…you’ll love these.
Archive for the 'literature' Category
I don’t do poetry.
There’s a famous definition of poetry - Professor Bergonzi’s definition - that says that if the words go to the end of the line, it’s prose; if they don’t, it’s poetry. This must be hard-wired into my brain because even if a few lines of a poem are quoted in a novel, my eyes skip those lines and jump straight to the nearest available bit of prose.
Shocking admission for an English graduate, but there you go. And hence I was a bit surprised this morning when a few fragments of a poem drifted unbidden into my head. Not any old poem either - a really rather difficult one.
I remember studying it at university and I really wonder if I understood it then as well as I think I do now. It seems to capture perfectly the peculiar depths of midwinter gloom. It also sums up how I’ve been feeling for the last few weeks. Hey, maybe John Donne merely suffered from SAD and needed some UV therapy…
So here we go. If you have a problem with poetry too, you are not alone. But read the first stanza at least. “The world’s whole sap is sunk / The general balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk” is a fantastic bit of writing.
Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day
being the shortest day
by John Donne‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world’s whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death - things which are not.All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.But I am by her death - which word wrongs her -
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.
A few weeks ago for some reason I kept thinking about The Owl Service by Alan Garner, a book I’d not read since I was at primary school. I used to have a boxed set containing that, Elidor, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and so on - long since lost.
I’m not generally a fan of fantasy and perhaps I liked this one of his books best because it’s grounded in reality - in some ways it’s just a cracking good ghost story. A girl called Alison on holiday in Wales hears scratching noises in the roof. When the housekeeper’s son investigates he finds a dinner service in the loft with a pattern that looks like flowers but Alison sees that they are really owls. She starts making paper models of the owls and very odd things begin to happen.
Browsing in a bookshop I spotted a single copy - the only Alan Garner book they had. So of course I had to get it. It was as good as I remembered but paradoxically it seemed to be rather devoid of the sexual jealousy between the three main characters that I’d remembered.
Then 
I discovered that it had been adapted for TV by Granada in 1969 - the first colour drama they ever made. There’s an excellent article on the making of the programme - scripted by Alan Garner himself - and all the owly coincidences that dogged (owled?) its making.
I’m pretty sure I never saw the TV series, but having watched the first two episodes on DVD I’m struck how it looks exactly like I pictured it in my head; and the sexual jealousy is all there again. Am going to ration myself the rest over the next few days like a box of chocolates.
“I could have been a Judge, but I never had the Latin for the judgin” - Peter Cook.
Well I did have a bit of Latin and I was thinking the other day of The Aeneid which I did for O-Level. It was the only thing that made it bearable; that and our Latin teacher shocking us all to bits by using the F-word to describe quite what it was that Dido and Aeneas were getting up to in that cave.
I was looking it up on Wikipedia just now and the entry on Dido - Queen of Carthage (as opposed to Dido - The Singer, presumably) has this amusing paragraph: (bear in mind that prior to this Aeneas has slung his hook with his fleet and Dido has impaled herself on his sword and indulged in a bit of self-immolation on the marital bed…)
During his journey in the underworld Aeneas meets Dido and tries to excuse himself, but Dido does not deign to look at him. Instead she turns away from Aeneas to a grove where her former husband Sychaeus waits. T. S. Eliot once called this “the most telling snub” in Western literature.
I was doing a bit of writing this evening and ended up at one point including the phrase ‘ee-ay-addio’ which had me wondering about its origins. Via Private Eye’s football reporter E I Addio, I ended up looking at football chants and then back to the nursery rhyme ‘The farmer in the dell’, where it comes from. The rhyme itself is alluded to in The Secret History by Donna Tartt (a book I love), and I’m pretty sure it’s referenced by Dennis Potter in The Singing Detective. It is also the source for the title of the book I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. For some reason I’ve been thinking about Robert Cormier recently, even though I’ve not read any of his books since I was a teenager. I went looking for any surviving Cormier books and found a long-forgotten copy of the screenplay to Jules et Jim. 
That and After the First Death are stacked up as the next books to read. And back at my writing - it’s a story about a computer - I finished a second draft, did a word count and discovered I had written 6502 words. The very first computer I used was my brother’s KIM-1, basically a development kit for the 6502 processor, and my introduction to computer programming was 6502 assembly language.
