Out of the book-case: History Lite 21,22

How about a couple of books to make you chuckle if not burst out ROTFL? Mr. Mills nods reverently to Sellar and Yeatman in the title he chooses for his romp through the history of that great British invention (after cricket): the Railway, especially the London and North Western Railway unless you are a G.W.R. devotee.

From the introduction to 4'8½" And All That : "What is the Englishman able to do which lesser breeds find impossible, apart from watching cricket matches? Why, of course, he can laugh at himself! though I must warn anyone outside the pale that it is not permitted for him to laugh at us."

I learned this word from 4'8½" And All That: Voussoir and from 1066 And All That I learned what AEGROT means. And here's another Oxford word to show off: hebdomadal, which is not at all as common as the Old English fortnight but it comes around twice as often.

From the bookshelves 20

    Change-ringing and the art of ringing church bells full circle is something peculiar to England. The beginnings of The Exercise, as it is sometimes affectionately known, were first documented and advanced by Fabian Stedman in the seventeenth century. Ernest Morris researched and wrote the comprehensive The History and Art of Change Ringing first published in 1931. A more modern history has now been published in three volumes under the editorship of J Sanderson. Many ringers today don't leave home without a copy of Jasper Snowdon's Diagrams in their pockets. The art of change ringing has expanded beyond the Standard Methods. The Central Council of Church Bell Ringers (CCCBR) is an excellent place to begin researching the art as it is practiced today.

    My learning to ring was slow and sure: weekly practice until I could handle a bell and ring 120 changes then I was able to become a member of the Essex Association of Change Ringers and was allowed to ring for Sunday services. Like all the arts it is better practiced than talked about.

Waking dream images

    I needed to get somewhere. I'd looked at a map and the best way to get to this place was by train. To get to the train station I had to find my way through a complicated system of roadways. I was walking through deserted buildings plastered with posters depicting the faces of revolutionary leaders. I was with crowds of people boarding trains at the train station. One way to the trains was through a dark tunnel. I had no money; and then I had a pocket full of the wrong kind of change. I was sat at a pic-nic table taking pictures of the friends around me. the last image was of a beautiful mountain scene with a cascading river and two people on horseback riding towards me. A man and his son. I tried to take a photograph but all that the camera focused on was the boy on the horse.

 

 

From the bookshelves 19

The Snow Goose is one of those poignant books that causes me to get a little weepy when I read it. Poignant because Paul Gallico describes salt marshes and creeks of the Essex coast. When the BBC adapted the story for television some of the location filming was done around Heybridge near Maldon.

Short story or novella? It's barely sixty pages. This is a Borzoi Book, the colophon of Alfred Knopf, which is part of the fifteenth printing of a reset edition of 1963. It was first published in 1941, just a year after the rescue of the B.E.F. from Dunkirk.

Paul Gallico liked cats and wrote a tale about Jennie, a cat that went to sea amongst other adventures.

Smoky the Cowhorse by Wills James was the first book that made me tear up when I first read it as a twelve years old. So, there's another topic to explore: books that make one cry.

Metamorphosis

    No, I'm not turning into an insect . . . I didn't want to miss a day. I'm still finding my way. I reviewed this blog from the beginning and note how it is changing direction. I'm not sure if that is through the influence of other posts I've read or just the way I am. What I had intended was a rather introverted look at all the parts of my life. I could look at it chronologically. Various ideas I've had is to choose a vivid memory of each year of my life and relate that to what was going on in the world. I know some early memories have been suggested to me by my sister or by photographs. I have one somewhere of me sitting on top of a chicken coop that used to be at the top of the garden when we first moved to Kelvedon from Oxford in about 1952. I remember the dungarees I was wearing were green. I remember brown corduroy leggings I wore when dad took me for rides on his bike. I sat on a seat fixed to the cross-bar. I put my hands under his to keep them warm.

    I told the story of my visit to England. I travelled a little bit here, up to Colorado and New Mexico in May. Then I started taking pictures of some of the books which surround me here in this little room. I don't write about what is in the books. I spend a lot of time reading; but much of the reading is like chewing gum, I'm not really concentrating on what I'm reading. As you might tell from the books they are very much reading copies and I tend to read quite a bit of fiction.

Found

    They were hiding behind other books. And yes I do have editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy there are so many of those in various clothing, even a Folio Society edition . . . And a correction on the sizes: The Hobbit and Tree and Leaf are Crown octavo; and Smith of Wootton Major is Small Foolscap octavo . . . not that anyone is the least bit interested in old book sizes, are you?


