More Samper

 Having had to do some rather heavy-duty intensive reading lately – those bird books and The Maias, among other things – I found myself in need of some light relief, preferably comic. Happily I had just spotted another novel by James Hamilton-Paterson, whose Cooking with Fernet-Branca had me laughing immoderately last year. The one I'm reading now is called Amazing Disgrace and turns out to be a sequel to Cooking with Fernet Branca, featuring the further exploits of that great comic character, the appalling Gerald Samper. This time he has been commissioned to ghost-write the autobiography of one Millie Cleat, one-armed sailor (she lost it to a shark) and national treasure, whose solo round-the-world voyage has made her the toast of Britain. The project is, of course, giving Samper much grief, and he is desperate to get out of writing the sequel, which will be devoted to Millie's 'spiritual side'. What he really wants is to write the memoirs of the celebrated conductor Max Christ (short 'i', mercifully), but he seems to have blown his chances of that, in truly spectacular (and laugh-aloud funny) style. Meanwhile, Samper is rashly trying out some tablets of Chinese origin called Pow-r-TabsTM which promise great things in the trouser department – and Nandy, the addle-pated boy-band leader last seen in Cooking with Fernet-Branca is back, wanting Gerald to write his memoirs...
  This is a sequel that is every bit as funny as the original – and I've just spotted yet a third entry in the Samper saga, with the promising title Rancid Pansies. I've bought it to keep in reserve for when I next have need of a cheering dose of top-quality comic fiction.

Olympic Park, Garden, Petroc

 Yesterday I was on an uncharacteristically urban walk, down in 'that Lunnun', as we provincial hicks call it. The walk began at Stratford (definitely not Upon Avon) station, and started amid the retail hell that spreads for some way beyond it. With that behind us, things became more architectural, with many new or newish 'statement' buildings, some of them left over from the 2012 Olympics – the velodrome by far the best, the actual stadium oddly anticlimactic, the exploded helter-skelter known as the Orbit Tower as hideous as ever. The post-Olympic buildings somehow gave the effect of being architects' models or 3-D simulations – or architectural drawings, making us feel like the shadowy generic figures that saunter about in those, lightly touched-in in gouache. However, the best of this part of the walk was not the buildings but the created landscapes of the Olympic Park, most of which have been superbly well done, particularly those around the cleaned-up and beautified River Lea, and will probably look even better in a decade or two, when the whole thing has matured and settled in, and even those buildings might feel more real. 
  Things did get more real later – not always in a good way – as we passed through the achingly hip, graffiti-covered streets of Hackney Wick, now a haunt of 'artists', among other poseurs. However, all ended well – indeed triumphantly – when, to our surprise, we found Hawksmoor's great church of St Anne, Limehouse, open. The interior is a typical masterclass in the management of space and volume (with nothing numinous about it), while the exterior is a grand demonstration of  Hawksmoor's uniquely fantastic imagination. This was ending on a high note...

Back home, I found that, in my mere two days' absence, things in the garden had accelerated, with new flowers blooming everywhere, buds bursting open and tender leaflets emerging, intensifying the vernal green. There is nothing like this time of year in England, when the sun is out and the weather mild (see Browning 'Home Thoughts from Abroad'). 

Sadly, this morning the great Petroc Trelawny presented his last Radio 3 breakfast show. Ever since I gave up on Radio 4's dismal Today programme and turned to 3, thereby vastly improving my life, I've found Petroc's show the perfect thing to wake to, easing me beautifully into the day. And his roving reports from various parts of the country (and beyond) were superbly presented. As for his altogether extraordinary Auschwitz programme... well, I wrote about that briefly at the time. Petroc is moving to the early evening programme, In Tune, but my mornings – and those of many others – will never be the same again. He will be sorely missed. 

Birds

Here's a round-up of recent bird books, my latest contribution to Literary Review (where it appears on slightly different form). As ever, I urge you to buy the magazine – it's simply the best...

Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin’s Strangest Idea By Matt Ridley (4th Estate 340pp £25)
Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood By Adam Nicolson (Collins 448pp £22)
The Great Auk: Its Extraordinary Life, Hideous Death and Mysterious Afterlife By Tim Birkhead (Bloomsbury Sigma 288pp £20)

