BOOKS 2019

DAVID COPPERFIELD by Charles Dickens
TZILI by Aharon Appelfeld

Heidelberg pics

Flying visit to Heidelberg in depths of winter.  Zoo and cinnamon snails.  And Gawain and the Green Knight (Cal) and David Copperfield (self).  Thomas, Nora, Johanna best hosts evs.

David Copperfield's Women

Can there be another book so highly populated with female characters?  It is a book, featuring Mr Micawber and Uriah Heep, no less, dominated by women.  I had never really noticed this before.  I read it first when i was 16, when I suppose I must have identified strongly with DC.  A second reading, I think in my thirties or forties, I simply luxuriated in.  Now these women strike me powerfully, as though Dickens is giving something away about himself.  And just as women are - despite all those godawful homogenising identity politics fascists we're hectored at by - just as people are - they are all quite tremendously different and themselves.

Clara Copperfield
Peggotty
Miss Murdstone
Betsey Trotwood
Mrs Gummidge
Little Em'ly
Martha
Mrs Gummidge
Agnes
Dora
Miss Mowcher
Mrs Steerforth
Rosa Dartle
Mrs Crupp
Mrs Micawber
and more, I'm sure, whose names for the moment escape me. 

Burne Jones Trailer

This trailer is a work of art in itself

Huw Stephens' Top Tracks of 2018

The 1975, Florence, Idles, Peace, Alt-J - and Sad Boys Club.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001sps?fbclid=IwAR25d3qKTHsp_GS4FaSqKIUgsi_okXNnBESOFhMiKzZyy2xWaJzLu2P5gDw

SBC EP V GOOD

TEN BEST EPs of 2018

https://www.thesoundblog.co/home/top-10-eps-of-2018

Don't Let It Get To That, Twin Sister, Silverlined, Machine Gunneress

artwork: Molly Line

BEST BOOKS OF 2018

Well, of the BBC's selection, I've read just one: the new Reacher.  I did read Sally Rooney's first novel, 'Conversations with Friends' but it failed to whet my appetite for 'Normal People'.  I did read some books published this year - a good novel by Cressida Connolly, set among Mosleyites on the south coast, an honest and tear-inducing memoir by Louisa Young, welcome new poetry by Douglas Dunn, a collection of medical anecdotes, both funny and moving, by Keyvan Moghissi, and a terrific book about 'Where Eagles Dare' by Geoff Dyer.  Another very good thriller was Henry Porter's 'Firefly'.  And now I'm halfway through David Copperfield (third time).  It'll be the first book I finish in 2019.  Putting the mark high for what is to come.  Looking forward to it.  Aren't books great?

Though I don't intend to read anything on this list - sorry, 'ultimate guide' - here is what provoked the above.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/SM82NZbRrY6XYY42WzMvrQ/your-ultimate-guide-to-2018s-biggest-books

AARON KLUG

I heard a few weeks before Christmas that a very good friend of my Mum and Dad - of the family - had died. He was terrifically distinguished, but I wasn't aware of his academic or intellectual significance when I was a boy, which is when I knew him. Well, I understood that he was interested in things - in the children of his friends for example. He would question us, in that lovely gentle Jewish South African voice, both quizzical and knowing, about what we were up to - I am sure we gave very dull answers, but he never showed disappointment. We went to stay with the Klugs in Cambridge (where my mother had first met Aaron) every Whitsun holiday. They had a lovely house with a big dining table - the white cloth stretched for miles up and down it - a largish garden we made the most of, and a half timbered Morris estate. 'They' were Aaron and Liebe and Adam and David. Adam was ferociously intelligent, a good deal older than I was. I seem to recall that he ran samizdat into the eastern bloc or something... He died of cancer, I learn, at some horribly early age. David was younger than I was, but almost certainly cleverer. He is, I believe, an academic of note. Liebe had been a dancer. She and I tried to get a sort of UK-SA arts programme going after Mandela was released, but probably through my indolence it came to nothing. Liebe was no-nonsense, but had a wonderful, full laugh. I'm very sorry to have lost contact with the Klugs. They were an important part of my childhood. Aaron was a kind of model human being.

Books on the back of 'Negative Caopability'

Marianne Faithfull's new album is entitled 'Negative Capability'.  On the back of the cover is a photo containing the following books.

Oscar Wilde / Оскар Уайльд  [that's OW in Russian - there's no title otherwise]
Vladimir Nabokov - Letters to Vera [his wife]
Chet Filippo - Hank Williams, Your Cheatin' Heart
Frances Yates - The Art of Memory (I'm especially impressed by this - I once read a book by Frances Yates called The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, and was dead proud to have done so).
Henrietta - Henrietta [I need help with this one]
Peter Siskind - Easy Riders
Barry Miles - title unshown, but could (might well) be In the Sixties
Sleeping Beauty and other Fairy Tales
Unidentifiable volume
The Complete Pelican Shakespeare

The phrase 'negative capability' was coined by Keats to describe Shakespeare's ability to render truth beyond the reach of mere fact or reason.

