full, and we draw each other's attention to the big (or apparently big) moonrise that occurs soon after sunset. A moonset near the full, however, would occur near dawn, the coldest part of the night; when (at least in temperate climes) we tend to sleep on, and even if we happen to be out and about the spectacle of moonset is probably lost in the mist. The little white ghost of a waning moon is hardly ever noticed when it sets during the hours of daylight. The most impressive moonset I've seen was a lazy moon on a cold winter night which became yellower and bigger, and finally just after midnight a smoky red as it dropped into the west. So rarely have I noticed a moonset in my fifty years that it hadn't really occurred to me that the setting moon must often go through the same colour changes as the setting sun.

If the moon is going to set earlier in the evening, not too many hours after sunset, it must be a brand-new sliver of a moon, which is probably not what most readers envisage while they're reading Wordsworth's poem. Yet evening, we imagine, is when the action takes place.

However, the hill makes a difference. After crossing the “wide lea”, with the moon spreading its light, the lover starts to ascend rather sharply, and “Lucy’s cot” is on a ridge. Thus the moon could seem to “set” when still comparatively high in the sky. Wordsworth had often noticed the sharpness of Lakeland’s high night-horizons, and e.g. famously written of how “the stars moved along the edges of the hills”.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.

To realize the emotional charge of this, it’s worth going out on a suitable clear evening and making it happen. The roof should be quite close, perhaps less than a hundred meters away; it happens just as the lover arrives. The moon falls “at once” because it is the lover’s relatively rapid approach, not the moon’s own descent, that causes it to drop out of sight. In those nights without any streetlights, the instantaneous change in the light would have been dramatic. If you are suitably sensitized, it still can cause a shiver.

*

In the opening pages of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë says (of a Bewick engraving): "I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly risen crescent, attesting the hour of even-tide." This is an understandable error - a crescent moon rises either early in the day (if waxing) or late in the night (if waning). The sharp crescent moon in the evening is not newly risen - in fact is soon to set - it is only newly remarked. As for her assertion that the crescent implies even-tide, she's probably right about that - so long as it's a waxing moon (horns pointing to the left). I ought to look up the Bewick engraving she's talking about, I suppose. In practical terms a moon in an engraving is always going to be low on the horizon, because otherwise it would be outside the frame.

And at the begining of Chapter 5, the young Jane Eyre is leaving Mrs Reed's house for Lowood. "Five o'clock had hardly struck on the morning of the 19th of January, when Bessie brought a candle into my closet and found me already up and nearly dressed. I had risen half an hour before her entrance, and had washed my face, and put on my clothes by the light of a half-moon just setting, whose ray streamed through the narrow window near my crib." Well, wrong again! A waxing half-moon would have set at midnight; a waning half moon would still be on the rise. But a moon that sets some time between 5 and 6 in the morning (as we are later informed) would have to be almost a full moon - say, 90%. Here, and later (e.g. Chapter 9), Charlotte Brontë registers what a significant aid moonlight was for getting things done in the hours of darkness. There was more reason in those days for noticing the moon; evidently this didn't necessarily mean observing it. It's tempting to make more of these small inaccuracies than they probably merit: to be struck by the mixture, in Charlotte Brontë, of very close observation - we have just read the wonderful description of pine-tree debris clotted together by frost - combined with a certain proud inattentiveness to fact. It's no wonder to be ignorant of the moon's movements, but it does seem remarkable for someone to be so aware of the moon as a mobile creature and yet not to know its patterns. And I can't resist connecting this with how long the author had been satisfied with her Angrian settings of a Yorkshire landscape in Africa, in total defiance of what we suppose she must have known of African climates. Naturalism was a cloak she learnt to put on, but her imagination was always busy with other things than naturalism.

2010-09-13T16:45:00.001+01:00

Look in the mirror and tell your lovely face
now is the time that face should form another;
whose pretty softness, pen it in one place
and you beguile the world, un-bless some lover.
For who is he so proud who could resist
the soul-brilliance your eyes?
and where is he so fair that wouldn’t Be there
when you unfold the pennies of your prize?
Bring out that berried child into the lanes
that now within your glances makes its hide
So gem the fhills with flower, strew the plains,
and further brilliance wracked on every tide.
Your hearth a fane of love and laughing peace
whose songs continue when all time must cease.

what i've read or looked at or listened to quite recently

2010-09-03T11:37:00.031+01:00

Jim Goar - Seoul Bus Poems. I might review this, I like it. I also went to the ezine that he edits, which is called "past simple", and I read some of that, mainly the British-writers number. Out of what I browsed there it was Sean Bonney's contributions (not for the first time) that stood out for me. And in the most recent issue there's some Danish and Polish things that I enjoyed a lot. It's a top ezine.

John Gimblett's review in Stride talked about how Seoul Bus Poems took him into a "calmer personal space" and that was what I experienced too. Though I'd put it more materially, compare it to a kind of brain cleanser. These first impressions aren't always that important, but I suppose the question arises with a book like this, how many people will feel that there's anything more to be got out of a second reading: hasn't it delivered its cleansing effect fully and completely at first read, has it anything else to give me? Better to say "Cool. Highly recommended." and move straight on to the next book? A lot of good modern poetry is like that, it's a one-shot package.

I suppose I've read all these poems about twenty times, so let's see.

There's a beautiful transparency about the title. We're told, upfront, that many of the poems were begun on bus journeys; but Goar's untitled poems don't generally evoke the bus; it's only the poem's structure - or its pace, if that's a different thing - that derives from the bus-journey. Public transport and modern urban poetry have had a long association; you don't have to drive, and a lazy lulling sort of disjunction, the disjunction of urban life, infuses the writing.

And in a way, though they are not saying poems, you already know what the poems say, just as you would do with an Elizabethan sonnet sequence. Goar is a young poet with a sense of humour, he doesn't think his life is especially important, he sometimes forgets to shave, writing poetry is not a problematic activity, and the book ends with love and sleep, - for instance. They are not saying poems, but the autobiographical element has the same transparency as the title.

