Author: Harry

Categories
Culture

Cloud Atlas

I recently read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It’s structurally odd – six stories which are all set in different historical periods and linked – but not causally.

i.e. the first strand is written as a journal, and the second has a character who finds the journal in a library and reads it, but is otherwise unconnected. It has the first half of all six narratives chronologically and then finishes them off in reverse order – i.e. 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 4 3 2 1 – so it ends with the one it started on. There are themes that run through, but still, it’s basically a book of shortish stories arranged in a gimmicky way.

Even so, I think it does, on balance, feel more like one work than six. And a lot of the writing is very good, though some strands are more successful than others. I still can’t decide whether the whole manages to be more than the sum of the parts. Does the result justify the gimmick? The historical sweep of the book, taken seriously, implies a kind of importance – it is a narrative on the Grand Scale. But actually it’s several narratives on the small scale.

I’m going round in circles (rather like Cloud Atlas). I am glad I read it, but not as impressed by it as I was hoping, given the reviews.

I’ve also just read Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, by Lauren Slater. I read it in a couple of sittings, because it was readable and interesting, and I’d certainly recommend it, without feeling it changed my view of the world. That might seem like a high bar to set, but considering that I know relatively little about experimental psychology, there was room for it to teach me stuff. In the event, most of the experiments were more-or-less familiar from other reading. I suppose psychology has quite a high public profile.

Next up – the new translation of Don Quixote. January 16th was the 400th anniversary of the novel’s publication, and as I didn’t finish it when I tried reading it as a teenager, I thought this was a good time to have another go.

Categories
Nature

pheasant in the garden

There was a nice healthy-looking, shiny, brightly coloured male pheasant in the garden yesterday – which is pretty unusual in south London. What with the Ring-necked Parakeets and the Beast of Sydenham, it’s starting to seem pretty exotic around here.

Categories
Culture

poem no. 10 – Ralegh

As you came from the holy land – Sir Walter Ralegh

As you came from the holy land

Categories
Culture

Turner Whistler Monet

I went to Turner Whistler Monet at the Tate today.

The three artists are brought together because of shared interest in light, water, and shared subject matter – the Thames and Venice. Turner was an influence on the later two, as well.

It’s hard not to think of it as Turner vs Whistler vs Monet. In which case I think Whistler would win, on the basis of the paintings on display – though I have seen more impressive Turners and Monets in other exhibitions. Whistler’s ‘nocturnes’ were fab – very controlled, very simple, but absorbing. Monet came out worst; compared to the Whistlers and Turners, the fussiness of his brushwork seemed distracting, the colours bordered on the vulgar and the composition seemed a bit haphazard. Having said that, when the Monets were just right – or when I was in a more receptive frame of mind – they were lovely.

I went to have a look at the other Tate Turners later, and it’s really only the late paintings that invite comparison with Impressionists. The interest in light and atmosphere is clearly there in the early stuff, but he hasn’t developed the extraordinary colour-handling yet, and isn’t willing to let the light effects take over the painting to the point that they become the subject. It’s quite interesting that some of the late paintings that most interested the Impressionists are actually unfinished; he worked by laying down all the expanse of colours, then adding some details at the end to turn the painting into a lake scene, or Venice or whatever – but quite a lot survive which are just arrangements of colour. Even when he’d finished them, he didn’t always add very much, so it would be interesting to know what he’d think of people admiring them as paintings in their own right.

The TWM exhibition had some information about Mallarm

Categories
Me

stuff

while in the tree, the dunnock flicks its wings

idea for poem: 30 final lines

under sodium streetlights, daffodils are the same colour as concrete

the smell of smoke turns a spring night into autumn

I don’t know why I’m producing all this nature-stuff particularly. ho-hum

Categories
Culture

poem no. 9 – Yeats

High Talk by W B Yeats

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.

Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, make but poor shows,
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon his timber toes,
Because women in the upper storeys demand a face at the pane,
That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane.

Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.

All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.

I only recently realised there were people who didn’t like Yeats. Hearing their objections did at least encourage me to look at his work more critically. The complaint is that he is grandiose, a posturer, a blusterer. I can recognise that about him; he plays the part of the Big Poet, and the attitude can grate. I also think that, at a time when we tend to value gritty authenticity in art, we’re suspicious of someone who is such a glamoriser.

With the McCartney sisters just back from the USA, it’s tempting to focus on the dangerous glamour of Yeats’s nationalism. But actually, he brings glamour to every subject he touches. Partially it’s the lusciousness of the language, but it’s the treatment as well. Take Among School Children. Imagine if Larkin had written a poem about visiting a schoolroom as an aging local worthy, and reflecting on lost youth and mortality; perhaps it would have been bleak, perhaps it would have been wryly humorous. But it certainly wouldn’t have managed to reference Plato, Leda, Quattrocento art, Alexander the Great and Pythagoras.

Anyway, I recognise the fairness of the accusation. I generally prefer the sparer late poems to the floweriness of things like The Lake Isle of Innisfree, and I’m sceptical in the face of some of the more outlandish poems, like Sailing to Byzantium. But I think you can be pretty ruthless in stripping out the overly twee and the overly showy, and still be left with more great poems than any other C20th poet.

One of them, I think, is this one. In some ways it is guilty of exactly the showy gesture-making that makes me wary elsewhere – he’s boasting about and justifying his showmanship with striking and dramatic images; images which, perhaps, don’t mean much. But I love it anyway, for the long lines, the spareness of the language, and the striking imagery. Perhaps it’s because the poem’s central metaphor is rooted in reality, rather than some mystical vision of Byzantium, or faerie Ireland. I like the Crazy Jane poems for the same reason – they feel rooted, physical and placed.