Poem

perhaps

i

mein leben

ist

unbekannt

zu mir

mein schicksal

ist

zufällig

auch

vielleicht

ii

ma vie

est

inconnu

moi

inconnu

hasard

j suis

hasard

peut-être

iii

my life

is

unknown

to me

Schicksal

is

hazard

for me

perhaps

Bells Whistles and Streams

Bells Whistles and Streams

Hidden History

Bells

While thundering along country lanes on my bike I am often struck by how the world has changed. Hedgerows and big oak trees are very telling about the past use of the land. On route to Ludlow I passed an old church, and had an odd thought. Bells, whistling and streams, which all played a big part in shaping the landscape.

The history of bells and how important they were to our daily lives is amazing. There was a great pride in a village that owned and rang its own bells. Skirmishes between villages in order to steal bells were not unknown; such was the prestige and practical value of a bell. Before affordable clocks the village bell played several important functions apart from the obvious keeping of the time.

It rang to warn of danger e.g. invasion, fire

In rang at times of celebration

It rang the religious office of the day and called people to prayer

It rang the start of the day sending workers to the fields – and brought them back

It rang when someone died

It rang when there was an excommunication

It rang when there was an exorcism

Bells were used to proclaim, as far as they could be heard, the message of Christianity. Christianity is out of favor and churches are sold, left to fall down or become costly historical artifacts for a community.

Whistles

Harpo Marx communicated by whistling in films, and as funny and as ingenious as it seemed there is in fact a history of countries and peoples that communicated by whistling. It is easy to call to mind shepherds working their dogs over mountain sides and sailors leaping to their stations from a bosun’s whistle, but harder to imagine people having whistled conversations. But people did do just that. In parts of Spain there is a whistled language of several thousands of words still used to communicate over long distances. Many country people would communicate like this, if in only a limited way. There were many countries that used whistling at some time in some form or other to communicate including France (Occitan), Greece, Spain and Turkey.

Streams

The humble stream has played a big part in the history and development of communities.

The history of any hamlet, village, town or city is also the history of its water source. It is no accident that many cities and towns have a river at its heart. The great rivers have watered the great cities as well as provided a means of transport, communication, commerce - and sewers. The Severn, considered to be the last free running river in Europe, starts on Plynlimon in mid Wales and runs down to the Bristol Channel. On its way down stream water is taken by Shrewsbury, Worcester, Cheltenham and Gloucester not to mention Ironbridge, Bridgnorth, Stourport, Tewkesbury and numerous villages that all in turn put their ‘treated water’ back in the Severn. Londoners complain that their water has been through eight sets of kidneys on average! The Romans made good use of the Severn, building bridges along the river where they were absolutely necessary, but mostly using fords. 

Hidden, but still running beneath the streets of some towns and villages are the original water source. Cheltenham has the river Chelt that once ran through the town centre but is now visible in only a few places. It is not far from the alleged original source of Cheltenham’s mineral water Royal Well. Finding mineral water was the making of many towns such as Malvern, Leamington and Bath. The popularity of Spas spread throughout Europe giving the rich chance to ‘cure’ themselves of numerous ‘illnesses’ whilst displaying their wealth and enjoying the ‘entertainments’. It is no surprise that many of these towns have magnificent baths, theatres, concert rooms, parks and gardens.

A good look at a map, or walk round, will show that the development of any community, even one or two cottages, will be due to a water supply near by. It is sure to be a stream, well, spring or pond.

Cheltenham’s mineral water could be said to be an acquired taste. This rhyme is often mentioned in connection with the waters

Here I lie with my three daughters

For having drunk the Cheltenham waters

Wish that I had kept to Epsom salts

And I would not be in these vaults

Cr­épuscule

When I see a twilight sky ….