The blood will come and go
as children will go
out of the hamlet by a flute
played once upon a time
for style is straight or slightly bent
souls follow crumbs to the hut
where the oven is with tasty children
wrung dry of echoes the town falls silent
hails never weaken corn
shrugged and lost its yellow its
green a fire consumed
our houses of redemption

I wanted to choose a "typical" poem - that is what a reviewer ought to quote - but now I'm afflicted by doubts about whether this is a typical poem or not. In some ways it is. Most of the poems have a four-square look and are about this length; those that aren't are splatter-poems, you know, the ones where single words or phrases are placed all over the page, - the sort I try to get out of quoting, if I can, because the formatting is too much like hard work. It's one form or the other, nothing in between, and that has quite an interesting effect.

Jim Goar has a way of repeating words in more than one poem - my list of these repeats goes: dice, shrug, crumbs, blue, lemon, prancer, corn, bananas, shave, widow, crane, crow, table, chameleon, bell, trash, fist, bones, gin, knee, echo, leaves, toe, frozen, snow, eye, weep. All rather simple, colourful words, headings from a children's encyclopaedia. In this poem you can see four of those words: crumbs, echoes, corn, shrugged. The words begin to seem like dominoes patterned together. The opposite of a descriptive poetry of percepts. And looking into this poem specifically, there is a pattern of habitation-words - (hamlet, huts, town, houses) whose relation to each other is not obvious and may not exist at all. (Prancer, if you don't know, is the name of one of Santa's reindeers.)

This use of animal-words as tokens is also a feature of Goar's chapbook Whole Milk. It's not just about exact word repetitions. Here the egg of one poem ("Turn the egg over") becomes the bird-extravaganza of the next ("A pigeon broke its neck") and points obliquely, via a goose or two, into the sketchy short story of the next ("a twist a turn"). [NB "dirty Hanes" in that last poem = crew socks.]

But I don't want to talk about this only structurally. There is a pervasive atmosphere (OK, so you don't often hear "atmosphere" used as a technical term in poetry reviews!) of Seoul; and of being in a foreign city: as wide-eyed as you would wish to be (and Jim Goar is), it is still foreign. I want to find a political meaning for this - something about poetry for a semi-globalized world. I might not be able to. But if a book like this isn't political? - That's an issue isn't it?

Let's carry on. The way I see it is there a connection between the previous two paras. The connection, if you like, is the inadequacy of words to describe things: in particular, the inadequacy of English words to describe the experience of a city outside the English-speaking zone. One is inevitably tongue-tied. A few things mean something to you, but a lot of things don't. The world is more tangibly incomprehensible, and in an odd way simpler: because what is incomprehensible is not seen as having any features - is not well-seen at all - it is a billboard with no interpretable writing on it, a building with no known function or architecture. Things begin to assume merely childlike, unspecific shapes. Vocabulary becomes numb and fluffy. You can't call the building something culturally specific like a tanyard or a tollbooth or an orangery; you're not in the culture; you have to just call it a building.

But that's about foreignness. However we're semi-globalized now, and Seoul isn't by any means entirely foreign. International brands and commerce and technology create a lot of familiarity to counter-balance the foreignness. The streets are (culturally speaking) half-lit. To get an idea of what that means, you couldn't do better than read about Loren Goodman's visit to Costco. Increasingly, this is a paradigmatic experience for many people. And Goar's book seems to me to be poetry from that space. (Goar is a US poet who now lives in Norwich, which is another foreign spot.)

I got this book because I signed up for the Reality Street supporters thing. That was a no-brainer because I already knew I was going to buy Richard Makin's Dwelling, so I got the other vols almost free. We're still waiting for Dwelling, but the other volumes , Goar aside, were Bill Griffith's Early Poems - a totally crucial book if you're in any way involved with modern UK poetry - oh no, that makes it sound so boring, but you won't be bored - , and Fanny Howe's Emergence, small collection of what used to be called "fugitive" pieces. The only thing I thoroughly like about the latter volume is David Miller's and Ken Edward's jacket design. I'm not there with the poetry at all. Whatever, I like not liking it. Being a Reality Street Supporter is really a lot of fun.

David Harsent, Mr Punch (1984). Finished this last night. Poems about Punch, often in a modern domestic context. Obviously a violence-against-women collection, but that's just the surface. So you are on unsteady moral ground from the off, because how can violence against women ever be just a surface? and some of these bruised and battered lines are so beautiful. Harsent cuts a lot deeper (unfortunate metaphor) than many mainstream writers (or p-a writers, come to that), and I'm not surprised that Andrew Duncan singled him out for attention.

[You may not know, I certainly didn't, that David Harsent is also the crime authors Jack Curtis and David Lawrence, and (in the name of the latter) a prolific screenwriter for The Bill, Holby City, and Midsomer Murders e.g. the episode "Blood In The Saddle": "Ford Florey is a town with a Wild West Society and many grudges. During a Wild West show at the local fayre, the witch on the 'Dunk the Witch' stall is well and truly dunked. Laughter turns to horror when she doesn't get up and the water in the tank starts to turn red. Barnaby and Jones need to be quick on the draw to track down the murderer." A series currently in the news because of an inflammatory Radio Times interview with the producer Brian True-May, who praised its distinctly (and, it now seems, intentionally) whites-only vision of rural England... the subsequent media furore has made the story bigger than when it started, the most unpleasant development being the opportunity seized by the xenophobic Daily Express to see if it can't harden the opinions of Middle-England into something even nearer than they already are to the grand days of apartheid ("Midsomer Race Row: 99% of viewers insist the TV show should stay white"). I am greatly in favour of poets being involved in the monuments of popular culture, but it could be time to walk away from this one. - note added Mar 2011.]

