Over on The Dabbler...

I take a look at Jean Ingelow.

I Remember, I Remember

On this day in 1954, Philip Larkin finished one of the best of his early mature poems, I Remember, I Remember (published the next year in The Less Deceived). A sardonic antitype of the sentimental lyric of the same name by Thomas Hood, it is a work full of literary echoes. Like any poem about a train halting somewhere in England, it inevitably recalls Adlestrop ('A whistle went: Things moved. I sat back...') - but it also pre-echoes Larkin's own yet unborn Whitsun Weddings. And that last line - 'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere' - surely calls to mind Auden's 'Poetry makes nothing happen'. A poem of thorough disenchantment, it is also quietly, satirically funny about all those cliched things that did not happen to the young poet - and of course, being Larkin, it is technically very accomplished indeed.


Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
"Why, Coventry!" I exclaimed. "I was born here."

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been 'mine'
So long, but found I wasn't even clear
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates
Were standing, had we annually departed

For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.
'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?'
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just where I started:

By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family

I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be
'Really myself'. I'll show you, come to that,
The bracken where I never trembling sat,

Determined to go through with it; where she
Lay back, and 'all became a burning mist'.
And, in those offices, my doggerel
Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read
By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

Who didn't call and tell my father There
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead -
'You look as though you wished the place in Hell,'
My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,
I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.

'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

A New Use for Isms

'Colombia for Magical Realism.'
 How's that for a sales pitch? Really makes you think, Mmm must go to Colombia and get me some of that Magical Realism...
 I spotted this unlikely legend on a poster over the stairs that descend into Victoria Underground station. I think it's the only case I've known of trying to sell a country on the basis of a literary/artistic Ism (though, come to think, Belgium for Surrealism might work, being merely descriptive). But I guess when your only alternative is 'Colombia for Cocaine', you might get a tad desperate.
 Talking of surrealism, this poster is on exactly the same site as the legendary 'Chichester - the New Copenhagen'.  

The Invisible I

The first time it happened, I thought I must have missed something, or perhaps it was lost in the edit. So, when the subject returned to the news this morning, I listened with more attention - and blow me down, the same thing happened. The subject was the latest wave of demonstrations by the fast-growing German populist movement that calls itself Pegida - Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West. There was quite a lengthy report this time, with vox pops, interview, expert analysis - and, once again, not a single mention throughout of Islamisation, or indeed Islam or any of its derivatives. Despite its name, this organisation is apparently opposed only to the other I word - Immigration. Makes you wonder why they bother with that name, doesn't it...
 Clearly 'Islamisation' is now as invisible to the BBC mindset as 'Immigration' itself was not so long ago - how ironic that the latter is now the respectable term used to conceal the former. Whatever the rights and wrongs of 'Islamisation' - whether it exists, what it is, what kind of  threat it poses, if any - would surely have been matters worth discussing, especially as it's the Bad I Thing that seems to be preoccupying Pegida and many others across Europe. But whatever discussion is to be had is clearly not going to be heard on the Today programme. It's the Immigration, stupid. And look, the expert analyst pointed out, this protest movement is at its strongest in Dresden, where there are not many immigrants. So it's just those benighted racist Saxons; others, who have experienced the wonders of vibrant multiculturalism, love it so much they're more inclined to mount anti-Pegida protests. Well maybe, though one of the vox pops suggested otherwise: a woman described herself as 'a refugee' from her home town, where the prevailing culture (no hint as to what that culture might be, but I think we can rule out Lutheran) was such that she didn't feel it was a safe place to bring up her daughters. That woman may be a benighted racist - as may they all - but there's no way of judging when the very thing against which they're protesting can't even be mentioned on the BBC.
 Meanwhile Cologne Cathedral turned out its lights in protest against protests against Islamisation. And they say the Germans have no sense of humour...

Happy Day

Well, to conflate the words of two classics of popular song, I am
once
        twice
                  three times a Grandad.
My daughter in New Zealand brought another fine big boy into the world earlier today. Mother and baby well. No name yet. If he'd hung on one more day he could have been Epiphanius...

The Name's Bond...

James Bond was born on this day in 1900. No, not that James Bond, but the one who wrote the definitive guide to Birds Of The West Indies (first published 1936).
 Bond was born in Philadelphia but moved to England with his father in 1914, studying at Harrow and Trinity College Cambridge, where he was the sole American member of that almost risibly exclusive institution the Pitt Club (though the late David Frost was somehow a member, not to mention large-lipped actor Eddie Redmayne). Returning to America, James Bond spent three years in banking before his lifelong interest in natural history got the better of him and he signed up for an expedition to the Amazon. He never banked again, but became an ornithologist at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, where he rose to become curator of ornithology. 
 Ian Fleming, being, among other things (most of them covered under the term all-round shit), a keen birdwatcher resident on Jamaica, was naturally familiar with Bond's Birds Of The West Indies, and borrowed its author's name for his hero. As he explained to Bond's wife, 'It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born... In return, I can only offer you or James Bond unlimited use of the name Ian Fleming for any purposes you may think fit. Perhaps one day your husband will discover a particularly horrible species of bird which he would like to christen in an insulting fashion by calling it Ian Fleming.' Unfortunately no such opportunity arose.

2014

So, 2014 - what happened? Time for a look back.
 After a quite amazingly wet winter and early spring, the weather turned rather glorious and the second wonderful Butterfly Summer in two years got under way, lasting even into November - but I've already reviewed that (rather prematurely, as it turned out).
 Reading highlights included Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, Stanley Elkin's The Magic Kingdom, discovering the short stories of A.E. Coppard, rereading Mercier and Camier and The Green Man, finally embarking on Barbara Pym (and finally reading The Master), and marvelling at John Gross's great Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (see here, here, etc).
 It was the year of my discovery of that Provencal nectar Henri Bardouin Pastis, and my annual outing to the kinema was rewarded with the wonderful Inside Llewyn Davis (the companion musical DVD is also a joy). I travelled around quite a lot, with visits to Ontario, Dieppe, Norfolk, Margate, Nice and (more than once) the Peak District all chronicled here - but, though I paid a few flying visits to galleries, I only took in one exhibition (this in the year of Veronese and the Matisse cutouts!). I didn't even get many walks. All this I expect to change after mid-2015, when I shall finally loose the surly bonds of NigeCorp and reclaim my life. I fancy next year's look back might be rather different...