Books Do Furnish A Room

Paradise by Way of Kensal Green

I mentioned a few Fridays ago that I might share with you Chesterton's famous poem on the making of the English road - the windy, careless and carefree road of countryside and imagination.  But in fact, there are three of these poems, all offering different views, and you will have them all over the next month or so; they are the Poems of the Car Club from The Flying Inn.  Here is the first of them, G K Chesterton's The Rolling English Road, sung emotionally by Dorian Wimpole, the poet who has been almost hijacked by the good guys in the book, and has gone over to them with a vengeance.  Do read The Flying Inn, it's hilarious and thoughtful, and there's lots of poetry like this (by the way, if you don't know the geography, worry not - just assume that the directions are ludicrously wrong headed):

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,

The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,

And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;

A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread

The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,

And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;

But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed

To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,

Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,

The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run

Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?

The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,

But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.

God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear

The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,

Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,

But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,

And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;

For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,

Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

B. O. P.

I mentioned a few days ago that I had bought an Annual of the Boys’ Own Paper (or B.O.P. as it called itself) for 1908-09.  This was partly to “replace” one I had in childhood, inherited from an elderly great-uncle, although it’s actually not the same year.  Partly it was just out of sociological interest; and partly, I was conscious of following the example of Erridge in Powell’s Dance.  For Erridge, this was a regression to childhood when worried or irritated; for me, it is just mild fun.

The first thing about the BOP that you notice is how dense it is; the print is small, and words crowd the page.  There are a lot of illustrations, but they are drawings and photographs, with no cartoon strips at all.  There’s almost no colour, except in the very occasional special plate, and the quality of the photographs is understandably poor – low contrast, low definition.  The tone is very serious, very improving, and very patriotic and public school (or at least, traditional male schools with uniforms, classical curricula, and fierce discipline).  There are adventure stories, lots of soldiering and scouting, and lots of articles on ships, trains, and other boys’ toys of the time – and lots of ‘doing’ articles: how to make a boat, a kite, a fishing rod et cetera.  Lots of animals are shot, Britain is naturally top country, and the Empire is a force of beneficence throughout the world; indigenous people are respected but in need of the white man's guidance, and they are sometimes “niggers”.

Yet, however uncomfortable all this is, there is a wholesomeness and an innocence too.  Good wins out, boys are basically honest and decent, and are encouraged to do outdoor things, play games, and support their school, country and chums.  BOP unashamedly puffs itself at any opportunity, and the general standard of humour is schoolboy in the juvenile not the scatological sense.  With a little social re-orientation, one would be very happy to see boys (there is no place here at all for girls) reading much of this today, rather than watching some of the video, television and computer games they spend so much time with (“Hrrmph!  Said cross of Tunbridge Wells”!).  The tone is unashamedly avuncular, and would certainly not be tolerated by any boys I know in the right age group (8-14, I guess?).

Let’s look at an issue at random – Saturday, February 13, 1909 - a drawing of a rugby match on the cover, "Dr Silver:  a school story" (part 3), "In the Heart of the Silent Sea" (an adventure story, part 20 (!)), two other adventure stories, another school story,  a not very good drawing of a white man in Africa shooting a native who has attacked him - but no story attached, a hockey story, an article on the Privet Hawk moth, one on football in Australia, a long article on "The Romance of Surveying: Thrilling Stories by the Men who are Mapping our Possessions", a school humourous poem and a weak cartoon.  Other editions can be very different, with columns on chess, draughts, puzzles, etc, but there is a strong strain of serialised and thrilling stories in school and around the Empire. Altogether 16 very full pages, quite a long, serious read.

As I hope I've made clear, it is very much of its time, and really has a pretty limited social outlook.  But I can take it for what it was, discount its Imperial attitudes, and look forward to getting a good deal of quiet enjoyment out of it over the coming weeks - though I doubt I will ever read all 800 pages!!  Frustratingly, as I have only one volume, some stories will start before my volume begins, and others will not finish - but that probably doesn't matter; it is the flavour of the beast, not the outcome of the story, that I am after.

Liquorice afternoon: Sunday Salon

Allsorts of books building up on my desk at the moment, and here, at Sunday Salon time, are four that are under way at the moment (I always read more than book at a time, often five or six!).

