Zut Alors!

One of the members of my class today told me he had paid £5 for a cup of coffee in Paris over Easter and not in some flash hotel. I'd love to go there again and I have the passport and the money...but. Present bedside reading is Richard Cobb, Paris and Elsewhere, and that will do for now. You can't beat his evocation of the city he first visited, as an 18 year old, in 1935 and in which, with a short break for the war, he spent the next couple of decades. My favourite story is of his time teaching English to students of agriculture: only two turned up for the first class and after that no-one but he went on being paid for a decade or so. At the end, when he was leaving to take up a post at Aberystwyth, he received an official buff envelope that he thought might presage his being rumbled by the authorities. But no, it was to notify him that as a result of his long service and sterling efforts teaching the agriculturists he was being awarded the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. [illustrated...pretty nifty stuff]

In The News

It didn't take long to suss out why this sleepy little dorp was crawling with TV news crews the day before yesterday. Being the epicentre of a prospective pandemic has not affected the lieges, most of whom have centuries of Calvinism in the genes and whose attitude might well be summed up in a saying of my grannie: 'Whit's fur ye'll no go by ye.'

Serendipitous Surrealism

Next up for re-reading is Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, borrowed from the local library in the new Penguin Classics edition with a fine introduction from Christopher Hitchens. Sadly, the proof-reading has left a couple of typos in this section, the best being in this quotation from Martin Amis: 'for all its marvels, Augie March, like Henderson the Rain King, often resembles a lecture on destiny fed through a thesaurus of low-life patios.' Even without the misprint this is blithering nonsense, Bellow writing some of the finest prose I've read. A happy quarter of an hour was spent, however, conjuring up images of the decor and personnel of a low-life patio...

As If

The 50% upper tax band [it was 63% in the palmy days of the Grantham Gargoyle] is calling forth pained cries of 'Class War!' from the commentariat of the right and assorted fatcats. I wish. The guy in the illustration is making a valid point here.

Partiality

Looking for a favourite illustration in The Oxford Companion to Music, that of Liszt travelling by train to see whether, as a friend claimed, he was playing a silent travelling keyboard [he isn't], there was this barbed little comment in an item on the facing page:



LITANIAE LAURETANAE,

or Litany of Loretto, is a 13th century litany in honour of the Virgin Mary. It is sung every evening at Loretto and is much sung in Italy generally. It is frequently used at Benediction after the O Salutaris. Palestrina composed many settings of it and modern composers too many.

'But The Iniquity of Oblivion Blindely Scattereth Her Poppy'

Today, as last Friday, was spent handling items that belonged intimately to Roman auxiliaries long since dust: a mass of corrosion made up of the countable hobnails of a military boot or caliga, the very item that gave his nickname to Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus; a fragment of ceramic with clear finger and palm prints; a number of copper alloy brooches for fastening uniform; a little crudely shaped figurine of an owl; a broken torso of Venus Kallipygos. Unlike the usual pottery or building material these bring you closer to the owners. As Sir Thomas Browne said, 'Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments.' Auden comes also to mind:

Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria, I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.

Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;
There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away,
I want my girl and I want my pay.

When I'm a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

More True Than Ever

Gosse's Father and Son re-read with great admiration after a decade or so. Deeply saddening in many ways, oddly funny in others. The conclusion he reaches is a painful one..

'..there occurred to me the reflection, which in years to come I was to repeat over and over, with an ever sadder emphasis,--what a charming companion, what a delightful parent, what a courteous and engaging friend my Father would have been, and would pre-eminently have been to me, if it had not been for this stringent piety which ruined it all.

Let me speak plainly. After my long experience, after my patience and forbearance, I have surely the right to protest against the untruth (would that I could apply to it any other word!) that evangelical religion, or any religion in a violent form, is a wholesome or valuable or desirable adjunct to human life. It divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse. There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but treat it as if it were the uncomfortable ante-chamber to a palace which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know absolutely nothing.'

On Memes of Song

Tagged by Martin: List 7 songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to. [Sadly, I don't know 7 other people...]

Make It Another Old-fashioned, Please
Cole Porter, sung by Ethel Merman. Wonderfully witty take on heartbreak ['When you're off the liquor you feel so much slicker....well, that is, most of the time'] with a distinctly catchy rhythm. When I get into feeling gloomy this always lifts the spirits, in every sense.

