Just asking

I’ve recently had cause to take Boots own-brand codeine and paracetamol tablets (“for acute moderate pain” according to the enclosed leaflet). Maximum recommended daily dosage is 8; if you take them for more than three days there is a “risk of addiction.” They are sold in packets of 32. Is this a marketing strategy?

Bookstock Reviewed

Here.

 

 

Further sightings

Wednesday, 22nd June.

I will be appearing at the next  Speaky Spokey.

 

 

Self promotion

Bookfest

The above link is for an event next Friday. There’s an interestingly varied  line-up of poets and, to add an extra element of randomness, an open mic.

Disclaimer: I am one of the people reading. Mostly from this book, but some new material.

 

If you build it, they will come. Probably.

I’d checked train times before I left. I hadn’t checked if there would be any trains. Still, the replacement bus service ran smoothly enough and I reached Crawley on time, Waterstones had copies of my book, and there was an audience – not bad for an event where the time and the line-up had been changed and the venue on the website was still given as TBC. Counting the casual shoppers who occasionally stopped to listen the number almost certainly never fell below double figures. Not a great turnout, but then I’ve seen Les Murray read to an audience of twenty, and, only a few weeks ago, I saw poets as good as Brendan Cleary and Jackie Wills give a free event that attracted a crowd of eight (and two of them left when they realised it wasn’t an open-mic night).  And, once, I was part of a reading to which nobody came, a fringe festival event held in the same building as a student production of The Tempest. I waited with two other poets for an audience that never arrived. From time to time someone would put their head round the door and immediately apologise and back away. So the turn out for Sunday’s Crawley Wordfest event was not bad, considering it was mother’s day and all.

The other members of the panel (a grand word for three men sitting by the cash register) were Adam Lowe and Rhys Hughes. We gave brief accounts of our works, had a discussion about the nature of satire (What does it mean? What do we want it to do? Is it what we’re doing?).Which in turn led to a discussion about the impact of satire on politics, and then politics itself. The discussion was necessarily inconclusive – satirical is one of those words that only seems to have a distinct meaning – but the audience joined in eagerly enough. I read from The Noise of Strangers, Rhys, claiming his novel Mister Gum is unsuitable for a family audience,  from a short story parodying Hemingway. The whole deal lasted about an hour, followed by a coffee in a local gallery (thanks Jo!) and a replacement bus ride home. The literary life!

 

 

Forthcoming

Marking Our Turf
Gardening, Satire & Niche in Contemporary Writing

At Waterstones in Crawley, Sunday 3rd April. This is what the event was supposed to be; unfortunately Kay Sexton, the author of a book that has something to do with gardening, was unable to attend, and suggested me as a replacement. Thanks, Kay!

The organisers are going to tweak the title to reflect the change in line-up. Interesting to see if any gardeners will attend. As I’m a flat-dwelling urbanite (admittedly in a fairly small urbs) there could be an interesting Q&A.

Context

Surprised to hear Jon Snow on Channel Four News raise the question whether Ghaddafi “should be taken out” – and not in the sense of bought a meal and shown a good time. “Taken out” is Mob slang: it would hardly have been more surprising if Jon Snow said “whacked.” Is this the official language of international affairs? (And it isn’t a move in the direction of plain speaking: it’s just drawing our euphemisms from a different source).

Grote, again

“I have specified briefly each of the two or three hundred towns which agreed in bearing the Hellenic name, and recounted its birth and early life, as far as our evidence goes . . .”

It’s curiously addictive: the long, flat sentences, the frequent repetitions of the same point, the repeated warnings that the accounts left by the Greeks are not always reliable on points of detail . . . Grote is a careful writer, rather than a good one, too scrupulous for drama or epigram. This shows admirable character, but isn’t always compelling. And of course he remains an early nineteenth century figure, with all that that implies. His long account of the growth of Athenian democracy (Vol. III, pp 346-398) doesn’t come with the caveats a modern historian would mention: that Athens was a slave owning state and women were not included in the franchise.In fact, Grote, following his sources, barely mentions women. Sappho is mentioned – always paired, like an ancient double act, with her compatriot and contemporary Alkaeus – but she is remembered for her metrical innovations rather than the quality of her poetry – “Of their once celebrated lyric compositions, scarcely anything remains.”

In between I read Andy Beckett’s “When the lights went out,” a history of Britain in the 1970s. Melancholy reading, as all recent political history seems to be: a catalogue of missed opportunities, bad-faith arguments, and broken promises (cf. increases in VAT, student fees, major reforms of the NHS, “front line staff will not be effected,” etc).