George Eliot, Silas Marner. Audio book, read (brilliantly) by Andrew Sachs, though you would probably not admit all his voices in the Rainbow as pure Warwickshire. That there is already simplification of humanity in the ever-neutral Mr Snell and the ever-combative Mr Dowlas is justification. The slight difficulty in the novelist's approach is when the novelist's justifiable simplification becomes something that the characters themselves notice - as when the villagers, not unreasonably, suggest that so very timely a robbery as Dunsey's implies some preternatural power at work. The element of play in the fable is a way of seeing. Of seeing what, as Leslie Stephen remarked, a philanthropist or any other such public person wouldn't be able to see. The question about simplification arises again over Eppie's destiny. Of course we side hotly with the already settled relations of Silas, Eppie, Dolly and Aaron - why should their idyll be disturbed, these thrifty and wise working people? Well, because, as the novel itself has abundantly told us, they must remain for ever ignorant, unblessed by e.g. the author's own fluency in half-a-dozen languages; or because husbands like Ben Winthrop will spend their evenings in the Rainbow, and why wouldn't his own son Aaron? OK, you may think, but what worthwhile enlargement of Eppie's mind would the Casses supply, anyway? But wouldn't Eppie herself always think about this road not taken? These questions are not intended to be mean-spirited, they are what George Eliot's own tough-mindedness, coolly imbibed throughout the course of the book, are bound to provoke. Perhaps it's because we know that she knows, that this happiest of all endings is poignantly accepted.

Though the central message of love and community shines clearly, the behaviour of the older characters (not Eppie or Aaron) remains vexed and complicated. I'm thinking about the tree principals in the offer-scene. I just talked about Silas' need-love: what that leads to here is the lovely relationship between Silas and Eppie: what it could just as easily lead to is the tragic dysfunctionalism of the relationship between Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop. Godfrey Cass's faults are underlined by the author of course, his comments in the offer-scene detestable (e.g. about Eppie marrying a low labouring fellow), but still it seems to me that he is more aware than anyone else in the room about what's on offer and what's at stake - socially, materially, and more than materially. Nancy Lameter is admirable to us (when it's too late) for her easy forgiveness of what Godfrey supposed she would not forgive. And not just for that moment, either. Yet what to make of the author's insistent praise for her, when it has to do battle against our awareness of Nancy's capacity for being maddening: her severe and arbitrary notions of providence, her moral tyranny over an elder sister who has to dress like her and a husband who is not allowed to adopt children because Nancy thinks it isn't God's will, her attempt to persuade Eppie on the grounds of duty to the natural parent who has finally acknowledged her? You have to think that G.Eliot's admiring comparisons of Nancy's "wisdom" with other worthies more informed than herself are intended as ironic and a part of the book's ongoing critique of ALL such creeds and customs at whatever level of society.

Because although Silas Marner is in some ways a safe conservative vision, for example idyllicising aspects of a rural life that are totally unlike what GE herself would find tolerable, it nevertheless does conduct a running-battle with religion and tradition. Structurally the first half of the book is fantastic but the book drops in intensity once the redeeming miracle of the child has come to Silas. On a first reading we are, just about, sustained through the quiet domestic pages with Eppie by anticipating well-meant disruption from Godrey, or ill-meant disruption from Dunsey. On a second reading these pleasing terrors are absent and the result is just a bit dull, in a nice way. The first thing that strikes you about GE is what unique gifts she brings to novel-writing - the promise, indeed the fact, of going deeper and further than any other British novelist of her century (or later?). Yet she never wrote a novel that doesn't frustrate me.

Ménie Muriel Dowie, Gallia. New Woman novel of 1896, really good and interesting. I'm not sure if I wasn't even more interested in the author's life, though. She was a young explorer/writer whose book about her solo travels through Ruthenia made her an instant celeb, glitteringly married another explorer and travelled extensively, three well-received controversial novels, but published nothing after the age of 35, when she was divorced for adultery. She was unable to see her son until adulthood. She became a noted cow-breeder. She finally left her second explorer-husband, a violent drunk. Her son was killed during WWII and she died soon after, of a broken heart I believe. "Call no person happy until they are dead", as the Greeks used to say.

John Grisham, The Associate. "Nothing grips like Grisham" is the motto. But what impressed me about the book wasn't its grip, particularly. His stifling account of mega-corporate law (and the constant exhaustion of the associates) is what stays with me. The plot is really remarkably casual. From the moment that the hero, being blackmailed by mysterious all-powerful evil people, starts covert operations against them, we wait with pleasure and a little terror for the counter-operation, the slapdown that is certain to come. But it never does. The bad guys are simply caught cold and run for cover. And the hero, now honest with his father and the law, no longer even fears them. So it's more of a bildungsroman than a thriller. I was amused that the ultra-high-security custombuilt computers full of military secrets were in the end found crackable due to having an almost-hidden USB port discreetly placed near the power outlet.

Selma Lagerlöf, The Wonderful (and Further) Adventures of Nils, read in Sweden. Now, as in my childhood, in a translation which I suppose must be Velma Swanston Howard's adapted for a British audience and to a certain extent re-Swedishized - e.g. "Westbottom" became "Västerbotten" again. Impossible to be objective about this imaginative patchwork, which structures vast areas of my own brain.

Elisabeth Bletsoe, Landsacape from a dream, which I reviewed in Intercapillary Space.

Lawrence Upton, Wire Sculptures (2003) - on every page, that authority of being no mere poet. It makes me think I too would like to write poetry on those terms - not needing to make it poetic but only what it is, when you are out there and own your own tools.

Jeremy Reed, Selected Poems (Penguin). This is from the period in the 80s when he came in from the cold, though he didn't stay.

Two (buoys) I see wintering
at grass in a shipping yard,
veterans of long wars,
their grizzled tonsures hard

with resilience, awaiting
new paint, their cyclopean
eyeballs gone rusty from staring
unlidded at the ocean.

Judgments of this period are inevitably flecked with judgments of the political shift (in poetry terms). Setting that aside, so far as it's possible, this poetry continues to amaze me.

"Winter Mullet" (from Nero, 1985) has the author solitarily fishing the warm outflows of a power station and it climaxes in a truly outré simile:

I stay on, the cold chaps my fingers red,
its pimpling's like dried beads of black hemlock,
the fish have tightened now into a head,...

OK, so hemlock (Conium maculatum) is a common umbelliferous plant with a mousey smell and wine-spotted stems, highly toxic and evidently the source of the poison that was used to execute Socrates. (See
Enid Bloch's essay
Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates: Did Plato Tell the Truth?. It can also be used therapeutically, but hardly ever is because of the low therapeutic index.