Crépuscule - a beautiful and poetic word meaning dusk, dark creeper in Latin. Dusk is that moment, that feeling, when the boundary between the existential and metaphysical blurs and a transient moment of nothingness occurs. It is a moment when a feeling of the numinous hangs in the air. It is a moment when the sky reflects a mystery about the journey of our lives into the unknown. Looking up into that sky is like being beckoned … and its literature which prompts me to reflect upon the impossible questions …

In The Darkling Thrush Thomas Hardy writes of dusk as

The weakening eye of day

The weakening eye of day when light goes, the world disappears, darkness grows and sleep creeps towards us. Sleep inexorably bringing its second self – death.

In life there is always death. Et in Arcadia ego - and in Arcadia I (death) am with you.

Eliot considers this relationship repeatedly in The Waste Land:

There is always another one walking beside you.

For him, as for so many poets, dusk is a starting place:

Or your shadow at evening rising up to meet you

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock starts with that giddy moment when dusk swells into evening:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Beckoned on a journey down streets of ‘insidious intent’ -

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Eliot’s journey into the unknown is to pose and reflect upon the impossible questions and their significance for being. Is there life after death or nothingness?

Another journey into the unknown is found in Sebastien Japrisot’s Un long dimanche de fiançailles. Set in the First World War, a group of men play a game of chance at dusk for their very lives. Having been found guilty of cowardice and sentenced to death, they are forced into no-mans-land from the aptly-named dugout Bingo Crepuscule. Like Eliot, Japrisot uses dusk to make the reader reflect upon the equally random journey of life, and to consider the impossible and perplexing questions …

The opening of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has Marlow on a dusk-shrouded boat telling of a great and terrible journey:

We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun.

It is the journey into the very heart of the meaning of being. Like Eliot, Conrad considers what it would mean if there were only nothingness, if there were no God? What would be the point of living? If there is no God would that explain why there is evil in the world? It is the existence of evil that Dostoyevsky explores in The Brothers Karamazov. Dimitri Karamazov renounces God because of the evil in the world and asks the eternal question ‘Why?’

It is Shakespeare’s sonnet LXXIII that so concisely describes the dusk of life and end of life’s journey:  

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Dusk heightens the mystery and confusion surrounding the notions of existence, being and evil, and as Eliot says leads ‘you to an overwhelming question ...’

A beautiful window in St Laurence's Church Ludlow which is a parish church but is more like a cathedral. Well worth a visit.

Birdsong

Birdsong

This is a defence of the right to hold the view that Birdsong is not the book that it is often claimed to be. Fortunately, atheistic hard-nosed literary debate is allowed to shoulder its way into this obsequious adoration and have a say. The real problem now is to discern what is meant by a great work of art, keeping in mind the two-way relationship between artist, work and reader.

Birdsong is essentially a Mills and Boon romance set in the First World War. This not a criticism of Mills and Boon because some of the books are extremely well written, crafted, to a well-loved formula, if you will excuse the pun. This is a compliment as 75% of all manuscripts received by Mills and Boon are rejected. Birdsong is a carefully crafted and constructed book.

So is ‘crafted’ meant as a criticism? Not necessarily, it is just that fiction written in the passion of ‘white heat’, for all its unbalanced quirkiness, has more credence. It is a type of writing that gives unsatisfactory glimpses of the fleeting shadows of human nature, while on other occasions it is like a shaft of brilliant white light in a mine that picks out that one small sparkling gem. ‘Crafted’ versus ‘white heat’ writing is an old argument. Of course the best works of art have both. The personification of this must be Shakespeare’s sonnets.

The tests for good fiction, great art, are well-worn and ambiguous. In a capitalist society can art be anything other than a commodity? What is the function of art? Can a great work of art really stand outside its time and culture; can it have autonomy? Often great works of art are referred to as being like a mirror held up to society.

