Advent 23

Volume 23 (Vase to Zygo): Venice.

And so we reach the end of the text entries in Dave's Big Book of Knowledge. Tomorrow we have only the Index and Atlas to work from. Don't worry it will all come together seamlessly. Have I ever let you down?

I have never been to Venice but it's on my list this, 'city and seaport of Italy, occupying one of the most remarkable sites in the world'. If the pundits are to be believed I will need to get my skates on as the place is drowning under the twin burdens of climate change and tourism.

the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel

The appearance on page 63 of Venice gives me the opportunity to return you to quite possibly my favourite author, Simon Raven. Evelyn Waugh is demonstrably a better writer but we are talking about my middle-brow prejudices and so Raven gets the prize. He was a dilettante spendthrift who plied his authorial gifts in the service of earning money and his later works betray haste and some laziness. However his ten novel sequence Alms for Oblivion is an underrated and massive fictive achievement. Had my doctorate not been about Shakespeare, I would have chosen Raven as my subject. Anyway in the tenth and final instalment of that roman fleuve, The Survivors, Raven deploys Venice as a magnificent extended metaphor for the dying world of elegance. I was going to quote the final paragraph of the novel here but I will leave it for you to read the entire sequence yourself. You will thank me. Instead I will give you an extract from the brilliant and acerbic Introduction that Raven himself contributed to the 1998 reprint of Alms for Oblivion. I have quoted these lines before in these pages, but, hey ho, it is my blog after all.

The cry, 'If I can't, you mustn't', had some trace of justification, however sullen and unlovely the sound of it. Nowadays we hear instead an even less lovely cry, 'If I don't want to, you mustn't': i.e. 'It is just possible that I am, after all, missing out on something of value which you have been shrewd enought to detect and I haven't, and that wouldn't be fair and equal, now would it?' Once upon a time, however strong and righteous you considered your message, you scorned to become a pest: in 1998, however trivial your grievance, you find yourself encouraged and even 'morally obliged' to become not just a pest but a pestilence.     

Funeral In Berlin

I am an admirer of Len Deighton's fiction, particularly his Game/Set/Match/Hook/Line/Sinker/Faith/Hope/Charity roman fleuve. These represent professional writing at its best.

Funeral in Berlin is the second of the trilogy of Harry Palmer cinematic adaptations. Its star is another master of his trade, the cinematic giant that is Michael Caine. It is very sixties - no real hero, a plot that disappears up its own behind but staying just on the right side of being alienating. Enjoyable. 66/100.

The Second Law Of Marchant: Writers Read

I read this yesterday evening and its pearlescent beauty struck me. If I could write like this I would never leave the house, except to go to the public library to read my own books. That's not true of course but you get my drift.

Tietjens had walked in the sunlight down the lines, past the hut with the evergreen climbing rose, in the sunlight, thinking in an interval, good-humouredly about his official religion: about an Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible, but knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and the last oak; Christ, an almost too benevolent Land-Steward, son of the Owner, knowing all about the estate down to the last child at the porter's lodge, apt to be got round by the more detrimental tenants; the Third Person of the Trinity, the spirit of the estate, the Game as it were, as distinct from the players of the game; the atmosphere of the estate, that of the interior of Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been finished, a perpetual Sunday, with probably, a little cricket for the young men. Like Yorkshire of a Saturday afternoon; if you looked down on the whole broad county you would not see a ingle village green without its whie flannels. That was why Yorkshire alwayd leads the averages ... Probably by the time you got to heaven you would be so worn out by the work on this planet that you would accept the English Sunday, for ever, with extreme relief!      (Ford Madox Ford, No More Parades)

Round The Coast Towards Moelfre

I have been suffering with writer's block. That is putting it rather grandly - what I mean to say is that, rather to my surprise, my chapter on Antony and Cleopatra has got me stumped. I love the play but finding anything cogent to say about it is proving a horrible challenge. It is having too many ideas rather than none, which is, I suppose a good thing. Oh well, sod it, the sun's out and the red wine is chilled. Yes, I did say chilled red wine. If it's good enough for the Spanish, it's good enough for me.