 Here are three very different books about birds by three of our finest writers on nature and science. Matt Ridley’s is the most ambitious and wide-ranging, exploring the implications of ‘Charles Darwin’s strangest idea’ – that evolution is driven not only by natural selection but also by sexual selection. It’s an idea that has faced opposition from Darwin’s time down to our own, perhaps because it involves female choice, perhaps because it seems to dilute the purity of the all-embracing theory of natural selection. Alfred Russel Wallace dismissed it entirely, and it was attacked by generations of naturalists ever after, but for Darwin himself, after The Origin of Species, it was a subject of much more interest than natural selection, which, as Ridley points out, takes a back seat in The Descent of Man.
   Birds, Sex and Beauty begins before dawn somewhere on the Pennines, where the author is watching the extraordinary spectacle of a black grouse lek, a loud and lively gathering of male birds who, for eight months of the year, gather daily to strut their stuff, displaying their spectacular black, white and red plumage and scrapping with each other. Most of the time, this goes on in the total absence of females, but when the hens do arrive one cock will eventually get nearly all the sex, enjoying his two seconds of ecstasy with a succession of eager hens. Why, asks Ridley, do the male birds go to such bizarre, exhausting lengths? And why do their displays, like those of many other birds, notably peacocks and birds of paradise, seem beautiful to us (and, presumably, to susceptible hen birds)? What is going on in a black grouse lek is not an Arthurian tournament where the victor in combat wins the favour of the fair damsel, though that mistaken idea dies hard: Ridley calls out David Attenborough himself for promulgating it. Fights on the lek are not serious, and winners gain no status. No, something else is going on – something to do with beauty, something that has implications far beyond the world of birds.
  Female choice has triggered ‘runaway’ effects in male plumage and display, a circular process whereby ‘taste for beauty creates beauty which creates taste for beauty’. And female choice has done much more than that, as the heading of one of Ridley’s chapters suggests: ‘How Mate Choice Shaped the Human Mind’. The phenomenal growth of the human brain and human abilities might well have served the aim of seduction, and art could be seen as a ‘sexual display signalling system’. The line between instinct and culture, nature and nurture is blurred when culture can drive genetic change. Ridley’s book – written with a pleasingly light touch, larded with literary quotations (more beauty) and illustrated with excellent colour photographs – is illuminating, incisive and a pleasure to read.
 Every bit as enjoyable is Bird School, in which Adam Nicolson embarks on ‘an attempt to encounter birds, to engage with a whole and marvellous layer of life that I had lived with in a kind of blindness and deafness for decades’. He claims that ‘I had never paid much attention to birds’ – except, of course, seabirds, about which he wrote the classic The Seabird’s Cry. On land – on his own land, the Sussex farm on which he lives – he sets about immersing himself in its bird life by building a rather wonderful hide, a hexagonal shed on stilts, built to be accommodating to birds as well as humans, and placed in the midst of the birds’ world, on the margin of a wood and a field. Here he observes what is going on and writes about it, with typical elegance and rich descriptive power, focusing in each chapter on one bird and the theme it embodies – ‘Wrens: Surviving’, ‘Songbirds: Proclaiming’, ‘Robins: Occupying’, etc.
  This is a fruitful approach, enabling Nicolson to move easily between the particular and the general. In the chapter on songbirds, for example, he listens to a blackbird heralding the start of the dawn chorus, tells how a songbird identification app has transformed his relationship with birds, discovers that the order in which birds start singing is dictated by eye size (the bigger the eye, the earlier the start), describes the effects of light and sound pollution on birdsong, and ponders the various reasons why birds greet the day with song. And sex rears its Darwinian head again: Nicolson cites research that found that ‘starting early was sexy for blue tits’, as it demonstrates experience and virility.

 Bird School is a pleasing blend of lyrical description, exploratory thought, first-hand experience, research findings, and references to literature and music. Nicolson writes beautifully, with infectious joy in his subject, and the book flows effortlessly along. It ends with a chapter in which he ponders the subject of rewilding, and describes his own plans for his farm – not rewilding but what he calls ‘reculturing’, a kind of mending of the landscape, allowing ‘the ancient connection between human use and animal and plant life to re-establish themselves’ in patterns what were lost in the century of intensive agriculture. After the final chapter comes a ‘roll-call’ of the birds on Nicolson’s patch, vivid verbal sketches of each bird, with the basic facts of its life.

  The Great Auk by Tim Birkhead, author of that wonderful book on birds’ eggs, The Most Perfect Thing, tells the story of a truly iconic bird, the large, flightless northern seabird that became extinct before the 19th century was half over. As the subtitle says, the great auk’s life was indeed extraordinary, its death hideous, and its afterlife mysterious. A bird that was revered and totemic in the deep past, it became the first species to be driven to extinction by human activity – wholesale slaughter, which began as soon as Europeans first happened upon the bird in its huge, wholly defenceless island colonies. Now all that remains of it is in the form of ornithological relics – eggs, skins, stuffed specimens and bones, all of which command sky-high prices if they come on the market. Birkhead’s book begins with a chapter titled Funk Heaven, imagining the life of a great auk colony on Funk Island, off Newfoundland. Then, sadly, comes Funk Hell, beginning with the appearance of the first European explorers and developing into a terrible tale of carnage.
  Later, long after the poor bird’s extinction, the story is largely one of obsessive collectors fighting over great auk relics, especially the eggs, several of which have gone mysteriously missing. Birkhead introduces the extraordinary figure of Vivian Hewitt, one-time playboy and aviator, who ended up living in seclusion in Cornwall with the ‘housekeeper’ whose four children he may well have fathered himself. He also became an obsessive egg collector, at one time owning 13 of the surviving great auk eggs. Hewitt is the dominant personality in a rogues’ gallery of strange, driven collectors who feature in this fascinating page-turner of a book. And, interestingly, Birkhead suggests that Darwin could have used extreme collecting ‘as a metaphor for sexual selection’. So there we are – back to sex again.

