Wednesday, 30 December 2009
Pertinent Bard
To sport would be as tedious as to work.”
1 Henry IV
Birches by Robert Frost
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane
Thursday, 24 December 2009
WS SJ?
Liu Xiaobo
UPDATE Liu Xiaobo has been sentenced to 11 years in jail.
Monday, 21 December 2009
Howards End
As I was thinking about this - and about how Trilling, too, had written a book about Forster - I remembered a scene from 1974. I was sixteen years old. I was standing in a group of people at a party or gathering of some sort. We were in a triangle of room that obtruded from some house or institution somewhere in Colorado. At the apex of the triangle were shelves. On either side were windows strecthing from ceiling to floor. The views were spectacular, over the Rockies. We were very high up. To my left was my father. To his left was Lionel Trilling with tremendously white hair. To Trilling's left was Isaac Stern, the great violinist. Between Stern and me was, I think, Saul Bellow. I think. Of the first three I am certain.
Sunday, 13 December 2009
Monday, 7 December 2009
Failing to Resist a List
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Oh Mr Porter
Ballon d'Or Winners
And this year? Lionel Messi (Argentina)
Monday, 30 November 2009
Sports Personality of the Year
And why has Gareth Edwards never received a knighthood? Sir Clive Woodward? but Mr Edwards? I suppose when you are a god it doesn't much matter.
Monday, 23 November 2009
Saturday, 21 November 2009
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
See How Easily You Can Transform
Orson Welles on Kafka
Monday, 16 November 2009
Walking Back to Buck's by Tarka Huxley Kings
Jonah Jones
The above is a message from David Townsend Jones
Ground by Luke Elwes

57 x 76 cm
mixed media on paper
I saw this painting the other day. It is a picture of tidal marshland in the Blackwater estuary, near Maldon, site of that blasted battle all English university students had to read about in the original Anglo-Saxon. I liked it at once. I'm partial to works that play between the abstract and the figurative (Ivon Hitchens is my favourite). I learned furthermore that the co-author of the painting was the very sea itself. Luke allows the tide to do its work with his paper. He also uses mud, wax, watercolours. There is the sense both of super-realism as well as flat abstraction. Lots to look at inside it. Something too of Monet's late lilies.
www.lukeelwes.com
Saturday, 14 November 2009
Foreword to Poems by Robert Graves, 1945
Robert Graves
Thursday, 12 November 2009
WALES' FIVE/SIX NATIONS RECORDS
FRANCE PL85 W43 L39 D3 WIN%50.59
IRELAND PL112 W61 L45 D6 WIN%54.46
ITALY PL14 W11 L2 D1 WIN%78.57
SCOTLAND PL114 W63 L48 D3 WIN%55.26
as of 12/11/09
Letter from Ed Vulliamy to Amnesty International
Monday, 9 November 2009
Jentacular Confabulations
Obs.
[f. L. jent{amac}cul-um breakfast (f. jent{amac}re to breakfast) + -AR.]
Of or belonging to breakfast.
1721 AMHERST Terræ Fil. App. 318 Nothing more..can be expected from those jentacular confabulations. 1811 A. KNOX in Corr. w. Jebb (1834) II. 44, I therefore wish to close at this ante-jentacular hour.
Citizen Kane
Thomas Jefferson's 'Three Greatest Men'

Friday, 6 November 2009
Legend of a Suicide by David Vann

This is a terrifically arch book. It is an amalgam of genres, including autobiography, memoir and fiction. I believe it is supposed to be One Thing. As I say, it is arch, very much the product of creative writing courses, written for the academy. Which is a shame because the central story, about an almost comically inept father and his son trapped on an island off Alaska approaches a Tolstoyan grandeur and simplicity at moments. Unfortunately it, too, is spoilt by creative writing-itis, as the point of view shifts mid-way from son to father for a reason I shall not give away (although it is preposterous). So some good stuff and I certainly couldn't do better. Has a lot of fish business in it.
Anne Bayefsky at the United Nations
Anne Bayefsy is a highly-regarded Canadian human rights lawyer. Unfortunately for her she is also regards Hamas as a genocidal terrorist organisation, not at all a fashionable view at the moment.
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Megan's Shoes
The Humbling by Philip Roth