It's renovation time here at Plas Piggy. I spent the morning ripping up the flooring I laid twenty plus years ago in the front bedroom. My handiwork will be replaced by a more professional product. Sad to see the last vestiges of my DIY efforts being consigned to the scrapheap but I have to admit that those few remaining features of my work are looking tired. 

After loading the old flooring into Canyonero (if you're not a devotee of The Simpsons and don't get this reference, I'm afraid I haven't got time to explain) I treated myself to a walk around the coast path towards Moelfre. The sun is out with only a slight breeze and the beach is crowded with happy noise. Life's been good to me so far.

I have been listening to the test match but have now given up on England. Is there a worse top three currently playing in international cricket? I know there probably must be but surely we can find better than this. Technique seems to be an optional extra these days. Pop will eat itself - see earler blogs for an explanation.  

Tonight I will mostly be eating meat pie.

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.

The Boy Parris Done Good

Matthew Parris writes well, not in the Champions League category with the Boy Liddle of course, but nevertheless he's got a good engine. All of which has made his recent peevish articles denigrating those of us who voted Leave rather tiresome. However let us put that aside (as I am sure we will all shortly manage to do as the embarrassing realisation dawns that the world has not come to an end) and applaud his return to form - Blair/Chilcot - an article in which a bit of realpolitik intrudes on the whinnying grandstanding of the chatterati. He clearly can't stand Blair (sounds fair enough to me) but puts to the sword the sanctimonious claptrap of shitbags such as that oaf Salmond.

Trump v Clinton is about to wind into full swing. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Ghost

The novels of Robert Harris are not great art, but who cares? What they together constitute is a body of bloody good professional writing. They are way beyond the capabilities of production of most mortals, not least production line students of creative writing. So there.

The Ghost attracted a deal of attention because of the perception of it as a roman a clef on the Blair governments. Yes, Harris was a friend of the Blairs and a Labour fellow traveller but there are key divergences from the real Blairs. Harris did nothing to dispel the notion that these changes were made to avoid litigation but the truth is that there was never going to be any allegation of libel - both Blairs are good enough lawyers to know that any such action would have been catastrophically counter-productive, and Harris himself is surely canny enough to have indulged the conjecture as a means of promoting his book. Certainly it is a touch his narrator (a jobbing ghost writer) would have appreciated.

What we have here is a book a little bit about modern global politics, but not so much as to be tedious. On this level, it is bloody good.

What we have here is a book a little bit in the thriller genre. On this level it is bloody good.

What we have here is a book a little bit about the process of writing. On this level it is bloody good.

So, in short, what we have here is a bloody good book. The sort that should be studied in creative writing classes.

A few interesting facts to toy with as you read this, they may elevate the fun: Blair (like Harris) went to Oxford; the fictional PM Adam Lang is a Cambridge man - in fact the last Cambridge PM was Stanley Baldwin and these sorts of things matter to Oxbridge types; the PM's wife and femme fatale Ruth Lang is an Oxford gal - this is a good joke because the real Cherie Booth is an LSE alumna and, quite properly, nothing winds up an LSE graduate more than being assumed Oxbridge. Just ask my dad.

Did I mention - bloody good book.

Advent 15

George Orwell's fame these days lies principally with his two great fictions, Animal Farm and 1984, but I would argue that the more material glory lies in his non-fiction.

My beloved old Britannica (1959 edition for which I paid the princely sum of £1 on eBay) sums him up in suitably spare Orwellian prose,

As a prose writer, Orwell is in the radical tradition of Defoe and Cobbett. His criticism (Critical essays, 1946) is revealing and enjoyable. In his essays (Shooting an Elephant, 1950 etc), he shows lightness and grace.

One of the best of those essays is The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. It was written in 1941 but still reads pertinently today. To quote Britannica again,

He was exceptional among writers of his generation in deliberately living under the social conditions he wrote about.

Here is that arresting Orwell style at work,

Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others are not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip.