To a T

This strange-looking T-shaped creature is a Plume Moth. Its wings are indeed plume-like, but at rest the Plume Moth rolls them up tight, like an umbrella, and holds them at right angle to its body, thus managing to look more like an arrangement of thin twigs or grass than a moth. Two of them - two perfect Ts - have taken up residence on the ceiling of my bathroom. In view of the time of year, and the cold, I had begun to think they were probably dead - but no, last night as I lay in my bath, I noticed they had completely changed their positions since I last saw them. They are still hanging on. One more day and they'll have made it into December...

Clothar and the Disappearing Monkey

Wikipedia's list of historical anniversaries is an invaluable resource - the chronological inspiration for many a post on this blog, I must admit - but it has its little quirks. Browsing on it last night, I found that the very first entry in the Events section read '561 - king Clothar I dies at a monkey Compiegne...' Annoyingly, someone has since nipped in and removed the intriguing words 'a monkey'...
I looked up Clothar and found his entry disappointingly lacking in monkey action, but full of bloodshed. Clothar, King of the Franks, seems to have occupied most of his life in warfare and pillage, when not bumping off members of his own family, beginning with his brother Chlodomer's children and ending with his rebellious son Chram, whom he burnt to death with his wife and children in a cottage in Brittany, whither the unfortunate Chram had fled. Following this last deed, he travelled to Tours to pray forgiveness at the tomb of St Martin, before going on to die at a monkey Compiegne.
Shouty Waldemar Januszczak has a TV series on BBC4 at the moment called The Dark Ages: An Age of Light. The Dark Ages, he booms, were no such thing - they were 'AN AGE OF LIGHT!' Well, no doubt he has a point, but when you read about the likes of Clothar, you do get the impression there was rather a lot of dark around too.

Any Excuse for a Picture of Venice...

'The built environment can be more beautiful than nature,' declares Planning Minister Nick Boles, calling for more open land to be built over as a means of 'solving a housing problem'. He envisages 'beautiful' building that is sensitive to its locality - at which point one is tempted to suggest that he really ought to get out more. Are the developers currently blighting the land with what even Boles can see is 'ugly rubbish' suddenly going to be converted into enlightened and sensitive builders, creating houses that fit their setting and are pleasing to the eye? Even if they could - and most of them are architecturally illiterate - they would have to price such houses very high, which is hardly going to solve any housing problem.
 The built environment can indeed be more beautiful than nature - the city of Venice, for example, is surely one of the most beautiful things on the surface of the Earth. But a large part of that beauty is down to its setting in the lagoon, to sky and light and water (i.e. Nature), to buildings consciously created for beauty and grandeur - and built to last - and to centuries of history and human activity.
 Houses that live up to Nick Boles's ideal already exist, in choice parts of the country, solidly built with local materials, bedded into the landscape, each with its little plot of land - and these models of commodity, firmness and delight cost a fortune, because everyone wants them and they can't be reproduced. The likely future for the British landscape, if Boles gets his way, is that much more of it will disappear under the familiar extrasuburban sprawl of standardised Noddy Vernacular houses, poorly built, poky, clumsily detailed, placeless, historyless, owing nothing and contributing nothing to their setting. This might help to ease the housing shortage, but it will certainly do nothing to beautify the land.

Dabbler alert

I see my thoughts on that terrible terrible terrible man Frank Randle are on the super soaraway Dabbler today.

Kenneth Koch: Thank You

Kenneth Koch's Thank You and Other Poems is - like the Rolling Stones - fifty years old this year. My increasingly battered copy of the Evergreen Original paperback has been a cheering presence somewhere in my life for around forty of those years. At present it's in the bedside pile, a reliable spirit-lifter, containing some of the funniest, happiest serious verse I've ever come across.
 Koch's laudable aim in his poetry was to express 'the fullness and richness of life and the richness of possibility and excitement and happiness'. Along with his 'New York school' friends (notably Frank O'Hara and the early John Ashbery), Koch was in the business of blowing away ponderous introspection and replacing it with something fresh, playful, light-footed, exuberant and cosmopolitan, drawing inspiration from abstract expressionism, surrealism, music and pop art imagery. His long poem Fresh Air - read it here - is a kind of manifesto, though the word is far too solemn for such a piece of work.
 Here is a characteristic poem from the Thank You collection - one of my favourites - in which Koch dances nimbly between the comic and the lyrical...

Permanently

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing—for example, “Although it was a dark rainy day when
        the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face
        until the day I perish from the green, effective earth."
Or, “Will you please close the window, Andrew?”
Or, for example, “Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill has changed color
        recently to a light yellow, due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby.”

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, “And! But!”
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the Adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

Enjoy!

Here's something for fans of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton to look forward to. Clearly a very classy biopic is in prospect...

All Over Now

I've been idly working out how much I'd have had to be paid - cash, upfront - to get me to the O2 Arena to see the Rolling Stones 50th birthday gig. I reckon I'd have done it for two grand, maybe a bit less - probably around the kind of money some desperate fans shelled out for a ticket. Most of my price, I must admit, would have been to cover the multiple hassles of getting to and from Greenwich and into and out of the stadium, and to compensate for my deep-seated loathing of giant music venues (I once made the mistake of taking up the offer of free tickets for the Three Tenors at Wembley - suffice to say we were out of there long before the interval...).
The Rolling Stones might well be 'the greatest rock and roll band in the world', but they were that 40-plus years ago, at their peak, and they've done little since, apart from somehow staying together and making it to this big-money semicentennial. I used to love their albums up to (and probably not including) Exile on Main Street - but hey, that was then, when it was all new; this is now, when it's all over. However well the aged Stones perform - and by all accounts they were on good form - there's nothing new here; it can only be pastiche and repetition. Rock music of the golden age (early 60s to early 70s) is music that can't happen twice - and doesn't need to, as all the best of it is there to be revisited on vinyl or CD. It's that river you can't walk through twice. Isn't it?