Wet Wet Wet

 I don't like to boast, but yesterday Lichfield, according to the Met Office, was the wettest place in the country, with 52.8mm of rain – that's two inches in the old money – falling in a four-hour period in the morning. I can't say I'm surprised: the weather was spectacular, with fierce vertical rain, lurid sheet lightning, earth-shaking thunder, and the lower-lying parts of Beacon Park under water. And that morning onslaught wasn't the end of it – back it came in the evening, as dramatic as before, clocking up (according to a local weather station) another 41mm. So that's the best part of four inches in 24 hours, and the drought of the past two months is well and truly over, putting an end to reckless talk of 'another 1976', and greening up the wilting vegetation. The garden is looking wonderfully refreshed, and the birds will be glad to have worms and snails on the menu again. 

Also

I've just realised that today is the 450th anniversary of the death of the greatest of all Venetian painters, if not of all painters – Tiziano Vecello, aka Titian. 

Forester

 Born on this day in 1899 (in Cairo, under the name Cecil Smith) was C.S. Forester, a novelist of a kind that was common enough in his day but now much rarer – a fine storyteller, a prolific, versatile and more than competent writer, producing entertaining high-quality fiction with wide appeal. His Hornblower novels prefigured Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, and two of his works, The African Queen and The Good Shepherd, were successfully filmed. Like Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse, he was educated as Dulwich College, and, like them, spent much time in the United States (where Forester worked during the war for the British Ministry of Information). He achieved sufficient fame to appear on an episode of You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx, in 1956, and during the war he met the young Roald Dahl and encouraged him to take up writing (we'll forgive him for that). 
  The Hornblower novels proved so popular that he ended up writing ten of them, between 1937 and 1962. I dipped into them (and others of Forester's works) as a boy. My father was a big fan, and my brother still is. Indeed, he was inspired by the Hornblower novel Flying Colours to make a rowing expedition on the river Loire – and to write a book about it: here's the link.

'A later artist, Tintoretto, also did his paintings here...'

Recently Johnson's ballad parody, 'I put my hat upon my head', turned up on this blog, apropos Marianne Moore's tin ear for meter. Browsing last night in a recent charity-shop purchase, The New Oxford Book of Light Verse – edited by Kingsley Amis – I came across it again, sandwiched between two other Johnson parodies. I particularly like the last one...

Epigram

If a man who turnips cries
Cry not when his father dies,
Is it not a proof he'd rather
Have a turnip than his father?

(from Burlesque of Lines by Lope de Vega)

Ballad

I put my hat upon my head
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand.

(from Parodies of 'The Hermit of Warkworth')

Idyll

Hermit hoar, in solemn cell,
Wearing out life's evening grey,
Strike thy bosom, Sage, and tell
What is bliss, and which the way.

Thus I spoke, and speaking sighed,
Scarce repressed the starting tear,
When the hoary sage replied,
'Come, my lad, and drink some beer.'

(from Parody of Thomas Warton)
Thomas Warton, who became poet laureate in the year after Johnson's death, was best known for an early work, The Pleasures of Melancholy. 

From the same anthology, I also enjoyed this one, in which John Betjeman applies the plodding Hiawatha meter to La Serenissima...

Longfellow's Visit to Venice
(To be read in a quiet New England accent)

Near the celebrated Lido where the breeze is fresh and free
Stands the ancient port of Venice called the City of the Sea

All its streets are made of water, all its homes are brick and stone
Yet it has a picturesqueness which is justly all its own

Here for centuries have artists come to see the vistas quaint
Here Bellini set his easel, herе he taught his School to paint

Here thе youthful Giorgione gazed upon the domes and towers
And interpreted his era in a way which pleases ours

A later artist, Tintoretto, also did his paintings here
Massive works which generations have continued to revere

Still to-day come modern artists to portray the buildings fair
And their pictures may be purchased on San Marco's famous Square

When the bell notes from the belfries and the campaniles chime
Still to-day we find Venetians elegantly killing time

In their gilded old palazzos, while the music in our ears
Is the distant band at Florians mixed with songs of gondoliers

Thus the New World meets the Old World and the sentiments expressed
Are melodiously mingled in my warm New England breast.

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Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits

At least three literary birthdays today – Max Beerbohm (born 1872, a birthday I've marked more than once on this blog), Jean Rhys (born 1890, on the Caribbean island of Dominica) and Jorge Luis Borges, mentioned here the other day as a literary librarian. His library career took an interesting turn in 1946, when the dictator Perón got him dismissed from his post as a municipal librarian in Buenos Aires and 'reassigned' as an inspector of poultry and rabbits at public markets. This calculated insult was a punishment for his and his family's vocal opposition to Peronism, and Borges did not endure it for long. After Perón was ousted, Borges was appointed director of the National Library, a post he held until he resigned in disgust when Perón returned from exile in 1973.  

Busy

 Busy times, with much family activity, but I did manage to get away for a day's walking in the Cotswolds with my brother and friends, in the course of which I revisited the monument to the Bray children in Great Barrington church  – 'one of the finest in England,' in Mrs Esdaile's estimation (it features in this book, pp175-7). Unfortunately the long, difficult journey back from deepest Gloucestershire left me too exhausted yesterday to post my usual after-walk report. 
  Also contributing to the busyness is a small pile of books on death, ageing and longevity that I'm reading for review. Talking of ageing, here's Kay Ryan – 

As some people age they kinden.
The apertures of their eyes widen.
I do not think they weaken;
I think something weak strengthens
until they are more and more it,
like letting in heaven.
But other people are mussels or clams, frightened.
Steam or knife blades mean open.
They hear heaven, they think boiled or broken. 

Librarians

 As a former librarian, I am always keen to learn of writers, artists and musicians vastly more illustrious than me who also worked as librarians at some point in their lives. So far, my list includes Proust (who took a job as a volunteer librarian, to please his father, but hardly ever turned up for work), Marcel Duchamp (who worked briefly as a librarian, to free his mind for other things), Borges of course (director of the National Library of Argentina for 18 years), Marianne Moore (library assistant at the New York Public Library's Hudson Park branch during the 1920s), Hector Berlioz (librarian at the Paris Conservatoire), Philip Larkin of course (university librarian at Hull), Anne Tyler (assistant librarian at McGill University Law School) and Angus Wilson (British Museum Library, as it then was, before and after the war). Has anybody got any more names to add to the list?
   And then, of course, there is Keith Richards, bibliophile extraordinaire, who spent many happy boyhood hours in Dartford public library, was fascinated by the Dewey decimal system, and might well have been a librarian if his career hadn't taken a somewhat different path. In 1998 he suffered the least rock'n'roll accident that ever befell a rock god, when he fell off his library steps while reaching for a book, breaking three ribs and puncturing a lung. You can read about it here (and follow the link, if you can, to one of the most curious books in my own library).