In the gatefold:
Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights and A. N. Wilson's After the Victorians (both authors, it so happens, with whom I have had conversations). I have not, however, met Andrea di Robillant, the author of Lucia in the Age of Napoleon. Other titles are generally indecipherable, although there is one called 'Happenings', which is probably about, you know, 'happenings', those occasions that take place in art galleries where nude persons cover themselves in paint or blood or feathers and roll around making marks, remarks or merely spectacles of themselves.

DEAR MONA by JONAH JONES

https://www.serenbooks.com/productdisplay/dear-mona-letters-conscientious-objector

Not only a fascinating portrait of love (requited and otherwise), libraries, life, objection, doubt, forestry, war, Israel, Palestine, quakers, art, and peace, but also beautifully put, and finely edited.  And a lovely object in itself.  Plus an outstanding Foreword.  Well, a Foreword anyway, by me.

Health tip

"I think the extremities require to be at peace before the stomach will conduct itself with vigour"  David Copperfield

Rob really likes Sad Boys Club

BAND PUFF

Nice little paragraph from the utterly magnificent ShortList Ones to Watch feature.

NOTICE FOUND ON A TREE by Chrys Salt

Notice Found on a Tree

Lost Dog.

Three legs

Blind in left eye.

Tail broken.

Missing ear.

Loved by Samantha

Pat and Bri.

Got him for Christmas

Last year.

Recently castrated.

Small Reward.

If you find him

Please send word.

Answers to the name

Lucky

THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR

THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
12 December
Barbican
RSC
Directed by Fiona Laird
David Troughton (Falstaff)

Yuletide fare. A warm hearted farce.  The director moved the setting from Windsor to 'Essex', and down a class from middle middle to lower middle, with no great damage. The costumes were a hybrid of Elizabethan ruff and contemporary dull.  In tone there was a Gavin and Stacey air to the whole proceedings (a Dick Emery joke worked its way in for the more senior members of the audience) - or perhaps it was watched over by the spirit of Alison Steadman's most memorable performances, spiced with a touch of Sibyl Fawlty (and even the merest hint of Vicki Pollard).  The action, in commencing, seemed perhaps a little slow, the comedy forced; but it may be that the audience itself needed to become familiar with the characters.  As the evening went on, the play seemed to accelerate, and the laughs became more frequent and more natural.  I personally found it hard to hear many of the actors,  Troughton, Vince Leigh (Master Ford) and most of the women excepted.  I was sorry Karen Fishwick, otherwise perfectly competent as the desirable Ann, allowed the immortal lines "Good mother, do not marry me to yond fool... / I had rather be set quick i' th' earth / And bowled to death with turnips!"  be consumed by business (lying on the floor waving legs), of which there was perhaps a little too much altogether.  The well-known scene in which Falstaff is hidden in a laundry basket - one of Shakespeare's great comic set-pieces - brought the show fully to life, despite there being no laundry basket in evidence.  Instead, both on stage and in the text, there was a filthy wheelie-bin.  Almost the entire play is in prose, so this was quite acceptable, and one imagines WS would not have disapproved.  And anyway, it was very funny.  Troughton gave Falstaff the centre of attention, but it was the Merry Wives themselves who were the stars of the show.  As, presumably, ought to be the case. 

SNOWDON

I reviewed this book some time ago, for 'Planet: The Welsh Internationalist', but it - the review - has not been otherwise available online - so here it is now.


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Snowdon

The Story of a Welsh Mountain

by Jim Perrin

Gomer press, £14.99, 240pp

ISBN 9781843235743

Reviewed by Wynn Wheldon

There are longer novels than The Great Gatsby, but Gatsby is a masterpiece.  There are buildings larger, taller, wider than the Taj Mahal, but the Taj Mahal is one of the glories of humankind. There are hills higher than Snowdon, but Snowdon is, emphatically, a mountain.  One of the few bones to pick with this tremendous book is the author’s occasional description of Snowdon as a hill.

         Hills are passive, mountains are active. This last April alone saw two climbers killed on Snowdon. Snowdon - by which is meant the three peaks of Garnedd Ugain, Y Lliwedd and Yr Wyddfa – is perhaps the most visited mountain in the world: its summit is reached by almost half-a- million walkers a year. It is both hostile and welcoming. 