Black hemlock is an alternative name for mountain hemlock, Tsuga mertensiana, a decorative tree of no great utility from the snowlines of the Rockies. The hemlocks are a genus of mostly New World coniferous trees that gained their name from a supposed resemblance of the scent of the foliage to hemlock.

It's from another of these, the Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), that the substance "black hemlock" (hemlock pitch, Pix Canadensis) used by perfumers and herbalists is made - it's made from the resin.

The name, of course, is replete with darkly glamorous potential. Thus Linda Pilkington's Ormande Jayne fragrance Ormande Woman uses black hemlock as one of its materials, and her publicity positively encourages a confusion with "Socrates' chosen poison". Likewise Boudicca's Wode is advertised as containing an extract of Queen Boadicea's death-potion. It's from here that the phrase "black hemlock" has slipped into popular culture, re-emerging in that popular piece of costume jewellery for Goths, the black hemlock poison ring, a large black crystal hingeing to reveal a secret compartment beneath it. It even turns up in footy talk, in this surprising demonstration of why Seneca was a Southampton supporter and all Saints fans are Stoics (red blood, white toga, black hemlock - get it?).

That artificial injection of West End glam seems entirely appropriate to Reed's poetry but what does he mean specifically? He must be referring to the herbalist's resinous substance, his numbed fingers feeling when they touch each other like they are touching, not each other, but something alien between them, while the poet takes on the semi-comatose trance of the fish themselves and is caught in shock by a man's torchbeam. But this simile is more important for its effect in focussing attention on the poet's conflicted performance than for its descriptive meaning. And though his swarming winter mullet are nearly as memorable as the lashing conger eel (in another of these poems), it's the performance that is mainly what I think is fascinating about the mainstream Reed.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Stolen Apples 1972. (his-own-choice selection translated by various US poets of "the first rank"). More controversial populism that I thoroughly enjoy. What I'm enjoying is a sort of welling out, the simplicity of it all, the poet's idea of himself, and a warm invitation to come on in, the water's lovely.

The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers. Well, it is their best album, even though it's also the most playable. (Hmm, bit of a theme developing here.) And a certain pleasure in its own arch fakery is inseparable from that. Attempts to ground judgement of the Stones in a moral solidity that is somehow attached to Keith and correspondingly denied to Mick - that's something I was a year or two too young to ever understand - for me the compromised nature of the enterprise was a key to it, kept the music secure from other British tendencies of earnestness and pomp.

Sara Wheeler, Terra Incognita. Travel book about Antarctica. Undeniably, I'm enjoying this, though I've got mixed feelings about the recent sort of travel book that mixes personal reportage with a lot of chattily recounting history, as if the impressions were only collected in order to frame library research. What the papers love to admire. Bruce Chatwin's got a lot to answer for.

Bill Oddie, Gripping Yarns. This is in fact (though not in origin) the book you've been waiting for ever since the Little Black Bird Book. Nature as a hobby for grown men acting like boys, with rather awesome expertise. The same kind of way in which enthusiasts write about rock-climbing or urban exploring.

Arthur Court, From Seedtime to Harvest and A Farmer's Diary. Books by a local dairy farmer for a local audience. George Henderson's The Farming Ladder is inevitably recalled as the apogee of farming autobiography; Court has no heroism or fierceness, was a more civic spirit altogether, a stalwart of amateur dramatics and later local TV - his account only rising briefly to expose deep-buried emotion when his herd had to be slaughtered during a foot-and-mouth outbreak.

Charlotte Bronte, Angrian novelettes and The Professor. This is as far as I've got in my plan of reading all her books in sequence. One of the strangest things about her was that after the immense output of Angrian novelettes (I have only read the last five) she went seven years without writing anything except a few poems before embarking on the Professor (probably not really true, doubtless there were destroyed abortive novels). Michael Mason in a very awkward introduction to a Penguin Jane Eyre argues against the temptation to link the Angrian works with what came later, apparently because he's worried that critics have always been a bit sniffy about Jane Eyre and this just plays into their hands. But the result is a vacuum, I think; it can't be right to discipline Bronte's novels into something befitting a sober tradition. Anyway. The Professor is a pretty good book, and it does makes me appreciate anew what it's possible to do in a novel that you can't do in a novelette, but it definitely isn't a revelation like e.g. Stancliffe's Hotel. I've started Jane Eyre now: Mr Rochester seems to me very Angrian indeed.

Bodil Malmsten, Mitt Första Liv (2004). Book about her childhood and youth, read because we passed close to Bjärme on the way to the fells. I have nothing objective to say about this, being merely delighted at my near-ability to read it without using the dictionary more than once or twice per page.

Gwendoline Butler, Coffin's Game (1997). Police investigation whodunnit kind of book, listened to as audio-book. Perhaps the last ever book to portray a "modern" London that is entirely white. OK, I admit it, there is a single mention of "ethnic troubles" in Swinehouse - just those two words. Otherwise, the only foreigners we glancingly encounter are a senior French policeman, an American FD, and a South African doctor (white). This is part of a long series of Coffin novels which are set in the "Second City", an imaginary slice of East London which has its own police force (apparently, this was based on an idea floated by David Owen back in the 80s). Mobile phones, word processors and AIDS have entered its pages, but the only industry in the second city is such immemorial pursuits as theatres, docks, shipping, prostitution and a coffin-maker. In case you haven't grasped it yet, the second city's modern trappings hide a substructure of pure 1930s Agatha Christie vintage. And to understand this book you need to understand that it's really about the life of its audience, domestic and suburban. A pet dog and a house mouse are important. The strongest scene, easily, is when Coffin's wife, who's gone missing, suddenly turns up again, and they're both so angry (yet relieved) that they can't help but attack each other. There's an odd social-ethical feature, which is also in Christie - the characters come across as incredibly cynical and judgmental. I'm talking about the innocent characters. While some of this is explainable by the author toying with the readers (we of course don't know who is innocent), I can't help thinking that a certain amount of cynicism is indeed commended. This particular ideal of humanity involves "realism", sharpness, wit, a contempt for any nonsense and pride in people not being able to pull the wool over our eyes. And while I'm unpleasantly struck by it, I can't deny that it involves taking a very acute interest in the personal lives of those around us. On the other hand, an ideal of sensitive non-intrusiveness, such as I'm more inclined to cultivate, can conceal both timidity and indifference.