After a strangely satisfying day at work I feel like I’m on a roll. I’m reading a great book (thank you Sarah) - a Douglas Coupland that eluded me - Eleanor Rigby. Pretty much every page has a beautiful idea or joke - like the idea that the reason that the FBI witness relocation program is so successful is because anyone who goes on it gets shot. Genius!
And I’ve rediscovered a lost gem in my CD collection (thank you Smilja wherever you are) - Are You Okay? by Was (Not Was). It’s from 1990! It still sounds great! It has an up-tempo song that’s actually about domestic murder! It has Leonard Cohen singing about Elvis’s Rolls Royce! It has a song - oddly not heard on the radio much since 9/11 - called ‘I Blew Up The United States’! And I feel better than James Brown! I feel better now. How do you feel?
One of the unexpected pleasures of having young children who play rugby on a Sunday morning, is that one of the other dads just lent me Mark E Smith’s autobiography. I’m glad I didn’t shell out for the hard-back as it’s a slim volume, but I did chuckle at the things he had to say about the BBC and Johnny Cash.
They’re an odd bunch at the BBC. I remember having to meet these two media graduates just before they started filming that documentary… what a pair they were! One of them was this girl, a festival type, a Jo Whiley-ite. She’d just come back from some festival or other, and that was all she could talk about… First thing she did as she sat down was cross her legs as if she was about to do some fucking yoga - a modern hippy, in other words. I offered to buy her a drink but she’s like, ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly have another drink. I drank so much at this festival’… and she never made an effort to get her round in. What are they teaching them at the BBC?
I liked the way everyone started jumping on the Johnny Cash bandwagon as well. If you were a Cash fan in the 70s people thought you were a racist. Nobody admitted to it… I find it horrible the way they’ve made money out of him, releasing all these maudlin recordings. Give me early Cash any day… The film was a disgrace as well… Would you rather see Walk the Fucking Line with River Phoenix’s daft brother or Cash Live at San Quentin?
And just the odd beautiful turn of phrase:
You can bet some strange things go on behind the doors of the FA. They’re like a cult; a randy cult souped up on good wine, expensive fruit and nice clean sausages.
I saw this on the CBBC show Chute! By the end I was laughing out loud.
Here’s a good game… found on a blog called Never Judge A Book By Its Cover.
“Someone” [she doesn't say who] reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. It’s not the Big Read though — they don’t publish books, and they’ve only featured these books so far. In any event . . .
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 or less and force books upon them.
1. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
3. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
5. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
6. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
7. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
12. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
13. His Dark Materials (trilogy) - Philip Pullman
14. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
15. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
18. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
19. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm - George Orwell
25. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
27. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
28. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
30. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
32. Complete Works of Shakespeare
33. Ulysses - James Joyce
34. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
36. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
37. The Bible
38. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
40. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
41. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
46. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
48. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
49. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
51. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
53. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
54. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
55. Middlemarch - George Eliot
56. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
57. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
60. Emma - Jane Austen
61. Persuasion - Jane Austen
62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
64. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
65. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
67. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement - Ian McEwan
70. Dune - Frank Herbert
71. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
72. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
73. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
74. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
75. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
77. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
78. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
79. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
82. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
83. Dracula - Bram Stoker
84. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
85. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
86. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
87. Germinal - Emile Zola
88. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
89. Possession - A.S. Byatt
90. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
91. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
92. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
93. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
94. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
96. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
97. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
98. Watership Down – Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
100. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
So how did I do? Read 27 or 28, so a bit better than 6, piss-poor for an English graduate - and I only really loved 4 of them. Well, Hitch-Hiker’s Guide is a radio play not a novel, and The Wasp Factory isn’t Iain Banks’s best book, The Crow Road is, as any fule no.
Bit depressing. Of those four I loved, Donna Tartt is the one I’d fish out of the fire first. Man, can that woman write. She doesn’t write much - having made a career out of writing only two books in about 20 years - but she just puts you there like no-one else.
Today I was killing time while my sons had their swimming lesson. I walked around the outside of the pool with my daughter. As we got ready to go back inside I heard a man say to his young son “the Astra is basically Vauxhall’s version of the Focus”. And it’s at times like that that I think I know why Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
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