Good lines

h and I adding our names to the wall at Ground Zero Blues Club, Clarksdale, Mississippi in April this year (that bit of trip here)


In this post I offer you a few quotations – from things I've read recently.

1. Via Chatwin

Whilst travelling I did read a book or two and one was “The Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989). I'd heard Chatwin's name for years but never got round to reading anything by him so I picked up a couple of his books in a second hand shop in Washington state. It was hard not to find “The Songlines” interesting as it covers a lot of my favourite subjects (walking, singing, trying to understand the world...) but it wouldn't be to everyone's taste (it just... stops here and there... not your average book, for sure). I was pretty interested in all the information about Australia and its Aboriginal people but I found Chatwin's style a bit repetitive and, now and again, even tiresome. Still, he was the erudite type and he does use some great quotations. Here's one from Robert Burton's “The Anatomy of Melancholy” (first publ. 1621):


The heavens themselves run continually round, the sun riseth and sets, the moon increaseth, stars and planets keep their constant motions, the air is still tossed by the winds, the waters ebb and flow, to their conservation no doubt, to teach us that we should ever be in motion.


And here's one from Kierkegaard (letter to Jette – 1847). I may have seen this quotation on another, more energetic, walker's blog too:


Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it... but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill... Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.


And now a bit of Chatwin's own text:


'I know this may sound far-fetched,' I said to Elizabeth Vrba, 'but if I were asked, “What is the big brain for”?, I would be tempted to say, “For singing our way through the wilderness.” '


I like that one.


2. Martin Bloody Amis?

There was a piece by Martin Amis in the Financial Times recently about one of my very favourite poets Philip Larkin. It contained this:


Literary criticism, throughout its long history (starting with Aristotle), has restlessly searched for the Holy Grail of a value system – a way of separating the excellent from the less excellent. But it turns out that this is a fool’s errand.


Guess I've met a few fools then (I knew it...). I'm certainly no Mamis fan but it's a really good article. Interesting too how he calls Larkin “the novelist's poet” (and very much not the poet's poet...).


3. Dawn French (popular culture alert!)

How about this from comedian/actor (or is that comedienne/actress?) Dawn French in her autobiography (of sorts) “Dear Fatty” (2008)?


I personally like the adventure of difference


and a longer excerpt (about her year in New York when she was 18/19):


For the first time ever, I was alone in a different country. I was nervous about how I was going to cope in this big bustling city and so I employed a technique which still serves me well today. I imagined myself as someone who relished new exciting opportunities, who was utterly unafraid and perpetually optimistic. It was a kind of reinvention. Everyone I met was new. These people didn't know me, there was no shared history, so I could be anything or anyone I wanted to be. My theory was that if I behaved like a confident, cheerful person, eventually I would buy it myself, and become that. I always had traces of strength somewhere inside me, it wasn't fake, it was just a way of summoning my courage to the fore and not letting any self-doubt hinder my adventures. This method worked then, and it works now. I tell myself that I am the sort of person who can open a one-woman play in the West End, so I do. I am the sort of person who has several companies, so I do. I am the sort of person who WRITES A BOOK! So I do. It's a process of having faith in the self you don't quite know yet, if you see what I mean. Believing that you will find the strength, the means somehow, and trusting in that, although your legs are like jelly. You can still walk on them and you will find the bones as you walk. Yes, that's it. The further I walk, the stronger I become. So unlike real lived life, where the further you walk the more your hips hurt.


I'm not normally a big reader of celebrity stories but (a) it's one of my Mum's books (and there are plenty of those still around the house), (b) I'm always fascinated by people who manage to make a living out of comedy and (c ) French's Dad killed himself... and I'm always fascinated by people who have been in this same, very peculiar boat too. It's not a great book (I have skimmed at times...) but it has its good moments. And I like her overall (there's an interview with her here on of all things 'This Morning'... why the hell not..?)


4. Dundee's finest

From songwriter and musician Michael Marra (talking on BBC Radio Scotland) about his ambition as a young man:


I didn't want my name in lights - I wanted it in brackets


I've written about Dundee's Marra on the old blog loads of times... in fact I even wrote him a poem (back here). 



5. Krishnamurti

And finally a line from Krishnamurti – via a young relative of mine on the evil facebook:


It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society


Some food for thought I think.

x

The Reading Promise

On our recent can-we-escape-normal-life-please trip to the US and Canada we spent a certain amount of time in bookshops. All three of us (man, woman, child) are fairly keen readers and we all feel comfortable and relaxed, I think it's fair to say, in a bookshop (though we like music and DVD shops too...). In our time overseas we went to little second hand bookshops, giant book megastores and pretty much everything in between (and indeed one of my favourite places in North America is undoubtedly Powell's marvellous bookstore in Portland, Oregon - our Oregon visit is back here).

Despite these bookstore visits in fact I did very little reading during those six months on the road – mainly I had my nose in guidebooks and maps, leaflets and more maps. I read a few books along with h – though currently she prefers to read to me rather than the other way round – but mainly I planned to catch up with reading again when we got home. It was a bit weird reading so little for six whole months (usually I read quite a lot, I suppose) but it made it more like a holiday (as in different from the norm) and it seemed the right thing to do at the time.