I'm really pleased that Howard Jacobson won the Man/Booker Prize. I examine this feeling. After all I think poetry prizes are meaningless. But if you're a mainstream novelist like HJ, it makes a difference. I suppose what I'm really pleased about is that a whole new bunch of readers will now discover and relish books that I've previously discovered and relished (Redback, Coming from Behind) - before it's too late. The thing about novels is they date really quickly and then go into the doldrums for about fifty years, during which they're unread and almost unreadable. That's where Angus Wilson is right now. There's some egotism in this - in fact some loneliness. As we grow older we become fearfully aware of how most of the colleagues and friends we mix with every day, those that are twenty or thirty years younger, have never even heard of most of the things we've given our hearts to. So when even a minor presence in my life (like HJ) comes back into the spotlight, I feel a certain pleasure, the same thing that eventually makes people read obits. To assure themselves that what they remember as life really did happen, they did live.

(updated at various times, to March 2011)

bullace / corydalis / valley heights of Yorkshire

2010-09-01T09:26:00.007+01:00

The plum orchard was bulldozed by Blooper Homes, but there was an unexpected compensation. Among the other things they cut down was a big ash-stool behind the garages, and this exposed (what I'd never noticed before), a bullace well-loaded with fruit. So we'll have pie this year after all.

There seems to be no botanically-acceptable distinction between damson and bullace. Of the numerous distinctions that are claimed, the most credible is Mrs Grieve's, that damson fruit is somewhat oval whereas bullace fruit is round. Also, the word damson always seems to imply a dark purple fruit, whereas bullaces may be any colour including green and gold. And generally you more often hear of damsons in a garden context than a hedgerow context.

So perhaps the best way of seeing it is that the word "damson" is used to name a particular group of varieties of "bullace", which in turn vaguely designates those plums that are more sloe-like than most, i.e. with smaller fruit, downy twigs, and occasional thorns.

And since it's at that fruiting time of year:

The rather faded notice at the base of Hambleton Hough in Yorkshire tells us that the flora of this mountain includes "Climbing White Fumitory". Once you have ascended the 35 meters from here to the summit (we used GPS to check this) you'll find the plant in most seasons - Climbing Corydalis, (Ceratocapnos claviculata, formerly Corydalis claviculata). The name "White Climbing Fumitory" is not found in McClintock and Fitter nor in any flora since, but it still clings on from the botanical past. It isn't a good name, though. The fruit of Fumitory is an achene, while Corydalis fruit is a capsule.

Achene - a dry, 1-seeded, indehiscent fruit.
Capsule - a dry, many-seeded, dehiscent fruit.

They never explain this stuff in the wild flower books, but I suppose the logic is this: if a fruit contains more than one seed, then it needs to scatter them to prevent them all germinating in the same place. Therefore some sort of process of breaking open (dehiscence) and scattering of the seed is more or less inevitable (there are a few exceptions). On the other hand, if there's only a single seed, then it might as well hang on to its protective fruit-coat until germination.

(Several attempts to use supermacro in a dark wood at sunset - not a good combination...)

John Durkin writes, on the BSBI site:

"In County Durham it could almost be said to be an indicator of PAWS woodlands (plantations on ancient woodland sites), being often abundant under conifers on ancient woodland sites, but very scarce in broadleaved ancient semi-natural woodland and almost unknown in recent plantations. PAWS woodlands on slightly acidic glacial sands have the best populations."

That describes Hambleton Hough perfectly, where the natural woodland was cut down by a former owner and replaced by Scots Pines. The ground flora is bracken and very little else, and yes, it is a glacial deposit left behind by the Humber glacier in the otherwise dead-flat part of the Vale of York. Well, apart from its neighbouring twin peak, Brayton Barf, which also has plenty of C. claviculata.

Hambleton Hough and Brayton Barf are accumulated heaps of glacial debris that built up around an original nub of Bunter Sandstone (Triassic). The debris is mainly coarse sand of a reddish cast. I like to imagine that this sand was scoured off North Yorkshire sandstone cliffs like those still to be seen at Sutton Bank, but this may be wrong.

links to Sámi-language related pages

2010-08-19T11:37:00.012+01:00

You should certainly look up the Sámi language entries on Wikipedia for some basic information, but I found it frustrating that a lot of their references are broken links. All the links in this post do work! Or at least they did when I added them.

I'm particularly interested in South Sámi, but the most practical variety to explore first is North Sámi, because there's a lot more material.(North Sámi has c. 20,000 speakers, Lule Sámi has c. 2,000, none of the others has more than a few hundred.) There is currently a drive to describe the dozen varieties of Sámi as dialects of a single language, rather than as a dozen separate languages (this is in order to emphasize that the Sami are one people).

* means recommended - that is to say, recommended for anyone like me who doesn't know any of the Sámi languages but is kind of generally interested in an irresponsible poetical personal sort of way. I particularly recommend the audio courses in North Sámi and Lule Sámi - even if you don't know any Swedish, you can listen to the audio samples and probably work out what's going on.

GENERAL

* http://www.samer.se/
(webzine on Sami matters, published by the Sami Information Center (run by the Sámi Parliament in Sweden), in Swedish and English)

* http://same.net (communication platform administered by the Sámi Education Center in Jokkmokk. Useful to compare the text of the main pages in Lule, North and South Sámi - as well as Swedish, English, and Finnish. Contributors write in various languages, most commonly Swedish)

* http://lexin-billedtema.emu.dk/billedtema/nordsamisk.html
http://lexin-billedtema.emu.dk/billedtema/lulesamisk.html
http://lexin-billedtema.emu.dk/billedtema/sydsamisk.html
(Illustrated lexicon by topic, for various languages/dialects including North Sámi, Lule Sámi and South Sámi alongside Danish, English, etc. NB For unexplained reasons the first topic page, which is about family relationships, always seems to be in Swedish, but the other pages look fine.)