New novella by Philip Roth. Covers familiar Rothian territory, namely the identity of the self. This time the protagonist is an actor who has "lost his magic". He has lost his ability to be someone other than himself, and in doing so he has lost himself. As usual in Roth books, sex is the answer, the place where he can slough off any personal identity and become merely animal. In this book the sex is with a lesbian who eventually reverts to her original predilections in the actor's presence, donning a strap-on dildo, and thereby becoming no longer herself but a pretend man. The bed becomes a stage, and therefore the actor is robbed even here of the ability to be his primeval self. Roth is all ego and id. But he writes beautifully, beautifully, beautifully. However, among our senior novelists I do not think Mr Roth is maturing as well as Mr Trevor.
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
An Education
PS "Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material involving sexual content, and for smoking." Dpes this mean that 'Casablanca' is now a PG-13 in the USA?
Monday, 2 November 2009
The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

Nick Cave's new novel. Part picaresque, part ghost story, but chiefly an old-fashioned morality tale concerning itself chiefly with lust. Bunny Munro, named for his ability to copulate like a rabbit, as well as for his animal nature, is a salesman for Eternity Enterprises. He sells anti-aging creams to vulnerable women. After his wife's suicide at the beginning of the book he sets off on a journey to hell, in the company of his son, Bunny Junior, the true hero of the book, and the character closest to the reader. Bunny is a disgusting, repellant, charmer, but he is undeniably full of life and as irresistible to us as he is to the women he seduces. Written with tremendous verve and love of the unexpected simile (hair pouring down the back of a character "like chicken soup"), this is an enjoyably old-fashioned book, and altogether more compassionate than you might think.
Saturday, 31 October 2009
Rasselas by Samuel Johnson

"The most intelligent book ever written" Howard Jacobson
Some hyperbole is simple gushing. This is considered hyperbole. And perhaps it isn't even hyperbole. Perhaps it is true. It is the one neglected masterpiece mentioned on Mariella Frostrup's radio programme that I have a) heard of and b) actually read.
Poem
I send down a maid to explain I cannot see him
And she does not return.
Soon the clank starts up again. I down my pencil
And, cautious for my son, who is intrigued,
I go myself, and do not return.
Wynn Wheldon
Friday, 30 October 2009
Civilization
Kenneth Clark, Civilization, BBC
Tuesday, 27 October 2009
Dan Jacobson on Dad
"I shall never forget Huw kneeling down with a tiny Jess to do a charade of Jack and the Beanstalk, in the garden of Jonah Jones' house, above that estuary in Wales. All of him was there."
Hate Crimes
Monday, 26 October 2009
Books of the Year
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (1878)
Love and Summer - William Trevor (2009)
Dirt Music - Tim Winton (2001)
Journey in Moonlight - Antal Szerb (1937)
The Dying Light - Henry Porter (2009)
The Midnight Bell - Patrick Hamilton (1929)
Netherland - Joseph O'Neill (2008)
Breath - Tim Winton (2008)
Juliet, Naked - Nick Hornby (2009)
The Believers - Zoe Heller (2008)
Honorable mentions for John Updike, Lee Child, Robert Crais, William Boyd. Nick Cave
Saturday, 24 October 2009
Chris Steele-Perkins