    And just as a bonus for the musically inclined: Donald Swann set many of the songs in the books to music. The foreword by Mr. Swann begins: I was playing over the songs in this book to Dick Plotz, the President of the Tolkien Society of America, and he said, "It must be hard to write new tunes for these poems when there are already existing ones." I was nonplussed by this for a moment, and there was a short silence. "Where?" I said. "In Middle-earth," he replied.

From the bookshelves 13, 14

    George Allen and Unwin Ltd published J. R. R. Tolkien in the United Kingdom. Pauline Diana Baynes, the well known book illustrator died in August last year. Farmer Giles of Ham: the Rise and Wonderful Adventures of Farmer Giles, Lord of Tame, Count of Worminghall and King of the Little Kingdom published 1949; this is an eighth impression copy from 1971. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil was first published in 1961; this is a sixth impression copy from 1972. Finding these sent me looking for Smith of Wootton Major, I know I have a small 12mo edition somewhere, and Tree and Leaf, an essay.

Pinch and a punch for

the first of the month.

    This is becoming Arizona's driest monsoon season on record. The day temperatures have been hovering in the low 90°s F (30°+C) here in the mountains; goodness knows what the temperatures are like in the low desert and I don't really want to know because I'm not going there any time soon. Horrible wild fires ravaging the San Gabriel mountains in California. Any hope of Jimena cooling and damping us down? Maybe I need to look at a newspaper or watch a news programme on TV. Duh.

Silence

A time to be quiet and reflect again.

From the bookshelves 10, 11, 12

Peake's Progress was published in 1981 in the USA by The Overlook Press it includes the complete The Wit to Woo and much poetry and many illustrations and sketches of theatre sets and costumery. For many years I had a copy of the Penguin Mr Pye but was at last able to secure a hardbound Overlook Press edition published in the USA in 1984.

Below is the cover of the programme of a stage adaptation of the Gormenghast books by John Constable and David Glass and performed by The David Glass Ensemble on tour in 1992. I saw the performance at a packed Cambridge Arts Theatre Saturday 31 January (or was it 1 February I don't have that diary at hand) And wonder of wonders I have a clipping of an article by Sarah Hemming from the arts pages of The Independent of Wednesday 22 January 1992. I actually managed to get Kathy to come along though she'd not read any of the books.

"Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) was a playwright, painter,poet, illustrator, short story writer, and designer of theatrical costumes as well as a novelist. His first book of poems, Shapes and Sounds, was published in 1941. He also wrote Rhymes Without Reason (1944), Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1945), The Craft of the Lead Pencil (1946), Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948), Mr Pye (1953), The Wit to Woo, a play (1957) and The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1962). In addition, he illustrated several classics including The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island and The Hunting of the Snark."

In 1982 Overlook Press published the Gormenghast trilogy with the original cover illustrations made by the author for the first British editions of Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959).

The first two number among the few books I have read more than once.

And, yes, I am aware of the 2000 four part BBC television adaptation. I have not seen it.

Another word or two of which I am fond . . .

Inchoate : How I feel tip-toeing or more often stumbling around the bloggosphere. Just trimmed the list of blogs I follow and changing some I've been following from 'anonymous' to 'public'. I notice that like a living organism like minded blogs and followers tend to cluster . . . then there are the two per-centers who refused to be catalogued, pigeon-holed, categorized, typed or ordered into any kind of taxonomy . . .

Memory - stub

"The boy stood on the burning deck . . . " but I was standing on a chair and it wasn't burning; I was on fire with shame and embarrassment. Was this a punishment of some kind or was the class set an assignment to each tell a story to the class? I can't remember. What I can remember is that prickling sensation of panic rising up my legs to my reddening face as I squirmed thinking desparately of what to say.

Australia was a fascination for us then what with the £10 assisted passage for emigrés to that land, The Flying Doctor series on the wireless and learning about the peculiar animals of the outback, including the wallaby, duck billed platypuss and wombat. What a lovely word: wombat; I wandered what the animal looked like. I'd listened to a tale about a wombat on the wireless a few days before. What little television I saw was at friends' houses; I knew none of my contemporaries listened to the wireless so I retold the tale of the wombat escaping a bush fire . . . knowing it would be fresh for them. And thereby I esaped burning embarrassment.

Unfortunate turn of phrase

I could hardly keep a straight face when the headmaster confided sotto voce, "The boys enjoy master baiting," as we entered the classroom on my first day; but unfortunately not sotto voce enough. "Stop that snickering boys!"