NORTH SÁMI (DAVVI)

http://www.teigmo.no/html/how_to_meet_and_mingle_with_th.html(In English, with North Sámi tourist phrases)

http://www.uta.fi/~km56049/same/svocab.html
(larger vocabulary North Sámi - English)

* http://www4.ur.se/gulahalan/
(starter course in North Sámi, in Swedish – with audio)

http://skuvla.info/skolehist/lone-s.htm
(Lone Synnøve Hegg, Existential School History from Loppa – in North Sámi, with translation in Norwegian.)

http://www.dubestemmer.no/filestore/Dokumenter/se_Samisk/DVD_dubestemmer_sam.pdf
http://www.dubestemmer.no/filestore/Dokumenter/se_Samisk/DuBestemmerSE_lowres.pdf
("YOU DECIDE" Pamphlets for young people issued by Norwegian govt, on social networking - in North Sámi)

http://www.samifaga.org/web/index.php?giella1=sam
(The Sami Non-fiction Writers and Translators Association website – in North Sámi)

* http://www.ub.uit.no/munin/bitstream/10037/1283/3/thesis.pdf
(Lisa Monica Aslaksen's literature thesis - in North Sami)

INARI SÁMI

http://www.inarinpaliskunnat.org/rhyear.html
(Inari site in English about reindeer herding, with some reindeer-herding-related vocabulary)

http://www.uta.fi/~km56049/same/inarinsaame.html
(small vocabulary Inari Sámi - English)

* http://www.evl.fi/kkh/to/kjmk/saame/inarijpkirja.pdf
(Inari Sámi service book)

LULE SÁMI (JULEV)

* http://www.ur.se/samasta/
(starter courses in Lule Sámi, in Swedish – with audio)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:11699cr_lulesamisk_salmebok.jpg
(Photo of two-page spread in old Lule Sámi Hymnbook, taken by Olve Utne)

SOUTH SÁMI (ÅARJEL)

* http://skuvla.info/skolehist/snasa-s.htm
(Reports and interviews from South-Sámi camping school, by Inger Johansen. With translation into North Sámi and Norwegian - note that, confusingly, the North-Sámi word for South Sámi is "lullisámi"! There's a lot of other interesting stuff on this site (mainly in North Sámi) that I haven't had time to look at yet.)

http://www.risten.no/bakgrunn/gram/sma/index.html
(South Sámi grammar; in Norwegian)
http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Sydsamiska:_Grammatik/Substantiv_och_nomen
(same thing in Swedish)

False Oat-grass (Arrhenatherum elatius)

2010-08-14T22:45:00.006+01:00

False Oat-grass (Arrhenatherum elatius), a ubiquitous coarse grass. In late July/August, at the point when most of the seeds have been shed and the papery-transparent glumes remain on the stems, it becomes a light-show, nothing in itself and everything in the mass.

vast quantities

2010-08-11T09:14:00.003+01:00

In your face and in your eyes
concealed skies;
what made you, what dominated you, and what prevented you.

That's what I love,
what you had no choice in, what afflicts you every day.
You, you, you...
This is the real you, the quiddity of reactionary priests.

oh those details: the poverty, the grandmothers,
the big suitcase, the terrifying shadow:
we both love them
It is beautiful, I promise you

the skies of your native past
turquoise heroic
lit up your eyes

your possession!

it's only a question of this: do the chains matter?
isn't it far better to buckle down?
Relax, carrot and blossom-honey, friendship.

but you fight in the shallows
I will change
I don't want you to
I don't love
your change.
remember, happy times too?
That's how I'm behaving!

Bubbles from their eyes
Floating in
The bucket.

the concealed
essence
ignorance bliss

let's go and tend your grave.

specimens of the literature of Sweden - bottle of Ramlösa

2010-08-01T22:05:00.010+01:00

I've extended my obsessive researches (typically collected in one week of every year) to include artefacts.

An everyday item, this: a bottle of Ramlösa, a famous naturally-effervescent mineral water ("kolsyrat naturligt mineralvatten") from a spring (Hälsobrunn) in Helsingborg in Skåne.

Mineral analysis:

Natrium (Sodium) 210mg
Kalcium 3mg
Kalium (Potassium) 2mg
Magnesium 0,5mg
Vätekarbonat (Bicarbonate) 520mg
Klorid 21mg
Sulfat 6mg
Fluorid 2,7mg

Names of the elements. Swedish compared with English uses some element names that better match the symbols (Kalium, Natrium). But it has a different name for carbon: "Kol", which also may mean coal or charcoal, though these can also be distinguished as "stenkol" (stone-coal) and "träkol" (tree-coal) respectively.

It also has a different name for hydrogen - "Väte". From my parochial English viewpoint this came as a surprise. After all hydrogen was not discovered until 1766 (Henry Cavendish, London) and was given its name by Lavoisier (1743-94) from the Greek, meaning water-generator. But the Swedish word is cognate with a range of terms in other European languages, e.g. German "Wasserstoff", Finnish "vety", Polish "wodór", Czech "vodík" etc.

"Kolsyrat" - literally carbon-soured, meaning "carbonated". This refers to carbonation, i.e. dissolved carbon dioxide in the water, making it effervescent. A very small percentage (0.2-1%) of this CO2 reacts with the water(H2O) to produce carbonic acid (H2CO3). ("syra" also means acid). This is why it's sometimes been claimed that fizzy water can damage your teeth - but the effect is said to be negligible (hundreds of times less) compared to the sugar in a soft drink.

I don't think this water's natural carbonation has any direct connection with its relatively high bicarbonate content (passing chemists to confirm or deny, please). Bicarbonate is a negative ion (HCO3-) found in still mineral waters too. (e.g. Evian, 360mg). Here the philological question is about English: why do we call it BIcarbonate? The term arose because it takes twice as many bicarbonate ions (HCO3-) as carbonate ions (CO3--) to neutralize an acid. This term is now deprecated. Instead, it's recommended to use the term hydrogencarbonate (cf. "vätekarbonat" in Swedish).

