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2-7-09Former headmaster Fred Sedgwick was in the centre pages of the Evening Star. His new book is called, Where Words Come From. He certainly has a way with words, it says. Seems he's up on the Scandinavian and similar tongues' expressions for farting. Great, Fred.
We knew him as a poet and reviewer before this. He's the one who said Martin Stannard was writing poetry void of the features, such as rhyme, assonance, metaphor, synecdoche or what you will, habitually associated with the art. (Fred didn't realize that was the very point being made at the time.)
Sedgwick says his verbal explications went down well at dinner parties (surely not the blowing-off ones, Fred, when people are eating?). He finds that, on the other hand, most people are not the slightest bit interested in discussing poetry.
He's right there. when I handed out flyers for the Merekatz gig I repeated, 'Words, music and madness' and left out the audience-losing p-word.
That's why I think I'll concentrate instead on creating screenplays to be presented on YouTube.
16-6-09
An inflamed ego like mine was unlikely to get enough cold cream on a website like Authonomy. The other members are in it for themselves (we all are, so no bad cess to them for that).
I made a brave plea on the Forum saying let's attract more READERS instead of scribblers. But the members almost all of them, have got to be, by definition, writers. They don't log on to read, but to be read. They read because they have to, to get a reading and a rating for themselves. Which of them does not wish to be discovered as the great keyboard-whipping 'I am' of the writing school dormitories?
To get high in the charts and rate a cherished reading by
HarperCollins brass you clearly need to devote yourself
to the site for several hours a day, reading, commenting and being
reciprocated upon like a good 'un. It is time I do not
have. I have to send stuff to those outlaw websites where
people go to read because they want to look at it, man.
* * *
Craig Taylor's play 'Return to Akenfield' was great--the first
half. We enjoyed the first hour. Then, after the break
and a glass of sparkling elderflower wine we found that the remaining hour and a half got increasingly boring. A mistake these days to have a second half longer than the first. Some old git came on talking
about his use of the strimmer in the churchyard. We'd have liked to
stick that strimmer somewhere--sideways.
Of course, if we got up to leave we would have had to go past the low stage where they were acting--they could easily have done a Ken Dodd and asked where we thought we were going. We hadn't the guts to face it, but it would have been great to get out.
The themes were in the play all right. It was a good stage set, too, and there was some effective 'business', as when they all hummed the noise of a car shooting by. There was much talk of country life. General impression was that Broadband was the greatest thing since Akenfield the film came out. There were the Polish apple pickers, topical all right, and Range Rovers or 'four-by-fours' were the subject of ridicule.
8-6-09
Reading Borrow has certainly given me a better conception of East Anglia. Borrow was born in East Dereham, the place old Bob used to go to, to visit his cousin. (Deep in his dotage by then, he got off the train at the wrong stop and was found by the sympathetic coppers wandering around Diss, I believe it was, muttering to himself and unable to find his destination.)
Borrow died at Oulton Broad, which was then classed as being in Norfolk, not Suffolk. Every weekday I consign books and leaflets to be delivered there in the brown skips carried by the SCC Libraries' van drivers. The Suffolk clay can't be that negligible if it nourished a character like George Borrow, 'The Romany Rye'.
I was reading today where he's persuaded by one of his gypsy friends--who provides the fifty pounds required--to buy a horse. It should be possible, he knows, to sell the steed for four times as much. Borrow rides off rejoicing, but after a while it appears that a horse takes a lot of providing for. And though it is praised most lavishly, none of the people he encounters has either the inclination or the cash to buy it from him. Exactly the sort of stew any of us might end up in, if not with a horse then with other things. And the sort of situation no novelist would invent.
No one knows how much of The Romany Rye is fiction and how much is autobiography. In the peculiar Appendix at the end of The Romany Rye he says himself that it is neither, rather a form of dreaming. The prose could be that of an early 19th century Henry Miller, minus of course the Anglo-Saxon expletives, and plus an amazing depth of erudition when it comes to languages--including Armenian.
2-6-09
Found a new enthusiasm: ever read George Borrow? Got a nice little hardcover (Nelson Classics) with wrapper for £2 in a charity shop:The Romany Rye. Now I had always assumed that as in the song 'Coming Through the Rye' this meant travelling around the fields full of gypsies and tinker folk. Well, pretty close, but the word 'rye' in the Romany speech means bloke, as 'rawney' means woman. So Romany Rye means the Gypsy Gent.
