The big freeze has its picturesque side
Sometimes even a cement mixer can have a certain poetic charm, when it is blanketed under several inches of snow. And so it was this afternoon in our Derbyshire back garden.
As for Christina Rossetti’s carol, it’s true that
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
… but this ‘bleak mid-winter’ isn’t ‘long ago’ but with us for the rest of the week. It’s a good job the email can get through, as the Royal Mail didn’t!
Christma’s partie’s for all
At this time of year, I’ve been given a special Christmas present: what I think we should call the Publican’s ’Postrophe. Until today, all I had was hearsay – but now, as Othello says, we have ‘ocular proof’ from the window of the very hostelry in London’s Wood Green where these ‘Christma’s Partie’s’ are advertised. There is of course some clever word play here, despite the artless lettering. For surely these are no ordinary Christmas parties but festivities in honour of Mary, Christ’s Ma?
No doubt the publican is aware of the need to bring old customs up to date, just as the Guardian recently reported how Jeanette Winterson has, in an interesting phrase ‘taken up the crusade’ by bringing out her own, ‘unorthodox account of the nativity story told from the point of view of the donkey in the stable’. Not that it’s very unorthodox; U A Fanthorpe included a ‘Cat in the manger’ in Safe as Houses
Matthew, Mark and Luke and John
(Who got it wrong,
Who left out the cat)…
Thomas Hardy wrote about The Oxen, ending:
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so
So Happy Christmas, everyone, publicans, sinners and, as Betjeman says,
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.
Shock, disbelief and erudition in a City sex discrimination case
For ordinary mortals, it’s hard to know what is most jaw-dropping about the Nomos Capital sex discrimination case. The allegations are shocking for a start, confirming our reasonable prejudice that the love of money is indeed the root of all kinds of evil and those greedy blighters truly are a different species. Except, of course, that they are merely a worse version of much of the rest of mankind in their arrogance and bullying.
Then there’s the claim by ‘multimillionaire financier Mark Lowe’ that he ‘always treated’ his employee, Jordan Wimmer, ‘in a gentlemanly way’. His use of ‘gentlemanly’ seems rather stretched when his conduct included emailing jokes which ‘compared women to dogs, expensive cars, sheep and corrosive chemicals’. Perhaps Lowe (described, rather bizarrely as ‘erudite’) was using the word in the first, archaic, definition given by the OED: ‘properly, one who is entitled to bear arms, though not ranking among the nobility’ (‘now chiefly historical’), though I rather suspect he may have been trying to lay claim to be ‘a man of chivalrous instincts and fine feelings’. Yet the report continues: ‘He admitted referring to Wimmer as “only decorative”, but he said it was a joke.’ Is it gentlemanly to jest about a young lady in that way, even in London?
Mix this in with the information that Miss Wimmer, at the tender age of 29, was paid £577,000 a year ‘to introduce rich individuals to hedge funds’. Ah, the etiquette of introductions is so expensive, isn’t it? All that money merely to be decorative! Add to the brew her claim that he’d hired a hitman to kill her and Hugh Muir’s revelation in Friday’s paper that this ‘erudite’ man was known at Balliol College Oxford as ‘Markedlylowgrade’. Which might explain Mr Lowe’s unconvincing riposte that the accusation that he thought of women as objects was ‘reductio ad absurdum through false syllogism’. Such language might be material for Word of the Day but it rings hollow, particularly when read in the light of Hugh Muir’s story on Thursday. This has Mr Lowe look in on the Balliol College law library. ‘This is just like a gentleman’s club,’ he said. ‘In that case you’d better leave,’ came the reply.
The humble wage-earner might also enjoy a moment’s schadenfreude when reading that, in a reductio ad absurdum, Lowe’s firm was brought low, nay liquidated, after being burned by the Bernard Madoff Ponzi fraud. Unfortunately (as much for him, I feel, as for natural justice), Lowe still has an estimated wealth of £100m. As we’re being jocular, we might consider it appropriate that ‘to be a gentleman’, the OED tells us, is ‘to have no work to do’. Even more appropriately, perhaps: ‘in contemptuous or humorous uses; esp. old gentleman = old fellow, spec. the devil’. The devil, after all, also took pride in false syllogism – but that’s another story, involving, as Oscar Wilde reminded us, ‘a man and a woman in a garden’ and ending ‘with Revelations’. Revelations enough in the employment tribunal for now.
Today’s Service to Mark the Passing of the First World War Generation at 10:50 on Radio 4 (Long Wave only) will include a poem by the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. It’s called ‘Last Post’ and if you miss the programme you can find the text on the Times site. There’s more about today’s service on the BBC site.
Earlier this year, The Guardian printed some of the results of the new Laureate’s commission of war poetry for today under the title ‘Exit wounds’. At the time, she wrote: ‘Such lines are part of the English poetry reader’s DNA, injected during schooldays like a vaccine.’ In recognition of this, she opens her poem with words from Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est‘.
An email from a school this week asked for ‘poetry which expresses the humour of the infantry during the Great War’.