Anyhow, there's not much poetry in this. I bought this bottle at Skavsta airport when I was flying home. Airports are where I usually find those iconic things like Dala horses and bottles of Ramlösa - Once off into the country, these things are seen to be mere dots clustering around the tourist concourses. But the hoarse, slightly tangy water sustained me through many small hours. I got to Stansted OK, picked up my van at midnight and found the M25 East was closed, so I drove unsteadily all the way round the west of London to get to E.Sussex, where I was to spend what was left of the night. I never saw so many cones in my life.

*

I forgot to mention one more thing about this bottle (labels are much more complicated spaces than poems). It's this:

PANT
1 KR

Yes - in Sweden you get a deposit back by returning plastic bottles. (1 krona = about 10p.)

*

When we no longer value the authentic, office-water-cooler-collectors will seek out Borg & Overström product (which has nothing to do with Scandinavia) with the same enthusiasm that we currently buy Superdry clothing (which has nothing to do with Japan).

*

[Other mineral waters that you find in Sweden:
PREMIER - Saxhyttans källa i Jeppetorp (Västmanland) - weakly mineralised. Some people like their water weakly mineralized, e.g. the Norwegian Isklar (glacial) or the Spanish Bezoya. I think they're nice cold (especially Isklar), but at room temperature I definitely prefer the bite of a water with plenty of carbonates, e.g. Evian.
AQUAD'OR - the spring is in Brande in Jylland (Denmark) - hydrogencarbonate 120 mg/litre, an averagely mineralized water. Widely sold. ]

2010-07-12T23:03:00.002+01:00

Away in Sweden, etc for the next couple of weeks...

[Here's where I stayed - with a frog orchid (Coeloglossum viride) in the foreground.]

anthocyanins

2010-07-04T10:35:00.010+01:00

This group of Wall Barley (Hordeum murinum) at the foot of a lamp-post was very eye-catching in the red light of dusk, though my camera could only gesture at it.

The next day I went back a couple of times to try again - a bit furtively, since the street corner is constantly overlooked and taking photos of weeds is obviously eccentric behaviour.

Wall Barley always seems to grow in places where dogs piss, but whether the unusual amount of red in these plants has anything to do with being pissed on, or with some other polluting accident (petrol, White Lightning), I don't know. (When nettles are pissed on it sometimes turns them pale yellow; dog-owners come to accept brown patches on their lawns.) [NB written a couple of weeks later: - In the Swedish fells I noticed a grass that I suppose was Poa alpina whose panicles were very strikingly coloured, sort of rosy-pink as well as strawy - I forgot to photograph it.]

And where did wall barley grow before human beings existed? Difficult to imagine it in Britain, - perhaps around a few dry rock exposures? - I rather imagine it was a latecomer from the dry south, eagerly colonizing our primitive clearings.

More or less unconnectedly, here are some plants whose anthocyanins went missing. This rather surprising plant is Herb Robert (Geranium robertianum), found in Savernake Forest.

(Here's what it normally looks like: - remember?)

And this plant is, of course, not White Campion (Silene latifolia) but white Red Campion (Silene dioica). Obviously in this case the context is a massive clue. The other clue is that a white Red Campion usually contains no anthocyanins, so its stem and calyx are pale green. By contrast, the white petals of White Campion are as a rule prettily contrasted with the wine-flushed calyces.

These are only probabilities. For two species so different in character and habit, (and in normal circumstances so instantly distinguishable), a cast-iron diagnostic difference is surprisingly hard to pin down. The main one concerns the capsule-teeth...

These ones are revolute not erect, proving the plant to be red campion. But you need to wait for mature fruit before you can see it.

my literary life....

2010-06-29T12:46:00.014+01:00

The long commute to my new job means that I've been listening to audio books borrowed from Frome Library. The choice is not enormous, but constraint is liberation (theory of the provincial hotel library, i.e. it forces you to read what you wouldn't normally read). So after the predictable Little Dorrit, I've since gone through John Le Carre's The Spy who Came in from the Cold, Buzz Aldrin's autobiography Magnificent Desolation, and now just coming to the end of Anita Brookner (The Rules of Engagement). These are all new authors to me. Though in another way "new" is the last thing they strike me as; more as parts of my own past life that I somehow failed to attend to at the time.

The last time I had a job with a long commute I employed it learning Shakespeare's sonnets by heart (and reciting them - aloud, but only to myself) . I was up to about Sonnet 52 before other amusements intervened. That was a fantastic experience, it brought out wholly different aspects of the poems. As did the art of honing my recitations. One day maybe I'll record them - (yeah yeah that's really going to happen..). I'm no kind of a trained verse speaker but I found that recitation of the Sonnets turning into a sort of dramatic performance.

[I was then unaware of, though not necessarily uninfluenced by, the delicious lines in "Brush Up Your Shakespeare", from Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate (1948):

Just recite the occasional Sonnet
And your lap will have honey upon it.

.]

I've just seen an obituary for Garry Shider of Funkadelic. As far as I'm concerned "One Nation Under a Groove" is the true American anthem, the one imagined by Whitman, whose America was not a nation but the end of nationality. And maybe Garry also played the guitar on "I call my baby pussy", from that fantastic dbl-LP America Eats Its Young.

I'm writing little pieces for Intercapillary Space. Most recently Lara Glenum and Rupert Loydell/Robert Sheppard, next will be Elizabeth Bletsoe.

As the reference to Buzz Aldrin may have already hinted, I don't really draw a line between literature (high) and literature (writing of all kinds). Some of my most intense literary experience recently has come from a Swedish Puzzle magazine. In the mere words of a language, especially a language I'm only semi-competent in, lie some of the discoveries I care about most. - uppifrån och ned, nyhetstorka, plastsandaler, augustimörker, kryss, bokstäver, avkomma, tävlingsord... It's the same in nature. National Trust reserves are full of things you can't find elsewhere, but nature is also outside National Trust land and is not just a pale shadow in these outsides but has strong, unexpected features. Just see, and a great, strange wilderness is here, in the business park, A-Roads, scruffy estates.