Here is a list of considerations that are usually mentioned in one form or another in trying to arrive at a definition of great art:

• Good literature should make you consider the human condition
• It has enduring popularity
• It ‘stands the test of time’
• It is well written and has a good story
• It makes you realise a truth about yourself
• It makes you see a truth about the world
• It accurately reflects the world

To be fair all of the above could be said of Birdsong and it has undoubtedly been a commercial success. However, can it really be considered to be a great novel? Is it really that glittering gem? Is it really the equal of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, David Grossman’s See Under Love or Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader?

Birdsong is a love story and a portrayal of the futility of war. 

Here I drop any pretence of an evenhanded and balanced approach to give a personal view - which is that I really do not like Birdsong for a number of reasons. The use of the First World War as a backdrop for this thin love story is facile. It is easy, but dangerous, to borrow a theme to lend your own work gravitas. Poor writing often takes difficult themes to bolster its own credibility. In many respects it is lazy writing; the author feels that they have ready-made human dilemmas just waiting to be exploited. The difference between Birdsong on the one hand and The Reader, See Under Love and All Quiet on the Western Front on the other is that the authors of the latter novels have written about painful human dilemmas that just happen to have occurred in a time of war. Pride, insanity and betrayal are powerful personal and social issues in their own right. Love is also a real issue. But Birdsong is not Dr Zhivago, which again is more than just one love story. The more important and complex love story in Dr Zhivago is that of Russian people for their country.

The central theme of The Reader is the stubborn pride of an illiterate woman, drawn into an unequal relationship with a youth who has the beguiling gift of reading and a treasury of books. Her pride will be – as in many great tragedies – her downfall. This is pitiful but absorbing.

From the half-crazed ramblings of a seemingly senile and demented old man in See Under Love comes a holocaust survivor searching for the reason of his survival and for the existence of evil.

In All Quiet on the Western Front a generation of young men are betrayed by their elders’   jingoistic patriotism, each one eventually pitifully slaughtered. An awful poignancy is elicited in the perplexed anguish of the young men who finally realise that they are about to give up their lives in vain.

These are powerful and gripping tragedies written with force and passion. They are books that have pain and anger.

I was angry when I finished reading The Reader, See Under Love and All Quiet on the Western Front. I was angry at a stupid woman’s pride which trapped her in so many ways, angry at how a modern-day Lear had been created, angry at how young men were, and still are, manipulated off to war. I am angry at the simplistic cliché-ridden over- romanticised war of Birdsong.

This weak little book can prompt some of the questions that great literature does, but it is not great literature. And I get annoyed that people should are offended when their ‘love’ of this book is challenged.

As Noel Coward said - extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

OSS 117

#OSS117

To my surprise I found a twitter hashtag for a film that I like for all the wrong reasons! Max my little son said I was not ranting – so here is some strong enthusiasm for the French film OSS 117 staring the now very famous Oscar winning Jean Dujardin.

In the Oxfam shop in Ludlow mooching around and picking up anything vaguely German or French I found among the DVD’s Cairo Nest of Spies. (Last week they had the complete box set of the first Heimat series for £20 – aaaah as I already have it.) This was a French comedy “Infinitely superior to Get Smart” which was an awful TV series/film  – but it was £2 and a chance to learn some more French – and the possibility that it might be funny. It turned out to be really funny. There were even character actors from the Luc Besson Taxi films.

Office of Strategic Services (OSS) really existed and was set up by the Americans during the war as a spy network. Like Ian Fleming, but well before him, Jean Bruce saw the potential for some good spy fiction based on the real thing. His first book was published in 1949 Bond appeared in 1953. There was a series of films based on the OSS books.

The Dujardin films are spoofs of the earlier spy thrillers. Looking very much like Sean Connery in ‘le smoking’ he has an amazing screen presence and charisma which steels every scene. The dialogue is slick and in places there is some astute political satire. On the other hand sometimes the film is outrageously un P.C. and plain crass. I’m not sure why copies of the film are not being burnt and a fatwa issued.

