Advent 18 Canon

This is a slight cheat on my statement that in the canonical sliver of this enterprise, I am reading books that I ought to have read but have been too lazy to take on. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Other Poems did cross my way when I was at school. I wasn't ready for it, come to think of it probably still am not. No matter, this is dynamite stuff. Elusive, allusive, beguiling. Two extracts stand out for me. First from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, comes one of those passages I wish I could pass-off as my own:

In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.

More striking still is this that served as the inspiration for the title of Waugh's brilliant novel, A Handful of Dust:

And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  

In Remembrance Of The Now Inconsequential

 

4-3-3: Cup Final Saturday 2010

 

(11 May 2010 – David Cameron forms a coalition government;

15 May 2010 – Chelsea-1; Portsmouth-0)

 

 

On Cup Final

Saturday

men unite

 

to watch the game

and all that

goes before

 

it. That at least

is what I

remember

 

from days when my

grandfather

was alive

 

to administer colour television

and distribute conspiratorial beer

 

whilst speaking in

awe of the

singular:

 

A

Goalkeeper in

splendid

isolation.

 

All trace of romance and enjoyment has

now been betrayed. In the spirit of the

New Politics today I cut the grass

instead.

 

This poem of mine appeared on this blog back in 2012 but, admit it, you had forgotten about it. I certainly had but it came back to me as I meandered around a garden centre on Saturday afternoon. And the reason? Because I was meandereng during the Cup Final. In this age of wall-to-wall televised football, the Cup Final will never recapture the status it once had. Ah well. Our garden looks nice though.

Haiku Number 1

This is not Haiku

It is just an exercise

Ce n'est pas Haiku

 

A Stately Pleasure Dome

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree

Coleridge lived too early ever to have seen the stately pleasure dome decreed by the remarkable Lord Armstrong at Cragside but the poet's lambent words went searing through the Pig's pretentious mind as he walked from the car park to Cragside this morning. Don't get me wrong, the Pig loves this sort of stuff, that is to say both Coleridge's poetry and Armstrong's grandiosity.

The house itself is a higgledy-piggledy affair, remodelled and extended on several occasions by Armstrong as he rose from a law office to mechanical genius - yet another case (take my mate Walter Bagehot for example) of someone qualifying as a lawyer and deciding there was a better life elsewhere. If only, if only, muses the Pig.

The whole Cragside Estate is testament to man working on his environment - lakes were created, hydro-electric power harnessed, millions of trees planted. It is fabulous. The Groupie made a very good point as we soldiered about in the rain - precisely what would the modern media make of a billionaire who had the audacity to try something as adventurous as Cragside today.

The Coleridge lines get an outing in Citizen Kane of course. I don't know enough to say whether Armstrong died bereft like Kane, but he certainly died childless and a century plus later his creation is in the hands of the National Trust who do a grand job. Death and taxes - life's two great certainties.

Cragside - a brilliant and thought-provoking day out. No dining out today. We're having shop-bought pizzas and I've opened an insolent (vinous argot for cheap) rioja. Good times.  

The Pig Is A New Romantic

I'm feeling rather chipper, thank you for asking. The Groupie and I went for a bracing walk in (on?) Cannock Chase this afternoon. Got a bit muddy but good times - the sun shone for much of the time so I wore the precious Oakleys - said it before but it merits repetition - girls go crazy for a sharp-dressed man.

Anyway, what's this romanticism that's got hold of the Pig? Well may you ask - here we go: 

Government has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own. It is therefore just, only so far as it exists by their consent, useful only so far as it operates to their well-being.

Percy Byssche Shelley in the conduct of his private life may have had the morals of an alley cat, but that is the only regard in which he might be compared to Donald J. Trump. The quoted lines make up the first clause of Shelley's Declaration of Rights, coined in 1812. They are brilliant. We should trumpet them and act by them.

Now for some damned fine coffee - Machu Picchu since you ask. Reasons to be cheerful, one, two, three. See ya. 

The Land Of My Fathers

Bits and pieces of Under Milk Wood are still eddying through my mind.

At the sea-end of town, Mr and Mrs Floyd- the cocklers, are sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt and brown, like two old kippers in a box.