• Regis Debray's Against Venice, recommended by a blog reader as an antidote to the occasionally overwhelming hype about Venice.  Debray is one of those of overarching political-cultural intellectuals that only the French can really produce - supporting Che Guevara in Bolivia, then advising the Mitterand government in France, and now interested mainly in "mediology", the study of the transmission of signs in society.  Against Venice is a slight work, provocative and stimulating, and is a blast against the canonisation and excessive veneration of this city.  He sets out his stall early:  he says it is "[not] my fault that Western history has set the family jewel at the top of the Italian boot, glittering obscenely and tenaciously in the fold of the groin"!  For him, Venice is a drug, of which only the first trip is a good experience.  He makes a passionate case for prefering Naples: "Naples has a cheerful skeleton, with merry winking eye-sockets.  Venice fades the flesh, the honeymoon temple hastens the end of love".

• C S Forester's Lieutenant Hornblower.  The first of the full length Hornblower novels in some ways, as Midshipman Hornblower is really a collection of short stories strung together by a thinnish storyline.  Forester is the first, and still the best, of the naval storytellers - and some of his work is distinctly respectable, notably The Gun.  If it's good enough for Churchill, it's good enough for me!

• Primo Levi's The Wrench, which I have been reading because I mentioned cranes in a recent posts - the feathered kind, in Japanese prints - and these stories of an Italian workman, a skilled rigger of cranes and bridges came to mind.  These are wonderful stories, told by the rigger in the first person, about his work around the world, full of human detail about triumph and failure, and full of the warmth and pride of the man who builds things, rather than just talks about them.  I love Levi's writing, and this is one of his most compelling books, a kind of counterpoint to the wonderful stories based, very loosely, on chemistry in The Periodic Table.  I recommend all his work, but these two books are particularly accessible and entertaining.

•   Last week, I went to the Cranach exhibition at the Royal   Academy, which - though it was small and didn't include all the famous pictures I knew from around Europe - was very enjoyable and had several lovely gems - including nudes of Venus and Eve.  I bought the catalogue, and will spend the next few weeks occasionally flipping through it and reading a little here, admiring a painting there.  He lived around the turn of the C15-16th, working in Vienna around 1500.  He was a close friend of Martin Luther, and this exhibition contained many fine portraits, some of Luther himself, a number of nudes of various subjects - a rather new and daring departure for the German renaissance - and several beheadings, notably portrayals of Salome.  It's almost too late to see it, but go if you can.

Avocets!!

Quick dash to Barnes wetland centre this afternoon to see an historic sight - breeding avocets in London.  This lovely bird used to be common in wetland coastal areas, but became (almost) unknown in Britain, though it returned to East Anglia in modest numbers in, I believe, the 1950s.  It's rarity, the hope it held out of reversing wildlife catastrophe, and its charisma all led to it being adopted as the Symbol of the RSPB .

These are not my pictures - the birds were too far away without a howitzer lens - but they show you what you can see in central London today, under the Heathrow flight path!  The wonderful image below comes courtesy of the Abstracts of Nature photoblog.

We have had avocets at Barnes before, when a pair nested a few years ago.  Young hatched, but were eaten by herons.  We wish this pair better luck - they are sitting on a nest with three eggs, and valiantly and noisily defying crows and gulls.

Two short poems

Two poems this week, from an author hardly anyone seems to have heard of - Per Iter Tenebricosum and The Image Maker by Oliver St John Gogarty.  He was an extraordinary man, and if you want to be drunk on words for a space, I recommend his memoir As I Was Going Down Sackville Street.  He was Irish, very Irish, and he knew everyone in the arts and in politics, and he is Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses. He lived from 1878-1957, but he crammed hundreds of years of experience into those 80 years - a fine poet and story teller, a renowned (and heroic) surgeon, a national class bicyclist and a pioneering aviator.  Yeats thought him the finest lyric poet of the age (I beg to disagree, but he's worth reading), and so many stories are told about him that if I start, I may never stop.  But he performed a public pioneering larynxectomy, and recovered his own incriminating door key from the body of his friend Michael Collins when doing the autopsy on the Irish hero.

First, Per Iter Tenebricosum, in easy reference to Catullus' famous lyric:

Enough! Why should a man bemoan
A Fate that leads the natural way?
Or think himself a worthier one
Than those who braved it in their day?
If only gladiators died
Or heroes, Death would be his pride;
But have not little maidens gone,
And Lesbia's sparrow - all alone?

