rivverrun past Eve and Adam's...

Here's a surprising story from far Cathay - they're lapping up a Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake (can it really be translated?). Not everyone is impressed though, a state-approved professor declaring that 'Joyce must have been mentally ill to create such a novel', while author Li Jie says sales of Finnegans Wake are being 'pushed by a current of unprecedented vanity'. He may well be right; FW might be a book for having on your shelves rather than reading, or attempting to read.
  I blush to recall that when I attended my admission interview at an august seat of learning, I boldly lied that I had read Finnegans Wake all through. I had in fact read parts of Anthony Burgess's short version, and reasoned that there was no way I could be cross-questioned on this, as plainly my interviewers hadn't read it either. This was not the only farcical element of an interview in which at one point I found myself arguing in favour of armed revolution (I felt like Miranda in one of those moments when she turns to the camera in helpless bewilderment, unable to believe what is coming out of her mouth). Instead of picking me up by the scruff of my neck and the seat of my trousers and chucking me out, the fools let me in.

Nursery Talk

This story about the dire consequences of the British 'stiff upper lip' - or rather a British combination of embarrassment, fatalism and not wanting to make a fuss - is probably, like most such stories, nonsense (the counter-example of Denmark would seem to suggest as much). But of course it has attracted much media coverage, and was discussed at some length on the radio this morning. (In the course of this discussion I was interested, if hardly surprised, to learn that, of all those self-testing bowel cancer kits sent out to everyone as they turn 60, barely half come back.) One of those taking part in the 'stiff upper lip' discussion, and supporting the case, was A Doctor (I didn't catch his name), whose ringing conclusion was that we must overcome the taboo that surrounds matters of 'blood and bottoms and poo'... 'Poo' eh? Now there's a man not afraid to break taboos and call a spade a spade.
Alas, this nursery euphemism, until recently the preserve of toddlers and young children, is now universal, to the point where it's rare to hear the stuff called anything else. Even in otherwise grown-up science programmes, even in the magisterial wildlife films of David Attenborough and co, 'poo' is always the word. 'Wee', I suspect, is fast catching up, with who knows what other infantile terms to follow. I suspect our plainer-speaking friends across the Atlantic must be mystified by it all...

Mature Attitude

The film star Victor Mature (his real name, improbably enough) was born on this day 100 years ago. Like many of his war-straddling generation - and almost none of today's stars - he never took acting (or himself) very seriously. 'I was never that crazy about acting,' he said, after he'd more or less given it up. 'I had a compulsion to earn money, not to act. So I worked as an actor until I could afford to retire. I wanted to quit while I could still enjoy life... I like to loaf. Everyone told me I would go crazy or die if I quit working. Yeah? Well what a lovely way to die.' In fact he enjoyed a full 20 years of loafing after his last film.
Many years ago I had the strange experience of watching Mature in Samson and Delilah, opposite Hedy Lamarr, in a cinema in Split (Spoleto), with Serbo-Croat subtitles. This was the film about which Groucho Marx famously uttered words to the effect that he couldn't take an interest in a movie where the leading man's bosom was larger than the leading lady's. Harsh, but not far short of the truth...
You have to warm to a man who, when refused membership of an up-market country club on the grounds that he was an actor, protested 'I'm not an actor - and I've got 64 films to prove it!' They don't make them like that any more.

Mark Doty: Tenderness and Style

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon is the title of a painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem (above)  that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York - or rather it was the title; it was recently changed to Still Life with a Glass and Oysters, ignoring that glorious curl of lemon. But it still the title of a rather wonderful slim volume - a long essay really - by the American poet Mark Doty, which I've just read. 

Doty's small book begins with an encounter with De Heem's painting and takes off into a heartfelt meditation on our attachment to things, their place in our lives. Doty's brilliant analysis of the power of the Dutch still life interweaves with scenes - and objects - from his own life, from the red-and-white-spiral mints that his grandmother always carried, to memories of his wife's mother and her house (it was an early, doomed marriage), rummaging and collecting with his late partner (death is ever present here), things seen and picked up, things that stayed in his life, others that were lost... He finds in the Dutch still life a celebration of abundance, of the pleasures of the senses, the fall of light on objects, their Presence, their Thisness. The most commonplace things are intensely seen and celebrated for their own sake, as in Adriean Coorte's Still Life with Asparagus, which is simply a bunch of asparagus painted with meticulous attention, against a brown darkness, the bundled stalks brought (or restored) to the fullness of their being by the act of concentrated attention. 