This wonderful photograph featured in The Times magazine today. It made me laugh out loud. It was taken by Chris Steele-Perkins, and was taken on Blackpool beach in 1982. It comes from a collection called 'England, My England', published by Northumbria Press
Thursday, 22 October 2009
Love and Summer by William Trevor
Wednesday, 21 October 2009
Emma
Monday, 19 October 2009
Freedom to be Disagreeable
"A repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathsome and inhumane". This was Stephen Fry's response to Ms Moir's article. This strikes me as pretty offensive (and certainly smugly condescending) not least to those two and a half million people who buy the Daily Mail. Given that one cannot switch on a TV, radio (or phone) or pick up a newspaper without coming upon the ubiquitous, omniscient Mr Fry making his views felt it seems a bit rich that he should be laying down the law on what others with less exposure may have to say. It now seems that spurred on by the bien-pensant elite Ms Moir has been reported to the Metropolitan Police on suspicion that she may have committed a "hate crime".
In another article on this subject Yasmin Alighia-Brown uses the word "toff" as a term of abuse to dismiss the views of Martin Amis (who, so far as I know, has said nothing about Stephen Gately's death, even assuming he knows who Stephen Gately is or was). Many years ago I interviewed Ken Livingstone, on the subject of lying in politics. I put to him an Orwell quotation - i think it was "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful" - and his first response was to dismiss anything written or said by an Old Etonian. So there we are then: Toffs' opinions count for nothing among ex Mayors and those with double-barreled surnames.
Just for the record: I don't listen to Boyzone and I don't read The Daily Mail, but I do think there should be a place for anti-establishment views.
Sunday, 18 October 2009
Charles Trenet, 'Boum', Paris 1938
My father was in Paris in 1938. He described the French as being full of "quick-glancing panic" - something nasty stalking them. Hitler's autumn speeches were widely reported. In the same year Duchamp curated an exhibition of surrealism, lining the beautiful galleries of the Beaux Arts with 1,200 coal sacks.
Friday, 16 October 2009
Thursday 16 October
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Dutch bees
To this spot, where life would seem more restricted than elsewhere - if it be possible for life indeed to become restricted - a sort of aged philosopher had retired; an old man somewhat akin to Virgil's - "Man equal to kings, and approaching the gods;" whereto Lafontaine might have added - "And, like the gods, content and at rest."
Here had he built his refuge, being a little weary; not disgusted, for the large aversions are unknown to the sage; but a little weary of interrogating men, whose answers to the only interesting questions one can put concerning nature and her veritable laws are far less simple than those that are given by animals and plants. His happiness, like the Scythian philosopher's, lay all in the beauties of his garden; and best-loved and visited most often, was the apiary, composed of twelve domes of straw, some of which he had painted a bright pink, and some a clear yellow, but most of all a tender blue; having noticed, long before Sir John Lubbock's demonstrations, the bees' fondness for this colour.
These hives stood against the wall of the house, in the angle formed by one of those pleasant and graceful Dutch kitchens whose earthenware dresser, all bright with copper and tin, reflected itself through the open door on to the peaceful canal. And the water, burdened with these familiar images beneath its curtain of poplars, led one's eyes to a calm horizon of mills and of meadows.
Here, as in all places, the hives lent a new meaning to the flowers and the silence, the balm of the air and the rays of the sun. One seemed to have drawn very near to the festival spirit of nature. One was content to rest at this radiant crossroad, where the aerial ways converge and divide that the busy and tuneful bearers of all country perfumes unceasingly travel from dawn unto dusk. One heard the musical voice of the garden, whose loveliest hours revealed their rejoicing soul and sang of their gladness. One came hither, to the school of the bees, to be taught the preoccupations of all-powerful nature, the harmonious concord of the three kingdoms, the indefatigable organization of life, and the lesson of ardent and disinterested work; and another lesson too, with a moral as good, that the heroic workers taught there, and emphasized, as it were, with the fiery darts of the myriad wings, was to appreciate the somewhat vague savor of leisure, to enjoy the almost unspeakable delights of those immaculate days that revolved on themselves in the fields of space, forming merely a transparent globe, as void of memory as the happiness without alloy."
Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of Bees, 1901
(brought to my attention by Jane Ridley, for which many thanks)
Promises Promises
Monday, 12 October 2009
Nobel Prizes
The Dream of the Virgin


Saturday, 10 October 2009
Motorbiking News for Women
Friday, 9 October 2009
UP
The Same Hymn Sheet
"Obama's "showdown" with Iran has another agenda. The media have been tasked with preparing the public for endless war."
Match the quotation with the writer
Arthur Kemp - Foreign Affairs spokesman for the British National Party
John Pilger - New Statesman columnist
Barack & Books
The Times today has published a list of the 60 best books of the last 60 years. It is a laughable collection, part meretricious, part infantile and generally depressing. For 1964 Len Deighton's Funeral in Berlin has been chosen over Saul Bellow's Herzog. That is one example of numerous fatuous choices. There are only five books written in a foreign language. Where is Milan Kundera? Where is Invisible Man? Where is Achebe? Or Oz? Where is The Bonfire of the Vanities? Muriel Spark? Richard Hughes? A House for Mr Biswas? R.K. Narayan? Where is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, you moronic Top People? Simenon? Where, in the name of all that is good and holy, is The Master and Margarita? I understand that the books were selected by readers of The Times. Gawd help us. I am a self-confessed middle-brow but this lot takes the biscuit. For what it is worth, my favourite novel of the past 60 years is The Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh.
Thursday, 8 October 2009
Normando Hernández González

