I never felt I was quite right for the New Sincerity – what if I woke up one day feeling flippant or ironic? But with my output of about a poem every six months, I’m a natural for the Slow Art movement.
Categories
Category: Culture
I’ve come back from Perigord to the grim news from New Orleans. I don’t really have anything to say about that, for the moment.
I did manage to listen to the cricket on Radio4 LW via a buzzy little radio. I ended up having to hold it out of an upstairs window and nearly had a heart attack when I thought the Aussies were going to win the thing. Fingers crossed for the Oval. I have a ticket for the fifth day, so my ideal result would be an England win on Monday. But I’d also accept five days of rain.
Not much on the bird front in France; a distant hoopoe was the best bird. The swallows and martins are gathering on the telephone wires and in the treetops. They take off in great twittering flocks and flutter around chasing insects before settling again somewhere else. It’s such an evocative sign of the changing seasons; one which I generally miss, living in London. One day soon they’ll take off and head for Africa.
Swallowtail, tiger swallowtail, lots of butterflies. My favourite insects though were the hummingbird hawkmoths, which I could happily watch for hours. Minutes, anyway.
Lots of booze, lots of food – duck carpaccio, duck paté, confit of duck gizzards, duck pizza. A morning of very hung-over canoeing, which made me feel like I was going to die. We visited a C12th church carved out of the face of a cliff, complete with a necropolis, a C9th font for total immersion baptism, and a reliquary modelled on the tomb Joseph of Aramathea had built for Christ in the Church of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem – as seen by one of the local nobles who’d been there on the Crusades. It even had a temple to the Roman god Mithras which they found under the main church. So that was pretty fab. We played the Lord of the Rings edition of Risk, as well. There may be something in life that makes you feel more geeky than saying “I’m going to invade Fangorn” and then pushing a little plastic orc onto your opponent’s square and rolling a dice to see who wins. But I don’t know what it is.
I finished The Victorians by A. N. Wilson, which is OK. One volume isn’t really enough to deal with a 70 year period, and his opinionated comments sometimes seem a bit dubious, but it’s readable enough. I was more impressed by The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, which was last year’s Booker winner. The central character is a gay PhD student writing about the style of Henry James while living in the house of an up-and-coming Tory MP in the 1980s; he (the student) becomes involved with a wealthy coke-snorting playboy who eventually dies of AIDS. It is in fact something of a satire of that period, but it’s handled with a much more sensitive and nuanced touch than that summary would suggest. Hollinghurst is an impressive prose stylist himself.
The cricket is so enjoyable that I almost regret the fact that tomorrow I’m going to the Dorgogne to spend a week eating, drinking and being merry with a bunch of friends. Here’s a picture of Marie Lloyd for you to look at during my absence:
Mike Snider asked ‘why do people insist on calling any 14-line poem a sonnet?’ and KSM replied at length. His argument is very reasonable. If ‘it is next to impossible for any poetry-literate reader to see a fourteen-line poem and not think “sonnet”‘, it seems a pity, since that dilutes whatever interesting distinctiveness sonnets have, but if readers really do see sonnets everywhere that battle is already lost.
I slightly wonder
I slightly wonder whether it’s true;
If I saw a fourteen-line poem which
was laid out in a little block on the
page, with those sonnet-y proportions,
a little bit taller than it is wide —
shaped, in fact, like a sonnet, I would
probably make the connection; even
more so if there was a little gap
to mark a notional ‘volta’ and divide
the preambulary or thetical octet
from the conclusive or antithetical
sestet; and even if the implied
sonnetesque rhetorical structure
turned out to be just white space.
I’m not
on the other hand
so sure
that
faced with a poem which
meandered in an irregular
wander
down the page,
I would
even
notice whether it had
fourteen lines.
If it occured to me it might,
I’d have to count them to check,
anyway.
I went to get my hair cut today, and the barbress said “Your hair’s nice and shiny – you obviously don’t smoke.” She’s right, I don’t, but I’m surprised she could tell by looking at my hair. The conversation turned to a documentary on TV last night that followed various taxidermists in their preparations for what they all called ‘the World Show’ and thus, inevitably, to Jeremy Bentham.
The head at the top of the picture is a wax replica, because the real head was damaged in the preservation process. In this picture the real head can be seen between his legs, but apparently it has since been put into storage as it used to be a target for student pranks.
Dr Moog has died. I love the sound of analogue synthesisers. It’s like drum-machines – the overtly mechanical sound of them is part of the appeal. I was about to try and come up with a theoretical justification – something about their overt artificiality and how in a sense it brings you closer to the roots of music, perhaps, or how electronic instruments gave musicians the chance to revitalise popular music when rock was getting past it – but it would all be post-facto. It’s actually just because I’m a child of the 80s. There’s still a little part of me, deep down, that thinks Axel F is the coolest piece of music ever written – although the Crazy Frog is doing a pretty good job of making me hate it.