Maps - a stub

I get lost wondering around this jungle called the internet. Where are the maps? Ordnance Survey in Southampton was where I used to turn or I should say the old ¼ and 1 inch maps that dad and I would pore over after having been on a bike ride long before the days of personal computers, never mind lap-tops. Why after not before the bike ride? I wonder. I still like poring over maps of places familiar and unfamiliar. All the bike rides. Just looking at maps. Drawing imaginary maps. Lost in the web with no map. And why try to map my life? Where have I been? How do I get there again? Ctrl+h only shows me where I've been! Walking along a crowded virtual street greeting strangers and popping into virtual shops. How did they do that? That blog is too noisy. What language is that?

From the bookshelves 9

I was made aware of the work of Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell) through a wonderful television adaptation of Sunset Song (Sorry, there's not much information on IMDb). A Penguin edition of the book is available on Amazon. This copy of A Scots Quair was published by Schocken in 1977 with a foreword by Ivor Brown. Canongate published a new edition of the trilogy last year. A few years ago Roger Lyall made this account of the past rural life in the Mearns. Mitchell managed to write sixteen books in a seven year period of a life that lasted just thirty-five years. The writing flows wonderfully with rhythms of Scottish speech. The hardness of life on the land in that part of the world at that time, the turn of the twentieth century to the Great War and after, is unflinchingly described through the life and thoughts of Chris Guthrie, Chae Strachan, Rob of the Mill and Chris's love, Ewan.

From the bookshelves 8

I'm not sure when I was first aware of Guillaume Apollinaire. Most probably in an anthology of poetry. These are quirky stories the most memorable for me being the tale of a rogue (or overly pius?) priest who consecrates all the bread in a bakery early in the morning and then thinks of the consequences for un-shriven souls. That's how I remember it after nearly forty years anyway. The Sacrilege. This book I took with me to read on breaks at the brick-works; there are still smudges of clay on the cover and the spine is cocked. The frontispiece illustrates a retelling of the story of Salomé. First published in 1910 L'Hérésiarque et Cie was a runner-up to Colette's La Vagabonde for the Prix Goncourt.

From the bookshelves 7

    Before On The Road there was The Town and the City. When I was younger I didn't want to read just the well known writings of authors and went on a quest to find everything published by a particular writer. Consequently I had a D.H. Lawrence phase not for the infamy of Lady Chatterly's Lover but because Sons and Lovers was one of the books set when I did 'O' level GCE. William Golding's The Spire, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and the travel writing followed Lord of the Flies. I still aver Steinbeck's best is East of Eden although I enjoyed Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. I no longer own copies of many of the books I read through the attrition of lending, moving and misplacing, giving away and selling.


    Truman Capote said of Kerouac's work,"That's not writing; it's typing" But Visions of Gerard makes a lie of that view. The book mark from Chatterton's of Hollywood and the date I've written inside the cover confirm I was living in Hollywood at the time I read this book, so it may have accompanied me on Will Roger's State Beach at the end of Sunset Blvd.

     It is easier to list the Kerouac I have not read: The Scripture of the Golden Eternity; Book of Dreams; Visions of Cody and Mexico City Blues. I also have a copy of the selected letters 1940-1956 which is on a growing to be read (or finished) pile.

Personal stuff

Dreamed. Went to the doc this morning. Stopped procrastinating for today only? Caught up on reading blogs. Practiced mandolin, guitar and dulcimer. Listened to radio programmes. Walked. Watched a couple of episodes of Foyle's War. All the cats are safely in for the night. Oh, I haven't introduced all the cats. Later. Now I'm ready for a nigh-cap and a few more chapters of The Hummingbird's Daughter . . . what can I say? I'm a slow reader.

Facsimile of a facsimile

"ONLY 425 copies of the Kelmscott Chaucer were printed (not 325, as originally announced), so it is not surprising that a number of facsimiles have been produced to satisfy demand for this legendary work. Head and shoulders above the rest is the Basilisk Press edition of 1975. Printed at the John Roberts Press by letterpress from line blocks, on paper commissioned as a perfect match to the original, it is an astonishing creation, and even experts have difficulty distinguishing one from another.
It is thanks to the kindness of Mr. Bernard Roberts, proprietor of the John Roberts Press at that time, that the Folio Society facsimile has come into being. He loaned his own copy to be disbound and photographed for the printing of this edition."

Bound by Smith Settle of Otley, Yorkshire in full goatskin and blocked in gold from an original design by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson. This is number 914 of 1,000 printed for sale.

