Steffie needs a sonnet

Four-square quatrains and a sonnet: An imaginary meeting with Stephanie Flanders

Giovanni through an open door
Drew her inside. I noticed, sought
To halt the disc but not before
She shook her head, her interest caught

Zerlina wrestles with The Don
As I restrained an active eye
Sensing that head of chic aplomb,
Those legs’ supreme authority.

Detached she sat, her thoughts beyond
The fate of Mozart’s heroines
Beyond the power of any bond
That lacked her expert disciplines.

The Don in Hell, she smiled at me,
And asked if sonnets could contain
The dullness of technicity
The theory of the sheer arcane.

“Of course,” I cockily replied.
“Then write me one about my trade,
And add the elegance denied
Me, sporting on the news parade.”

XXXX

Your brief surf-rides a global turbulence
Its chaos balanced by conflicting flow
Of interest, labour, monetary suspense,
The oscillations of the quid pro quo.
Uneasy in its equilibrium
This particle desires a steady state
A transfer from extreme to tedium
From procreate to quieter celibate.
But you and I and banks and presidents
And storms and droughts and maladies combine
To tilt the axis with our discontents
And crack the crystal’s talent to divine.
The figures rise and fall in your report
The past explained, the future chance’s sport

NOTE: 1. Plutarch lent me The Anthologist a novel by Nicholson Baker. A vestigial plot encircles a vivacious primer on how to write poetry. Baker disputes that iambic pentameter is the natural heart of poetic English and offers instead the four-feet line. I tried him out (see above) but found four feet restrictive and rumpty-tum. Hence the reversion.
2. Stephanie Flanders is the BBC’s economics editor. She knows her stuff, seems to be about seven feet tall and wears mini-skirts. She was also the source of a personal epiphany for me. After writing a passage in my novel about a woman having her hairstyle changed (with help from commenters) I discovered that Stephanie’s hair is coloured exactly the way I envisaged. This left me slightly breathless.

How about wearing a burqa?

Dined in Stratford-on-Avon with Mr and Mrs Relucent Reader, Mechanicsville, VA, passing through GB on a whirlwind tour. Such encounters present me with a dilemma. Those who know me only via the blog know me at my best. The fleshy presence is another thing. Apart from talking too loudly and hogging the limelight there is the shock of discovering my utterances on life, art and the material world are megaphoned in a regional accent that is difficult to take seriously.

Would it be kinder to issue my side of the conversation on yellow Post-Its? Or via mobile phone text? Fortunately the RRs were tolerant as well as witty and I had Mrs BB by my side to restrain my wilder impulses. Much of the talk concerned books since the RRs have experience on the other side of the counter, in libraries.

THE NOVEL Still revising but in new ways. Aware that I use “He smiled.” (covering several reactions to something said) and “He nodded.” (Agreement without saying “Yes.”) I wondered if I used them to excess. So I unlimbered MsW’s Find function and went trawling. Yes I do – but not now.

Worried that I had repeated details of Clare’s upbringing too often. This was more difficult so I trawled “parents” and “wealth”. The jury is out, perhaps because the search words are not sufficiently representative.

THE PICTURE Note the date! This wine was created while France was still occupied. I have blogged about this before. My job was to taste this in 1995 on someone else’s behalf. If it was duff he would be charged £450 for the bottle, if OK £550. It was OK

The misspent youth

Sonnet – Wednesday night practice
(Or perhaps Julia was right)
The darkened nave entailed a womb of light
Gilding our boyish group. Standing, we sang
The Nunc Dimittis, Angels ever bright,
Stainer – all proof our aims were Anglican.
The words were null, my job to recreate
The notes with an unthinking treble voice.
I soared the heights towards the perfect state
Where notes become a licence to rejoice.
Fatigued by descants, holding volume low,
I left betimes starved like a refugee,
Ate Marmite toast then turned my face from woe
Dispensing with the evening’s ecstasy.
Oh wasteful child who lost that gift along the way
And deeded me this false reed in decay.

NOTE: Thanks to Lucy for bringing the techno-word “enjambment” to my attention.

Still trying to keep the faith

Julia suggests a bloggish tug-of-war in my noggin: one side says “technology”, the other says “rhyme”. Very perceptive if not quite true. For even posts about camshafts and food processors require some imagination and my limited supply is being siphoned off into more effete or society-climbing projects. But I do still like things that do things.
SHOULD YOU GILD THE, ER, DANDELION? A moral question for Avus. Walking to the supermarket I was overtaken by that curious contradiction, a Volvo sports car. Uninventively called the P1800 it had mild exposure in a TV series called The Saint and was long ago dropped by the Swedish company which went on to concentrate on labrador carriers. This one had been, as they say, “lovingly restored”. Ah, but had it? It rode on wheels much wider than usual (to take modern tyres) and the tight smooth engine note suggested serious transplant surgery. Is this a pragmatic attitude towards boneshakers or a betrayal of Volvo’s admittedly etiolated design principles?

BETTER THAN SEX? A neighbour has decided to remove a hedge - Mrs BB thinks it’s laurel and I have to accept this - on a strip of land adjacent to the pavement. As I passed a man was manipulating a Manitou Telehandler (substitute a chain and a hook for the forks on the inset pic). Surely a steam-hammer to crack a walnut? The guy at the controls laughed. The Manitou happened to be available in his equipment yard. Most of the work consisted of chopping off branches. But then came that blissful moment when he wrenched out the roots with a device many times superior to the task it faced. Engineer’s porn.

