On dit que le destin se moque bien de nous

 I'm back. I'm tempted to pretend that I've been on a week long mescalin trip, but I think we all know that actually I have been doing sudoku and listening to the cricket. I have been to see an outdoor, socially-distanced opera production, but I'll come back to that later.

In the meantime, here's the former first lady of France singing a poem by W.B. Yeats.

Never Judge a Book by its Colour

I've received a couple of questions about William Watson, one of whose poems featured here the other day, mainly along the lines of "Who he?". Well, he is now a somewhat obscure literary figure - deservedly so if the example of his work which I posted is anything to go by - who first came to my notice because he was born in Burley-in-Wharfedale, the village half way between Otley and Ilkley. Sir William, as he apparently was, nearly became Poet Laureate on more than one occasion, but didn't. He did however contribute to The Yellow Book, which is the other reason I had vaguely heard of him. The Yellow Book was a quarterly publication whose contributors included all sorts of fin de siècle luminaries such as Henry James, W.B. Yeats, H.G. Wells and so on; and has cropped up in a number of books that I have read, most recently David Lodge's 'Author, Author' which is about James. It appears that the cover colour and the name was chosen because that was the generic term at the time for salacious French novels - one such features in the story of Dorian Gray's descent into decadence - and they wanted to be cool by association. 

Note the exchange rate

As a bit of research I have dipped into an edition - the one whose cover appears above - and must report that it hasn't aged well. It opens with another terrible poem by Watson - the Lower Wharfe Valley is not to poetry what it is to wargaming - and then moves on to a pretty unreadable essay by James. I am aware that my own prose style is somewhat convoluted, full of ellipses, subordinate clauses and whatnot, but James makes me look like Ernest Hemingway in comparison. On top of that he sprinkles his work with untranslated French phrases in italics; not terribly comme il faut if you ask me.

Their marketing ploy backfired somewhat in the end. Oscar Wilde turned up to one of his trials clutching a racy novel recently arrived from Paris, but the colour of the cover made everyone assume that it was The Yellow Book itself. Given that Wilde was about to go to prison for gross indecency what they found they had actually achieved was to appear débauché by association with him.

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.” - Oscar Wilde

Here's a faux French phrase that might have livened up Henry James' article: A woman walks into a pub and asks for a double entendre, so the barman gives her one.

Ubu

I have been to see 'Kneehigh's Ubu', which is, as it implies on the tin, Kneehigh theatre company's version of Jarry's 'Ubu Roi'. The reason they have revived this rather notorious piece at this particular time is perhaps most easily illustrated by quoting the Wikipedia entry for the original play. The eponymous Ubu, who has taken over the country in a coup spurred on by his ambitious wife, is described as "fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, greedy, cruel, cowardly and evil". Does that sound like anyone we know?

Katy Owen as Ubu and Mike Shepherd as Mrs Ubu

It was simply brilliant. Described as a 'sing-along satire' it involved maximum audience participation with members invited not just to sing, but even to get up on stage and fight at one point. There was also a keenly fought game of dunk-a-trunk, which looked like good fun; I have made a mental note of the rules and equipment required. Kneehigh's style is much to my taste (see this previous posting on their Tristan & Yseult; and of course the Wise Children company reviewed  glowingly here on a couple of occasions over the last couple of years spawned out of them) and it was equally appreciated by the mainly mid-teen schoolkids amongst who made up most of the audience. Now when I was at school all we ever went to see was Shakespeare.

It is just possible that Alfred Jarry's school focused on the Bard as well because, as you have no doubt already worked out for yourself, the basic structure comes directly from Macbeth, and there are bits of other Shakespeare plays thrown in for luck. Someone even exits pursued by a bear at one point.

The events surrounding the first (and only) performance of the original play are well worth reading about. Amongst those there were W.B. Yeats (whose opinion may have been coloured by the fact that he didn't speak French) and Stéphane Mallarmé, another poet previously quoted in this blog.  Incidentally, Jarry invented the concept of pataphysics; there's a limit to how many times I can post a video of the same song, so let me send you back to here. Whilst this latest production has run for a lot longer, by the time you read this you will have missed the chance to see it. If it's ever revived then don't miss it next time.