This book is actually the sequel to Lavengro, which I have not read but now earnestly intend to do so. The Romany Rye is full of gypsy talk and terms, you are hustled straight into the midst of things. It's first person narration with the author having recently pitched his tent in a dingle where he is camped alongside the lovely Isopel(sic) Berners. You get a fine idea of her as a fascinating minx, though stand-offish, and the author intends to marry 'it'. She leaves him heartbroke though, driving her cart to a sea port where she intends to leave England and him behind. She sends him a letter bidding farewell for ever. He sees the post mark and debates whether to run after her to persuade her. But he knows that will cheapen him in her eyes--and his own.
Mr Petulengro (name known from fortune teller Julian P. in the Daily Mirror of yesteryear) and other gypsies are camped outside the dingle and the author is on good terms with them, sharing many cups of tea and visits to pubs.
The whole thing is told in a down to earth and unpoetical-poetical way that is contagious. So I will be reading more of Borrow after this, such as Wild Wales, The Bible in Spain and, of course Lavengro. All can be got for pennies or borrowed from the library. You see these little books, say the Nelson Classics, and they are printed on good paper in clear print, well bound, pocket-sized hardcovers. All the classics and some interesting oddities, but nobody wants them so they are practically given away, hurrah! Hours of engrossing, immortal reading for pennies. Hurrah! Hurrah!
28-5-09
Got a DVD of 'Alfie' (the Michael Caine one, not Jude Law) at the Whitsun car boot. It's still in the shrink wrap and we look forward to it immensely. A time will be set aside to watch it from start to finish.
A fair revisiting of the 1960s.
Alfie talking about whether or not to marry 'it'--that is a living celluloid icon. There was my sixth form mate, Dave Elek, Polish coolster, who was to us another Michael Caine in Alfie and Harry Palmer mode. He could even make an onelette. There was also the older hand at Harris's pork product factory saying uncomprehendingly to a chap my age (about his fiancée who worked in the office): 'You've rubbed it out, haven't you? So why do you need to marry it?'
I want to put the disc in and see Alfie Bass, and Vivien Merchant. I want to remember being turned on by Millicent Martin--and how we all regarded Julia Foster as wife material. Yes, in that case many would surely have married 'it'. Then there's Denholm Elliott's panic-stricken abortionist. The only duff note in the casting is Shelley Winters, who should be a yummy mummy type but is rather more feminine than Rod Steiger. You simply cannot believe Alfie will be besotted. Of course 'Miss' Winters was Hollywood and this was a low budget movie that might sink--they saw having her aboard as its salvation, possibly. She can act all right but was miscast.
I wish now I had gone to see the stage version of 'Alfie'. Not the original, but the Adam Faith one. 'Budgie' was a great TV series which really set young Adam (Terry Nelhams) up for the role.
As Hardy said, 'The years, the years.' Even the Beatles split up. Even Woolworth's goes. Alfie must be grey by now, probably took to pigeons and Bingo. Many gunslingers of the poetry workshop scene now perform bona fide social work. They don't mystically do it 'through' their scribbles any more, but at least they get a wage, oh my brothers.
14-5-09
After six years I was catching up on The Da Vinci Code. It's a great read, and when last weekend they had the film on TV I watched the first 20 minutes and it seemed to me close to the book and pretty good. (I had always heard this was the worst film ever made.)
Back in the '80s I read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail which was what the DV Code was based on. The authors tried to sue Dan Brown for plagiarism, famously, and failed--of course, why didn't they write it as a best selling novel themselves? He wasn't stopping them, after all. And there's no copyright in ideas. As it is the novel is a pacy read with short chapters and cliff hangers but a somewhat marshmallow ending.
I am now looking at the follow up to the Holy Blood called The Messianic Legacy, which is a fascinating long essay on kingship, archetypes in works of art (including popular culture) and the history of the early church amongst other things. The sort of book I love, and one that will go on the shelf alongside The Bible as History and Gods, Graves & Scholars.
The Messianic Legacy gives an account of Hitler's ceremony of Insemination of the Flags whereby an old bloodstained flag 'inseminates' new Nazi drapes. Hitler apparently used to guide the old one (from Beer Cellar putsch days) into the others the way a herdsman does the pizzle of his prize bull into a favoured cow. Not many books that tell you things like this, methinks.
