Kay Ryan: Doing it again

I've remarked before on Kay Ryan's extraordinary ability to condense a world of meaning - of truth indeed - into a few short, simple lines and images. Here she is, doing it again, in a poem I came across last night while browsing in The Best of It:

Learning

Whatever must be learned
is always at the bottom,
as with the law of drawers
and the necessary item.
It isn't pleasant,
whatever they tell children,
to turn out on the floor
the folded things in them.

What weight that word 'folded' (the only long 'o' sound in the poem) carries - and those 'folded things'...

Another Edward Thomas

From one of the many documentaries marking the centenary of the Kaiser War, I picked up the arresting fact that the man who fired the first British shot of that war shared his name with one of its greatest poets - Edward Thomas. Drummer (later Corporal) Edward Thomas of the 4th Dragoon Guards was on reconnaissance near the village of Casteau in Belgium, on August 22nd, 1914, when his troop came across four German cavalrymen. They chased them down and, in the ensuing confrontation, Thomas shot and wounded one of them. And that was it.
 Thomas himself - the other Edward Thomas, that is - put his feelings about the war and his particular form of patriotism into an angry but wise poem written after a blazing row with his more conventionally patriotic father, on Boxing Day, 1915:

This is no case of petty right or wrong  
That politicians or philosophers  
Can judge.  I hate not Germans, nor grow hot  
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.  
Beside my hate for one fat patriot  
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true: –  
A kind of god he is, banging a gong.  
But I have not to choose between the two,  
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned  
With war and argument I read no more  
Than in the storm smoking along the wind 
Athwart the wood. Two witches' cauldrons roar.  
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;  
Out of the other an England beautiful  
And like her mother that died yesterday.
  
Little I know or care if, being dull,  
I shall miss something that historians  
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance 
The phoenix broods serene above their ken.  
But with the best and meanest Englishmen  
I am one in crying, God save England, lest 
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.  
The ages made her that made us from dust:  
She is all we know and live by, and we trust  
She is good and must endure, loving her so:  
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.

Cameron: Looking at Fish

Hats off to David Cameron? Well, kind of, provisionally, maybe lifted an inch or two from the pate... I find myself quite impressed by how, in the face of what the BBC describes as 'huge pressure' and amid much outcry in the media and among his fellow politicians (and even the resignation of the Tories' token Muslim Woman), Cameron has so far not joined in the hand-wringing, moral grandstanding and wholesale condemnation of Israel over what is going on in Gaza. No, rather than cave in to that 'huge pressure', he employs himself (so far anyway) doing what he loves to do - looking at fish in a fish market. He was doing it last year, he's doing it this year, he clearly intends to go on doing it every time he find himself anywhere near a fish market. Good for him! To paraphrase Dr Johnson, a man is seldom more innocently employed than when he is looking at fish. Especially a politician...

Over on the Dabbler...

There's me on Ricks on Keats and embarrassment.

Missa Whaat?

Half-listening to the radio last night as I drifted towards sleep, I heard what I took to be a traditional setting of the Mass for four male voices - but there seemed to be something wrong with the words. What was it? I could only make out odd fragments, so was none the wiser, until the presenter (the Right Rev Mark Tully) came on and told us that it was... Missa Charles Darwin!
Yes, a bright spark called Gregory Brown had decided to put words from Darwin's seminal works and correspondence to a traditional Mass setting. You can read all about it here, and listen online if you care to... It put me in mind of those absurd Temples of  Reason that sprang up after the French Revolution, appropriating the apparatus of Christianity and adapting its rituals to lend spurious resonance to atheism and humanism. A Mass based on Darwin's writings strikes me as either a fabulously stupid gesture or blasphemy, or perhaps both. No doubt some keen atheist is already at work on a Missa Richard Dawkins...

Getting Round to Barbara Pym

I vaguely remember dipping into Barbara Pym back in the late Seventies, around the time her then neglected work was acclaimed by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil in the TLS and her career was instantly revived. I was curious to see what all the fuss was about - and I could dimly discern it, but felt Pym's novels weren't really for me. This was probably because I was too young. Now that I am considerably more laden with years, I have finally got round to having a proper crack at Barbara Pym - and I have to report that Larkin and Cecil were bang on the money: she's brilliant.
 This judgment is formed on the basis of just one novel (so far), but I can't remember when I last got so much sheer pleasure from a novel as I did from Jane And Prudence (published 1953). Through much of the book, there was barely a paragraph that didn't make me smile, outwardly or inwardly, or laugh out loud. Pym's eye for the ridiculous is unfailing and her prose is wondrously supple and nuanced. An extremely deft craftswoman, she does just what is needed and no more - enough to bring her characters alive, place them in their world, and set the plot spinning. Her eye is clear but never cruel, even though there is really rather little to commend any of the characters - especially the men, who are a sorry bunch.
 The reader's sympathy is generally with Jane, an Oxford graduate who had thought of being an academic but married a nice, rather dull vicar. With her gracelessness, dreadful clothes - she dresses as if she's going out to feed the chickens - and habit of coming out with wildly inappropriate, if well-meaning, contributions to any conversation, she put me in mind of Miranda (Miranda Hart's comic alter ego, that is - not Shakespeare's Miranda). You can't help but like her, though you probably wouldn't want to meet her.
 There is rather less to be said for her more glamorous friend Prudence, who was at the same Oxford college but is a decade or so younger and unmarried (at the age of 29, which seems dangerously close to old maidhood in 1953). She seems to spend her life in a state of romantic self-delusion, drifting from one unsuitable and/or uninterested man to the next. Her unerring instinct for these (steered by the well-meaning Jane) leads her inevitably to the supine, dangerously handsome widower Fabian Driver, the novel's best comic creation, who's at the centre of most of the funniest and most excruciating scenes.
 Also at the centre of things, at all times, is food: the action takes place against a daily round of cooked breakfasts, three-course lunches, cooked dinners and bedtime drinks (Ovaltine!) - not to mention the morning and afternoon tea and biscuits (or cakes) that are the main focus of purposeful activity in the office where Prudence works (if that isn't too strong a word). Meat - still on the ration in 1953 - is a constant preoccupation, because 'The men must have their meat', although, as one character darkly hints (to Jane's bemused dismay), they only really want 'one thing'.
 This endless round of meals and snacks - how come there was no 'obesity epidemic' in those days? (see also Bowen) - and the leisurely pace of working life are among many things that remind us of how hugely different the England of 60 years ago was from the rushed, food-foraging, TV dinner present. Another is the preoccupation with religious identity. This is a world in which everybody (apart from a few oddballs) is a church-goer, and questions of High and Low are very much alive. It is also a world in which people read poetry - Prudence will sit over lunch reading Coventry Patmore(!), and Jane is forever quoting, or at least thinking of, lines from the Metaphysical poets (her speciality). This poetical vein running through the novel gives it a very distinctive flavour and hints at unexpected depths...
 I read Jane And Prudence in a Virago Modern Classics paperback adorned with a wildly inappropriate chicklit-style jacket and prefaced with a gushing introduction by Jilly Cooper. But the back of that garish jacket carries this endorsement by Anne Tyler: 'Barbara Pym is the rarest of treasures; she reminds us of the heartbreaking silliness of everyday life.' That, I think, is exactly right.

Bookmarks

There's a nice piece on the AbeBooks website about the strange things people have used as bookmarks and forgotten about - everything from forty $1,000 bills to a rasher of bacon (at least it wasn't a fried egg).
It puts me in mind of the time I opened a book and found some chap had cut off the end of his trouser-leg to use as a bookmark. 'Well,' I thought, 'there's a turn-up for the book.'