My battered old edition includes a brief preface by Daniel Jones which ends with an interesting point:

In case Under Milk Wood falls into the hands of a Welsh philologist, it must be made clear that the langusage used is Anglo-Welsh. Dylan Thomas spoke no Welsh, and the reader must imitate his inconsistency if he wishes to hear the words as they were pronounced by the poet himself.

This is then the land of my (father's) father, proudly Welsh but non Welsh-speaking. This has been this Englishman's gain.

And Before You Let The Sun In, Mind It Wipes Its Shoes

Under Milk Wood, a dazzling piece of, well actually that begs the question - what is it? Written as a radio play, it should of course be listened to but it also reads beautifully as an affectionate and amusing prose poem. It is a masterwork.

The book as appreciating asset? I picked up my copy of Under Milk Wood for 50p in a second hand bookshop and I have only just noticed that its cover price in 1972 was a mere 40p. Mind you the intervening inflation rather ruins this tale and explains why I am not an economist.  

The Seventh Age Of Man - Day 1

The Boy Shakespeare knew a thing or two.

                                  Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

And so the Pig has embarked on his seventh decade. It is only a number but I must confess that this one has given me more pause for thought than any previous landmark. I am tempted to feel old. Is that a bad thing? Rage, rage against the dying of the light, as another poet of note put it.

If only more clients had cause to be that grateful

Sans teeth? Quite good on that score - despite close on forty years of rugby I have lost only one tooth. Sans eyes - well I am wearing my cheap reading glasses to write this but otherwise my laser-enhanced eyesight still does me proud. Sans taste - aye there's the rub. Nothing particularly wrong on that score, apart from the uneducated palate that has accompanied me all my life. I still fight against this handicap and as if to prove that there is life in the old dog yet, my last two nights' drinking ought to satisfy any oenophile who has strayed onto this site. On Sunday I blew the dust off a present from a grateful client from my former life, indeed a client at the heart of the best work I ever did. Dom Perignon Cuvee 1992. Yum yum; a delicate mousse, and a nutty smoothness.

Then last night for my birthday tea I had steak, chips and onion rings - my request. My other culinary favourite had arrived at lunchtime - my Mum's quiche delivered to the doorstep. Spoilt brat. Anyway, to accompany my steak (beautifully cooked by the Groupie) I opened the penultimate bottle of the La Serra Barolo 2001 from the cellar (alright, I admit it's a cupboard). The Groupie had got me four bottles of this divine stuff for my fiftieth birthday, having first encountered it at the Fat Duck. Yum, yum, yum. The odds are against the final bottle lasting to my seventieth. 

So after this a day of lethargy, I have resolved not to mope. I have been blessed to enjoy six previous ten year childhoods (the Bard got that bit wrong) so I am going to make the most of this one. Sans everything? Not bloody likely mate. Not yet.    

Writers Write - The Third Law Of Marchant

 It is almost four years since I wrote this poem about the wretched illness of my dear father. I could not bring myself to publish it at the time, lest it seem disrespectful. As in so many things I was of course wrong. I revisited it today and found that it says something of that terrible, prolonged grief we endured. The final line is bitter. If I was writing today I would probably omit that final line but the poem will speak better if it speaks from the time when I wrote it. God bless you Dad.

The Gradated Death of a Local Hero

1. In the Pink

And – which is more – you’ll be a man my son.

His quest for finished fullness never won

He bequeathed it to me

Not from any harshness but affection

That any loss at pitch and toss might be redone.

No island entire of itself and yet he stood

Craggy proud in spirit’s fatherhood

Gifts borne hero proper lightly

And regiven burnished to his tribe

Pretty burdens urged and not misunderstood.

2. Faded Shaded

He hosts his thieving illness

Though always searching

Yet cannot find his keys

Terrified of stillness.

For stock questions

He learns stock answers

Yet cannot find his keys

Resents helpful suggestions.

At all meals’ end he tidies

Meticulous in stacking

Yet cannot find his keys

Nor tell Sundays from Fridays.

The form is an abandoned shell

How often must we say farewell?

3. Palimpsest White

loud character overwritten

in grey

and lighter

and overscribed again until

in white

finally undetected unpersoned

in spite at our winnowed out grief

nothing can be read

of a local hero.