Towards the end of his essay, Doty ponders the relationship between painting and poetry, seeing both as essentially unparaphrasable; they can only exist as they are, in the form they are in. Whatever he says about a painting will always fall short, will always miss an element of mystery - its 'poetry'. Part of that poetry, Doty concludes in his beautiful closing sentences, is 'the inner life of the dead, held in suspension. It is still visible to us; you can look at the paintings and you can feel it. This is evidence that a long act of seeing might translate into something permanent, both of ourselves and curiously impersonal, sturdy, useful.

  Of what use, exactly? As advocates of intimacy, as embodiments of paradox, as witnesses to earth, here, this moment, now. Evidence, thus, that tenderness and style are still the best gestures we can make in the face of death.'

Beetle

I spotted a couple of these little beauties sporting their lustrous metallic sheen on a lavender plant today. Very striking they are - and, unfortunately, pretty deadly to lavender, rosemary, sage and various other plants. The Rosemary Beetle (or Lavender Beetle) was first seen in the UK in 1994, but it really took off around 2003. A fast breeder with no predators to stand in its way, it's now spread across the whole of Southern England and is advancing northward, its larvae chomping their ways through all those tasty plants. And if the beetles are out and about already, just after a bitter cold snap, they are clearly a force to be reckoned with.

Thrushes, Darkling and Otherwise

Sad news today about that fine bird, the Mistle Thrush - though I must say that, like many such reports from the RSPB, it rather contradicts my own experience. Down my way, the Mistle has never been much of a garden bird, preferring the tall trees and open spaces of the many parks with which my southern suburban demiparadise is blessed. When I was growing up (in the same demiparadise), the Song Thrush was a common garden bird, and it is certainly much less common now, though I see more than I used to ten years ago. I still see pretty much the same number of Mistle Thrushes as I ever did - a fine pair unusually close only the other day in one of the parks. As for the Starling - in steep decline according to the RSPB - I haven't seen so many in years as I've seen this winter. They are recovering very strongly down my day, and on these cold days I'm seeing far more Starlings than anything else. But back to the Mistle Thrush - I wonder if Hardy's Darkling Thrush was a Mistle? It sings pretty much all year round and in the grimmest circumstances (hence its other name, Stormcock). Hardy would have known of course, but he doesn't say. Here's the poem, in which Hardy, inspired by nothing more than a thrush's song, almost lapses into optimism...

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-gray,

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be

The Century’s corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited ;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

The Joy of Soda

The old-fashioned soda siphon was a thing of beauty. Elegantly shaped, made of impressively thick and heavy glass - engraved with fancy patterns and the maker's name - it used to be a fixture in every drinks cabinet and on every bar (not to mention essential kit for soda fights at the Drones Club). In my boyhood I thought it a very wonderful thing, partly because of the huge deposit payable and reclaimable (recycling paid then) - if you happened to come across an empty soda siphon and took it to the off licence, you would be handsomely rewarded. And if you got the chance to use the thing - what larks! A press of the lever and that sudden exciting gush of fizzy water... (We made our own amusements in those days.)
But the classic soda siphon has long been a thing of the past. Pubs now squirt fizzy water from multifunction bar hoses, and those of us who like a splash of soda in our whisky or brandy when drinking at home have to make do with the bottled stuff, which invariably goes flat long before it's finished. Or so I thought, until - clapping my hand to my brow - I realised that I could just buy a soda siphon online. Not the elegant glass artefact of old, but a serviceable siphon nonetheless, squirting fresh fizzing soda every time. I bought myself one recently - black it is - and it's become one of my life's little pleasures. Once I'd given up on the wholly impenetrable instructions for putting the thing together - even the pictures made no sense - I soon had it working, and it's never let me down since. It stays full of fizz to the last squirt, and when it runs out it's the work of a moment to refill it, screw in a new metal slug of CO2 and start again.
Jeeves - my usual B & S, if you would!