Robin comes in from the other room while we are discussing Da Vinci at work and says when the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911 more people came to see the hooks on which it used to hang that ever saw the picture.
I told him about the lions and tigers in London Zoo during the war. They were evacuated in case a bombing turned them loose among the populace. But people visiting the zoo still walked over and looked at the cages and apparently derived satisfaction therefrom.
Eeh boys, the mind, mind, has mountains, like.
29-4-09
Spending time on the Authonomy site, reading and commenting and being commented on, is fine, so long as you don't harbour the illusion of getting somewhere.
The people commenting are in the same dugout you are.
All trying to get into the top 5 chart at the end of the month, but even if you do all you are gauranteed is a reading by the HarperCollins editors. No one of course can guarantee publication, not even for number one on the chart. Anbody who has reached the top 5 has got to have something going for them, but who knows what will sell? The editors' reports (on past top five authonomists) that have been published have been complimentary but that's all. They tend to suggest that a lot more work needs to be done, and the book will then probably be of interest to a publisher. If you get even to number one you may simply be praised at the end of the day with faint damns.
Authonomy is good for a bit of the old to and fro with someone who has looked at your story and it does make you think critically about your book. But you have to ask yourself if the advice you get is sound. (Frequently one commentator will say the opposite of another--which do you follow? Either?)
You certainly have to put a lot of time in reading Authonomy writers. And if you're working at a day job too you've got to ask how much of your free time it merits. You can be burning up hopurs that may be better spent writing your own things.
There are people who read, it seems, 6 or 7 books a day and have something to say about them. (And they get their reciprocal reads, usually, from those they review, and often are shelved by them. Getting on someone's shelf makes you rise in the charts. Yes oh yes, considerable of a whirl it is, it is.
15-4-09
We went to the Railway with Gwen and Stephen, but the place was advertising only 'seafood and burgers' looking around for a menu there was none, only a wine list. Four regulars at the bar, settled in for the night. One barmaid slowly, lovingly pouring the suds into an oval-shaped litre glass and ignoring us totally.
Fug this, I thought, seeing Joan, Stephen and Gwen grinning at my discomfiture (I always 'lack authority' at the bar anyway, and this shit hole was giving no joy whatsoever).
'Let's try the "Station" instead,' I suggested.
This we did and all they had chalked up for veg was Moussaka, but the girl said the chef would whip me up something, what did I like? I could think of nothing but a vegetarian mixed grill, but I took it that they didn't have an quorn sausages on hand.
She suggested kedgeree done with eggs and cheese. She'd had the kedg with mackerel the day before and it was superb.
'Say no more, I take it.'
Stephen and Joan went for the moussaka, Gwen opted for sirloin steak and chips. Joan would handle the tab with her credit card.
After an episode in the early 1980s when I had several cut-price tins of greasy moussaka on hand and couldn't get through the first one I have avoided the dish, and most olive oil. The Aussie delicacy was for me.
The Railway was a notch or two up the social register from the other place. Swan-like young women with earnest receding escorts in tweed jackets, silk-lined waistcoats and olive waterproofs.
We were left alone. There I was a rough among toffs, in the other place we'd have been toffs among roughs.
6-4-09
People have often told me if I wrote down the tales I come out with they would make a great book. It's like recently, telling Jackie at work about some of my 'encounters'. The 'hit' you might say, was an account of meeting the Marianne Faitfull type Mandy at a book sale and chatting her up as she didn't have a wedding ring (and I had had enough at that time of invovement in a marriage circle).
Long story short of it was that Mandy's husband hadn't known what was what. He was an odd type who wanted bed to be an antiseptic sort of affair and 'didn't want all the juices'. In fact he wiped them on the sheets--a bit distasteful to him, don't you know.
All I know is, once this timid mouse had been got up into my room for the proverbial cup of tea and subjected to the gambits of an experienced roué she became delirious.
It's true I wrote some of this up at the time and tried to market it as a diary, but now as it comes back to me I may be able to tell it better--without any literary trickery this time. (The diary was probably written to be read, which is how it now reads.) Now my idea is like that beatnik writer, just to say, 'shit on the soup, let it burn. Fuck everything!' (I always thought, shouldn't that be 'shit IN the soup'?)
Another encounter was with a straggly-haired Communist girl who looked according to Harry '16 going on 60'. Someone else said she was like a female Ghandi. And, to paraphrase Michael Caine's Alfie, I dated it!
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