And now The Image Maker, about a sculptor who sees the statue in the stone, and who is helped by the stone itself to free his vision.

Hard is the stone, but harder still
The delicate preforming will
That guided by a dream alone,
Subdues and moulds the hardest stone,
Making the stubborn jade release
The emblem of eternal peace.

If but the will be firmly bent,
No stuff resists the mind's intent;
The adamant abets his skill
And sternly aids the artist's will
To clothe in perdurable pride
Beauty his transient eyes descried.

"I am Voss"

I recently read Patrick White's Voss as part of the Cornflower book group, although they didn't take to it very much - indeed, the readership was much lower than many of the other books they had read.  I was disappointed by this, as I found it very powerful, if not conventionally enjoyable.  So I have decided to post on it separately, building on my comment in that group. White is a great writer, and I felt my battle with his anti heroes, Johann Ulrich Voss and Laura, between whom there is an intense and spiritual marriage in testing circumstances, well worth it.  The spirit of Nietzsche hovers over Voss himself, and the passive violence of the Australian outback, and the total inadequacy of man before it - particularly a proud and solitary man - was powerfully portrayed.

And my title is not meant to suggest that I am literally Voss or even like Voss, but to illustrate the central reason that I find this a compelling, even a great, book.  For many of us - by no-means all, I freely accept - there is no guiding power in our lives; in the language of Nietzsche, "God is dead", and there is no way to live which does not involve facing our failures, unless it be adopting an inward, a fearful life which poses no challenges.  That is my position, and Voss speaks to me and all of us who know that we are not big enough to succeed in the challenges we have set ourselves, but are big enough - at least in our own eyes - not to accept any challenge which is small enough to overcome.

It's difficult firstly because one of the central themes - the spiritual union of Voss and Laura - is so fleetingly described. What is it? Is it action at a distance as a physicist might suggest, or a mere remembering of each person by the other and the inspiration of those memories? Well I think it's something different from either, I think it's real but magical, in the sense of the magic realism of the Latin American authors of the last decades of the C20th. She IS there in the desert with him. And she gets better when he dies - not as a cliche - but because it would make no sense for anything else to happen: all her strength has been supporting him, and when he dies, the burden is removed and she can sustain herself again. The cliche, whcih he resists, would have been for her to love and marry the only survivor of the expedition - but she too must fail, not just Voss himself.

Voss attempts to live by the will, and without other people. This makes him strong and terribly weak at the same time, and very alone.  And sometimes, he has to prove to himself what no one can ever doubt, that he has an adamantine will and cares nothing for others' esteem - as when he kills his faithful dog, an act of brutality for which there is no possible justification except his insecure need to prove himself.  It is utterly unforgivable in normal parlance, but there is an awful sympathy for him too: how sad he is, how warped, how alone.  And of course, he lives alone and dies alone, without achieving anything except trying.  Eliot has something to say on this (from East Coker):

...and what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Voss fails, as he always must, but fails in heroic, tragic, circumstances. And to go back to an earlier theme, Man is not enough, however strong, and this is full of interest because none of us are strong enough for the challenges we face, and, in the end, we will all fail (if in no other way, that we will die with aspirations unmet). Voss is clearly written with Also Sprach Zarathrustra in mind: and it poses no answers (because there are none) to the terrible question, of How do we live, when Man is not enough and God is dead? That is why it is worth the struggle to read Voss, and to think of him every day of your life.

Herons and cranes

As a child, I was always fascinated by herons, which were much rarer then than they are now, and always saw it as a lucky omen if I saw one on the estuary where we lived while walking the dogs.  They were aloof, tall and elegant, and I love them still.  Now, of course, there are other herons in this country - little egrets, for example, smaller but more elegant, dappling the south coast at Poole or points west.  And when I grew, in my early 20s, to a love of all things Japanese, I found that cranes were a powerful motif, in drawing, sculpture, painting, and textiles.  And now, we have cranes back in this country, in East Anglia, and with luck they will spread and become widely known and loved again.  Now I know that cranes and herons are quite different, but they share many qualities and attributes, and I am fond of all these leggy, striding birds, still and commanding.

These images come together in Yasunari Kawabata's short novel, Thousand Cranes.  Like Rituals by Cees Nooteboom, on which I have posted before, it is around the tea ceremony, but is a much less violent, forbidding book - but it's a very fine story, full of sadness and confusion, which I recall loving but the detail of which has faded quite away.   But Kawabata is a fine writer, and this is well worth a visit to the local library - as is Snow Country, or Master of Go. 

