Fathers’ Day Ramble

This year’s Annual Fathers’ Day Ramble [there have been two] was in and around Dedham Vale, the River Stour and the Suffolk-Essex border. Constable country. The weather was kinder -and warmer – than had been forecast and the first and last thirds of the walk through really beautiful countryside. As more or less everywhere it seems, buttercups are flourishing strongly this year; in addition to which, there were poppies, water lilies, irises, enough horses to start a small ramada – and several splendid churches, testament to the region’s earlier wool-based wealth.

Sarah, Molly and I kept up a goodly pace, arriving at Flatford Mill – site of what is possibly Constable’s best-known painting, The Hay Wain – in time for a well-earned afternoon tea with a view of the river and the meadows beyond.

Way to Go !

Striding Out

Poppies Galore

Exhausted !

Monet, Eat Your Heart Out !

Flatford Mill

Afternoon Tea

 

 

 

 

 

 

Birthday Honours: Albert Irvin OBE

Amongst the other people I was happy to see on this year’s Birthday Honours list – Grayson Perry, Anish Kapoor, P. J. Harvey and the marvellous cinematographer Roger Deakins ['No Country For Old Men'/'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford'] – I was especially pleased to see the name of Albert Irvin, now in receipt of a much-deserved OBE.

Now in his early 90s, Bert is still working as both a painter and printmaker, constantly affirming and advancing his position as one of the foremost artists in this country.

You can find out more about Bert here, on his website, and look at examples of his work.

Lee Harwood, Award Winner

I should have been off with my daughter to the BFI South Bank last night to see the documentary, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, said daughter rightly exercised about the extortionate punishments meted out to three members of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot recently in Russia. A call from my friend, the poet Lee Harwood, intervened. He had just heard he had been chosen as one of four poets this year to receive, through the Society of Authors, a Cholmondeley Award, presented annually to poets for their body of work and their overall contribution to poetry. On the date of the award ceremony, Lee would be in Amsterdam – would I, as one of his publishers through Slow Dancer Press, go along and collect the award in his stead.

An honour for Lee, richly deserved, and, in some small reflected way – I had published him after all – an honour for me.

So, it was goodbye Pussy Riot (daughter’s mum happily went in my place) hello The Army & Navy Club, which is where the Authors’ Awards evening was taking place. And, my goodness, there were scads of awards, too. All with cash attached. £70,000  from the Society of Authors, a goodly amount of it coming from various sponsors and trusts. The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. The Betty Trask Prize. The McKitterick Prize. The Somerset Maugham Awards. For poets under 30, the Eric Gregory Awards. And, somewhere in the midst of all that, in the midst of famous and less famous authors, poet-friends like Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy (name-dropper!), ooddles of wine and fancy canapés, the Cholmondeley Awards, which went, in addition to Lee, to Simon Armitage, Paul Farley and Medbh McGuckian, all of them receiving the sum of £1,500.

Of Lee, in the programme, it said the following:

His poetry is lyrical, humane, amused and precise; it is hospitable, but never superior.

His active internationalism has had an influence on decades of British Poetry.

At Slow Dancer Press I was proud to have published two collections of Lee’s poetry: one, a pamphlet, In the Mists: Mountain Poems, the other, book-length, Morning Light. We also published Dream Quilt, a collection of  30 short stories. All of these are now, sadly, out of print. But there’s a good deal out there, including a Collected Poems published in 2004 by Shearsman Books, a Selected Poems from the same publisher in 2008, and The Salt Companion to Lee Harwood, edited by Robert Sheppard, and published by Salt in 2007. Seek ‘em out.

And, what’s more exciting, rumour has it a new collection is on the way …

Reading Matters : John LeCarré

With all the disturbing news about American security service interception of this country’s (and others’) email and internet use, there couldn’t be a better time to read LeCarré.  [Or Orwell, for that matter, whose 1984 is shooting up the Amazon list.]

In his acknowledgments to his new novel, A Delicate Truth, LeCarré cites the British Government for its “latest assaults on our liberty, whether implemented or planned.”

And the plot, which revolves around the taking and possible rendition of a terrorist by members of the British army, with the aid of American forces and private mercenaries – a plot which goes nastily, bloodily wrong – leaves us in no doubt as to the lengths, including murder, to which the powers-that-be will go to keep their violent indiscretions from the judicial or pubic eye.

It’s a good book, eminently readable – LeCarré’s best for some time – but those critics who claim he is back to the absolute top form of The Honourable Schoolboy or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, are, I fear, as driven by wish-fulfilment as the film critics who hail every slight improvement in Woody Allen’s recent movies as a return to the heights of Manhattan or Annie Hall.

Come on, now – these guys are knocking on some – Allen’s 77 and LeCarré’s 81. What do you expect? A little falling off is permissible, surely? A fact of life.

[Now you see why I'm keen to quit while I'm (just about) ahead ... ]

 

Crime on TV : A Dying “Fall”

Okay, I know endings are difficult, but, after what had been, I think, a superlative series, the final episode was disappointing. No getting around it. From the moment the realisation finally sank in, somewhere around the half-way mark, that they were going to let the killer get away so as to set up the situation for a second series, most of the life seeped out of it.

There were, admittedly, some good scenes, a couple especially between Jamie Dornan as Paul and Bronagh Waugh as his wife, but even Gillian Anderson failed really to shine, shorn of a moment of triumph or resolution. And, in the narrative, there was a real and unfortunate sense of too many  loose strands coming not too convincingly home to roost.

After the excellence of what had gone before I felt cheated, sitting there with my glass of Scotch, watching not the true end of something, but the trailer for something yet to come.

Monk Calls the Tune

A nice example of Thelonious Monk’s dealings with his fellow musicians comes in Robin Kelley’s recent book*, where he describes a recording session involving the renowned saxophonists, Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane, both of whom were having difficulties with the arrangements they’d been asked to play.

When Hawkins asked for some explanation, he got an earful. Art Blakey remembers, “Monk said to Hawk, ‘You’re the great Coleman Hawkins, right?’ Hawk agreed. Then Monk said to Trane, ‘You’re the great John Coltrane, right?’ Trane blushed, and mumbled, ‘Aw … I’m not so great.’ Then Monk said to both of them. ‘You both play saxophone, right?’ They nodded. ‘Well, the music is on the horn. Between the two of you, you should be able to find it,’”

* Thelonious Monk: The Life & Times of an American Original – Robin D. G. Kelley

And there’s a good web site devoted to Monk and this book about him here …

Crime on TV : “Jack Irish”

I missed out on this series when it was first shown here, not having the requisite channel, but caught up with it recently via DVD. Made in Australia and based upon two of Peter Temple’s Melbourne-based crime novels – Bad Debts & Black Tide – the series features Guy Pearce as Jack Irish, lawyer and trouble shooter, a private eye by any other name.

As one of the screenwriters says in the Behind the Scenes extras, it’s impossible to boil down a whole novel into some 90 minutes of screen time; what you can hope to do is create something based upon the novel which works in its own terms while, hopefully, preserving the mood and atmosphere of the original. Something I think these  pieces, adapted by Andrew Knight and Matt Cameron and directed by Jeffrey Walker manage to pull off.

Maybe the action scenes, well filmed as they are, are given a little too much prominence and – something that brings the series far closer to American TV than British – there is a much stronger emphasis on guns and gun play; our hero seems to kill two bad guys towards the end of Bad Debts without getting as much as a slapped wrist.

Much depends, of course, upon Pearce’s ability to make the main character likeable, both because of as well as in spite of his weaknesses and insecurities. Kick sand in this bloke’s face, though, and he’ll be coming after you, no matter what. As well as which we’re led to believe he is pretty irresistible to women [it's a long way from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert], pulling – I believe that’s still the expression – journalist Linda Hillier, played by Marta Dusseldorp, within moments of their meeting. Which, since it means Ms Dusseldorp gets a goodly amount of screen time has to be a good thing. A mix of Vera Farmiga, Robin Wright and violinist Viktoria Mullova, to my old eyes she’s a stunningly attractive woman [whatever the political correctness police may think of that statement] and fully deserving of the extra screen space this blog allows.