An email from a school this week asked for ‘poetry which expresses the humour of the infantry during the Great War’. I pointed out that though there are many books of war poetry, humour doesn’t get much coverage in the standard anthologies. There is of course the sardonic humour of someone like Sassoon in ‘The General‘. Kipling’s ‘Epitaphs of War’ are often sombre but also contain some sarcastic outbursts. (It would also be very illuminating for students to find out about Kipling’s personal involvement in the war effort and its aftermath.) You can read all his ‘Epitaphs’ online in the brief selection of poems I’ve put online here; they include background notes based on my volume in the York Notes Advanced series.
There is a good range of poetry in Martin Stephen’s anthology Never Such Innocence. He includes a lot of material that isn’t otherwise readily available in print, such as the anonymous ‘When this blasted war is over’ (to the tune of ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’). As for ‘fun’, try Rose Macaulay’s ‘Many Sisters to Many Brothers’ – she wasn’t a soldier but that’s the point. She writes: ‘Oh, it’s you that have the luck, out there in blood and muck…. But for me … a war is poor fun.’ It also features in Stephen’s collection, though I first came across this in a friend’s Second World War utility edition of Poems of Today, shown here, which indicates how popular this anthology for ‘boys and girls’ had remained since it was first published in 1915. You can find the text online at Project Gutenberg.
There’s plenty more online, of course. A good place to start is The Muse in Arms from 1917, ‘for the most part written in the field of action’, which is on the First World War.com site. A recent CD The Pity of War contains both music composed during the First World War by Elgar, Janacek and Debussy and a second disc of Wilfred Owen letters and poems read by Samuel West, interspersed with wartime songs – both sentimental and, at times, comic. (If the Amazon copies seem expensive, try the Orchid Classics site, where you can also find out how to download the album.) There are many more Great War links on the Literary Connections First World War pages.
Is the afterlife just the second half of a line of verse?
I came across an interesting use of this word in a Media Guardian article about the death of Reinhard Mohn, the owner of Europe’s largest media group, Bertelsmann: ‘Mohn’s death has been described by German commentators as a “caesura”‘.
So is the afterlife just the second half of a line of verse? And if so, from which poem? Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained? ‘Futility’ or ‘Easter Wings’? Or is this some deeply existential statement about life imitating art?
It was good to see that yesterday’s Word of the Day, ‘sophistry’, was also used at least twice in yesterday’s Guardian. ‘But I doubt many people believe this is anything other than sophistry in pursuit of profit’ said Chris Hawkey and it appeared in Comment is Free too (online only): ‘The piece opens with a clever piece of sophistry….’ Clearly Word of the Day is in step with the Zeitgeist (Word of the Day for 12 April 2006). What’s that? Pretentious? Moi?
Ah yes, Wednesday’s word is: pretentious. We’re just a few paces behind Hadley Freeman in today’s paper.
Further suggestions for Word of the Day will be gratefully received – from journalists, actors, critics and any others who have fearlessly probed the spirit of the times in search of truth, themselves, an audience or just someone to talk to.
‘Lord Mandelson is “beyond anger”‘, says Jackie Ashley in today’s Guardian, ‘which must be quite a sight.’ It reminds me of the sign over the cosmetics section in Harvey Nichols, which reads ‘Beyond Beauty’. For those who can pay Harvey Nichols prices (we only went in for a cup of tea, since that at least was affordable), it seems that mere beauty must be too plain, too common, too readily bought at counters of mere High Street stores. ‘The quest for healthy skin is on going,’ they say. ‘On going’ where? What lies beyond beauty: the ineffable? Or ugliness? Perhaps only the very rich know, for truly they live in another country.
And where do we imagine Lord Mandelson to be in his ‘beyond anger’ state? Is he crouched under his Lord-High-Everything desk in whimpering despair? Is he going through the roof in an ecstasy of rage? Or has he attained that blessed calm that comes from knowing it’s not worth it? A page earlier in today’s paper, Madeleine Bunting extols the virtues of ‘such counter-cultural values as humility, patience and contentment’. Rubies beyond price, though I didn’t see them on the shelves of Harvey Nichols.
Today is National Poetry Day. To celebrate, The Guardian has an interactive quiz taken from I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud: And Other Poems You Half-Remember from School
So Booktrust will distribute one million books of the nation’s top eight rhymes in celebration of Bookstart, to help today’s parents rediscover their love for the rhymes. I wonder why they announce the ‘top ten’ but only print eight? Are they inadvertently helping to kill off the unfortunate ninth and tenth: ‘Send for chooper to chop off his head’? Good gracious, they even list ‘Jack And Jill’ as the last of the ‘least popular’ rhymes!
Twitter updates posted on the Literary Connections blog
I thought it was about time to play with this toy, so now Twitter provides a Word of the Day feed each word can be seen on the new Word of the Day page on this blog.
Judging by the ‘followers’ whose own updates stop after a few entries, it may soon wear off. However, I may be underestimating my ability to twitter on about nothing….