Dujardin’s hapless character disguised as a musician finds himself forced to perform a solo. The song he nervously stumbles into is a classic French 50’s number one made popular by the adopted Egyptian siren Dalida  - Bambino. It is one of those irritating songs with a stupid refrain that is impossible to get out of your head. Just like the Girl from Ipanema.

An interesting film for many reasons.

John Goodfellow

John Goodfellow

The inspirational teachers rarely get the glory they deserve and it seems rather offensive that there is a Teacher of the Year Award. This is an award that quite clearly states that some teachers are better than others. But what qualities must that sole recipient of such a prestigious award have?  How is a teacher judged to be good? What is success for a teacher? Is a good teacher one that gets good exam results? Is a good teacher one that inspires young minds? Is a good teacher one that challenges young minds and gets them in turn to challenge their world?  Is a good teacher one that fosters independent thought in young people? Of course the answer will come from what a society or culture wants its education system to produce. In a capitalist society education has to produce a workforce; there is little room for education for education’s sake - it is often seen as a luxury.

The most inspirational teacher by whom I was fortunate to have been taught had a gift, and the theatre’s loss was my gain. A group of us were deeply affected by this charismatic man. However, like most teachers there are always pupils that don’t like them. There are comments on Friends Reunited about him ranging from the bizarre to the plain stupid. One female pupil who hated him and his lessons, got his real name wrong, but his nickname right, which was Granddad. I never understood this choice of name as John Goodfellow was about as far from an old man as it was possible to be. He was so full of life and energy. Being a heavy smoker, his explosions of enthusiasm often ended in red-faced coughing fits. He was a passionate energetic man. In later years he did sport a goatee, which along with his paunch, made him the spitting image of Falstaff and I suppose made him look older. He enjoyed life and a good glass of something took its place in that enjoyment.

He was deeply passionate about literature and drama and his reading lessons destroyed any hope that the BBC would have us live happily listening to its drama and short stories in years to come. He was a consummate actor and reader and there have been very few programmes on the radio that have come close to his mesmerizing performances. Strolling round the room, book in hand, he brought to life the mist-covered moors of Jamaica Inn, the tension of Hannay’s chase on the steam-shrouded bridge, the slow sultry heat of the South and Tom Sawyer’s naïve but honest intentions. And lost from the great and memorable pantheon of performances of Lear’s heath speech, is his. Most remarkable of all was his fluency in reading Middle English. Chaucer lived and drew breath! I knew the wife of Bath – she was a neighbour. The shitten Sheppard changed my life. This was a man with a large and generous heart – he gave everything he had freely. We were not the élite, we were not even grammar school children, we were secondary and on the whole not that bright or interested - but we got the very best that he had to give. Some of us listened.

There are few days that go by when I don’t think about him. He put poetry in my life, gave me new worlds, and gave me autonomy. I am probably close to his age now when he died. I am amazed at how little I actually know about the man who had such a profound effect upon my life. But in truth, perhaps all that matters is the passion and love for literature and life that he passed on to me.

More importantly one day he said to me - I believe you can do anything you set your mind to.

Leslie Paul – The Angry Young Man

Leslie Paul – The Angry Young Man

Leslie Paul - the man who gave the world the expression Angry Young Man, novelist, poet, journalist, academic friend of T.S. Eliot, member of the Bloomsbury group and creator of The Paul Report - died quietly in Cheltenham in 1985. There was an irony in the fact that a man of such great literary and social importance passed away, in Eliot’s prophetic words, and in a fate that awaits most of us, ‘not with a bang but a whimper’. It was hard to understand where all the glamour and clamour of the press and literati had evaporated to, leaving on that night just a colleague and two students at his bedside.

There is very little written about Leslie Paul today and his Wikipedia page is thin on his numerous achievements.