Words, words, words

I dipped into Poets of Our Time this morning and read John Betjeman's London. Here is the last fourteen lines:

'Twas not, I think, a conscious search for God
That brought me to these dim forgotten fanes.
Largely it was a longing for the past,
With a slight sense of something unfulfilled;
And yet another feeling drew me there,
A sense of guilt increasing with the years -
'When I am dead you will be sorry, John' -
Here I could pray my mother would not die.
Thus were my London Sundays incomplete
If unaccompanied by Evening Prayer.
How trivial used to seem the Underground,
How worldly looked the over-lighted west,
How different and smug and wise I felt
When from the east I made my journey home

I consulted the Chambers English Dictionary see what it said about "fane". Dad had a copy of Chambers 20thCentury Dictionary he dipped into when completing cryptic crossword puzzles. He said it contained a good selection of unusual words more often found in larger dictionaries. I've since obtained a copy of the compact OED and in the past had a copy of the American Heritage dictionary. I've never had the inclination to buy a Merriam-Webster . . .

Words, Words, Words I thought was the title of Jean Paul Sartre's autobiography but a quick search disabused me of that notion. It is Les Mots (Words).

Some words I've had to look up in the past include desuetude, crapulous, pranked, caducity, esurient, catamite . . .
And some of my favourite words - mellifluous, horizon, crepuscular, amanuensis (I wish I had one of those)

The dictionary is always close by. I need to use it more often. Fane? a temple. Oh I miss John Ciardi.

From the bookshelves 5

I used to skip poetry in books I was reading. At primary school we were introduced to poetry of Walter de la Mare and Robert Louis Stevenson and encouraged to write a verse or two; of course it had to rhyme and have a nice tum-de-dum rhythm. Then came 'O' level and CSE English which included a good smattering of the likes of Spender, Auden, Blackburn, Hughes, R S Thomas; and whole books of nothing but poetry. I like reading poetry now, influenced by all the Poetry in a Pub readings in the sixties; but I don't read enough now and, bad student that I am, never learned much by heart. I shall have to use my dad's tactic to stave of dementia; he learned all of the Rubaiyat (Fitzgerald's first translation) of Omar Khayyam . . . and this was a man who, when playing Iago, had the director in despair because he hadn't learned his lines soon enough for her liking. I've had the same trouble. After school I found the Beat poets and Brian Pattern, Anselm Hollo, and Adrian Henri (the Beatles aren't the only product of Liverpool); Leonard Cohen was popular, too, especially after he started recording and playing at the Isle of Wight festival.

I did learn this old London rhyme hence the approximation of how a street urchin might say it. I had it by heart in about five minutes in my 'yoof'. It can be found in Verse and Worse, I think

We had a bleedin' sparrer
What lived up a bleedin spaht
One day the bleedn' rain came dahn
And washed the bleeder aht

And as he lay 'arf drahnded
Dahn in the bleedin' street
He begged that bleedin' rainstorm
To bathe 'is bleedin' feet

Then the bleedin' sun came aht
Dried up the bleedin' rain
And that bleedin' sparrer
Climbed up the bleedin' spaht again

Then a bleedin' sparrer-'awk
Spies 'im in 'is snuggery
Sharpens up 'is bleedin' claws
And pulls 'im aht by thuggery

Then a bleedin sportin' type
What had a bleedin' gun
Spies the bleedin' sparrer-'awk
And blasts 'is bleedin' fun

The moral of this story
Is plain to everyone
Them what's up the bleedin' spaht
Don't get no bleedin' fun.

And I love listening to Ian Macmillan's Roger McGough's voice on BBCRadio 4's Poetry Please . . .

[edit 24 Sept '09: I'm confused again. Ian's programme is The Verb on Radio 3]

From the bookshelves 4

Books as objects; objects to heft, smell, feel, taste? Books as the depositories of collected wisdom? How about reading books? Here I am treating them like objects. I have read them but I haven't said anything about them. Perhaps I need to read them again.

This is a selection edited and introduced by Julian Shuckburgh and published in 1986. An edition of the complete 72 Peverel Papers in chronological order was published in 2008 by John Owen Smith.

Little boy . . .