God mocks us.

Another Poem

The Gradated Death of a Local Hero

1. In the Pink

And – which is more – you’ll be a man my son.

His quest for finished fullness never won

He bequeathed it to me

Not from any harshness but affection

That any loss at pitch and toss might be redone.

No island entire of itself and yet he stood

Craggy proud in spirit’s fatherhood

Gifts borne hero proper lightly

And regiven burnished to his tribe

Pretty burdens urged and not misunderstood.

2. Faded Shaded

He hosts his thieving illness

Though always searching

Yet cannot find his keys

Terrified of stillness.

For stock questions

He learns stock answers

Yet cannot find his keys

Resents helpful suggestions.

At all meals’ end he tidies

Meticulous in stacking

Yet cannot find his keys

Nor tell Sundays from Fridays.

The form is an abandoned shell

How often must we say farewell?

3. Palimpsest White

loud character overwritten

in grey

and lighter

and overscribed again until

in white

finally undetected unpersoned

in spite at our winnowed out grief

nothing can be read

of a local hero.

God mocks us.

A Northern Interlude II

I have, dear reader, completed my first day as a delegate at an academic conference. But more of that anon. First I must correct my initial impressions of the good city of Hull. I had obviously, with my unerring radar, honed in on the shitty end of town when first I arrived. I retract. The University campus and its surroundings are elegant and the people are unfailingly friendly. I can see why Philip Larkin liked it.

Also liked Hull

Now for the life academic.

We assemble outside the hotel for the bus to the university. Old friendships are renewed (not by me - I have no friends in this milieu) and congratulations for published works are loudly exchanged. An unprepossesing bunch physically - I could take all of this lot in a fight even at my age - except that girl in the black dress. We embus (yes that's now a word). I sit upstairs which feels nostalgic on this the forty-fifth anniversary of my first day at King Edward's Aston. Should I engage someone in conversation? I decide not. The majority are women and I fear appearing predatory. In any event it is already apparent that the opening question is always, 'Are you presenting?' Too bloody right I'm not. The Boy Roberts is here to listen and observe and see if he can hack it intellectually.

I register, having found the courage to engage an Irish scholar in light conversation. He is presenting. Oh well. First up is a brilliant lecture by Professor Tiffany Stern on Renaissance ballads - a tour de force that ends with a speculation about the market economy around Shekespearean live arts. I make a mental note of some comparisons with the modern economics of popular music and then summon the courage to share them with some fellow delegates. No one laughs. Out loud. There follow panel presentations on Shakespeare as the conscience of Czech alternative theatre, and the problem of the English national poet as performed in Ireland's national theatre. I keep my thoughts to myself. This, we judge, is wise.

Most telling moments during the panel sessions come courtesy of a late arrival. His tardiness is not his fault - he and many more have spent a painful few hours captive on a delayed train. He sits next to me at the back and proceeds to peruse and reply to text messages. I'm sorry but that's just rude. I decide I don't like him. He asks a pertinent but self-referential question. At this juncture I twig that he is a leading Shalespearean - an academic behemoth. At the drinks reception which follows he wears his sunglasses indoors. This misstep is matched by the two males who wear hats indoors. I decide they must be 'characters'. Whatever. 

Most people are nice but there is at all times a faint popping sound - the sound of of delegates disappearing up their own arses. Your correspondent is not immune to this but he is, in his defence, self aware. Hopefully.

 

The One Less Traveled By

(And by the way, for the curious, that is the spelling of 'traveled' that Robert Frost chose). The road less taken for me in my journeys to Anglesey is these days the one that I invariably took in our early years of ownership - the A5. The more prosaic M6 is a speedier route. But today I took my time and came up the old coach road. As I turned into the Ogwen Valley I was reminded of Snowdonia's majesty and the CD brought up some clamorous Verdi right on cue. Life's been good.

The road to somewhere

The Pope And The Archbishop Walked Into A Bar ...

Don't worry I'm not going to tell you a terrible dirty joke, much less a clean one, knowing as I do absolutely no clean jokes. All jocularity is the Devil's work.

