Sunday, August 28, 2011

Happy Birthday John Betjeman: Aug 28, 1906 - May 19 1984

John Betjeman was Poet Laureate of England from 1972 to 1984, and a very popular laureate.  Many Brits who did not care for poetry learned to love it because Betjeman's work was so accessible and so excellent.  I'd never read him until recently when, at the library, I browsed upon a Collected Poems published in 1976; it had an introduction by one of my favorite poets, Philip Larkin, who was Betjeman's friend.  There were about three hundred pages of poems; I read every single one.  Betjeman was a meticulous observer; you could see exactly what he was seeing.  I wanted to pick out one single favorite poem to put in this blogpost.  I narrowed it down to five, but couldn't eliminate any single one of those five.


A Subaltern's Love Song


Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Miss J.Hunter Dunn,
Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament - you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won,
The warm-handled racket is back in its press,
But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.

Her father's euonymus shines as we walk,
And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk,
And cool the verandah that welcomes us in
To the six-o'clock news and a lime-juice and gin.

The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,
The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,
As I struggle with double-end evening tie,
For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.

On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts,
And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports,
And westering, questioning settles the sun,
On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

The Hillman is waiting, the light's in the hall,
The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall,
My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair
And there on the landing's the light on your hair.

By roads 'not adopted', by woodlanded ways,
She drove to the club in the late summer haze,
Into nine-o'clock Camberley, heavy with bells
And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
I can hear from the car park the dance has begun,
Oh! Surry twilight! importunate band!
Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand!

Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
Above us the intimate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.

And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.


The other four finalists:  "The Town Clerk's Views" - "Saint Cadoc" - Monody on the Death of a Platonist Bank Clerk" -- ah, now that I think of it, this would be my favorite, but I cannot find it online, and I long ago returned the book to the library -- and, lastly, "In Willesden Churchyard"


As a Poet Laureate, Betjeman had the right to be buried in Westminster Abbey; he chose instead to have just a memorial floor stone there; he's buried in  the yard of St. Enodoc's, a "chapel of ease" he loved in Trebetherick, Cornwall.


St. Enodoc's has an interesting history.  Some of it can be traced to the 12th century, but over the years it was nearly buried in the shifting dunes of sand.  Restoration was accomplished in 1863-4.  According to the record of a vicar's son, "the sands had blown higher than the eastern gable, the wet came in freely, the high pews were mouldy-green and worm-eaten and bats flew about, living in the belfry .... While the building was restored, the walls were partly rebuilt, on good foundations, the sand removed and the little churchyard cleared and fenced with a stout wall.  The roof was renewed and new seats provided.  It all cost about 650 pounds and I remember the pains and energy my father spent to raise the money.  These works were done by the masons and workmen of the parish with loving care and nothing was destroyed needlessly or removed if it was of use or interest."


A "chapel of ease" is a small church within the area served by a larger parish church, and would be built so that those who cannot reach the larger church with ease would have a nearer-by place to stop and pray.  I can't find the reference now, but I read somewhere that when St. Enodoc's was inundated in sand, locals would climb through the roof to get in to pray, for if it became abandoned of prayer the parish could end the stipend paid for its upkeep.






Betjeman wrote a poem about St. Enodoc:

Sunday Afternoon Service in St. Enodoc Church, Cornwall


Come on! Come on! This hillock hides the spire.
Now that one and now none.  As winds about
The burnished path through lady's-finger, thyme,
And bright varieties of saxifrage,
So grows the tinny tenor faint or loud
All all things draw toward St. Enodoc.
Come on! Come on! and it is five to three.


Still, Come on! come on!
The tinny tenor.  Hover-flies remain
More than a moment on a ragwort bunch,
And people's passing shadows don't disturb
Red Admirals basking with the wings apart.
A mile of sunny, empty sand away,
a mile of shallow pools and lugworm casts.
Safe, faint and surfy, laps the lowest tide.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Happy Birthday Christopher Isherwood - Aug. 26, 1904 to Jan. 4, 1986

Christopher Isherwood had an amazing ability to live a chunk of life and then, working up the best characters and situations he'd experienced, write a novel about that particular chunk.  Everything seems authentic -- presumably because it was.  It seems like it would be easy to write like Christopher Isherwood, but it's not.  I guess you have to be a Christopher Isherwood to write like Christopher Isherwood.