Why did I start writing a blog? Why such a title? To find out who I am by telling the world who I think I am? I can tell the world about the dreamy, shy little boy I think I was. I hated injustice. I thought the world could be fair. I knew injured wild animals had to be killed. I wondered why babies had to be born in a hospital. I thought hospitals were for dying. I thought men had breasts to be able feed babies in an emergency. I was scared of the dark. That was the inner me. I had permanently dirty knees. I would click and cluck my tongue. I would grind my teeth. I loved picking at scabs and my nose but I'm too polite to tell you my favourite cuss words. I was a scrapper so long as I chose the fight. I hated being teased (still do). I hated seeing weaker children being picked on. I chose the outsiders to be members of my patrol in Scouts. I was neither the first nor the last picked when sides were chosen for games and I sometimes did the picking. I'd scrump pears and apples, cherries and plums; when mum asked why I had cigarettes in my pocket I said,"For smoking". I joined in the boyish games to see who could pee the highest, spit the furthest. I loved the prettiest girl in the class and dreamed of carrying her away on a great white stallion. I know I was a wriggle britches because my trousers seats' were soon shiny and thin if not torn or worn through. I'd run my sleeve along dusty window sills, and jump in puddles. I'd walk miles alone. Telling stories was natural . . .

Jam Night ...

Bob, wash-tub bass; Jim, fiddle; Bob, guitar. "So, what'll we start with? May the circle be Unbroken . . . ? "

Charlie guitar, harmonica (and banjo) Springerville Blues

Pat on Banjo . . .

Jim on fiddle Whiskey Before Breakfast.

Play something and I'll take your picture. Thanks, Charlie. Just don't make it a video with sound. Tripping Up the Stairs

From the bookshelves 3

The poet Laurie Lee's most well know work is the autobiographical Cider With Rosie (The Edge of Day). The autobiographical theme is continued in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Nineteen year old Laurie leaves the Gloucestershire hamlet of Slad for London. He makes his way to Spain not long before the outbreak of civil war.

Laurie describes a post-war Spain in A Rose for Winter.

I Can't Stay Long is a collection of incidental writing the most poignant of which is an account of how the villagers are coping a year after the Aberfan disaster of 1966 when a mountain of slurry engulfed the village primary school school killing over a hundred children.

From the bookshelves 2

This is a copy of the California University Press reduction of the original Arion Press folio edition designed by Andrew Hoyem.

"The Arion edition was limited to 265 copies, of which 250 were for sale. the type is handset Gaudy Modern. The Leviathan Capitals use for the title and initial letters were designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. The illustrations were drawn and engraved by Barry Moser. Members of the Arion Press who assisted in the production of the original edition were: Pauline Christensen, Margaret Green, Lester Lloyd, Abigail Potter, Gerald Reddan, and Glenn Todd. The printing commenced in March 1978 and was completed in May of 1979.
The original pages were photographed for reproduction in this edition by Charles R. Wood."

I have a copy of Boccaccio's Decameron also published by the University of California Press in 1982. The John Payne translation revised and annotated by Charles S. Singleton. Three volumes bound and slip-cased in buckram. Very handsome.

Mis-using words - delete

I can not keep up with the voice in my head telling me to write. So many things I have lost. Ah poor me. Oh, to relive the joy of a child greeting each day; eagerly anticipating all the adventures and discoveries possible in that brilliant time beginning at sunrise and ending lying restlessly in bed impatient for tomorrow's sunrise. What about now? Now the morning page beckons me to write until that moment when it stops being easy and trite, when I have cleared my head of the detritus of sleepy dreams and the kernel of an idea of something to write about begins to appear on the page . . . then I stop writing, I come to the edge and retreat as the quotidian impinges . . . feeding the cats, ablutions, breakfast . . .

So far this is an amorphous collection of incomplete thoughts. You got that right. There is a cheeky voice has to have his say. This used to happen when I'd type cryptic notes to myself on an old IBM Selectric many years ago. I have those pages somewhere. Definitely not for public consumption.

So, what is this about? Does it have to be about something?

Of bibliophages

Of the few interests noted in my profile most are to do with music beginning with the very general 'music making'.

When was I first aware of music? The nursery rhymes my mother sang as she rocked me to sleep in her arms? The music dad would play at the piano? My own humming?

I haven't listed reading but I do say my favourite book is the one I am reading at the moment. Now I will raid the book shelves for a sampling and a good place to start is Nicholas Basbanes's

A Gentle Madness Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.

Forty years on . . .

Not quite a class reunion. Show Low, AZ. Friday 14 August. Mike's a couple of years younger than I but we had drama, Richard III, Gilbert and Sullivan, Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn, Toad of Toad Hall; and teachers in common . . . Mr Ashton, Mr Southgate, Mr Hope, Mr Chadwick, Miss Tyler, Miss Piché, Mr French . . .

Stastistics nerd

Maybe it's the way it is spelt (or spelled) but there are only two of us listing 'bodhràn' as an interest. . . . . right that's enough nonsense for one evening.