Good riddance

This post has been brought to you by Tarquin's Cornish Gin - the gin for the skin you're in. 

“Life? Don’t talk to me about life!”

I am afraid that this blog has done it again. My recent post about W.B. Yeats contained an allusion to a quote by Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe. No sooner had it been published than Stephen Moore, the voice of said Marvin on radio and television, sadly died. He was of course a most distinguished actor - I remember seeing him as Hector in the NT's touring production of 'The History Boys' - but I'm afraid he will forever live in an awful lot of memories as a depressed machine.

Speaking of distinguished actors I have been to see David Suchet speak about his life. Just as Jeremy Brett is the definitive Holmes, so surely there is no other Poirot (who, just like Marvin, had a brain the size of a planet) to rival Suchet's.

He either finds it very easy to slip in and out of character as the Belgian detective or, despite having played many other parts in his career, the boundaries between life and fiction are beginning to blur for him. In fact he told one story about one lady who encountering him in costume just off set on location expressed a fervent hope that there hadn't been a murder locally, and when being told by him in Poirot's accent that he was merely on holiday replied by thanking him for choosing her hometown in which to vacation. It was all very entertaining and it is always thought-provoking to note what a contribution migrants to the UK and their families have made to national life: as well, of course, as his broadcaster brother John, his father was one of Sir Alexander Fleming's assistants in the early days of penicillin and his grandfather was the Fleet Street photographer who took the first photograph of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson.

WB Yeats and The Second Coming

"Throughout the whole absurd life I’ve lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind levelled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living."

                                         - Albert Camus

W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

                                      - W.B. Yeats

News of Ciaran Carson's death came on the same day that I attended a discussion to mark the centenary of Yeats' poem, held by Irish poets and academics John MacAuliffe, Martina Evans, Alan Gillis and Colette Bryce. To mark his passing they read from his work, with the final poem of the evening being 'Fear', whose opening two lines I have always rather liked:

I fear the vast dimensions of eternity.
I fear the gap between the platform and the train.

What Carson is saying is that the human mind, being either incapable or unwilling to face up to the infinity and emptiness of time and space and our own insignificance in it as mere pawns of fate, chooses instead to focus on those smaller, more immediate risks which we think we can control. For me there is also an element of this in Yeats' much quoted (and much more quoted since June 2016) poem. The reason for the concept of a second coming (or its equivalent in other religions) is precisely to put some sort of end point on our current situation. But the poet is also saying that when the apocalypse comes - and it will come because it always has before - it won't be in one big bang, but rather in a series of mundane problems of the type we face every day anyway: the falcon will not hear the falconer for example. In other words, we may not recognise it when we see it; indeed, we may have already failed to recognise it.

The panellists wisely steered away from Yeats' peculiar love life, his spiritualism and his anti-democratic political views and focused on his craftsmanship. Whilst arising from the context of the end of the Great War, the struggle for Irish independence, the Bolshevik revolution etc, the poem is timeless and relevant to any age that fears and foresees an impending calamity; which, of course, has been the case for all civilisations throughout history and will continue to be so until man finally annihilates himself completely.

I won't attempt to summarise the wide-ranging discussion but it covered areas as diverse as the Riddles of the Sphinx (I didn't previously know that there were two), Brueghel's painting of Icarus (reproduced in this blog post about Auden's poem), and the band Uriah Heep (unlikely ever to be mentioned further in this blog unless I get round to writing a post about how I spent my 8,000th day alive), to the effect of becoming a father on middle-aged men (if you ask me the first ten years are the most difficult, and the subsequent ten years are the most difficult as well).