Woodcraft Folk

He was born in Dublin in ‘the cruellest month’ of April, in 1905, but grew up in South East London, an area of hardship and poverty that was to shape his politics. Although he never joined the Communist Party he was sympathetic to its beliefs and spent a lifetime challenging injustice, remaining a socialist all his life. Out of the deprivation of his early life came one of his great achievements, the Woodcraft Folk, which survives to this day.  Once ridiculed as being a nature-loving hippyish poor copy of Scouting, it has now become a respected ‘green’ movement inspiring much about the ethos of the increasingly popular Forest Schools.

The Great and the Good

By 1919 Leslie Paul had secured work for a local newspaper and was fortunate enough to be the first journalist to interview Nancy Astor on December 1^st, the day she took her seat in the House of Commons. She became the first female Member of Parliament by defeating the Liberal candidate Isaac Foot, father of the future leader of the Labour Party Michael Foot. (For all of Michael Foot’s verbal ramblings at the dispatch box he was reputed to have had the most complete and elegant dictation when it came to anything that was to be published.)

Writing

Leslie Paul wrote nearly forty books. One of the most important was an autobiography the title of which caught the zeitgeist, inspiring a group of writers and a whole social movement. It was called Angry Young Man. John Osborne never alluded to or acknowledged Leslie Paul’s work. Although Paul published a number of works leading up to the Second World War, including a slim volume of poetry in 1927, there was nothing of great significance until the end of the War. It was at this time that he met and became friends with T.S. Eliot, then working for Faber and Faber in a small room at the top of an office block in

Russell Square

. Paul wrote a number of books about the War, some fiction and some fact.

The Paul Report

In the late 1950s Leslie Paul’s books and reputation as writer and academic caught the attention of the Church of England, who were looking to commission a report about the state of the Church and its clergy. At this time the role and status of the local vicar was integral to the social fabric of every community. They were part social worker, part marriage guidance counsellor, school governor, spiritual guide, a legal and spiritual authority in deaths, births, marriages and much more. The average Sunday attendance returns gave a very black-and-white sketch in numbers when a much more colourful and detailed painting was required about the health of the Church. The Paul Report, as this work was to be popularly known, was a classic piece of sociological research. The traditional techniques of participant observation, questionnaires and interviews were all used to elicit information about the state of the Church.

The report’s findings were truly astounding. Had some of the more sensational disclosures been made public irreparable damage would have done to the Church. Leslie Paul thought that there was no need for sensationalism and kept much from the tabloid press. He uncovered many sad stories of over-worked clergy and disgruntled parishioners. One vicar was so disaffected from his parishioners that he had literally barricaded himself in the church with barbed wire. There was also great resentment amongst clergymen towards each other, partly because there was a time when a parish was for life, there was little chance of movement or promotion. This meant that some clergymen had nice rural parishes with little or no work, while others in inner cities had more work than they could cope with. In short, the Church was not egalitarian. Grateful and impressed by the nature of the report, as well as by the conduct of Leslie Paul himself, the Church awarded him a well-deserved Honorary Doctorate, of which he was very proud. To this day there are clergymen who turn pale or red by turns at the mention of Leslie Paul’s name.

The Novels and Education

Of all of his novels Paul had a soft spot for The Waters and the Wild published in 1975. This received favourable reviews, likening the book to Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer in view of its perceptive portrayal of children. As a pacifist Paul was particularly pleased with a school textbook he wrote about Hitler and the Second World War. He taught various subjects and at various levels throughout his life. He was a philosopher, theologian and sociologist as well as a novelist and lecturer. This intellect was perhaps best encapsulated in a small book which drew on all of these themes and sought to get to the heart of the human condition. It is Springs of Good and Evil: Biblical Themes in Literature. This was published in 1979, a few years before he became resident writer and occasional lecturer at the College of St Paul’s and St Mary’s (now University of Gloucestershire). While at the College he made many friends among the staff but none more so than Ken Surin, now a Professor at the prestigious Duke University. The two would often lunch together and Leslie Paul took great interest in Dr Surin’s work in progress at the time, The Problem of Evil. He also took great interest in the College Literary Society and encouraged new writers and writing. The College held its own small literary festival at which he read his poem written many years before as a response to his friend Tom’s Little Gidding. It was extremely moving.

