Belated tribute

Sonnet – Virginia Mayo “Colorado Territory”

Her blonde largesse is proof that God was there,
A nabob said, ignoring that His child
Spoke woodenly and lacked the mobile flair
To match the grace by which her looks beguiled.
A Venus paid to bathe in froth, or play
A pallid version of reality;
Foil to a vulgar comic’s roundelay
Or soft support for muscularity.
She did what sleek-set men told her was best
Which was what other staring men would want,
Til later, stripped of rouge and coarsely dressed,
She died – on film – with passion triumphant
Within a canyon, and beyond the curse
Of beauty measured by a banal purse.

NOTE Written on paper! With a ballpoint! On the Newport – Paddington express! But, as always, MsW helped resolve a flat penultimate line back home. Hurray for railways (Re-read “The Importance of Being Ernest” on the e-book reader on the return journey); even bigger hurray for computers.
UNRELATED NOTE Blogging with someone is the perfect preparation for lunching with them a year later. The conversation dives straight into the stuff that matters, like what constitutes a print. Dramatis personae: Marja-Leena with Fred, BB, Mrs BB.

The clothes proclaim the (versatile) man

Miltonian sonnet* - Gavin Hewitt: TV news reporter

Dull dust-blown shoes stand in eternal dust.
The denim shirt surrounds a thickened neck.
The précis matched against time’s rigid check
Broadcasts a message countering mistrust.
Distant the filthy disagreeing clouds
Pall grievously another killing war
The dead are food for deadline’s avid maw
Screens flicker, forecasting advancing shrouds.
But now the shirt’s exchanged for coat and tie,
With news of banks and theories just revealed.
Switch to a scarf, windproof, light-glimmered eye
Provincial murder now requires his art.
From that square face an instinct to impart
The hack’s quick truthfulness of wounds unhealed.

(* eg, To Mr Lawrence).

NOTE. Ughh, far too hard for an amateur. The seemingly random distribution of the rhymed lines after the first two quatrains left me unbelayed. Why, Milton, why?

Music's beautiful technology

Music dishes out joy, tears and, occasionally, the sensation of stepping on a stair that wasn’t there. Take the first two sung lines of this Everly Brothers song:

Bye bye, love.
Bye bye, happiness
Both get the same guitar accompaniment but the first line is two syllables shorter than the second. To me, a musical ignoramus, the effect is strange. When I sing those lines an impulse deep within tries to force me me to complete the first line verbally – with a “di-dah” or by stretching out “lo-o-ove”.

I wanted to know: how the absence of those two syllables is represented on the score, and what effect the brothers were hoping for. A case for The Prague Polymath. Because I phrased my email so clumsily PP answered a different question, raising a much more interesting musical matter which I hope to return to. However, she also provided a link to the score.

For me musical notation could be Choctaw. But finally I traced the “missing” words to two symbols: a scribble and a backwards-way-round lower case r. Googling “music symbols” brought the answer: a quaver rest and a crotchet rest. Hurray for the ignoramus. As to my other question PP has a theory which I’m still studying.

But my point is one of simple revelation: the precision with which music is set down. Having made my infantile discovery I became aware – not for the first time – of how inexact words are compared with this other language. The technology of music. Briefly I played The Tin Ear’s Lament – oh, how I’d love to speak that language. Then I went away and mangled a poem.

Curbing the bending tendency

Another giant step for mankind is imminent and Works Well readers will be informed before anyone else. The new technology resolves a problem British sausage-eaters have wrestled with for decades – the moment when the object of their desires ceases to be a cylinder and opts to become a banana.

There are no doubt good reasons why a sausage, sensing the heat of the frying pan, curls up as if returning to the womb. But for once the physics doesn’t interest me. I am concerned only with the irritating necessity of rotating an assymetrical body through three 90-deg. steps to ensure equally distributed browning (as evidence of having been cooked).