'As sure as there is a Space infinite...'

And here's something to raise the tone...
  I heard this piece on Radio 3 the other morning and it brought me up short, the more so when I learned it was written by Gavin Bryars, a composer perhaps best known for the chanson trouvé 'Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet', and for co-founding the gloriously inept Portsmouth Sinfonietta. It's from The Fifth Century, Bryars' setting of words from the fifth of Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditations. The text set here is 'As sure as there is a Space infinite, there is a Power, a Bounty, a Goodness, a Wisdom infinite, a Treasure, a Blessedness, a Glory...' Here is the link – 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3210dgdT-_0

  Staying with music, today is the anniversary of the birth (in 1866) of the great Italian pianist, composer, teacher and transcriber Feruccio Busoni. I first discovered him through his Bach transcriptions, and the greatest, most monumental of these is surely the magnificent Chaconne in D minor. Today I came across a recording of Michelangeli playing this masterpiece live. It's a lush, virtuosic performance, very much in the 'romantic' manner, but I'm sure Busoni would have approved – and I think Bach would have too...

As the Actress Said...

Here's something to lower the tone.
  The phrase 'As the actress said to the bishop' is still just about extant (on this side of the pond), employed to draw attention to a double entendre. A slightly naff expression, it was a favourite of Ricky Gervais's David Brent in The Office. But where did it originate? I hear you ask wearily. Well, it has an origin story, which may or may not be true, but it certainly made me laugh, so I pass it on...
  It seems the actress, socialite and alleged royal mistress Lillie Langtry was a guest at a country house party, where one of her fellow guests was a bishop. While they were strolling together in the rose garden, the bishop had the misfortune to prick his thumb. Later that day, at dinner Miss Langtry inquired of the bishop, 'How is you prick?' 'Throbbing,' he replied, causing the butler to drop a tureen of potatoes. 

[This reminded me of Arthur Marshall's account of Clemence Dane's unfortunate turns of phrase.]

Rembrandt in Birmingham

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of prints on loan from the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam  – 58 of them in total, nearly all etchings. I was there yesterday, and would urge anyone with an interest in Rembrandt and in etching to visit if you can. There are portraits and self-portraits, landscapes, biblical subjects, genre scenes, studies and sketches, and there are even a few of the original copper plates – also, helpfully, a video explanation of the technique of etching and a display of etching tools and materials. Each of the prints, from the tiniest sketches to the larger, more finished works, is worth a close look, and the museum helpfully provides magnifying glasses so that even the most delicate lines and marks can be examined. The skill with which they are made, and the punch the best of them pack, seem almost miraculous. Looking intently at these works was both richly satisfying and  borderline exhausting, but it left me more convinced than ever that Rembrandt is either the greatest artist there ever was, or the equal of any other contender for that title. This touring exhibition is on until June 1st, and is going nowhere else in the the UK, so catch it if you can.   

As well as the Rembrandts – supplemented by a few of his etchings from the museum's own collection – there is a small display of prints by two West Midlands artists: Raymond Cowern (1913-86), a fine etcher, painter and illustrator, and Harry Eccleston (1923-2010), whose engraving skills were such that he became the Bank of England's first in-house artist-designer, creating the first pictorial British bank-notes (Newton, Wellington, Shakespeare, Wren and Florence Nightingale). Both men were products of Birmingham School of Art. 

From the French

 There are reports of a poetry revival in France, with book sales even of new poetry surging. This is being interpreted as a response to troubled and uncertain times, poetry offering a kind of solace or escape – which sounds plausible enough, though it's hard to see a poetry revival happening in this country any time soon. If it does, those in quest of solace will more likely be looking for it in the poetry of the past than of the present. 
  Anyway, I reckon it's time for a poem, so let's go for a French one – in translation, of course.
Richard Wilbur was a great translator from the French. His Molière translations are regarded as the gold standard – but here is something on a smaller scale, a sonnet translated from Stephane Mallarmé (who, like many French littérateurs, took Edgar Allan Poe very seriously)... 

The Tomb of Edgar Poe

Changed by eternity to Himself at last,
The Poet, with the bare blade of his mind,
Thrusts at a century which had not divined
Death's victory in his voice, and is aghast.

Aroused like some vile hydra of the past
When an angel proffered pure words to mankind,
Men swore that drunken squalor lay behind
His magic potions and the spells he cast.

The wars of earth and heaven — O endless grief!
If we cannot sculpt from them a bas-relief
To ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe,

Calm block here fallen from some far disaster,
Then let this boundary stone at least say no
To the dark flights of Blasphemy hereafter.