Eightsome Reel
The result of a couple of presentations I've recently done on Hamish Henderson as song-writer is that several of his songs are on a loop in my head. This, first heard in the local folk-song club forty five years ago, is a favourite, combining as it does the brisk dance tune 'Kate Dalrymple' with brilliant, effervescent lyrics celebrating VE Day in Italy from the point of view of the ordinary squaddie ['Ye mean crowd o' bams see's anither twelve drams/And we'll reel Auld Hornie an' his gang tae glory!'].

Thine Be The Glory
Sung at my son's wedding three weeks ago and consequently very much in my head...regardless of that head's atheism and the fact that the tune was originally designed to praise the Butcher Cumberland's brutal victory at Culloden and after.

The Diggers' Song
Gerard Winstanley as performed by Chumbawamba and probably inspired by getting spade and hoe into my own exiguous patch of territory as the sun has shone this past few days.

Nine Inch Will Please A Lady
As a result of presenting a course on Burns for his 250th birthday, this piece of unexampled bawdy, set to the douce wee tune 'Merrily Danced The Quaker's Wife and Merrily Danced The Quaker' and beautifully sung by Jean Redpath as though butter widnae melt in her mou', has been intruding itself in gallus fashion. ["It's no' the length that gars me loup, but it's the double-drivin' "]

Chinese White
The Incredible String Band, a happy memory from undergraduate days forty years ago and recovered recently when I bought the CD of the long-lost vinyl. The best of fey hippy dippiness; I'm sure Zappa would rip the piss out of it but it is sanctified by auld lang syne.

A Las Barricadas
Anthem of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, the CNT, currently being practised by an affinity group I belong to in preparation for a May Day event. Stirring stuff. Alza la bandera revolucionaria!

While not in the same class as, say, the Victimae Paschali Laudes, or Schubert and Strauss's very different takes on Frühling, they are all in their different ways, pious or priapic or what you will, optimistic (if through a glass darkly but amusingly in the Porter). OK for Spring, then.

Tagging Matt, Rosie Bell and the Plump.

You'll Have Had Your Summer

Today probably was the Scottish summer for 2009. From 8 am when I hit the shower until now it has been blue sky, no wind, genuine heat. Just the day to climb a hill through dense woodland, carrying the sort of axe the huscarls used to good effect at Stamford Bridge, and spend a good four hours keeping nature at bay from an Iron Age site. See photographic record. Now time for a few restorative swallies, I think.

Beaded Bubbles.....

It seems that the Etruscans had more genial deities than the Aztecs [not too difficult, really]. Their god of wine had the splendid name of Fufluns.......

Later: It occurs to me that this is Easter Sunday. Regard the illustration as a commentary on the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Bloody Constraint

Well, inside in yesterday's dreich weather and outside in the sunlit garden today, Prescott, the 19th century American historian, that is, was consumed avidly. What a page-turner! What a dreadful, vicious, murderous, treacherous, blood-stained business it was! The neat two volume Everyman edition, bought for 25p in Edinburgh 36 years ago, will no longer sit accusingly unread on the shelf. Now for Dennis's The Cities & Cemeteries of Etruria.........

The Wet Good Friday

The sky here is, to use one of my grannie's more vivid similes, as black as the Earl of Hell's waistcoat and the coming rain is due to linger for the holiday weekend. Plans to get on the bike are shelved and it'll be a case of having to coorie doon with Prescott's The Conquest of Mexico, another of the many unread books on the shelves which are slowly being ticked off that list.

No, Ex-Minister

On PM tonight we had Blunkett suggesting that photographers should be banned from taking snaps in Downing Street in the wake of the chief anti-terrorist rozzer having been kodaked carrying papers marked 'Top Secret' whose hush-hush contents, thanks to telephoto lenses and PhotoShop, could be read by all and sundry. There is already nasty stuff going on the statute books banning people taking photos of the police, just the sort of photos that have blown the whistle on their own thuggery this past week, and now we have suggestions for more of the same. Of course, this is exactly the sort of tankie nonsense that the control freaks in New Labour delight in and the answer is GIRUY. Look, how difficult is this? If you are carrying documents that are security-sensitive to a meeting and are passing through a public space, you put them in a fucking container which covers them up. What is it that makes them flaunt these papers? Arrogance, incompetence or a desperate need to show off exactly how important they are? 'Look at me, I get access to seriously secret material!' Tossers.

