David Green

David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.

Tuesday 26 March 2024

More than Fair to Middling

Samuel Beckett's Dream of Fair to middling Women has been an entirely worthwhile experience. It's probably okay to call it a bildunsroman although it might prefer not to be called anything and just be itself as is the wont of many of us.
It doesn't want to be seen as a novel in the sense of Balzac or Jane Austen with their sense of character. That is just one of the things it sets itself against as coherent 'personality' seems to break up in this sensory world. It can't really be said to have a story either but it wouldn't be the first or last novel to not have.
What it can't help but be, though, is Joycean not only as a portrait of an artist as a young man, its myriad literariness and the way in which it is a gentle introduction to the ways and means of Ulysses and the Wake
Quite how well it works as a whole will be for professors of Beckett to explain but there are such glorious passages of writing that it serves to revive the jaded spirit that sometimes wonders when the resources of language might become used up like other natural resources of the world.
One of the three women the 'hero', Belacqua, finds himself caught between is the Alba, described as,
Alone, unlonely, unconcerned, moored in the seethe of an element in which she had no movement and from which therefore she was not doomed to filch the daily mite that would guarantee, in a freighting and darkening of her spirit, the declension of that movement.
and we might guess at what's happening two pages later when,
it is now or never the time to sidetrack and couple those two lone birds and give them at least a chance to make a hit and bring it off, would it not be idle on our part to temporize further and hold up the happy event with the gratuitous echolalia and claptrap rhapsodies that are palmed off as passion and the high spots of  creative ecstasy...
 
So, Beckett was not always the absurd minimalist he became more famous for being, reducing theatre and writing to as little as he very meaningfully could. He had once expounded quite beautifully, while equally dismissively, and word is that had Joyce lived a bit longer he would have followed up the Wake with something reduced back to Dubliners-style plain-ness maybe because once one has explored as far as it is possible to go and searched beyond, that is all that remains.  
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Next up, then, is a choice between the 745 pages of the Ellman Joyce biography or the story of just Ulysses that is only half as much. One can't put them off forever.

The Last ISBN

David Green (Books) was issued with 10 ISBN numbers in 1990 on the occasion of the booklet Museum. 10 came free in those days but now 1 costs £91 and 10 cost £174. I won't be having any more, then, and I've got one left.
So one day I'll use it and after that I'll either have to find a publisher for further titles - which isn't ideal because they will want to at least break even - or go without being listed which is fine in as far as nobody will order it but it won't feel 'official'.
It's a bit of a pain in the neck being official, having to send copies to copyright libraries and remembering to delete the title as 'out of print' as soon as looks respectable but it feels better.
The last ISBN, then, must be decided on sooner or later. I can wait indefinitely for the irregular output of poems to very gradually make it a bigger book(let), do the big career retrospective Collected Poems and include those from the last five years or we can have those in a book of their own which looks like the best idea because it's in keeping with the 'series' such as it is.
This afternoon I put together fifteen poems representing those worth seeing print, I reckon, since The Perfect Book. I like it well enough. Three poems were candidates to give the collection its title - Rainyday Woman, Romanticism and Success - and its Romanticism that's winning so far because it fits with the cover and, I'd like to think, continues with the ironies of The Perfect Book and a cover that said The Last of the Great Dancers, David Green.
It's all set up and ready to go, then. I realize that proper publishing houses take months if not years to produce a title but I can do it in a week or not. I'll think about it and look at it a while longer, though, because like it says in Aldi once that last ISBN is gone, it's gone and after 34 years of David Green (Books) that will be that.

Happy Birthday, Miss Ross


 80 today.

You can't make records like that and not be one of the very greatest.

