Wes

 Last night I found myself watching Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums again. I say 'again' but I hadn't seen it since I watched it, in a cinema, when it was released, all of 25 years ago. It was the first of his films I'd seen (I only caught up with Bottle Rocket and Rushmore later), and I remember being mightily impressed by the distinctive Wes Anderson style. Since then I've become more familiar with his tricks and mannerisms, that unmistakable look, but I still likes me a bit of Wes, and I greatly enjoyed watching The Royal Ts again, not least for its terrific ensemble cast – Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray, Gwyneth Paltrow, Danny Glover, Ben Stiller, Owen and Luke Wilson, all at their best. Two things struck me this time, one being the bookishness of the enterprise – it's framed as the reading of a physical book (as in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) and books are everywhere in the interior scenes (most noticeably Royal Tenenbaum's set of Encyclopaedia Britannica) – and the other being the music. The soundtrack is wonderful, featuring everything from Satie, Ravel and Enescu to the Beatles and Stones, Dylan, Paul Simon, Nick Drake, and – oh yes – Nico, a voice (if that is the word) that blasted me straight back to my youth. She features twice, with haunting songs written by the teenage Jackson Browne: 'The Fairest of the Season' and this... 

Time Well Spent

 Well, I am back, and it was a joy to see Gloucester cathedral again – if not the city of Gloucester, which is now, sadly, the very model of English urban degeneration, dereliction and decay. A sorry fate for a once fine town, and one that is all too common, thanks to terrible urban planning, bad architecture, drugs and 'welfare' dependency, among other things. But the cathedral – and indeed its close – that is a very different matter. Not only is it a building of quite staggering beauty – especially for those of us who love the architecture of the 14th and 15th century – it is also unusually well presented and accessible, offering the hugely rewarding experience of walking around the triforium and viewing the building from a height of something over 30ft, looking down into the nave and transepts, up at the amazing vaulting, and around at the complex structure of piers, buttresses and braces that give the building a strength belied by its airy grace. 
   The cathedral is famous for its vast and beautiful east window, known as the Crécy window, which is as large as a tennis court and was made, amazingly, at the time of the Black Death. When the second world war broke out, it was dismantled and all its thousands of pieces of glass were individually labelled and taken into safe storage in the cathedral crypt. Alas, when the war was over, it was discovered that the paper labels had come adrift from the pieces of glass, so there was no clue as to how the window was to be put together again – or rather, there was one clue: a coloured postcard of the window in all its glory. With this as their only pictorial reference, the craftsmen managed to reassemble the window exactly as it was. Two thoughts: if it had been the Germans dismantling a window such as this, every piece would have been meticulously catalogued, photographed and numbered, and there would have been no chance of anything going wrong. And, if the window had to be taken apart today, it would likely take months just to get authorisation to put up the scaffolding. Another of the ever growing number of things that we could not do today. 
   Anyway, there was also some walking, this over the border in Herefordshire, where we walked (in the morning, before the heat became intolerable) uphill from Ross-on-Wye to Brampton Abbotts – locked church, wonderful panoramic views – then down to the river and back into town, where an old friend of mine joined us for lunch at a riverside pub and a stroll around the rather delightful town. This was all time well spent – and there were butterflies galore on the morning walk: abundance of peacocks and red admirals, meadow browns and gatekeepers, with commas and painted ladies, clouds of whites, and, near the end of the morning walk, a single clouded yellow, flying busily past, as they always do – my first (on this side of the channel) in several years.      

Gloucester and Gwynn

 Early tomorrow I'm heading for Gloucester for a couple of days' walking (or not) with my walking friends. Gloucester is very high on my list of favourite cathedrals, so I'm looking forward to seeing it again after too many years. I'm travelling by train, so, knowing my luck, I'll probably end up in Tamworth again...
   Meanwhile, here is another by R.S. Gwynn – a perfect Petrarchan sonnet about a woman with the most difficult job in the business.

God's Secretary

Her e-mail inbox always overflows.   

Her outbox doesn’t get much use at all.   

She puts on hold the umpteen-billionth call   

As music oozes forth to placate those   

Who wait, then disconnect. Outside, wind blows,   

Scything pale leaves. She sees a sparrow fall   

Fluttering to a claw-catch on a wall.   

Will He be in today? God only knows.   

She hasn’t seen His face—He’s so aloof.   

She’s long resigned He’ll never know or love her   

But still can wish there were some call, some proof   

That He requires a greater service of her.   

Fingers of rain now drum upon the roof,   

Coming from somewhere, somewhere far above her.   

Unsuspected Kindness

 On today's Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp writes of the 'unsuspected kindness' of which, happily, the world still has abundant supply. He leads up to the subject by way of an anecdote about an exemplary act of kindness – of Christian charity – by that great poet and man, George Herbert, as recounted in Walton's life of Herbert, and turned into poetry by R.S. Gwynn, in a fine poem, 'Music at Midnight'. I must confess I had never heard of R.S. Gwynn, an American poet and anthologist who is, according to Wikipedia, 'associated with New Formalism', which is generally a good sign. He is, according to Dana Gioia, 'an effortless master of verse forms', and he seems to have a way with humorous and 'light verse'. Here is one, a paraphrase of Hopkins, that actually had me laughing out loud –

Fried Beauty

Glory be to God for breaded things—

   Catfish, steak finger, pork chop, chicken thigh,

         Sliced green tomatoes, pots full to the brim

With french fries, fritters, life-float onion rings,

    Hushpuppies, okra golden to the eye,

            That in all oils, corn or canola, swim

Toward mastication’s maw (O molared mouth!);

    Whatever browns, is dumped to drain and dry

             On paper towels’ sleek translucent scrim,

These greasy, battered bounties of the South:

                            Eat them.