Here, to capture the mood, are two Japanese prints: the first is Five Egrets by Shosun, the second Hashimoto's Snowy Herons.   For these, and the next print, I am indebted to the Wetmore Print Collection of Connecticut College which allows free use of its images.

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And here is another print, Kokyo's Sagimusume, the spirit of the heron or white egret in Kabuki

 

 And finally, with an elegance all its own, a crane in the distance, seen from the Thames in west London. And there's a very wonderful series of short stories - Primo Levi's The Wrench -  about building cranes and similar structures, which is absolutely unmissable:  a real hymn to homo  faber, the maker of things, and a wonderfully inventive and amusing account of one Italian workman's skillful interaction with all the world.

Growing pile: Sunday Salon

A busy week, in which I don't feel I've done much reading - but in fact, when I look back more carefully, I have, and I've acquired a lot of books too - a familiar problem to me and to many other book lovers, I know.  Recent visitors to my house have remarked that in the space war, the books have definitely got the upper hand, are capturing a number of strategic points - dining table, sink - and are massing for the surge which may overpower me once and for all.

The war metaphors come to mind, because I have been reading Doonesbury, on which I posted recently - fine satire about US involvement in Iraq, and also Welcome to the Nerd Farm, his latest, wonderful collection.  On a completely different front, I've been browsing through Richard Mabey's Beechcombings, a meditation on trees and life, concentrating on the native beech, which he describes in another book as the only English tree we think of in feminine terms, with its smooth bark and sinuous, gentle curves.

Oxfam this week yielded George Orwell's Keep The Aspidistra Flying, and I have also been reading The Death of the Critic by Ronan McDonald - of direct interest to all of us, as he examines the role of the popular, including bloggers, on the appreciation of literature and books.  He is inclined to lament the loss of high profile academic criticism, while others laud the democratisation of the bookshop recommendation and the blog.  For me, I am in the middle, and I want to read both.  It would be a shame if the Leavises and the Steiners were to pass away, but I would not give up the wealth of "amateur" comment from friends and bloggers to buy their return.  Also read some fine short stories by the American Z Z Packer, in her collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.  I recommend them for a hard, sometimes painful look at contemporary poor black America.

Two other books to mention, and to return to later.  First, The Boys Own Annual 1908-09.  Now you may be thinking that this is an extraordinary choice, but I have my reasons.  When I was a child, I had a BOP (as it was known) annual from the early 1900s, and I loved it.  It was given me by an elderly great uncle, and of course, it was fantastically dated - and very white, male, and middle and upwards class - but still a lot of fun.  Somewhere along the line, in some parental clear out or house move, it got lost or given away - but this week I replaced it from abebooks, and am looking forward to serious nostalgic wallowing over coming weeks: there's a lot of wallowing to do, because its  quarto, densely printed, and nearly 900 pages long - you got your money's worth in those days (1d, or one old penny a week - (240 pennies to the pound, for my younger readers!!).

Finally, the week saw me complete Patrick White's Voss, as suggested by Cornflower's book group.  They didn't really take to it wildly, and I'll admit it wasn't a barrel of laughs.  But he is a great writer, and I felt my battle with his anti hero, Johann Ulrich Voss and Laura, with whom he has an intense and spiritual marriage in testing circumstances, was well worth it.  The spirit of Nietzsche hovers over Voss himself, and the passive violence of the Australian outback, and the total inadequacy of man before it - particularly a proud and solitary man - was powerfully portrayed.

Between the wickets

This Friday's poem marks the fact that this is the week of the first Test match (that's cricket, and it's England versus New Zealand).  I shall go tomorrow, to Lord's to see the third day, but for now I offer you Francis Thompson's At Lord's.  For those who are not cricket fans, the red rose is the symbol of Lancashire, and Hornby and Barlow were a famous opening partnership from the 1870s-90s for Lancashire, well known for their speed between the wickets and their audacious run-stealing.  The other technicalities are few, and can be ignored; suffice it to say that the author is at Lord's, world headquarters of cricket in London, but can't concentrate on the match before him - his mind's eye is filled with old glories from Old Trafford (which is a cricket ground, remember).  This is like a soccer fan today remembering Bobby Charlton and Gordon Banks.  Enjoy the lilt of the language, and the sweet nostalgia.