Sunday 24 March 2024

Portsmouth Music Festival Gala Concert

 Portsmouth Music Festival Gala Concert, Crookhorn College, Mar 24

Portsmouth Music Festival is a compendium of categories and compartments like a local musical version of Crufts and so its celebration of the winners is as various as those jamboree bags of bygone days in which you might find a whistle, a paper hat, a bubble gum and a gobstopper, all of which once seemed like special treats. It's not often a programme opens with a piece by Muse which is followed by Hummel.
It's a strange feeling to find that 'young people' now are into rock music that came after I'd affected to grow out of it. My nearest reference point for singer Millie in Attica, a 4-piece band, was Siouxsie Sioux. Their version of Hysteria is impressive and, not being familiar with the original, I'll take their word for its verisimilitude and retro sympathies. They know exactly what they're doing.
Elias Simojoki's Hummel Trumpet Concerto soothed and smoothed in contrast before then merrily and militarily parading Elias's fine phrases accompanied neatly and confidently by his brother Markus.
An early highlight, though, was surely Mia Drover's Rachmaninov Prelude that noticeably stilled the audience with its atmosphere and composure. Any reservations I'd had about surrendering a Sunday afternoon to a lucky dip of a show were banished there and then.
The classic recipe for such a show is to make 'em laugh, make 'em cry and then send on the dancing girls and Mabel Alsford's performance as Veruca Salt from Willie Wonka brought forward what used to be the somewhat demanding personality of Violet Elizabeth Bott remade for a later generation, delivered with consummate self-possession that prompted our genial host, Andrew McVittie, to enquire how much of it was acting. All of it, I'm sure.
Ben Ward's two Villa-Lobos guitar Preludes were next a captivating contrast full of technique and sensitivity that made a deepening, mystical impression as they progressed before equally compelling was Emme Hensel's sonata movements by Taktakishvili, the first sorrowful and so soulfully played and the second chirruping like a nest of birds that kept Karen Kingsley as busy as one of those dextrous pianists from the early days of cinema.

In such a gala event that does have 'something for everybody', there will be items that aren't quite the business for some of us. When I was about 13, Jack, 'a seasoned metalhead', would have been sensational to me and blown everybody else off stage. He brought in a wide range of electric guitar effects into what was ostensibly a blazing performance of some Metallica. I'm looking forward to celebrating the 80th birthday of Miss Diana Ross on Tuesday, though, and the flying-V guitar looked like the most olde worlde exhibit of the afternoon. The audience loved him, though, and that matters more.
Shifting as erratically as ever through genres, Hazel Humphries flirted with any idea of Crookhorn Sunday afternoon decency in her performance of The W.I. Calendar that thankfully went no further than it did and, in the hope that all my retro references don't become tiresome to anybody born since about 1980, she'd have been ideal for an old TV show called The Good Old Days.
Karen's versatility in the role of accompanist went yet further in switching from that to violinist Katie Ho's Smetana with its change of tempi and stylistic nuance before Katie was joined by sister, Priscilla, with her magical harp and they sparkled together through a Romance by John Thomas. 
And so, bring on the dancing girls, indeed. Lily Pearce was a lyric poem incarnate with her sequence of balletic moves and, as was remarked afterwards, was, like all the performers, brilliantly in 'performance mode' as soon as she was on stage. Katie Bone's vocal on Wherever He Ain't from Mack and Mabel was full of personality and New Juysey attitude and the Fortuned Cookies were a 'kooky' 4-piece a cappella doing what a barbershop quartet would have done if there had been barber shops for ladies. There was once a group called Fascinating Aida but that's the closest I can get.
But it wasn't all over because Students from the Marie Clarke School of Dance provided extracts from Beetlejuice full of slick choreography and vibrant song'n'dance by way of a literally showstopping finale. It was ages ago that it was suggested that the age, and even idea, of Variety was over. Well it isn't on this evidence. 
In a way it's easier on the performers who each contribute their part but the audience have it coming from all directions. That was a tremendous show. Exhausting, really. Best of luck to anybody who has to write about it.