One book that was top of my list to read when we got back was this one:





“The Reading Promise – 3,218 nights of reading with my father” by Alice Ozma (2011). I'd seen a copy in a Chapters store in British Columbia in June but had not bought it then due to our ever-increasing amount of luggage-to-get-home-somehow. Instead I bought it when we got home (it's originally a US book but I got the UK edition – published by Hodder & Stoughton, their page for the book is here). Then I got to reading it pretty much as soon as I could.

I suppose I found this book tempting mainly because it is about a parent and child reading together and reading is one of the things that h and I have done together most often. h has always loved books with a kind of crazy passion (this is the child that, as young as maybe not even 2 years old, woke us up in the middle of the night regularly with “read me the ducky book, read me the ducky book!”) and now, at 11, the passion shows no sign of dying out either. She doesn't only read books it should be said - she plays with them like they are toys, talks to them, wanders around the house with them, almost climbs inside them. She also much prefers to read aloud (or listen) rather than read quietly and again this preference shows no sign of disappearing. I find it interesting for many reasons but partly because “More about the song” for me was always at least partly about sound in poetry (rather than what seem to me drier, more intellectual concerns) and so I suppose maybe she and I have the preference for sound in common.

In “The Reading Promise” Alice Ozma tells her and her father's reading story – how left together at home for most of her formative years reading was one of their mutual passions to the extent that they agreed to read together every night (without fail) until she left home for college at 18. It started as a read-for-a-hundred-nights, turned into read-for-a-thousand nights and then it just kept going and they came to call it their “Reading Streak” (or “the Streak” for short). Ozma's father was a primary school librarian (not something we ever have in the UK to my knowledge) and he was something of a professional reader so in their case it was always him reading to Alice, rather than the other way around.

"The Reading Promise" isn't hugely about the books they read (something she covers in a blog post here) and like many readers I found this a bit offputting at first. However I stuck with it and I'm glad I did because it is a charming account of a very dedicated and loving father/single parent and the passion for books and stories that he nurtures in his daughters and his students. It is also, I suppose, about the place of books in our lives as computers advance in schools and homes (though this is mostly in the final chapters) and it is also about eccentricity, in many ways, in children and in their parents. Maybe all families are eccentric (thus making a nonsense of the word...) but I think that single parent families, in particular, can't help but be a bit eccentric (I know the one I grew up in was...) and that at times, as a child, you feel the lacks more than the gains. Ozma, however, seems to have learned (a bit earlier than I did perhaps...) to appreciate that devoted single parent and to celebrate their efforts and achievements. For that (and for getting a good book published before the age of 25) congratulations to Alice Ozma – job well done on both counts.

Alice's father, Jim Brozina, has written the foreword to the book and here's an excerpt from it that I know my Mum would have approved of:

“A parent who has proven time and time again that the growth and happiness of his or her children is priority number one does not have to worry about where those children are heading in life. They will be sensitive and productive members of society for as long as they live.”

I'm not sure it's always as straightforward as that... but it's not a bad idea to try it anyway.

x

Alice Ozma's website is here.

An old blog post of mine about reading to the small one is here

The pic at top of post is an old one of my Mum reading to h (aforementioned “ducky book” I think). It must be from about 2001.

And poetry?

Misty Montrose, last week


I mentioned when I started this new blog just recently that I wasn't sure whether it would have any poetry content at all... and especially if it would feature any poetry by little old me. In the old blog I posted quite a lot of poems, took part in poetry projects, wrote about poetry matters and such like so it would be quite a change for me and my online life if this were all to change. Some of you were good enough to protest a little about this suggestion and your comments were much appreciated (we take what we can, eh, crumbs of praise, crumbs of self-respect...) but in all honesty I really have no idea, at this point, if I will ever write another poem again. I mean, who cares, really, especially when there is so much else to think about (social unrest, social decay, settling back in at home, not settling back in at home, going out, staying in, family life etc.). And it's weird because I'm not upset or even particularly confused or anything - I just feel a bit 'dunno' about the whole thing. And people keep saying “you must have got so much material while you were travelling!” and I'm like “yeh, maybe, s'pose so” (in all those six months I read very little poetry and wrote even less). These inarticulate responses seem very teenage, don't they? Maybe it's some stage of bereavement or something.

I do know that, even in simpler times, I never feel about poetry the way some of you others do. I don't bathe in it, revel in it, wrap myself in it and float away and all that (maybe that's my problem – it has always been music with actual tunes that has done those kind of things for me). And, for example, when I listened to the radio documentary about poet Rosemary Tonks last year or so and they got to the bit about her withdrawing from the world of poetry the commentators (and poetry lovers) on the programme were all “how could she do that?” and “why would she do that?” and I was like “well, duh, why wouldn't you?” Her departure may have had something to do with religion but I could imagine many other reasons why a person might want to abandon poetry (or at least goings-on to do with it). For me (so far) the poetry world has never worked much magic (though I know that for others it is a wondrous place to be, likeminded souls and all that). In my case I've been to poetry festivals and felt time and time again like a fish out of water, a fish without a bicycle and pretty much a fish out on a slab with my head cut off (not so magical). And I know I miss Adrian Mitchell...

So will there be any poems as the posts roll out over the coming months? I dunno, I dunno and, again, I dunno. Sorry to be so adolescent.

x