Not long ago I came across some serious praise someone had written about one of Isherwood's novels.  I thought it was the most beautiful thing ever said about any novel, and, thinking I would use it on a blogpost about Isherwood when his birthday rolled around, I copied it down.  But I can't find it.  I've looked everywhere I know to look.  I'm bummed.


His most famous character is Sally Bowles, from The Berlin Stories.  She's based on someone he hung out with when he lived in Berlin from early 1929 until early 1933.  Her story was adapted for the stage; the title was changed to I Am A Camera and Julie Harris played Sally Bowles; this stage play was later worked up into a musical and the name was changed to Cabaret.  Liza with a Z Minelli got to play Sally.


Isherwood's body was donated to science.  What became of his remains I don't know.  In lieu of a picture of a tombstone, here's a plaque that was place on the Berlin house he lived in:


Sunday, August 21, 2011

Standing Up!

I first read anything about this guy Hatuey in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a wonderful novel by Junot Diaz which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.


In the Sixteenth Century, Hatuey, a Chief on Hispaniola, fought the invading Spaniards; he eventually fled to Cuba, warning the natives there about the Spaniards. Showing them a basket of gold and jewels, he said, "Here is the God the Spaniards worship. For these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into the sea ... they tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters.  Incapable of matching us in valor, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break."


He was eventually captured by Spaniards and burned at the stake. Before he was burned a priest asked him if he wanted to accept Jesus, thus assuring himself of a place in heaven. Junot Diaz reports Hatuey saying on the pyre: "Are there whites in heaven? Then I'd rather go to hell."


Considered Cuba's first national hero, the monument to him is in Baracoa, Cuba. 

Friday, August 19, 2011

Lost Pictures


I checked out Victoria Glendinning's 1978 biography of Elizabeth Bowen at the Orleans Library today; tucked inside was the above snapshot; "1998" is stamped in red on the back. Maybe someone somewhere has wondered what happened to this photo of a handsome man and his beautiful wife and their two loving daughters? I hope they are happy somewhere and that there is perhaps a grandchild or two by now.


There should be a website "Found Pictures" where you can go and look for pictures you've lost.  I'm way too low-tech to start up such a site.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

RIP: Elvis Presley - January 8, 1935/August 16, 1977


The center of life for me in a small town in Indiana in the mid-fifties was often the jukebox at Pete's Restaurant up on Main Street. The mesmerizing swirls of soft Wurlitzer colors ... the faithful mechanism that slid back and forth, stopping at your selected five cents and three minutes worth of Elvis Presley heaven ... removing it from the crowded row of vertical 45s and moving it to horizontal and laying it gently and precisely on the turntable.


I had a job mopping the floor of Pete's after its 10pm closing so that I could have, for an hour or so, the jukebox all to myself. I knew how to turn the volume to blast; it seemed a perfect antidote for all the hormones crashing around within me ... not that I knew what it was that was making my blood run fast and me hyper-active.
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I have thanked fate for rock-n-roll every day of my life since those I first felt it. You can't imagine how much less boring life was once you'd heard Elvis Presley, Little Richard, or Jerry Lee Lewis.
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In the Army I was sent to Fort Hood, Texas, in early 1959. It so happened that Elvis was also there but, according to rumor, was supposed to leave for Germany a couple days after I got there. Still, by chance, I was marching with my company one cold morning. Don't remember where we were going or why. Probably nowhere and for no reason -- such was the Army. Parked along the pavement ahead was a white Cadillac. As we neared the place someone said it was the Dental Clinic, and, sure enough, no less than Elvis Presley and a retinue of three or four others came out of the clinic, got into the Cadillac and drove off. I was a little disappointed that the Cadillac was white, not pink. And he did leave for Germany soon after.
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Gave me something to write home about.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Graphics

Sometimes I just like the graphics of something, such as of this flyer handed to me on an Avignon street a couple years back.


Monday, August 1, 2011

Favorite Snapshots: #1

A dear friend and a dear brother at Swan Lake Iris Garden,
Sumter, South Carolina; 1992.