Thursday 21 March 2024

Let's Mek It Beckett

 Next off the ranks is Samuel Beckett's Dream of Fair to middling Women, still part of the ongoing JoyceFest because it features a version of Lucia. I didn't feel like taking on another vast volume like Ellman or the biography of Ulysses just yet so I eyed Beckett with some trepidation and began. 
It owes a debt to Joyce and no mistake, published in 1932 when he was 26, it comes before the Wake but he would have been aware of what was being written by his chosen mentor. It's immediately more accessible to the extent that it is comprehensible and I have high hopes of it. As the title might lead one to expect, it carries an erotic charge but its language is the sort of joy that Joyce's much heavier technique outweighs in some ways to its disadvantage,
they kept it going in a kind of way, he doing his poor best to oblige her and she hers to be obliged, in a gehenna of sweats and fiascos and tears and an absence of all douceness.
That is brilliant and it's not the only bit that is.
We may be on a winner here and a visit back upstairs to revisit the likes of Murphy and Molloy after heaven knows how long could extend the queue of books lined up.
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We call Beckett 'Beckett', of course. We call Hardy 'Hardy', Dickens 'Dickens' and Larkin 'Larkin'. Sam, Thomas and Philip seem inappropriate. So would it be inappropriate to refer to some authors by their first names? It might seem to imply some familiarity, some casual acquaintance or even something patronising. Quite often here in book or music reviews I prefer first names if only to be friendly and not academically austere. It's different in each case. For some reason, I'd never call Paul Muldoon 'Paul' or Ms. Duffy 'Carol Ann' but, perhaps as long term favourites, Gunn is often 'Thom', O'Brien can be 'Sean' and Bishop is 'Elizabeth'. Sylvia is 'Sylvia' because she's famous enough as such, and if Dylan Thomas isn't always 'Dylan' it's in order not to confuse him with Bob.
The matter arises in regard to the essay due soon relating to Rosemary Tonks and Philip Larkin. I can see why it's not treating them on equal terms to call them 'Rosemary' and 'Larkin' but that's what I call them. I'm not 100% okay with calling Rosemary 'Tonks' but the 'house style' and academic propriety perhaps demand that I do so that's what it might have to be. Larkin is the institution that he has become and doesn't invite the informality of 'Philip' but 'Tonks' objectifies someone one has immense sympathy for and sounds too abrupt.
One of my first appearances in print, circa 1975, was in the letters page of the august Listener on that very subject. Linden Huddlestone, teacher of fourth form Eng. Lang., was a fellow subscriber and impressed that Thursday morning but word was, in a school where first names were rarely used before the sixth form, that it found little support in the staff room. Green !!! Good Lord, whatever next ??? He'll be wearing coloured socks and listening to pop music next. But, no, I wasn't. I was mis-spending my youth by taping Shostakovich String Quartets from the radio and reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
-- 
There is much to look forward to on all fronts, not the least of which is the appearance of that essay in print making me feel somehow like a bona fide contributor to Rosemary Studies. Long term there are some absolutely choice artefacts that might become mine that will be fine to have for the want of having before they are assimilated into the library and are taken for granted.
Ahead of those, though, this week's arrival of the Busoni Fantasia Contrappunstica will be the playlist until the arrival of the Brahms Viola Sonatas. Both come from the repertoires of much-admired artistes I've met as collateral benefits of my ideal retirement job as hack concert reviewer. The Busoni is somewhere up in that rarified area of his Bach Chaconne, a wonderful hybrid of the baroque and C19th indulgence. That will last until the arrival of yet more Brahms chamber music, a glorious niche, some of which is due in Portsmouth's Menuhin Room on May 11, at 12.30, and if you can get yourself there you'd be doing yourself a big favour.