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

Though my own red roses there may blow;

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.

For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,

And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host

As the run stealers flicker to and fro,

To and fro:

O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago !

It's Glo'ster coming North, the irresistible,

The Shire of the Graces, long ago!

It's Gloucestershire up North, the irresistible,

And new-risen Lancashire the foe!

A Shire so young that has scarce impressed its traces,

Ah, how shall it stand before all-resistless Graces ?

O, little red rose, their bats are as maces

To beat thee down, this summer long ago !

This day of seventy-eight they are come up north against thee

This day of seventy-eight long ago!

The champion of the centuries, he cometh up against thee,

With his brethren, everyone a famous foe!

The long-whiskered Doctor, that laugheth the rules to scorn,

While the bowler, pitched against him, bans the day he was born;

And G.F. with his science makes the fairest length forlorn;

They are come from the West to work thee woe!

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

Though my own red roses there may blow;

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.

For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,

And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host

As the run stealers flicker to and fro,

To and fro:

O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago !

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Z Z Packer sounds (and to an Englishman, it's seen as "Zed Zed Packer") a bit of a tough male name, bit of rock motorcycle hard man from the industrial states of the US;  in fact, she is black and female, born in Atlanta in 1973, and it's pronounced "zizi", a nickname to replace her real one, which is Zuwena.  Having got that lot off my chest, I can tell you that I have been reading Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, as recommended by Dark Puss.

It's a collection of eight short stories, set in America, and with a distinctive tone.  There's an feeling of realism - mainly realism about being black, but mixed in with the difficulties of teaching in a tough inner city school, or having a small time criminal for a father - but it's not painful, rub your nose in it realism.  There's also a corresponding sense of unreality, which illuminates the gloom sporadically.  A boy and his father trying to sell macaws at a a black rally in Washington (because they'll remind them of the jungle!  No white writer would dare put that in the mouth of a character), or two girls who hose each other down when they should be cleaning the canteen kitchens, rather than go home and have a shower.

The writing is unusual, very much with its own voice;  it's calm and closely observed, facing up to unpleasant realities toughly but without bravado.  That makes one or two passages a bit hard to take - in Speaking in Tongues, there are fairly graphic passages about a young girl running away to the city being pressured to have sex with a man who has picked her up, drug dealer, pimp, or just a bastard?  But some of the stories - most of them - are without this uncomfortable element, and are well worth reading: I particularly liked Brownies, about a group of hard black Brownies who decide to beat up a white group for racially abusing them (they hadn't), and then finding out that they are "delayed learners".  The group's reaction to this - defiance, shame, ignoral, is a fine backdrop to two of the girls, oppressed by the bullying leadership of the gang, finding their own, warmer, more tolerant voices on the bus back home.

Altogether, these stories give an unattractive picture of black, poor America, keeping poverty, violence and crime at bay with some hard work and prayer.  In most of the stories, there are shafts of light - like the pimp's partner in Speaking in Tongues, who makes sure the runaway girl isn't trapped in drugs and prostitution, and gets away home.  I don't think I share Dark Puss' very positive view, but if you're interested in edgy short stories about contemporary America, they're certainly interesting.  You could read ZZ because she's black and female, but to judge from one interview I read, she'd be pretty annoyed if that was your only reason!

Spring in Dorset: other stuff

My week in Dorset, now a while ago, was dominated by flowers and trees.  But there was a lot else to see in the woods as well:  I didn't get any of the butterflies and bees on camera, but here's a selection of other stuff which might be of interest.

First, a small snail which had climbed high on a tree, at least six feet up.  I think it's a white lipped snail, but in any event, it's very beautiful.

And this is one of several lichens on a venerable oak; an old oak is a real conservation paradise, for insects, lichens and other organisms.  This one was festooned with at least five species of lichen, a strong indicator of clean air.

And here are two of a round, hard fungus which only (or almost always) grows on ash.  It's called King Alfred's Cakes, as it looks like a burnt and shapeless bun.  But if you break it open, it's very beautifully marked - and it's latin name is Daldinia concentrica, for obvious reasons.

This peculiar looking thing is not another fungus, but a flowering plant, toothwort (Lathraea squamaria) which is parasitic on roots, especially those of hazel.  The white scales are the leaves, sheltering lilac flowers - an odd three or our inch spike emerging from the spring grass, along with Ramsoms and bluebells!