Habemus Papam

Our newish Pope (Francis - who succeeded that nice little German one we went and waved to on the Hagley Road) has worried me a bit at times. Not that I suspect he's much bothered by the part-informed ramblings of this particular fallen angel. No, I was just a bit concerned that he was, by papal standards, a bit of a hippie. That better known (than the OG) convert Papist, Charles Moore, hinted at this type of concern when the Pope went all Green last year - The Pope is Wrong . You see when it comes to Popes this particular parvenu (me not Charles Moore) likes to have his cake and eat it; he wants religiosity and a forbidding mien but also humanity flecked with approachability. Above all he wants a quite certain impression that the pontiff actually believes in God. This combination of characteristics is necessary because he has to carry the weight of his congregation's doubts - and believe me that's a ton of baggage just from this correspondent's direction. Thus when the current incumbent got into an unworthy Twitter spat with the malodorous Trump I was a bit concerned that his mind wasn't fully on the job at hand. But it seems I was wrong because his two hundred and sixty-four page Amoris Laetitia (every page of which you can download here: Papal Exhortation ) has done its job and satisfied loonies at neither extreme of his higgledy-piggledy church. Nice one - even the Guardian seems grudgingly impressed - Papal Score Draw .

Boy played a blinder

I'm a big fan of the Church of England if for no other reason than that the King James Bible knocks spots off all other translations (says he like he's read them all). I also think it is key to our constitutional monarchy - Prince Charles (yes I know you follow the OG) please note. However it can get itself into a squirmingly equivocal mess on the matter of faith. By which I mean I have encountered a disturbing number of its clergy who didn't seem to have any - faith that is. I may just have been unlucky because I exclude from this criticism the Archbishops of Canterbury of my lifetime: the one with the shock of white hair, whose name escapes me (just looked it up - Ramsey) who thanked me when I held the door open for him when he was walking down a King's College corridor; Coggan, who looked very scholarly; Runcie, who won the MC as a tank commander for God's sake; Carey, who perhaps wasn't the sharpest tool in the box but who is a King's alumnus and we need to stick together; Rowan Williams, now I really like him because he is far closer to my idea of Gandalf than Ian McKellen and I don't like the way the media persecutes bearded clergy; most recently, Justin Welby. Two things got Welby off to a bad start: firstly he's another sodding Old Etonian; secondly and more rationally, Archbishops just aren't called Justin, are they? Come to think of it neither are Old Etonians. Anyway, putting such reasoned prejudice aside, I am pleased to say he strikes me as a top sort of bloke and he talks sense with a strong inflection of faith. What has really brought this home is the astute way that he and his officials have handled the bizarre case of his paternity - Archbishop's Paternity . Now, of course, this stuff shouldn't be news at all but the C of E has played a blinder on this one - perhaps Welby should give lessons to the boys at Conservative Central Office who have served their Old Etonian boss so dimly these past few days.

Mind you, I still don't think Justin is a good name for a religious leader notwithstanding that St Justin was around as long ago as 100 AD. The trouble may be that I am a Moody Blues fan and cannot dissociate the name from the sainted Justin Hayward. You see the emotional and intellectual baggage I have to carry? It's a wonder I can even lift a pen. (Has lifting a pen become a metaphorical activity? I ponder this because this afternoon and for the first time I composed some poetry on screen without first scribbling notes. It was still crap. So it goes.)

Middle Aged Rockers

A splendid night at Oxford's New Theatre to see John Cooper Clarke and Squeeze. Pot bellies and dad dancing much in evidence as the ancient audience got into the swing of things but there is no denying that both acts have worn well. I was accompanied by Daughter Number Two, JE and AE. DN2 must have been one of the youngest there but she seemed to enjoy it.

Cooper Clarke is laconic, amusing and, yes, poetic. He had an album to promote (actually what we used to call a box set - Anthologia) which I am pleased to note (not quite sure why - ridiculous nostalgia?) is available on vinyl. The likes of Jeremy Hardy, Marcus Brigstock and the other legions of the bigoted left might learn a lesson from Clarke - it is possible to be right on without being hateful. Clarke even made a reference to the tour he made with Richard Hell and the Voidoids back in '78 which pleased me no end because that was when I had last seen him. Good then, good now.

