Socks

 

A fascinating read in the latest copy of ”The Bottle Imp” (https://tinyurl.com/ycepv4u4), about the poet Hugh McDiarmid and, more specifically, about the 1800 mile round-trip taken by his socks, and how it puts him not necessarily in a good light.

Get “The Bottle Imp” (https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/signup/) anyhow: it’s free, above all.

What Of It?

 

This is a bit of Flash I wrote 7 or 8 years ago and have just found again in my Google Drive. I expect I entered it for something and that was the last anyone heard of it. I had added a dark ending - a really really dark ending - for some sort of shock value and which I’ve deleted, leaving this sort of anecdote thing behind. Apologies to anyone who recognises themself in this: it isn’t really them! The top & tail quotes are from George Gissing’s “The Private Papers Of Henry Ryecroft”.

-------------------------------------------

“Nevertheless, my life is over”.

The best bit about quiz night was choosing the team name. "The AS Byatt Rocketry Club For Men '' had been deemed “de trop”: worryingly for the team's prospects it had been demanded of him “who was this Byatt anyhow when he was at home?”. So it actually turned out that thinking of a good team name before you got to the pub was the good bit, the golden pie-crust,  but that the reality more resembled the gristled disaster within.

He therefore felt difficulty heart-and-souling it as a representative of "Barbara's Big Beauties", - inevitably spelt "beauty's" - , and strove vainly against such areas of vital human endeavour as TV personalities' activities in a jungle scenario, the novels of Dan Brown, when Crystal Palace had last won the FA Cup*, or France's record in the Triple Crown**.

They came third, which they agreed Wasn't Too Bad, Considering. He had got the one about interest rates, insisting on his correctness in the face of dubiety, and was thus more pleased than otherwise, and walked the wet fag-butted street home with, not a song, a hum, in his heart.

“I am tempted to laugh; I hold myself within the limit of a smile”.

* hoot 

** v. funny, this.

Valentine Ackland/ Country Conditions

 

From Country Conditions (1936) 

 Not much preamble here. The author writes vividly about the daily life of countryside workers - in the 1930s, so it’s scarcely ancient history -  in the quaint country cottages that sell for hundreds of thousands now, once “done up”. Of course it’s beautifully written, has a lefty sting in the tail, and is taken from the estimable “Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society” .

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Some years ago I came across this self-portrait of the French artist  Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun in the National Gallery (London). So captivated was I that as soon as I got home I got stuck into the sources. The owner of one website in particular had a scanned copy of a biography written by the art critic Haldane MacFall (of whom more here). The scan had not been edited at all and so contained a lot of scan artefacts and imperfections. I offered to correct it and did so, and a few weeks later sent him my HTML and text versions. 

The only reply I ever got from the website creator was that he couldn’t look it over just yet because he was going to Antarctica - which I thought was an extreme form of criticism -  but after a while I got over it, assumed he’d fallen into a crevasse, dumped my efforts to Google Drive or whatever it was called then, and forgot about it.

Anyway, here it is . I don’t know if he took on my changes, or did his own, or just left it, because I’ve just read my version and I don’t have the energy to read it again just yet. But enjoy MacFall’s unique style and enjoy  Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun ‘s marvellous portraits.

Lockdown reading

 

I’m seeing too many recommendations for easy or comfort reading: I seem to swing the other way: when I was in for root canal work I was reading Siegfried Sassoon’s War poems. It was an almost instinctive reaction, not calculated at all, to make my trepidation and potential pain trivial. Since lockdown I’ve been reading Franz Werfel’s account of the Armenian genocide “Forty Days of Musa Dagh” which has a similar anaesthetising effect against the inconvenience and boredom... as well as being a very very good book.

Starlings

 

From this week's New Yorker (Despatches From a Pandemic 13 April) "Starlings are an invasive species; in 1890, a Shakespeare enthusiast released sixty starlings into Central Park, as part of a whimsical mission to introduce to North America every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare’s works; today we have two hundred million."

Some Writing, as in "that's SOME writing".

 

"A London charwoman does her work, takes her money and goes away, sterile as the wind of the desert. She does not spongily, greedily, absorb your concerns, study your nose to see if you have been crying again, count the greying hairs of your head, proffer sympathetic sighs and vacuum pauses and then hurry off to wring herself out, spongily, all over the village, with news of what’s going on between those two at Pond House." (from "Selected Stories (Virago Modern Classics Book 383)" by Sylvia Townsend Warner)

For more, see sylviatownsendwarner.tumblr.com