Uriah Heep

Let's finish with another Irish poet, again writing about a specific event, but with universal applicability:


Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven's weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

                      - Seamus Heaney

Don't ask me

Readers may be wondering why your bloggist hasn't commented on the latest carryings on by the UK government, or perhaps it would be better to say what passes for a government. Tempted as I am, I shall just quote W.B. Yeats:

"I think it better that in times like these

A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth  We have no gift to set a statesman right"

Interestingly the US government is just as big a shambles. How hard it must be for young people today to believe that the two democracies had stood together to save the world as recently as the mid-twentieth century and had then subsequently seen off the challenge of the other tyranny with which they had expediently allied to do it. Now of course the heir of the Soviet Union would seem to be having the last laugh. It will not have escaped your notice that yesterday's post was to mark the centenary of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Luxemberg didn't have much time for Lenin, and one assumes that she would have had even less for Stalin had she lived that long. She was also not so keen on Bernsteinian revisionism (*), which is essentially the form of socialism as preached and occasionally practised by all mainstream Western European parties of the left, including, now that Jeremy Corbyn has recaptured it from the neo-liberalism of the Blair years, the Labour Party. What Luxemburg did believe in was grassroots activism, whereby society was controlled from below rather from above; she took the view, which I think we can agree was borne out by events, that otherwise the new boss would be as bad as the old boss. In these dark and challenging times it doesn't do any harm to reflect on what she wrote in her critique of the Russian revolution: "Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" "Freedom is always freedom for the one who thinks differently" * Eduard Bernstein was a friend and associate of Engels, but nevertheless spent all of his long life campaigning for the achievement of socialism by peaceful means through incremental legislative reform in democratic societies. I have no idea how he found the time to write 'West Side Story' as well.

Never give all the heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

                  - W. B. Yeats

A loaf of bread...

...and thou beside me singing in the wilderness

Omar Khayyam (a) of course. Not the chap who liked the product so much that he bought the company, although I do hope they are related. I can't help thinking that Victor has appeared in this blog previously, so apologies for any repetition. The product that I currently like very much is the breadmaker. Obviously it is immensely inconvenient to use, costs far more than going to the excellent artisan baker five minutes from my house, and has required the acquisition of lots of additional equipment - flour storage, milk thermometer etc - but the bread is really good. I am slightly disappointed that the best results so far have come from ready prepared mixes rather than from my own efforts, but perhaps that's why Waitrose is the spiritual home of the breadmaker owner. 

Last night, following the purchase of yet more expensive ingredients, I set it up so as to have freshly baked bread available first thing this morning; the smell was as every bit as good as you would expect. There has been one other bonus out of all this. Coral Laroc - a name not mentioned here for a couple of years, but still very much around - has gone on a juice fast as a new year detox regime (b) and is permanently hungry. What better entertainment then but to make sure that by email and text she is kept fully informed of just how good my bread (and cakes and biscuits and indeed the sweet potato, chilli and spring onion rosti that I made on Monday) are and how wonderful they taste.

(a) When racking my brains for a quote with which to introduce a post about bread I did briefly consider W. B. Yeast, but nothing relevant sprang to mind.

(b) One reason for not mentioning her very often is that if I posted every time she went on a faddy diet there would be no room for anything else.

I would wish to be less wise

William Butler Yeats was born one hundred and fifty years ago today.

"The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet."

Young Man's Song

I whispered, ‘I am too young,’ And then, ‘I am old enough’;      Wherefore I threw a penny        To find out if I might love.            ‘Go and love, go and love, young man,           If the lady be young and fair,’     Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,              I am looped in the loops of her hair.          Oh, love is the crooked thing,     There is nobody wise enough      To find out all that is in it,              For he would be thinking of love               Till the stars had run away,          And the shadows eaten the moon.         Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,                One cannot begin it too soon. -  W.B.Yeats

Pot11pouri

• Only a few days ago I arbitrarily used as a title for a blog posting "Hello, good evening and welcome", the catch phrase of Sir David Frost. And then yesterday he suddenly had a heart attack and died. Spooky. Using a wargames blog to foretell, or maybe even cause, someone's death; that's just wrong. And it's certainly a power that should never be abused.
• It's Seamus Heaney's funeral today in Dublin. As he himself wrote in 'The Harvest Bow', 

"The end of art is peace."

• This is in danger of becoming a bit morbid. I am going to a funeral myself on Friday - an aunt - and perhaps that has made me slightly more reflective than usual. But of course, the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on. As Heaney's fellow Irish poet W.B.Yeats put it

 "O mind your feet, O mind your feet,
Keep dancing like a wave,
And under every dancer
A dead man in his grave."

• And just a heads up that the title of tomorrow's blog posting will be 'Vote Conservative'