It was the language, too, that occupied a lot of my time with Anita Brookner's book. "as best we might" "such topics as I felt obliged to furnish the silence with". Some of the middle-class "one knew oneself to be one's own worst enemy" etc was terribly grating on me, because I could almost write like that if I wanted. That might have been just a personal thing. But the grating of the narrator's voice, Elizabeth Weatherall's, is a critical issue. To some reviewers her cold insights have seemed indistinguishable from Brookner's own, she is an all-too-"reliable" narrator. I am more inclined to recoil from her, to read her as an awful warning of what happens if you automatically don't "disclose" things, of making too many assumptions about other people's behaviour, of having nothing much to live for, etc. On my reading the "Rules" are in Elizabeth's mind, not in Brookner's. And surely her analysis is only at a Trollopian level, and is that Elizabeth or is it Brookner that I'm talking about? The style is sometimes slipshod, written in haste - this doesn't matter. The vision and the design are beautiful, the ending fabulously arrived at. Sometimes there's an air of something funny happening, of overwhelming movement at farcical speed, coexistent with all the bleakness and standing still. And this empty loneliness is an enormous and completely adequate subject.

I've also been reading: Romantic Women Poets 1770-1836 ed Andrew Ashfield. Like most people who go on reading poetry after leaving college, I generally have a distaste for books of poetry that are clearly aimed at a student audience - and I do take a malicious amusement in the knots that the title has tied itself up in, rendered tongue-tied perhaps by the uninvited headiness of romantic women. It's a grammatical peculiarity that "man" and "woman", as English adjectives, sometimes decline - e.g. "menfolk", "womenfolk". But that's the best I can say in extenuation.

Still, the book was irresistible when found in the charity shop, since I'm deep in Bronte absorption at the moment. At the moment I've read no further than Anna Seward (who's interesting) and Anna Laetitia Barbauld (no, not yet). AS had perhaps all the talent of WW, but not the opportunity. Greatness is not altogether something innate to certain poets, it is a social construct. Wordsworth was allowed to grow great, and he did, he was, he is. Anyhow. But it's wearying to encounter such poets either in gobbets or in single sonnets, in decontextualized chunks of close-printed text (a "generous" selection). I don't really meet A.L.B. . I hate anthologies, in fact. And I hate Selecteds. And I even hate Collecteds, come to that.

Once more these eyes with smiling pleasure hail
The vernal beauties of my native vale!

Well, maybe I lied about Anna Seward being the equal of William. Don't those lines sound worn out, as if the author supposes that poetry has nothing more to say about the spring? Yet they were written twenty years before Lyrical Ballads. But Wordsworth too was often ridiculous. Maria's tempting words to Malvolio - "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em" - are emphatically true of greatness in art, especially the last bit. For Anna Seward and ALB, greatness was not permitted. (Wordsworth himself thought that Charlotte Smith hadn't had her due. I can see why: she's the most exciting poet so far. But she led a difficult, constrained life and her biggest poem was left unfinished... that exemplifies how the social refusal of "greatness" comes about.)

Last night was devoted exclusively to grass books. One of my plans this year was to really get to grips with Agrostis (and so much more), but once again the deficiencies of Fitter and the severities of Hubbard defeated me (I didn't get on to Stace). So today I went to Amazon, took a deep breath, and bought Francis Rose's book, which I've wanted ever since I found out about it. I've spent far too much of my life reading grass books that I don't really understand, and deriving a starved though genuine kind of literary sustenance as a by-product. nb I have actually taken to growing Agrostis in my "garden" (an unattended part of the common land). This is actually a very revealing exercise, and a lot of fun. My plant (creeping bent, as I believe) has just come into flower.

The night before that I finished reading the complete Fawlty Towers, scripts by John Cleese and Connie Booth. The two series (12 episodes in all) were broadcast in 1975 and 1979. They're still pretty funny - a lot funnier than The Meaning of Liff, and even most of The Little Black Bird Book. (Humour, especially British humour, goes off really quickly, because it's so founded on class distinctions, on snobberies that must constantly be replaced by the ruling classes in order to maintain effective class markers.) Fawlty Towers curiously survived its quite uninnovative format because the relationship between the author/actors shows through, in defiance of the plot. Polly and Basil are evidently on the same wavelength but no-one ever says so. In that respect Polly is the most important character. Basil is a better Mr Punch than David Harsent's, because he's so much more than Punch. Only the comedy around Manuel has faded a little - but that was always the broad, Corporal Jones, appealing-to-young-children, side of it. (When F T was first broadcast it sent waves of relief through middle England, because at first it was seen as a Python spin-off, but it wasn't surreal or rude, could be watched by the children, and was guaranteed to be funny all the way through.)

There's a summer sale at www.realitystreet.co.uk that poetry-loving skinflints shouldn't miss - lots of strangely wonderful poetry books for only a quid or two each.

moon daisy - cloud-grass

2010-06-28T11:43:00.004+01:00

Leucanthemum vulgare is commonly called Oxeye Daisy in handbooks, but I was very impressed when I first heard the popular name Moon Daisy. Because, as the author of BioImages explains: "If well established it will provide a sea of flowers which stay open all night and look wonderful by moonlight!". This really is a very striking phenomenon: because the tip-tilted discs are whitish and seen all through the white nights of midsummer(and this behaviour is of course in marked contrast to the daisy (day's-eye), Bellis perennis, which closes its eyes as dusk approaches). You can admire the same thing in Sweden, where the plant is very common indeed, but its name is prästkrage (priest's collar) - well, there is not much night there.

At a plant sale in Frome, the lady described saxifrage to me as "cloud-grass". That's another folk-name I've never heard, and I thought it was a good one, nearly as good as moon daisy. She referred me to the shapes of the leaves (it was one of those whorled ones, like London Pride, arguably resembling a cumulus cloud), but I also thought of mountains and mists and growing among the clouds, home to so many saxifrages. I can't find any internet confirmation for this folk-name. Cloud-grass is however the common name for a decorative grass, Agrostis nebulosa, native to Iberia.