Squeeze also have an album to flog, Cradle to the Grave, their first for seventeen years. The show perhaps inevitably lagged when they did the new material but the old classics were rapturously received and no one could be in any doubt about the talent and musicality of the band. Glenn Tillbrook's voice was strong and I had never quite appreciated how good a guitarist he is. And as for the new material, I'm going to buy that album so that in future I can sing along to that as well. 

A good night for ageing dancing bones.

RWC Bulletin 8 - Correction

Viperjohn (my wise commentator - see comments on last blog) is of course correct. My summation of the RWC quarter finals should have said "Scotland aside" the Welsh had made the best fist of it.

As for the Joubert fiasco, well it seems that the powers that be have given official approval of my conclusion that it should have been a scrum, but in doing so they have hung the ref out to dry and yet not commented on the most culpable element of his conduct, that is to say his flight from the locus in quo.

Time to move on. We are all Argentinians now!

Off to see Squeeze and John Cooper Clarke tonight. I last saw Cooper Clarke at the Hammersmith Palais in 1978 when he was on a bill with Elvis Costello and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Costello was rubbish, the two supporting acts far superior. Review to follow.

Poem

Dragonfly

the dragonfly steals a
view and blurred enhances
coy fine flirting with a
purpose kissing water

a nature

and climbing clarion
clattering the human
dragonfly spies for fire
purpose pilfered water

invention

A New Poem

Training Exercise (Amtrak Cascades 4 July 2015)

The Poem that is never read

Is locked and lost within my head

No verses that have run and fled

You'll have to have these ones instead.

I wrote it down some weeks ago

A villanelle with metric flow

There comes the pattern that you know.

I lost the pad I scrawled it in

Where I was starting to begin.

These rules are made to be broken.

. _  / . _  / . _  / . _

Biographising the Bard

I watched a recording last night of Ethan Hawke's largely bland investigation of Macbeth in the intermittently arresting series, My Shakespeare. One nugget of criticism did however stick with me. That nugget came from Dr Gwen Adshead, a psychiatrist working at Broadmoor who observed that Macbeth's language in the immediate aftermath of Duncan's murder becomes fractured just as is the case with the real killers with whom she has worked. This observation put me in mind of Walter Bagehot's certain assertion (in the context of a hunting passage in Venus and Adonis) that one can tell a good deal about Shakespeare from his works,

It is absurd, by the way, to say we know nothing about the man who wrote that; we know that he had been after a hare.

But is that right? Can we really construct a picture of what Shakespeare must have been like merely by reading his works. Taking Bagehot's logic to an extreme (and taking also Dr Adshead to be right) are we to assume that Shakespeare had direct experience of murder? Maybe he was just a bloody genius, a bloody big genius. Does it matter even a jot what Shakespeare was like - or are the plays the thing?

I had haggis for tea today. Which was nice. So far as I can tell the word 'haggis' does not appear anywhere in the complete works.  

Advent 5

There will be three poets in the progress of this calendar. Today we have the first. My knowledge of poetry is limited so it is with a degree of unaccustomed humility that  I offer this as the most affecting verse of all time.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, 

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, 

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, 

And towards our distant rest began to trudge. 

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, 

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; 

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots 

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. 

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling 

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, 

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling 

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, 

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. 

In all my dreams before my helpless sight, 

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace 

Behind the wagon that we flung him in, 

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, 

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; 

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, 

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud 

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— 

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 

To children ardent for some desperate glory, 

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est 

Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen went back to the front after injury, won the Military Cross  and died just one week before the Armistice on 4 November 1918. 4 November is the birthday of my revered father, who first alerted me to Owen's poetry.

Pyramid Selling: A Song Of Modern Management

up-sell

callage

partnership

pretty unique

critical mass

process mapping

bow tie approach

a brave new world

supply chain route

key influencer

multiple touch points

to much more focus on

far less failed deliveries

a whole nother suite of rooms

it's all about the customers

no second chance to create a first impression

 

selected for economy

a room too small

and smug with faux conviviality

fearful and loathing all

leaderene spitting vitality

oozing corporate offal

 

audience interaction

(non) participation

inanity

inaudible

how do you know?

trust me

 

money money money

must be funny.

 

Bloody hilarious.