Hoppin' The Freights

Fifty and more years back the family summer holiday was often spent all of a couple of miles from our council flat. My grandfather was the gate-keeper of one of the many iron foundries in the town and as such lived in the gate-house with my grandmother and the guard-dog, a black alsatian, Lass. Every summer the town closed down for a fortnight and the workers went off on their holidays. As my grandparents couldn't take Lass with them to a boarding house in Morecambe [their locale of choice], we spent two weeks in their flat looking after her. As we had no car this involved a bus journey with our suitcases and the budgie in his cage....These holidays were wonderful as we had the run of a deserted late 19th century industrial complex with waste ground attached, abounding in rabbits for Lass to chase. One of the highlights was the spur from the railway line between Edinburgh and Glasgow which led into the grounds of the foundry. Most years there was a goods van ['box car' in the US], see illustration, parked on the spur at the buffers which marked its terminus. This became a 'den' and a great place in which to play [they usually had a layer of straw inside]. Perhaps it is to this early formative experience that my romantic fondness for the idea of riding the rails or hoppin' the freights can be ascribed. Anyway, said romantic fondness received a boost today from re-reading, forty years on from first reading, Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. I can see why it appealed to a callow 20 year old from a small town Scottish background. Now, in spite of a few passages of vivid writing, mainly those to do with climbing in the High Sierras, it was just irritating: both the narrator's overblown hero-worship of the Gary Snyder figure and the concomitant proto-hippy Zen Buddhism. The jaunts in the box-cars were still a buzz, mind....

And Worse

Yesterday's quotation from Proudhon was sadly prescient given the new information about the death of Ian Tomlinson. 'Harrassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed...' indeed. But with the revelation of Met procedure in the cases of Blair Peach, Stephen Lawrence and Harry Stanley behind us are we surprised?

Panopticon World

Yesterday being the first day when ISPs had to store material relating to emails, site visits etc for our paranoid-psychotic government, the boys and girls in Cheltenham would have recorded your correspondent's visits here and here and here and here. If you are at all worried about being associated with this author's politics do not click on the above links.......

'Pickt From The Worme-Holes Of Long-Vanisht Dayes'

The scintillating post to match this magnificent title has yet to evolve. Talk among yourselves for a bit.

Stylistics

Anent his mention in yesterday's post, when I was wearing the old red gown and studying Ancient History I was telt aff for admitting into my essays too many of the stylistic quirks of Sir Ronald Syme whose great work The Roman Revolution I had taken to my heart. Syme for his part had obviously absorbed the style of Tacitus, on whom he wrote the definitive work. So I was throwing into my undergraduate lucubrations such terse little abruptnesses as these from the master...

'But the great triumph was Cato's, and the greater delusion'

'No less complete the military calculation.'

'Easy victories--but not the urgent needs of the Roman people.'

'More important the business in hand: it was expedited in swift and arbitrary fashion.'

'Dubious history--and irrelevant.'

'So much in public.'

'For the rest, elderly survivors, nonentities, neutrals or renegades.'*

'To Antonius, no grounds of satisfaction.'

Syme, New Zealand's greatest historian, described his work thus:
'The design has imposed a pessimistic and truculent tone, to the almost exclusion of the gentler emotions and the domestic virtues. Δυναμις and Τυχη are the presiding divinities.' Power and luck still playing a potent role in politics........


*Fill in current political grouping[s] that fit this list........

The Hounds Of Spring Are On Winter's Traces

And a restorative wee break was enhanced by some very fine weather plus the accompanying reading matter, Peter Linebaugh's The London Hanged. This 'mini-prosopography' [prosopography, the study of the common characteristics of an historical group, was a major part of Sir Ronald Syme's wonderful, Tacitean The Roman Revolution] as he calls it, a thorough and incisive account of 'capital punishment and the punishment of capital', is an enthralling and disturbing read which I can warmly recommend.