Wednesday 20 March 2024

Before the Dark Ages

The Lord, it was reported, had said, 'let there be light' and there was light and in due course the magi followed the guiding light of a star to find the new-born Christ who became 'the light of the world'. That is the Christian side of the story but Catherine Nixey, in The Darkening Age, the book before her recent Heresy, catalogues the other side.
She puts in her caveats early, in her introduction, that she is,
an almost daily beneficiary of such goodness 
as that performed by many, many good people impelled by their Christian faith. And I might add that Christianity has not been the only movement in history to do untold damage to our wider cultural heritage in the interests of its mania. Pol Pot's 'year zero', the Soviet rewriting of history, Donald Trump's fake news and all sorts of fanaticism have done similar things to establish their supremacy and delete all opposition but if Vandals gave their name to vandalism they owe a huge debt to Christianity who set them a paragon example to follow.
Having been brought up on stories and hymns about 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', which Heresy cast considerable doubt on, it takes a lifetime to recover from the sort of 'education' instilled in one at a formative age and not thinking that piety and devotion are somehow to be admired. Whatever goodness or faults Jesus Christ had in him it is unlikely that he would have condoned quite the levels of tyranny, cruelty and barbarism carried out in his name in the centuries after he had once and for all departed this earthly life.
Catherine Nixey accepts that there were periods of persecution of Christians by Romans but while we've heard all about that, we hear much less about righteousness persecuting anything pagan once the conversion of Constantine turns the balance of power in its favour.
The non-sequiturs of faith, the omniscient God and all that the doctrine brought with it had been pointed out by contemporary philosophers like Celsus but thought was of little interest to orthodox Christians,
they actually celebrated ignorance. They declare [Celsus wrote] that 'Wisdom in this life is evil, but foolishness is good' - an almost precise quotation from Corinthians.
Rather than engage in debate, Christians preferred faith, doctrine, uniformity of thought, obedience and intimidation. Not to mention murder, networks of informers and all the devices used by C20th tyrannies carried forward into the C21st because, having nothing but faith and doctrine, they had no answers. The Sociology departments of late 1970's universities were run on similar lines if we believe Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man and I tend to, not least because it was filmed on the campus of the university I went to where it was the campus orthodoxy. 
But it is the destructions of libraries and the desecration of temples and statues that is perhaps the main point of The Darkening Age, the systematic obliteration of previous cultures that wrote over such texts as those of Aristotle. Ovid and Catullus would not have been on their poetry reading list. Enjoyment was frowned upon unless it was smashing up art they didn't agree with and Christianity can take much of the credit for less than 10% of classical literature having survived. It was marauding monks that did it. Yes, we understand that the prayerful monks of Lindisfarne were slaughtered by invading Vikings in their turn but their predecessors were the foot soldiers of the campaign that made Christianity so oddly the dominant force in Western culture.
It is a lurid book but that is because it reports lurid stories. Of course it could be seen as one-sided but that is because it is an attempt to balance that which was instilled in us from an early age which, as ever, was history written by the winners. And then some.
There are some good hymns and I don't mind a bit of a sing myself given the chance but not so much Onward Christians Soldiers, Fight the Good Fight with All Thy Might or When a Knight Won His Spurs, that's all supremacist machismo.
My favourite is Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, Forgive Our Foolish Ways.

That is a lot to expect, though, of a God who wasn't forgiving in many of the available accounts of him and who has provided precious little evidence of being there unless, as Celsus wrote, one is one of the 'foolish, dishonourable and stupid' that were the only people Christians were able to convince.
However, it's not as much the relentless, headlong commitment to her cause that makes Catherine Nixey so readable. She's funny at regular intervals and though one wonders at her rigour, research and scholarship it is by her implacable ironies and sardonic wit that one will remember her books because evidence is one thing but the presentation of it is what makes it not only convincing but entertaining, too.
 

Tuesday 19 March 2024

Out of this world and Out of print


 Potato Scrabble is a low-level pastime undertaken to pass such time as needs passing when it is not being passed in higher level pastimes such as chess or crosswords. Activities such as writing, music and reading have been elevated to 'what I do' in the time since finishing paid work.
I operate at level 4, out of 5, and win maybe 30% of the time. Level 5 had seemed impossible as the computer helps itself to 7-letter bonuses on aregular basis and one stands no chance with a rack either full of vowels or none at all. But last night, just by way of a change, I had a few goes at level 5 and got lucky. 484-361 would be a good result at level 4 but at 5 it's a giant-killing comparable to that day when Colchester beat Leeds. I took a picture of it and will remember it always because it might not happen again.
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News from David Green (Books), the 'imprint' that originally gave this website its name, is that most titles are very nearly genuinely out of print. I marked them as such some time ago so that nobody would order them from the ISBN catalogue. To say that it was not a commercial concern would be some understatement. But looking for a couple of copies of each to give to people whether they want them or not entailed a more painstaking search than most publishing houses would need to undergo, especially if they only ever had nine titles in their catalogue.

Re-read, the Selected Poems from 2005, has a handful of copies still left and there are one or two of The Perfect Book and The Perfect Murder but my own archive copies of anything else is about all I can find without going to the British Library to look myself up. It's both a shame and a good thing. There isn't a great deal of call for them but on rare occasions like now one would like a copy or two to give away. In a way it's a gorgeous thing to be out of print, as in the almost other-worldly irony of Success, the poem due in About Larkin next month.