How many miles to Dublin town? Four score and ten, sir.

The novel. It’s not finished but I’ve just passed an artificial barrier erected to mark progress. On April 26 I finished the 99,407-word draft. This afternoon I completed the first intensive editing, reducing the wordage to 91,929. I mention this as a gauge of my seriousness. Like everyone else who parades their stuff before an audience I have ego problems. That I’ve cut out 7478 of my hard-sweated words means, I hope, my ego can be tamed.

I have also re-jigged the initial two paragraphs which The Crow suggested may have been otiose. Parenthetically I should add that the MS doesn’t contain any such five-dollar words and it’s a relief to allow myself this voluptuousness. As I said, an artificial barrier, now in the past. I’m celebrating with a picture of our garden, now someone else’s duty.

What’s next? The rather harder task of finding out whether the story’s any good. How will I do this? I’m uncertain. When I know I’ll post – probably at length. Under the shadow of my blog’s title which may turn out to be ironic.

Heart of the holiday

Sonnet – The pool, again
In Languedoc we ploughed this turquoise field
Then left our sillons, those seductive forms,
Transformed into a glaring sine-wave yield,
Transformed again as Hockney’s charm disarms.
Again we dive, drop, ease our bodies down
Churning the water into frantic dance
Destroying patterns from which rules have flown
Delighting in the molecules of chance.
It’s evening now, and symmetry’s in place,
The pool’s a solid, plane-smoothed block of blue
Swallows and martins, unaware of space,
Pluck tunes that spread as circles touched anew.
The circles widen as the maths decrees
The birds fly curves of consanguinities.

LANGUEDOC RELEASE The others, who’ve occupied the pool much of the afternoon, discreetly retire to the loungers and I’m in the water alone to swim my thirty, fifty, hundred lengths. An untrammeled kilometre without the fret of having to compete for a lane, of worrying what a stray hand may touch.

But my orange tee-shirt, worn as sun-protection, is starting to stretch and billows up at the turns. Hardly hydro-dynamic. I buy another at Hyper-U, size XXL, and make four small slots in the bottom hem. Sweat accumulating in my eyes I edge-stitch these slots and then pass two lengths of tape into the tubular hems. The tapes are long enough to encircle my barrel-like thighs and are secured by bows. The tee-shirt cannot now ride up my body and I am able to do one of the things I came to France for

Novel writing - the electronic approach

LANGUEDOC LEISURE
I took tons of improving books to the villa and didn’t read any. Instead I occupied myself (French equivalent: s’amuser) with two well-thumbed Michael Connellys whose work I liken elsewhere to junk constructed in Meccano. However, I did examine my own novel on a Sony ebook reader, trying to see it as another person might.

The initial paragraphs describe a modern, architect-designed office building on a French industrial estate. The Crow suggested these be deleted and the novel start with the first mention of Hatch, the co-central character. Stubbornly I refined my start, and refined it again, unwilling to kill off my literary conceit. And yet it read undigestedly. The ebook reader showed it in a new light and hinted at a solution which might satisfy both The Crow and myself. We’ll see. In the meantime ”Mme le Corbeau, je te félicite. assuming you accept the familiar form of the pronoun.” (Grammatical booboo now changed in last sentence.)

LANGUEDOC LIMITATIONS
Over the fortnight five Iphones were intermittently available at the villa but only one was used briefly to access the Internet. Money was the determinant. Linking up cost £5 but no one seemed sure whether this covered a 12 hr period or a single hit. We were hag-ridden by a report in which someone casually downloaded a couple of films while in France and faced a £6000 bill on returning home. However two Iphones carried Solitaire, the bargain of the century at 59 p for the app, and frequently I drifted off into Solitaire dreamland where the mind works but not a thought emerges.

Zach's entente cordiale

LANGUEDOC AND ZACH – Part one. Now four, he follows a morning routine at the Holiday Home (his label) that is immutable. While Big Grandad shaves he discards his PJs, puts on his new tee-shirt, pants, shorts, hat and flip-flops. Together they then set out for the Windmill (“It’s not a real windmill”) Shop, otherwise the boulangerie. There, in a clear voice, he orders Cinq croissants, s’il vous plait. plus a varying number of pain au chocolat. On the last day he’d been programmed to say, Au revoir, à l’année prochaine but stumbled over the words. As Big Grandad prompted him, a French woman customer in her fifties almost wept in sympathy at his struggles and applauded emotionally when they were over.

LANGUEDOC AND ZACH – Part two. Walking round St Jean de la Blaquière with Zach opens up unheard-of social possibilities. Smartly dressed women in their thirties, who would normally avert their eyes from such a ramshackle self-evidently English Englishman, greet the pair of us with roguish vivacity. One scorching morning an old man in a heavily knitted sweater, barely capable of locomotion, asked me if Zach was my grandson and we chatted aimiably. As we parted he groaned after me with profound feeling: “Look after him well, your grandson.”

LANGUEDOC ASLEEP. Don’t do dreams – they usually please the dreamer more than the audience. But this may amuse Plutarch given his knowledge of my interests. I’d been given a column in a gardening magazine but was at odds with the editor. I favoured literary allusion whereas he wanted more on aphids and systemic weed killers. I’d been struck in particular by the familiar but still beautiful:

Did you not see my lady,
Go down the garden singing…?

and it seemed my further employment was in jeopardy. And then, gentle reader, I awoke.