A tentative take-off

Neither Plutarch nor I could easily remember or pronounce A Stall Recovered the title of my second novel (now finished) so I junked it. Before I embark on the drudgery of sending the MS to agents I’ve been playing with a new title – modified biblical – and here it is on a draft dust jacket.

QUICK DESCENT No hymn starts with such splendour as:

Hark the herald angels sing
Glory to the new-born king;
Peace on earth and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled: etc, etc

and then deteriorates into:

Late in time behold him come
(Backward ran the sentences…)
Offspring of the Virgin’s womb;
(A Jack-in-the-box?)
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;
(Backward into the butcher’s shop)
Hail the incarnate deity
(More flesh than we need)
Pleased as man with man to dwell,
(Tempted to say “Pleased as Punch…”)

Plus this shocker in the third and final verse:

Risen with healing in his wings.
(Is it bread, or a chicken pie?)

Alas for C. Wesley, author of the above. In my hymn-book the next hymn is Christina Rossetti’s In The Bleak Mid-winter. Nuff said.

Profit from my mistakes

The perfect comment? Does it exist? Here are some of my imperfect comments deconstructed.




Great post! Great pix! Great philosophy! Meaning: I haven’t got the hang of blogging, I’m still into post-cards.

Loved your photo of the Grand Canyon. The white dot in the corner is in fact a 1997 Harley Davidson, the one with the power-operated kickstand. Meaning: I am unaware of natural beauty and am fixated on steel things that go broom-broom.

(0) Meaning: I am an inoffensive wading bird. I have left a footprint soon to washed away by the tide. Plus a neat pile of waste products. I shall now fade away.

My grandson Zach… Meaning: They’ll never love me but they may love him.

In 1947, when we ate stewed pebbles twice a week for lunch… Meaning: Deprivation and old age – an unbeatable plea for sympathy.

Your post about Barbara Cartland’s views on chivalry didn’t go far enough. You will remember in Ulysses when Bloom meets Dedalus… (Five hundred words later) … which goes to prove Joyce’s pre-eminence. Meaning: It’s been five weeks since I reminded people I’ve read Ulysses.

Ca va sans dire. Meaning: If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

Rebutting this thesis, Heidegger said… Meaning: Even if you haven’t got it, flaunt it.

The bottle was a touch pricey at… Meaning: Flaunt it in another way.

The pouches under my eyes… Meaning: I’m so self-effacing.

I banged my head on the beams inside. Meaning: But I’m physically impressive.

Rossignols are nightingales

SONNET
Damnit,
I
really
do
miss
ski-ing







It wasn’t all delight. At Crans I caught
A tip, tearing my shoulder at the ball,
Cracking the socket, facing a distraught
One-armed descent to the Swiss wailing wall.
The joint was luxé, squawked the harridan,
Who urged me to relax and not to scream
As others yanked on this prone Englishman
And others totalled up his bill supreme.
Yes, I was paying for those future days
Of hissing skis maintained in parallel,
Of turns that contoured all of heaven’s ways,
Of moguls charged, of schusses flown pell-mell.
That written self I often left behind
Is now in muck and bitterness confined

NOTE: The last line of this sonnet previously contained a mildly naughty word. Now I am professionally and viscerally opposed to censorship but some filtering sofware on the computer my younger daughter uses meant she was unable to open the post. On the grounds that there might be other nannying systems out there I changed the word and (the better the day the better the deed) made two or three other small changes. Since all the people who patronise Works Well are of superior intellect it won't need much elbow-nudging from me to hint at which word was changed and what it was changed from. Thus everyone whose mission is Truth Upon Earth may make the substitution in their mind and conclude that it probably hardly matters at all.

Problems with my bags

Once I bought four casual shirts all the same dark green. Having four absolved me from further shirt buying for five, possibly ten, years. Mrs BB was outraged, talked about variety. Our sartorial views are incompatible.

Fifteen years ago I decided I would only buy chinos. Seemed a sensible decision, allowed me to forget about trousers for ever but didn’t carry the finality I required. Chinos (trousers made of cotton twill fabric, usu. khaki-coloured) vary widely. Some come in thin, slippery, synthetic material that seems to flow over my legs like well-diluted paint. Others in something more like sailcloth, capable of stopping a .22 bullet. Others like waterproof pyjamas.

And there’s the colour. Khaki is not standard. My ideal is pale beige but I’m especially put off by diarrhoea (in all its forms). M&S’s Blue Harbour range was perfect until some fidgety designer got out his colour charts. Hereford is not the chino centre of the world; online sources lie about the details and colours are not dependable. And if I found perfection how many pairs dare I buy? I might get fatter (Am getting fatter!) or thinner.

But believe me my legs need covering.

DON GIOVANNI From the Met in HD at Hereford’s Courtyard theatre. Stodgy, slow first act, too many close-ups (even in duets!). Dull, dark set: one side of three-storey building which NYT said resembled an advent calendar. Superb voices made it all the more irritating. Don Octavio (not admittedly Mozart’s most heroic role) played by “veteran” (courtesy NYT) Spanish tenor Ramón Vargas had softest, most melodic voice ever yet looked like a greengrocer in mufti. Next Monday: Siegfried.

Money makyth man

If I remember correctly Mr Bingley in P&P has an income of £10,000 a year. Mr Darcy, it is suggested, has loads more but the figure is never specified. Too vulgar.

I am not sure whether Mr Collins’ income (which goes with his living) is ever specified but there are contemporary men of the cloth in Jane Austen and other authors whose living (ie, parish or curacy) brings in as little as £50. Occasionally the price of a loaf is cited as 1½ pennies. And a horse is sold for £8.