And this little monster is a small, glistening beetle, scurrying away in the grass.  It's an oil beetle, probably Meloe proscarabeus, and it's iridescence is quite something to see.

Finally, this is another fungus - an unidentified bracket fungus, which I liked for its shape and pattern, and the dappled evening sunshine in the ancient wood at the time.

Splendid ambiguities in the peacock's tail

This week's poem is a seventeenth century anonymous verse, I saw a peacock.  Learned men argue about whether the commas are best in or should be omitted entirely - I have left them in, but you will judge for yourself.  Every line is ambiguous, one meaning being rather staggering (a cloud circled round with ivy), the other much more normal (with ivy circled round I saw an oak), so have fun.  Ambiguity is richness, although - pace William Empson's famous book, Seven Types Of Ambiguity - it is much more complex than I could ever have imagined.  In this poem, I just love the flood of images, and the challenge of holding the rival pairs in your imagination at the same time; (a pismire is an ant).

Let me know if you enjoy it; I had no comments on To EmcC, and it worries me a bit when that happens .. did nobody like it?

I Saw a Peacock, with a fiery tail,
    I saw a Blazing Comet, drop down hail,
    I saw a Cloud, with Ivy circled round,
    I saw a sturdy Oak, creep on the ground,
    I saw a Pismire, swallow up a Whale,
    I saw a raging Sea, brim full of Ale,
    I saw a Venice Glass, Sixteen foot deep,
    I saw a well, full of mens tears that weep,
    I saw their eyes, all in a flame of fire,
    I saw a House, as big as the Moon and higher,
    I saw the Sun, even in the midst of night,
    I saw the man, that saw this wondrous sight.

Spring in Dorset: flowers

My week in Dorset was excellent, and I would recommend The Kingcombe Centre for anyone who wants to be out and about in the countryside, while learning a bit about it - everything from butterflies to woodland history, painting and basket weaving,moths and flowers.  I was delighted to hear Oliver Rackham at first hand, having read many of his books, and it was fascinating to hear him interpret the landscape from ditches and woodbanks, the variations of flora, and place names and maps.  The specific lessons about the ancient Forest of Blackmoor will probably fade quickly, but many of the general points, I am sure, will be of lasting interest.

But today, I thought I would just share some pictures of spring flowers, with another instalment later on notable trees, and a third on other natural history stuff!  This is the last week of April, and so we saw, well known plants like bluebell, primrose, campion, water crowfoot and many others.  But the ones I have chosen to share are, from the top downwards:  gorse or furze; herb Paris; cuckoo flower; Ramsoms or wild garlic; early purple orchid; wood sorrel; yellow archangel.

The climate in Dorset is quite benign, and early for the UK (though much later than last year).  So with a bit of luck, some of these will be with you now or very soon, wherever you are.

Cartoons that shake Presidents

This will be hard to write: my subject is Doonesbury, the great American cartoon, written by Gary Trudeau, whose humour has enlivened political debate in the US for three decades or more with wit, charm, and savagery.  He has entered the political field as no other, being regularly banned by some states' newspapers and immediately reinstated under huge protest.  He gave readers cut out coupons to send to Tip O'Neill about corruption, and they sent them by the hundred mailbags.  His characters are charming, real, and wonderfully adapted to capture the moods, social and political, of America.

Trudeau/Doonesbury is one of the consciences of America, with a warm liberal tolerance that reassures you in the face of some of the narrow intolerance and ignorance that we sometimes hear from .. well, you know who we hear it from!  But how can I tell you about him, without showing you a few strips?  That would undoubtedly be anti-copyright, so I will send you to his website and the Wikipedia entry.  I will try a few pieces of text without the drawings, but they do lose a lot, although they are very text rich strips, as beautifully written as they are drawn. 

As an example, Senator Lacey Davenport is in Palm Beach, when her aide Willy Royce is stopped by the police.  He's black, and they assume he's a servant, who therefore has to carry ID (this is 1985!).  In the following strips, each of four panels, Royce talks to the police, and Lacey talks to her Palm Beach host, Consuela:

Strip 1: (first Royce and then the police)  Pass card?  Officer, this isn't Pretoria.  - No sir, its Palm Beach.  All hotel and domestic employees must carry IDs. - So?  That's their problem. - No sir, it's yours.  If you don't have ID, then I'll have to arrest you for loitering. - Loitering? How could I be loitering at 35 mph?  - I meant speeding.  If you'll get out of the vehicle, please, sir. - This is definitely because I'm black, isn't it?  No, sir, Hispanics are entitled to the same treatment.