Jim Perrin has been under the mountain’s spell “all [his] outdoor life”, and, “better to understand this enchantment”, he goes to the church at Nant Peris on the northeastern flank of the mountain, or more particularly, its graveyard, where three gravestones mark the deaths on Snowdon of a child, a mountain guide and a man of God, and finds in them “the bones of a story aching to be told”. *

         Perrin’s narrative is both thematic and chronological, but he begins with a circumambulation of his subject. Much of the tone of what is to follow is established here. There is rich simile: Snowdon on the 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map “looks animated, starfish-like, pinky-beige”. There is anti-colonial outrage at the same Ordnance Survey map’s misnaming of Nant Gwynant  (it should be ‘Nant Gwynen’, and Perrin, defying the “tyranny of custom” calls it that). A footnote suggests the reader look at Brian Friel’s play Translations, “should you want a view of the historical and colonialist process at work here”.  Perrin is marvellously inclusive in this way, digression becoming part of the form of the whole, both in the body of the text, but more so in the glorious profusion of footnotes (all very properly to be found at the foot of the page rather than irritatingly among the end business).

         In this first chapter, too, we find Perrin’s sardonic wit at work on John Boorman’s film Excalibur (“codswallop”), on goat-culling “career-conservationists…who… countenance the slaughter of indigenous species [and] are, to my mind, the ones with the cloven hooves”, and on the Health & Safety Executive who would be “(obviously a good thing)…driven to terminal apoplexy” by the reintroduction of wolves to Eryri. 

Other agencies, persons, publications and so forth that will come under fire in succeeding chapters include Granta magazine, windfarms, the National Lottery, George Mallory, the Central Electricity Generating Board, contemporary Welsh academics, people from Surrey who retire to Wales, books with ‘wild’ in their title, tourists, and sheep. To really pass the Perrin test you would have had to be a member of the Independent Labour Party, while at the same time living in close proximity to the mountain, preferably a fairly long time ago. There‘s a touch of the Tebbit about him. Having grown up in Surrey, but hoping to retire to Wales, at times I felt bullied.

         This first chapter also touches on myth (Yr Wyddfa as the tumulus of the giant Rhita), on flora and fauna (the Snowdon lily), on geology, on climbing and on history, themes expanded on in the chapters that follow.

         Born in England, Jim Perrin has, like Jonah Jones and Jan Morris, become Welsh, and writes (as Jones and Morris have done) with the zeal of the converted. This book, while erudite and scholarly (there are references to Longinus, Burke and Sebald, among others), has the heft of its author’s own life in it.  Its expansiveness and generosity, the carefulness and grace of its descriptions, the occasional anger, and the sheer love for his subject add up to what is in effect a kind of treatise. There is a moral ardour here that occasionally borders on the sanctimonious (he finds the idea of “conquering” mountains “odious” – well, OK), that makes him do some dirt on Mallory and his companions (anyone who has read Wade Davis’s monumental Into the Silence will know that they were not negligible men), but which also gives energy and life to prose that mixes the demotic and the academic with pleasing idiosyncrasy.

         Perrin is, in other words, a Romantic. Snowdon can teach us how to live.  A regret, one I share, is that Coleridge left no record of his time on the mountain, probably due to inclement weather.  However, Perrin’s account, while perhaps not as “audacious, swirling and bizarre” as the great poet’s might have been, stands easily beside those of Pennant, Bingley and Borrow.  It is a classic. It should not, however, be attempted without a good map. An index would have been nice, too.

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* Your reviewer’s ancestors are buried here too: a tax collector, a preacher, an educationalist, with their impressive wives. For a Wheldon, to be on Snowdon is  either to be very much alive or to be very much dead.

REMEMBRANCE DAY POEM

WHEN IT’S ALL OVER 

“…what a time we shall have when it’s all over.”

I have a photo: lips ajar, a gap

between his front teeth, a long young face stares

from a spotted mount, half shadowed, and there’s

the slightest hint of pride - or is it humour,

sardonic, at the uselessness of all this,

a sad callow wisdom, prior to the end.

Late one night, November 2014,

my son and I went to see the poppies.

They bled through the cracks in the Reigate stone,

flooded the moat, the fields. Bloody Tower.

We all become history eventually

as bricks or pebbles, glass memorials.

We wondered which bloom might stand for

G.E. Nunns, Rifleman, age 20,

died first of September, 1918,

a Sunday ‘of unprecedented dryness’

during a war remembered for its mud:

My grandmother’s little brother.

We’d visited Queant Road cemetery

in September the previous year. 

Smallish, surrounded on all sides by flat

communal fields below occasional clouds.

Lavender lined the low front wall, bees

and butterflies littered the air with life.

We sought the gravestone. Found it. Stood. Read.

MY GOD AND KING TO THEE I BOW MY KNEE.

Why, ok, but how?  We don’t, cannot, know.

Where?  Best guess the second battle of Bapaume.

The Allies’ One Hundred Days offensive.

Eight dark yews stood like sentries, behind us.

Hard as a parent to see the heroics

in the warrior’s mortality. My son

and I lean upon the wall, looking down,

remembering one we never knew.

It is the early hours.  Shouts prick the night.

There’s laughter somewhere, and so it goes.


Wynn Wheldon

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