Solidarnosc

Wednesday, 7 October 2009
Monday, 5 October 2009
The Dying Light by Henry Porter

Boustrophedonically
Friday, 2 October 2009
Thursday, 1 October 2009
North End Avenue
Celebrating itself.
Boughs bow to one another in the breeze.
Trees green-barked a month ago
Now strut in darker suits.
Where the daffodils waved
Now the bluebells ring.
The ditches are drying, the ivy glitters.
I would have walked my mother
Up North End Avenue.
She'd be all curiosity
(Perhaps the name of a flower, that,
Like Honesty). I miss the love she had for me.
I miss giving the love I had for her.
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Tuesday, 29 September 2009
Comments
The Scorpion by Paul Bowles
Monday, 28 September 2009
Ordinary Thunderstorms
Saturday, 26 September 2009
Happy Birthday Bruce
Othello
Wednesday, 23 September 2009
Inherit the Wind
A Week in December
UPDATE
The second half is much better than the first, and I nearly wept at the end of two separate threads. This obviously is no mark of quality but rather a demonstration of a thundering sentimentality on my part that I try very hard to hide. So: not as bad as I originally tought, but not pushing my top ten for 2009.
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
Spooky Action at a Distance
"The premise behind a quantum computer is simple - provided you swallow the unpalatable quantum truths that underlie it. One is that objects such as atoms and electrons are not confined to being either this or that, as the objects of our everyday macroscopic world are; they can be both this and that at the same time. They might, for instance, be spinning clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously, or adopt two different energy states at once. This is known as superposition.
What's more, these ambiguous quantum characters can club together so that what you do to one affects the others. This is the phenomenon of entanglement or, if you're Einstein, "spooky action at a distance". Together, the characteristics of superposition and entanglement make for a computer of awesome power.
Take a classical computational bit such as a transistor current. It can adopt one of two states: 0 (off) or 1 (on). Not so its quantum counterpart, the qubit. Superposition means a single qubit can simultaneously be 0 and 1, giving you twice the information storage capacity right from the start. Then entanglement kicks in, allowing further bits to share their superposed states in a common pool. The result is that computing power grows exponentially with the number of qubits. While three classical bits are needed to store the number 7, three qubits can store all eight numbers from 0 to 7 simultaneously
Michael Brooks, New Scientist, 21 September 2009
Blimey! I don't really understand this stuff, but I love the hyperbole that turns out to be simple fact.
Saturday, 19 September 2009
I didn't realise it was you Norbert
Friday, 18 September 2009
Dawkins on Death
I have pinched this directly from Terry Teachout's terrific blog 'About Last Night'.
Thursday, 17 September 2009
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
Wonderworker
The White Album
Showering Malady
Eyelid
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
Juliet, Naked
Like most of the men in the book, Tucker is fairly useless (the women earn the money, make the decisions, bring up the children, talk the sense…). He does nothing. The book is a description of the mutual redemption of the two central characters, Tucker Crowe himself, and Annie, a woman locked into a loveless marriage with an obsessive ‘Croweologist’, Duncan. Crowe lives in the United States. Annie and Duncan on the Lincolnshire coast. The plot lies in the way Hornby brings them together.
He must have been delighted when he thought it up. It is another part of Nick Hornby’s attractiveness as a writer that he is so very easy to read, which invariably suggests that whatever one has read must have been very easy to write, which I daresay it wasn’t. He has great fun inventing Crowe, messing about with all sorts of rock and roll archetypes, traits and tropes that will appeal to the pop-culturally-aware readership that laps him up. He has a go, too, at the academic study of that very same pop culture that tends to lend to the trivial all kinds of weight that it should not be asked to bear.
It is a funny book, as well. There is something Kingsley Amis–like in Hornby’s determined eschewing of the high-falutin’. He writes with a delicious clarity. His authorial presence is ghost-like. We hear everything through his characters’ voices, the third person no bar to this. It is a deft trick. At the same time all three of the main characters make use of Hornby’s characteristic extended metaphors – the ones that (purposefully) break down like inexperienced tight-rope walkers desperately trying to keep their balance (there’s one beginning here, do you see?).
A final note: I would probably not have picked this up had I been reading piece-meal, but there are in the text I think at least four references to the verb tenses which are being employed. Has Nick Hornby been reading Michael Dummett?
Lo-Fi Culture Scene
Lo Fi Culture Scene perform 'Too Late Anyway' at the Joiners in Southampton, July 2009
Monday, 14 September 2009
Beginning
Badly want Federer to win. So much so I cannot watch the blasted match. Why should this be? Surely the neutral should root for the underdog? I also tend to want Man Utd to win things. I want the best to be the best. Then again perhaps I simply crave authoritativeness. Is that so odd in one who aspires to be an author?