Strip 2: (Lacey, then Consuela)  Well?  - I'm dreadfully sorry, dear, your Mr Royce didn't have an ID, so he was detained. - You mean arrested?  For what?  For being an undocumented black man? - Ordinarily, dear, it's a good system.  In fact, our employees love it.  It gives them a sense of security, of belonging.  The cards make them feel like members of our big Palm Beach family! - Are they?  - Don't be silly, dear.  It's just something they can show their friends.

Strip 3: (Lacey and Consuela again) Consuela, I hope you'll make my goodbyes for me. - Now, dear, I wouldn't make too much of this little incident.. We've really made great progress with the races recently.  Why, in 1979, we did away completely with an ordinance banning Negroes from owning property. - You did this in 1979? - That's right. - 114 years after the civil war?  - They seemed ready.

The storyline caused local outrage, and legislators moved quickly to overturn the law Trudeau was pillorying, a very typical Doonesbury outcome.  But he's often about social issues, or cultural ones, as well, and always worth reading.

And to end with, a few of the milestones identified in the Wikipedia article, most of which I recognise from hours reading and re-reading the strips in book form (I've left out some of the most controversial ones):

• During the Watergate scandal, one strip showed Mark on the radio with a “Watergate profile” of John Mitchell, declaring him “Guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!!” A number of newspapers removed the strip and one, The Washington Post, even ran an editorial criticizing the cartoon. Following Nixon's death in 1994, the strip was re-run with all the instances of the word "guilty" crossed out and replaced with "flawed," lampooning the media's apparent glossing-over of his image in the wake of his death.
• In February 1976, Andy Lippincott, a classmate of Joanie’s, told her that he was gay. Dozens of papers opted not to publish the storyline, with Miami Herald editor Larry Jinks saying, “We just decided we weren’t ready for homosexuality in a comic strip.”
• In November 1976, when the storyline included the blossoming romance of Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, four days of strips were devoted to a transition from one apartment to another, ending with a view of the two together in bed, marking the first time any nationally run comic strip portrayed premarital sex in this fashion. Again, the strip was removed from the comics pages of a number of newspapers.
• In June 1978, one strip included a coupon listing various politicians and dollar amounts allegedly taken from Korean lobbyists, to be clipped and glued to a postcard to be sent to the Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, resulting in an overflow of mail to the Speaker's office.
• In December 1992, Working Woman magazine named two characters (Joanie Caucus and Lacey Davenport) as role models for women.
• April 2004: On April 21, after nearly 34 years, readers finally saw BD’s head without some sort of helmet. In the same strip, it was revealed that he had lost a leg in the Iraq War. Later that month, after awakening and discovering his situation, BD exclaims “SON OF A BITCH!!!” The single strip was removed from many papers—including the Boston Globe. An image of BD with amputated leg also appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone that summer (issue 954).
• May 2004: two Sunday strips were published containing only the names of soldiers killed in the War in Iraq. Further such lists were printed in May 2005, May/June 2006 and 2007.

Whatever happened to Marty? Sunday Salon

Prompted, as so often, by  Harriet Devine, I have joined The Sunday Salon, and this is my first post for this new venture.  It might not be a good week to join, because the last fortnight has been a bit weak on the reading front.  After a week's delightful holiday in Dorset, where I read little except books for the course I was on, about woodlands and local history - and not much of that, as our days were very full.  Then, coming back, a lot of work had built up, with a lot of evening engagements too.  So regular readers of my blog will have noticed a bit of a falling off in posting frequency - I promise to do better this coming week!  But Dorset fed another passion of mine, for wonderful words - how about clunch, for hard chalk cut in blocks and used as a building stone.

But as I was in Dorset (whence these bluebells and mighty oak) for a week's tree and woodland study, it was natural to read Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders.  I haven't read any Hardy prose since my early 20s (though I read his poetry from time time), and I slightly dreaded this.  And I was a bit right and a bit wrong.