Academics busy themselves with deconstructive detail yet ignore (Too vulgar?) the significance of cash. What’s needed in all period books is a table of relative incomes (for differing strata of society in that novel and at that time) and of relative costs so that we can pin down the status of a character, get an idea of what sort of life he or she is leading and attach accurate meaning to various transactions. Authors tended to be vague perhaps because they reckoned contemporary readers could work these things out. But centuries have slipped by.

I discussed this with Plutarch and he makes a grumbling request about versts so you can tell which authors he’s reading. Come on people of tenure – make yourself useful.

YIKES! Ysabelle has not only got a degree and a job but has started a blog. For anyone interested in what it’s like to pass through academia at the present time and then lay siege to the job market click on Y’s name at the top of my links list. I should add she uses a full range of punctuation symbols.

Celebrating the flexibility of language

A handy Newspeak decoder.

UNACCEPTABLE Entity the government dislikes but for unspoken reasons (eg, the presence of oil, uncommitted voters, muslim bad feeling) refuses to condemn. The larger the entity, the more risible the adjective. As with: The behaviour of the serial killer who murdered half of Camden Town is clearly unacceptable.

UNCOMPETITIVENESS Result of imposing any form of restriction on the banks. Mass unemployment is felt to be a small price to pay for avoiding this.

REPATRIATION Historically the act of returning people to their homeland. Now used to include human remains and various vague abstractions thought to have been stolen from Britain by the European Union.

NATIONAL TREASURE Elderly celebrity (usually male and with a full head of hair) who has avoided controversy for ten years and is just this side of twenty-four-hour care.

GROWTH Any measurement of the national economy that doesn’t show decline.

OPENLY GAY Gay. Since secretly gay is a sexual preference that cannot be referred to.

DEBT Sum of money that is owing. Sovereign debt: similar but larger.

FEMINISM Much diminished campaign to achieve women’s rights. Now applied by rightwing press to any complaint by any woman about anything.

FUNDAMENTALIST Informal singing group subscribing to the values expressed in a small number of carefully selected Old Testament texts.

WIND FARM Ironically labelled collection of large propellors from which very little is harvested. The system is switched off when wind conditions become ideal.

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING Ritualistic event whereby trades union officials receive from an employer a list of members being made redundant.

HOORAY! HOORAY! Granddaughter Ysabelle, now a degree holder, has a job. Modest title, modest pay. But a job.

Picture. BB now rises at 6.30 am to pursue writing career. View from his window.

It wasn't all Proust and Ulysses

In Britain I’d have (reluctantly) identified H as working-class. But this happened to be Pittsburgh and so he was blue-collar. H’s origins were one reason why we became pals. Since both of us were appallingly under-educated our friendship depended on what we said rather than what we were. He saw me as a foreign exotic, given to useless long words and my pretentiousness tickled him. I delighted in his concise one-liners seemingly riven from a William Goldman script.

Most of these are now lost, one remains. I mentioned that X, a vertically challenged colleague, had a remarkably tall wife. “And X wouldn’t have it any other way,” said H lubriciously (an adverb he would have poked fun at).

H was brought up in Mount Oliver, on a cliff to the south of Piitsburgh overlooking the Golden Triangle ( At the confluence of Allegheny and Monongahela rivers; Mount Oliver to the right.). As a result we spent laddish evenings there in a bar called Moike’s which I would never have dared enter alone. Moike communicated via insult, it was all he knew. We always drank 25-cent beers and I asked H what would happen if I ordered a martini. “Moike would slam the gin and vermoot bottles on the bar and say: make it yourself.”

Political correctness may not have been invented then but it would been badly received in Moike’s. Mostly the talk was coarse or of sport. I liked baseball and football, could get along with basketball but Moike’s customers liked hockey (the qualifier “ice” was unnecessary in the USA) and I was often left out. Nobody cared about that.

Evenings ended with a hot-sausage sandwich which was impossible to eat tidily. I would give my right eye for one just at this moment.

Ich kann nur ein wenig Deutsch sprechen

I wouldn’t want you all to get the wrong idea: very little BB cuisine comes out of packets, tins and indestructible plastic trays from Iceland. But this Maggi Sauerbraten mix was acquired on one of Mrs BB’s Christmas market trips in Germany and there’s a bit of brisket going begging.

My interest here is linguistic and I’m drawn to Frisch dazu: 500 g Rindfleisch since I’m utterly convinced that dazu translates as “thereto” however archaic the word is in English. No? Then let’s turn over the packet and find that I’m urged to Schlagen Sie eine weitere Seite aus dem Maggi Fix Kochbuch auf:

A perfect example of where a little (German) learning can lead to. I know schlagen is “to hit” so this clearly means “Hit yourself with a further page from the Maggi Fix cookbook.” Unfortunately auf (on) is added at the end, but it’s a short word and can’t mean much. Alas, alas. German is known for its LEGO BRICK TENDENCY which allows words to be infinitely connected as in Donaudampfersgesellschaftskapitänswitwe (Widow of a captain formerly with the Danube Steamship Company). But it is equally known for its DISINTEGRATION TENDENCY whereby bits of verbs are sawn off and put elsewhere.

Thus auf was, in a previous life, attached to another word. How about aufschlagen (consult – as in book). The lesson endeth here. And here’s the moral. Never interrupt a German until he (or she) reaches the full stop, satisfyingly rendered as Punkt. There may be a tail in the sting.