And yes I know such browning can be achieved by baking or roasting the sausages tightly fitted into a small tray with a raised rim. Mrs B. has often done this and I like the result. But such sausages differ from those fried; for one thing the skin is hardened, for another some of the juice dries up.

My solution is hardly revolutionary. Imagine the business end of a small garden fork without the handle. Six 6-in. long x 3 mm wide tines, just over 1 in. apart. The circular cross-section tines, welded up from stainless steel, are inserted longitudinally into the sausages providing an inflexible “backbone” to each. Rotation becomes a simple finger job. I called Downey Engineering of Pontrilas (Tel: 01981-240427) and asked if they were interested. They said they were “provided we get one the sausages”. Watch this space.

Voie sans issue

En essayant saisir le francais
Un rosbif se trouve perturbé.
Mais son prof dit, “Bien sur,
J’ai une méthode moins dur,
On doit trancher le gorge de l’anglais.”

NOTE: C'est une andouillette.

Stupidity leads to rewarding chat

My garage doors are 83 in. wide; my car 78 in. That’s 2½ in. clearance on either side of the wing mirrors. Believe me, it looks less.

Entering and leaving the garage are just one problem. Inside, I ease the car inches to the left so I can open the driver’s door. Chalk marks on the wall help position the car longitudinally; carpet attached to both walls protects the bodywork. For ten years I have managed these mini-journeys successfully but three days ago I scratched the offside front wing (US: fender) on a quite different variant of the exit route.

The man at Auto Chips said it would cost £150. I thought the rate was about £40. “That’s if you’re shortly going to sell the car. If you’re keeping it you need something permanent.” My aim was to obliterate evidence of my own stupidity so I opted for the latter. I asked questions and he answered them fully, pleased at my interest.

The higher cost covers repainting the whole wing and then drying it in an oven. While it’s still on the car! We stood in a car-size chamber heated to 75 deg F. “People get the wrong idea about our oven,” he said, grinning. There was more. He knew his stuff and enjoyed explaining it in detail. It was (professionally), and still is, one my great pleasures to talk to a communicative expert – on anything.

I told Mrs B that the car was destined for the inside of an oven. “Remember to take the long-distance sweets (US: candy) out of the door compartments,” she said.

Time to get out of the poetry game

WHY I AM UNFITTED FOR, AND PROFESSIONALLY PREVENTED FROM,WRITING POETRY
The Rubik Cube is not my sport. The sides
Proclaim restraint, the shape a symmetry.
The garish colours act as childish guides
The aim a transient diversionary.
To write a verse, to form a brick of words
To take on rules that help to close our eyes,
To rhyme (like this) and risk what rhyme affords
We tumble into wretched compromise.
The language of a verse demands a blur
Else why not take the compass point of prose?
Why hint, evade, constrain, fail to concur
When truth and clarity all worth enclose?

For truth and clarity are hard-won gain
And fall in rhythmic rhyming’s false domain.

A plague on both their houses

Shaving – a time when I look deep into my bloodhound face barely able to contain my rage at being the victim of extortion.

A razor resembles that other example of fiduciary cynicism, the computer printer: purchase price suspiciously low, running costs ludicrously high. Razor designers, sniggering, add plausible complexity. From one blade we move to two, to the swivelling head, to three blades, to slender-handled pink jobs fit only for women’s delicate hands. Marketing departments, sniggering in descant, attach childish gamebox names and give away the handle and a couple of blades for almost nothing. Then the real costs become apparent. A replacement blade can cost over £2.

The blades cut bristle, they “work well”. And, since a customer has this niggling belief he’s invested in the valueless handle, he mounts the treadmill. Over the years I have shed many of my West Riding antecedents but I still have an abiding hatred of being gulled.

I have bought alternative blades, conscious that this involves the connivance of the big players. I have bought disposables which only announce their wear by scritching the face. I have dallied with power. Fear has denied me cut-throats. I have had many lousy shaves. This is a rant. This is the end.