In one of his last occasional lectures he outlined the book that he was then currently working on, which was about his deeply-held belief that animals did, after all, have souls.

He took pleasure in re-reading Rilke every year.

The teaching colleague and two students present at Leslie’s death were Ken Surin, myself and another student.

The Don Hale not Don Hale

The Don Hale  

 This was my reply to a Linkedin invitation

 

Re your Linkedin invitation to me -

To be honest I expect you think I'm Don Hale - well I am Don Hale but not the journalist - I'm the Don Hale who wrote the prize winning play Every Black Day produced by Phyllida Lloyd and which had Samuel L Jackson in it when it went to America - and the Don Hale who wrote the Bristol community play A Town In The West Country filmed for a South Bank show. I got more Victor Meldrew than Victor Meldrew and stopped writing...and I don't have an agent anymore.....

But in an Ed Reardon sort of way - if you were contacting me to see what I am up to these days and if I would be available to write a new piece....

Sorry - flights of fancy.....

The other Don Hale  is at http://www.donhale.co.uk/

At least 'he' isn't twittering yet so I do have that... and I am following some interesting German and French people at the moment

Best wishes etc etc

Don

#IDOTAI

In Defense of the American Intellect #IDOTAI 

Thinking about how crass American culture can be and how a lot of impressionable  minds around the world are traduced by it  - and as Elwood Blues of the Blues Brothers succinctly put it  -  everyone round the round world is trying to get into a pair of blue jeans and put on a baseball cap. This seems to be so true – that along with wanting to get into a McDonalds KFC Pizza Hut Ben and Gerry’s and Starbucks etc. There have been and still are some shockingly bad American book films TV and music. The mongrel American language has eaten into and debased languages and their related social customs the world over.

Can I get rather than Can I have

I’ve gotten rather than I have

I kind a guess rather than I think

OMG rather than That’s unusual

However

There have been moments in American Cultural history which are truly worthy of the epithet and part of the creation of The Great American Dream.

I’ve started a Twitter hash tag  #IDOTAI of Americans worthy of being really great intellects where ever they were born and who can be used in defense of Americas Culture

Ezra Pound

Ralph Ellison

Richard Wright

Gore Vidal

Ray Bradbury

Walt Whitman

William Faulkner

And because it satirizes itself and its culture The Simpsons…..

So many more

Ms Jane Austen

An Oxbridge Conceit  - Ms Jane Austen.

Zeitgeist -  and in the Foucaltian sense -  I’m a white Anglo Saxon (non protestant) man looking for different entertainments, in a different way, in a different time. But to be balanced here I do get old stuff too like Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, and the very subtle but clever Ms/Mr G Elliot- what a delight – and I absolutely rave about some old poetry….

What I don’t get is Ms Jane Austen. I don’t think it’s

• Clever
• Amusing
• Interesting
• Engaging
• Insightful
• Romantic
• Sexy (only joking)

I understand that the often very difficult term to define ‘wit’ is used in conjunction with Ms Austen’s books.

So here is the challenge for anyone with an Austenian Phd  –  could you please direct me to the bits in the books that are funny – well even vaguely amusing. As much as I would like laugh out loud thigh slapping  Runyonesque humour – I’m willing to do very subtle - no extremely subtle – nay even gentile musing…like lapping ripples against the Sunday rowing pleasure boats  idle movements….

AND

The defense of the indefensible is really annoying but the Oxbridge crew/s do really take the biscuit. Find one Oxbridge chap/chapess (all irritatingly born with an innate sense of superiority – and accents that are really now shameful in their antiquity) who does not like Ms Austen? It’s part of the Oxbridge conceit in the DNA to love and adore the clever amusing books of Ms Jane Austen - heaven forefend  - to even contemplate……no no no no no….

Or in my case Nothing Nothing Nothing Nothing Nothing