 

 

 

Lost worlds

Still plodding through Grote’s History. He’s one of those writers who seems to rise and fall with his subjects: there’s an arid stretch on the migrations of the Hellenic peoples which consists largely of Grote disagreeing with earlier writers. He concludes that we can’t know anything for certain from the contradictory literary sources, most of which were written hundreds of years after the events they describe – this is a history that pre-dates the development of archaeology. It picks up a little when he reaches the early history of Sparta, but even here he is firm about the limits of what, barring “positive evidence,” can be said. Several hundred pages of sensible nitpicking doesn’t make for an exciting read, and I’ve occasionally skimmed over his respectful and patient dismantling of the opinions of O. Muller and Mr. Clinton. Still, there’s an interesting overview – if, that is, you find that sort of thing interesting – of mid-nineteenth century scholarship and copious footnotes in a variety of languages – Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and, more rarely, German (the German scholars he cites usually write in Latin). Grote has read widely, and seems to include everything. His discussion of the Homeric epics makes comparisons with the Northern Sagas, the Mahabharata, the epic songs of the Balkan bards, the Mediaeval Arthurian cycle and early Christian Hagiography, all in an attempt to recover the mental attitudes of a remote period. It’s an impressive, if somewhat dusty, monument.

Also read: the Autobiography of Benjamin Robert Haydon, the self-aggrandising memoirs of an artist whose work never quite lived up to his ambitions, and who blames his lack of success on the Royal Academy. It’s a lively, bad-tempered book, with occasionally vivid, if unfair, portrayals of peers. Hazlitt, for instance: “that singular mixture of friend and fiend, radical and critic, metaphysician, poet and painter, on whose word no one could rely, on whose heart no one could calculate . . . With no decision, no application, no intensity of self-will, he had a hankering to be a painter, guided by a feeble love of what he saw, but the moment he attempted to colour or paint, his timid hand refused to obey from want of practice. Having no moral courage he shrank from the struggle, sat down in hopeless despair, and began to moralise on the impossibility of Art being revived in England . . .” Haydon argues with Shelley about atheism: “We said unpleasant things to each other, and when I retired to the other room for a moment I overheard them say, ‘Haydon is fierce.’” It’s true: Haydon is fierce, and his autobiography makes no attempt to hide his ferocity. He’s sometimes shrewd (“Wordsworth must always be eloquent and profound, because he knows he is considered childish and puerile.”), sometimes perverse (“Unfortunately I provoked all this clamour by asserting my belief . . . that the negro was the link between animal and man”). He is forever being advised to calm down, but forever throwing himself into controversy, and he identifies enemies everywhere (“I saw pride and revenge lurking beneath the smoothness of their manner”). His heroes are military men: Alexander, Caesar, Nelson and the Duke of Wellington. There’s a vivid account of France in 1814, overrun with foreign troops, with Napoleon still on Elba. Characteristically, he finds himself drawn to Napoleon: “though detesting [his] government, I was affected with something like sympathy for his private habits.” He is wary of the French women: their manners are exquisite, “but they had all more or less beard . . . they looked like skeletons in petticoats.” In fact, he doesn’t trust the French as a whole: “their vain ingratitude and unprincipled restlessness will be more apparent. Not a hundred years will pass before the great nations of Europe will be obliged . . . more effectually to crush them.” His autobiography tells the same story with variations: he works on a picture, he is let down by fair-weather friends and feckless aristocrats. His pictures are popular successes and admired by the cognoscenti but that damn cabal of Academicians and portrait painters conspire against him, and he has to start all over again. He petitions the government, but politicians are not interested in art. The autobiography stops suddenly: there are journals for the succeeding years. He is in debt almost continually. He commits suicide in 1846, at the age of 61. Representative sentence: “If I had the power I would spit fire at such insignificant wretches!”

 

 

 

Reading list

George Grote’s History of Greece. Longer ago than I care to think about, I bought an edition of this because I liked the look of it (it was also cheap). I’ve finally decided to read it. I’m 200 pages into the first volume (with nine more to go) and so far we’re still in the heroic age. Given I’ve only read about 0.5% of the whole book it still seems a little early to comment. Perhaps I’ll have a clearer idea by volume three. As it is, Grote’s account of the various mythes that the ancient Greeks took to be actual history shows him to be a careful, shrewd writer with an occasional dry wit.  It’s interesting to be reminded of the complexity of the Greek mythological system: that it wasn’t really a system at all, just a huge aggregate of often contradictory local beliefs gradually combined and refined and added to by generations of poets, dramatists, logographers and scholiasts, and, almost certainly, priests and political leaders eager to add to their local shrine’s prestige. Interesting also that, in the preface from the second edition (1849), Grote recommends a “recent publication,” Colonel Sleeman’s Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official: “The description given by Colonel Sleeman, of the state of mind now actually prevalent among the native population of Hindostan, presents a vivid comparison, helping the modern reader to understand and appreciate the legendary aera of Greece.” Comparative mythology, a proto-anthropology, and a tang of imperial condescension.