Over on the excellent First Known When Lost, Steve Pentz quotes Solar as a demonstration that Philip Larkin was not 'the dour personage of caricature'. Indeed not, though he could adopt the dour persona with wonderful conviction. Solar sent me back to High Windows - which I opened at this well known short poem, which I pass on simply because it is so beautifully made and, as it happens, so perfectly fits the season. It seems also, I suppose, almost hopeful...
The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Keats and Dashes
It's good news that this touching letter is to go on display where it belongs. Unless there's a dramatic discovery, that will be it - the last Keats letter to appear on the market. They are of course beyond price, in whatever form, but to see the actual sheets of paper on which Keats wrote adds an extra dimension and enlivens them with yet more vitality.
The letters have been my bedtime reading in recent weeks, and with all of them (except the most formal) you feel the physical act of writing (as well as the quicksilver mental activity) coming through with quite extraordinary force. Partly it is the punctuation - especially that liberal scattering of dashes, then and now the best punctuation for spontaneous writing. I wonder if this is itself a product of writing with a dip pen - the dashes marking the points at which the pen must be dipped. Certainly the use of dashes - which was also standard in printed fiction - seems to have died down with the coming of the fountain pen. Is this a theory? Does it hold water? Or even ink?
The letters have been my bedtime reading in recent weeks, and with all of them (except the most formal) you feel the physical act of writing (as well as the quicksilver mental activity) coming through with quite extraordinary force. Partly it is the punctuation - especially that liberal scattering of dashes, then and now the best punctuation for spontaneous writing. I wonder if this is itself a product of writing with a dip pen - the dashes marking the points at which the pen must be dipped. Certainly the use of dashes - which was also standard in printed fiction - seems to have died down with the coming of the fountain pen. Is this a theory? Does it hold water? Or even ink?
Is Is Is
I've remarked before on the mysterious phenomenon of the Double Is. Since I wrote that a year ago, this strange usage has spread - and on this morning's Today programme, Justin Webb took it to the next level. He achieved a Triple Is in a 'question' that began thus: 'The question is is - is it possible that...?'My ears are now cocked for the inevitable Quadruple Is...
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
Monday, 28 March 2011
Serkin
The pianist Rudolf Serkin was born on this day in 1903. He's always had a special place in my affections because it was through his recording - on a 12-inch vinyl, picked up cheap in a record shop (remember them?) - that I first came to know and love Schubert's great B-flat Sonata. Here he is in a rare bit of concert footage, bringing it to a triumphant - not to say breath-taking - close.
Friday, 25 March 2011
First London butterflies
Today's excitement - my first London butterflies of the year! A Peacock basking on a warm stone finial in Holland Park, from which prized spot it saw off a presumptuous Small White. This seems early for a Small White (one of the three species carelessly conflated by some into the mythical Cabbage White), but apparently the first was spotted a couple of weeks ago in Berkshire.
Portis Again
Having enjoyed and admired Masters of Atlantis so much, I've been reading another of Charles Portis's novels - The Dog Of The South. This is the story of one Ray Midge, who takes off on a long and eventful car journey in quest of his blue Ford Torino, his credit cards and his wife, who has absconded, taking all of these, with his friend and her ex-husband, Guy Dupree. In the end, this journey takes Ray, in a seriously unroadworthy car, all the way from Little Rock to Belize, via Mexico. Most of the comedy is in the strange ventures that Midge's delusions and compulsions lead him into, and in the amazing collection of oddballs he meets along the way. Among these is a true giant among comic characters, Dr Reo Symes, failed quack and inspired conman and fabulist. Overall I didn't laugh as continually or as helplessly over The Dog of the South as I did over Masters of Atlantis, but whenever Dr Reo Symes was centre stage I was laughing. Among Symes's strange convictions is that one John Selmer Dix was the greatest man who ever lived, and that his self-help manual for salesmen, With Wings As Eagles, 'puts William Shakespeare in the shithouse'. Here is Symes in full flow, recalling a compadre:
'I helped Rod every way I knew how. We were just like David and Jonathan. When he was trying to get his patent, I took him up to Long Beach and introduced him to a good lawyer name of Welch. Rod had an interest in a denture factory in Tijuana and he was trying to get a US patent on their El Tigre model. They were wonderful teeth. They had two extra canines and two extra incisors of tungsten steel. Slap a set of those Tiger plates in your mouth and you can throw your oatmeal out the window. You could shred an elk steak with those boogers. Did I say Everett Welch? I meant Billy. Billy is the lawyer. He's the young one. I had known his father, Everett, you see... He was a great big fine-looking man. He later went to Nevada and became minister of music at the Las Vegas Church of God, introduced tight harmony to those saps out there. He sold water to Jews. Jews are smart but you can put water in a bottle and they'll buy it... He's the only man I ever knew who saw Dix in the flesh. He met him once in the public libarary in Odessa, Texas. Listen to this. Dix was sitting at a table reading a newspaper on a stick and Welch recognised him from a magazine picture. It was right after that big article on Dix, right around the time of that famous June 1952 issue of Motel Life with the big spread on Dix, pictures of his trunk and his slippers and his mechanical pencil and some of his favourite motel rooms. The whole issue was devoted to Dix. There was a wide red band across the cover that said, 'John Selmer Dix: Genius or Madman?' I didn't have enough sense to stash away a copy of that magazine. I could name my own price for it today...'
And so on, and gloriously on. I don't think I've ever come across such tumultuously inventive comic monologue outside the pages of Dickens. Dr Reo Symes alone makes The Dog of the South a very fine and funny comic novel.
'I helped Rod every way I knew how. We were just like David and Jonathan. When he was trying to get his patent, I took him up to Long Beach and introduced him to a good lawyer name of Welch. Rod had an interest in a denture factory in Tijuana and he was trying to get a US patent on their El Tigre model. They were wonderful teeth. They had two extra canines and two extra incisors of tungsten steel. Slap a set of those Tiger plates in your mouth and you can throw your oatmeal out the window. You could shred an elk steak with those boogers. Did I say Everett Welch? I meant Billy. Billy is the lawyer. He's the young one. I had known his father, Everett, you see... He was a great big fine-looking man. He later went to Nevada and became minister of music at the Las Vegas Church of God, introduced tight harmony to those saps out there. He sold water to Jews. Jews are smart but you can put water in a bottle and they'll buy it... He's the only man I ever knew who saw Dix in the flesh. He met him once in the public libarary in Odessa, Texas. Listen to this. Dix was sitting at a table reading a newspaper on a stick and Welch recognised him from a magazine picture. It was right after that big article on Dix, right around the time of that famous June 1952 issue of Motel Life with the big spread on Dix, pictures of his trunk and his slippers and his mechanical pencil and some of his favourite motel rooms. The whole issue was devoted to Dix. There was a wide red band across the cover that said, 'John Selmer Dix: Genius or Madman?' I didn't have enough sense to stash away a copy of that magazine. I could name my own price for it today...'
And so on, and gloriously on. I don't think I've ever come across such tumultuously inventive comic monologue outside the pages of Dickens. Dr Reo Symes alone makes The Dog of the South a very fine and funny comic novel.
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