It is horribly over-written and sentimental, and distinctly mawkish at times.  But the fact that I now recognise the places whereof he speaks is fascinating in a slightly touristy, slightly self-important way - but I don't deny these failings in myself!  Hardy has a fine feel for the landscape, though writing in the very late nineteenth century, about the early decades of the same century, he is already witness to a dying not a thriving world.  I need not tell you the plot - as a very good friend said to me recently, they're all the same!  But the novel opens with the sale of Marty's hair, a violation and a ravishing, when she hears of the loss of her love.  There is then much worrying, a lot of distress and some vulgar glee, all washed down with a healthy sprinkling of dialect words.  The story is compelling enough - though I was confident of much of the outcome from the very beginning - but it's absurd to consider Hardy a great novelist in the tradition of Dickens or George Eliot.  Personally, I also find him much less accessible and pleasing than someone like Trollope, who for all his occasional shallowness and even sentimentality, is a fine teller of a story and a clean, easy writer to read.

Let me find a couple of sentences to demonstrate the frustrations and pleasures of Hardy for me.  First, this paragraph is on the first page:

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this. To step, for instance, at the place under notice, from the edge of the plantation into the adjoining thoroughfare, and pause amid its emptiness for a moment, was to exchange by the act of a single stride the simple absence of human companionship for an incubus of the forlorn.

Well!  I'm wondering what this book I've just picked up is about, and I get dumped on with that!  The physiognomy of a highway, incubus of the forlorn - these are heavy, artificial, pompous constructs, which really weigh down the page and make me gloomy, for sure, but with the thought of another three hundred pages of this, rather than anything else. And that sad little sentence in the middle, the contrast ... accounts for this, like some school textbook.  But he can do better, either on landscape or with people, though description - fine and personal - often gives way to ponderous pessimistic theology, as here:

They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves, elbowed old elms and ashes with great forks in which stood pools of water that overflowed on rainy days and ran down their stems in green cascades. On older trees still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; the lichen ate the vigour of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.

He sees well, he loves the Dorset woods, and he can describe them beautifully - but then he has to impose that empurpled gloominess on us.  I find it all too much!

That being said, I did manage to enjoy The Woodlanders, mainly for the pleasure of being in the same place as the story, and for the story itself.  Giles Winterbourne is in love with one woman, and loved by another - and needless to say, he doesn't get either of them, and they both end up unhappy, and he ends up dead.  Right at the beginning of the book, we are introduced to Marty, the girl that loves him, and she plays several important roles n the book - but coming in, as it were, from outside the narrative to move it along - the graffiti, the meeting with Mrs Charmond in the woods, the letter about her hair -but without being central to the story.  I regretted that; I thought she was an interesting character, and I wanted to know more of her, and to follow her story a bit more closely.  She starts by giving up her hair and her lover, and losing her father, and she ends by strewing flowers on Giles' grave: but in the meantime, we know little of her.  She must have had other suitors, a living to earn; she is pretty, lively, intelligent - and I feel Hardy has deprived me of her company!

Linden Lea

William Barnes flourished (1800-1886) teaching and writing dialect poetry about his beloved Dorset, whence I have just returned.  A linden is a lime tree, though that tree gets no mention here, although many others do.  He loved the Dorset words - and his book of them is, apparently, about to be republished.  In the meantime, chosen partly for itself, and partly because you can read it without a dictionary, is William Barnes' Linden Lea.  It is a tender, lyrical piece, without pretension but full of the joy of a simple man in having his freedom from the thrall of the office - in some "dark room'd town". It is, of course, hopelessly romantic about the life of the rural poor, which was at least as harsh in some ways as that of their urban counterparts.

'Ithin the woodlands, flow'ry gleaded,
By the woak tree's mossy moot,
The sheenen grass-bleades, timber sheaded,
Now do quiver under voot:
An' birds do whissle auver head,
An' water's bubblen in its bed,
An' there vor me the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

When leaves that leatley wer-a-springen
Now do feade 'ithin the copse,
An' painted birds do hush their zingen
Up upon the timber's tops:
An' brown-leav'd fruit's a-turnen red,
In cloudless zunsheen, auver head,
Wi' fruit vor me, the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

Let other vo'k meake money vaster
In the air o'dark-room'd towns,
I don't dread a peevish measter:
Though noo man do heed my frowns.
I be free to goo abrode
Or teake agean my hwomeward road
To where, vor me, the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea.