Synopsis of the great Welsh novel

Dai K lives at the end of a valley. One is not quite sure
Whether it has been drowned or not. His Mam
Loves him too much and his Dada drinks.
As for his girlfriend Blodwen, she's pregnant. So
Are all the other girls in the village-there's been a Revival.
After a performance of Elijah, the mad preacher
Davies the Doom has burnt the chapel down.
One Saturday night after a dance at the Corn Club,
With the Free Wales Army up to no goood in the back lanes,
A stranger comes to the village; he is, of course,
God, the well known television personality. He succeeds
In confusing the issue, whatever it is, and departs
On the last train before the line is closed.
The colliery blows up, there is a financial scandal
Involving all the most respected citizens; the choir
Wins at the National. It is all seen, naturally,
Through the eyes of a sensitive boy who never grows up.
The men emigrate to America, Cardiff and the moon.
The girls find rich and foolish English husbands. Only daft Ianto
Is left to recite the Complete Works of Sir Lewis Morris
To puzzled sheep, before throwing himself over
The edge of the abandoned quarry. One is not quite sure
Whether it is fiction or not.

-- Harri Webb

Yay

Tom Lehrer videos on Youtube. Tom Lehrer celebrated his eightieth birthday last week on April 9th. Happy Birthday!

Magnolia shoals

Up here among the gull cries
we stroll through a maze of pale
red-mottled relics, shells, claws

as if it were summer still.
That season has turned its back.
Through the green sea gardens stall,

bow, and recover their look
of the imperishable
gardens in an antique book

or tapestries on a wall,
leaves behind us warp and lapse.
The late month withers, as well.

Below us a white gull keeps
the weed-slicked shelf for his own,
hustles other gulls off. Crabs

rove over his field of stone;
mussels cluster blue as grapes :
his beak brings the harvest in.

The watercolorist grips
his brush in the stringent air.
The horizon’s bare of ships,

the beach and the rocks are bare.
He paints a blizzard of gulls,
wings drumming in the winter.

Reading/listening/watching

Reading: Elizabeth Bowen's Death of the heart, La chartreuse de parme (still)

Listening: George Jones, Doris Day

Watching: just finished series 2 of Deadwood. Not as good as the first, but still pretty good and v funny. Al Swearengen is just such a fantastic character.

Photography and war

Two related books. I finished Sontag's On photography a couple of weeks ago and followed it up with Regarding the pain of others: interesting to read two connected books by the same author, written twenty-odd years apart, on similar topics. I thought they were both fascinating

With regard to On photography, I'm finding it hard to think of things to say now because I find I'm more mulling over questions she raises than agreeing or disagreeing with things she says. Like, what is the effect on society when it is 'saturated' with photographic images, as ours is? She uses the phrase 'image junkies'. What is the relationship between a photograph and reality? We see photos as more real than paintings, but how real does that make them? She suggests that photographs can be very unreal: for example, in the section on Diane Arbus she talks about the way that Diane Arbus's photos distance the viewer/photographer from the bizarre or freakish subject.

In Regarding the pain... she talks about images of war and suffering, something I think about a lot. As I get most of my news from the radio and the newspapers online, I miss out on the visuals of the TV and printed papers. This isn't a moral choice, but convenience and personal preference (TV news pisses me off even more than the Today programme). Sontag writes about the authenticity of war photos, and how the way they are used can change their meaning, but she also discusses whether the enormous number of photos of wars and suffering lessens their impact. In contrast to her earlier ideas about society's saturation with photographic images, she concludes than no, they don't.

I think this has been discussed a lot in the media, whether shocking pictures on the television cause 'compassion fatigue' (horrible term) and make people become numbed to tragedy. I think someone looked into this and found that on the contrary, while shocking pictures are there, people's awareness is raised and they are more likely to donate to causes and charities. When the pictures go, people (unsurprisingly) forget about that issue.

I should also say that I love the way Susan Sontag writes: she is so clear and elegant, and these books are no exception. Anyway, what I really want is to own these books so I can come back to them, but a really crappy Penguin Modern Classics edition of On photography is ten pounds! for a really flimsy paperback printed on horrible cheap paper. So if anyone sees either in a charity shop/second hand bookshop/being sold off by a library, please can they snap them up and I will reimburse them. [20]

The catch

Forget
the long, smouldering
afternoon. It is

this moment
when the ball scoots
off the edge

of the bat; upwards,
backwards, falling
seemingly

beyond him
yet he reaches
and picks it

out
of its loop
like

an apple
from a branch
the first of the season.

-- Simon Armitage

Did I miss anything?

I love this poem on the excellent 37 days blog.

I've also been reading my way slowly through the archives of the So Many Books blog.

An interesting article from the New York Times about Antoine Saint-Exupery and his disappearance in a plane crash during the Second World War.

Some debate about women's representation or under-representation in poetry, following the Guardian's recent poetry booklets series.

Amazing photos of an abandoned library in Russia, via Things magazine, as well as a flickr set of pictures of an abandoned book depository in Detroit.

Le vide

Je descendais, je m'accrochais à des broussailles
Cherchant quelque rocher pour assurer mes pas.
D'habitude nous avons en nous ce compas
Qui mesure vite une pente à notre taille.
On sait s'il faut continuer une voltige
Et même si le goufre est un peu en retrait.
Mais ici plusieurs fois de suite le vertige
Du vide me laissait imaginer après
La même chute encore.

-- Edith Boissonnas

Recent acquisitions - poetry

Components of the scene - poetry and prose from the Second World War, ed. Ronald Blythe
Anthology of modern French poetry, ed. C.A. Hackett
Spells, ed. F. McEachran
French poetry today, ed. Simon Watson-Taylor and Edward Lucie-Smith

The book called Spells is a lovely collection of all sorts of bits of verse, from Homer to Auden. The introduction explains: "Essentially a 'spell' is an incantation, and all I can say is that the actuall practice of saying verse aloud, stressing the incantatory side, is the origin of the term here... I have defined a spell as 'concentrated poetry, of sound or sense'."

Recent acquisitions

Walter Benjamin - Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit
Gore Vidal - United States (essays)
AJP Taylor - From the Boer war to the Cold war (essays)
György Lukács - The meaning of contemporary realism
György Lukács - Essays on Thomas Mann
Decca: the letters of Jessica Mitford