   As for unsuspected kindness, Mrs Nige, who has similar mobility problems to Patrick, is often pleasantly surprised by the kindness of strangers, even in that wicked city, London. Here in the city of philosophers, of course, the milk of human kindness flows abundantly in every soul. 

This and That, Not Including London

 Well, I didn't make it to London on Friday. The Euston train got no further than Milton Keynes (of largely evil memory), where damage to overhead cables up ahead had ended all serious possibility of getting to London, short of limping in very late, packed into a cattle-truck train and with no guarantee of a smooth return. After almost an hour amid milling crowds on that depressing station, I found an escape route – northwards, back the way I had come. I would get off at Tamworth, a stop before Lichfield, and take a look around the newly reopened castle. This should have been straightforward, but at Rugby (of entirely evil memory), the train ground to a halt for half an hour and more, thanks to a broken-down train ahead. By the time I 'alighted at' Tamworth, I was fast losing the will to live, but I made my way to the castle, paid the entrance fee, and climbed to the entrance (the castle was built on a pretty impressive motte). From Norman to Victorian, with something of every period between, the building – or rather buildings – has plenty of architectural interest, and the interiors, more or less convincingly reconstructed, reflect the range of periods. It's a castle that was lived in continuously from medieval to Victorian times, so is a good deal more interesting than some castles I have dutifully trudged around. The whole thing is, as one would expect these days, very child-friendly and interactive, but I made my studious way along the prescribed tour route, unmoved by the opportunity to dress up as a Marmion knight or test the weight of a broadsword. I even made it to the top of the tower, from where the views are impressively wide. This experience, followed by a stroll around the more agreeable parts of Tamworth, almost made up for the earlier ordeal by railway. 
  The upside of all those hours on trains and stations was the opportunity it afforded of getting on with my reading. I had with me a volume I'd picked up on the bookstall outside the Samuel Johnson House – a novel called Max Gate, by a New Zealand writer I'd never heard of, Damien Wilkins. As the title suggests, the action is set in the hideous house that Thomas Hardy built for himself in Dorchester. The narrator is a housemaid, Nellie Titterington, looking back on her time at Max Gate in the winter of 1928, when the great man lay dying. It's a fascinating and convincing reconstruction of the gloomy, claustrophobic Hardy ménage, and I'm looking forward to reading on. No doubt I shall return to this one. Meanwhile, having finally done with Carlyle's French Revolution, I have new bedside reading, in the form of a book recommended by a friend, Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets by Donald Hall. The first essay, on Robert Frost, is a splendidly incisive, but sympathetic and fair, portrait of that deeply flawed, often deeply unpleasant genius. The title of the book, by the way, comes from Yeats's Lapis Lazuli:
There, on the mountains and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient glittering eyes, are gay.

Sanders

 I'm off to London today, so here's a post from some years back, in which I marked the July 3rd birthday of the actor George Sanders...

Born on this day in 1906 – in St Petersburg, whence his family wisely returned to England in 1917 – was the actor George Sanders. With his good looks and crisp, sonorous upper-crust voice, he became the man for playing debonair, louche, more or less depraved English aristo types – most memorably Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Jack Favell in Rebecca and Addison deWitt in All About Eve. He was a commanding presence on screen, even if he was mostly doing little more than playing himself (though he can hardly be accused of that in his classic voicing of Shere Khan in The Jungle Book).
  The tenor of Sanders's personal life may be judged from the fact that he called his autobiography Memoirs of a Professional Cad, and suggested the title A Dreadful Man for his biography (written by his friend Brian Aherne). He managed to marry not only the ineffable Zsa Zsa Gabor but also, some years later, her sister Magda – a marriage that lasted just six weeks and drove Sanders even further into drink. His end was sad. Threatened by dementia and failing health, Sanders decided to give up the unequal struggle, finally killing himself with a massive overdose of Nembutal in a hotel room in a small coastal town near Barcelona. He left behind a message addressed to 'Dear World': 'I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good Luck.' He was 65 – the precise age at which, according to his pal David Niven, he predicted that he would kill himself.
  But what of the real George Sanders? As ever, we turn to the authoritative Me Cheeta, where the index entries are not promising, all listed under 'Sanders, George, caddishness of'. However, Cheeta's few encounters with Sanders seem to have left a reasonably favourable impression. The two were introduced at a notably starry private screening of Tarzan and His Mate (the one in which Maureen O'Sullivan takes a very saucy swim). 'Cheetah, my deah,' says George. 'If you're anything like me, you'll find it absolutely excruciating to watch yourself on screen. I should leave before those terrible monstahs turn against you and skin you alive. It's not going to shit on me, is it, Maureen?'
  Hmm. On a more exalted level, it's an intriguing thought that the boy Sanders would have been walking the streets of St Petersburg at the same time as the teenage Nabokov*. I wonder if their paths ever crossed – either then or later, when both lived in Switzerland. Sanders might have made rather a good job of Clare Quilty in the Lolita film...

* and the young Eric Knight, author of Lassie Come Home, whose mother was a governess to the Imperial family.
  

O Canada

 July already, and my late mother's birthday (she'd have been 105 today) – and it's Canada Day, marking the anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, formed on this day in 1867.
It was on Canada Day in 1980 that 'O Canada' became the country's official national anthem (and one of the best). Here is the one and only k d lang performing it –

And here she is again, referencing 'O Canada' in one of the most beautiful recordings she ever made – her cover of Joni Mitchell's 'A Case of You'...