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Cat Reading
Dec. 11th, 2018 01:39 pm
It's always more fun to read after the lights are out.
Dec. 11th, 2018
It's always more fun to read after the lights are out.
Book 93 - Adrian Henri "The Mersey Sound"
Dec. 11th, 2018 05:30 pmAdrian Henri "The Mersey Sound" (Penguin Modern Classics)
Mersey, that area of our island that spawned the Beatles also brought us these modern poets that spoke to a generation of baby boomers which helped to define the sixties.
Liverpool was, of course, where it was all happening in the 1960s. Or, at least, thanks to the Beatles it was a place where outsiders were paying attention to things that might otherwise have passed unnoticed in the big wide world. One of these things that suddenly started to seem important was that in the trendily run-down neighbourhood of Liverpool 8 there were a number of basement clubs where young people sat around drinking frothy foreign coffee and listening to homegrown poets reading (and even - alarmingly - improvising) their works, for all the world as though they were in New York or San Francisco.
The three men who rose to fame as "the Liverpool Poets" (there were others, of course) were all from working-class, Catholic, Liverpool families, and they brought a particular Scouse flavour to their work, the instinct to make fun of themselves and everybody else, to fill their poems with earthy, everyday references, and at all costs to stay away from bombast and pomposity.
Adrian Henri was a surrealist painter and art teacher, and his particular contribution to the group seems to have been his connection both with the visual arts and with the American Beats (it was he who arranged Allen Ginsberg's Papal Visit to Liverpool in 1965). He also brought Warhol-style art Happenings to Liverpool.
Roger McGough started out as a teacher as well, but he was also a musician, performing with Mike McGear (Paul McCartney's brother) and John Gorman in the group The Scaffold, who were responsible for some of the most persistent earworms of the sixties, notably "Lily the Pink". McGough later became a very familiar voice on BBC poetry programmes and a senior figure of the poetry "establishment" in the UK.
Brian Patten is now known especially for his writing for children, but in 1967 he was barely out of his teens himself. He had left school at 15 to become a reporter on the Bootle Times, and he was the editor of the little magazine in which McGough's and Henri's poetry first appeared in print.
Obviously, some of the subject-matters has shifted a bit in the way we read it - bus-conductors and Woodbines and Mary Quant are no longer part of the register of everyday life. The politics, as far as it goes, looks a bit crude: war is a bad thing, nuclear war is worse, and most of the evils of the world are caused by an undifferentiated group of oldmen-in-power, who range from First World War generals to Kennedy, MacMillan and Wilson. Patten is the only one who talks about racism at all, satirising Enoch Powell's attempts to exploit the racism of voters in "I'm dreaming of a white Smethwick", a poem that is clearly heartfelt but just as clearly written to meet one specific set of events. Actually, perhaps not much has changed here.
On sexism, they don't do any better than most of their male contemporaries. Women seem to appear in the poems only if they can be considered young and pretty enough to be potential sex-partners, and it is only Patten, in particular, seems to be almost mature in the way he writes about women.
So still worth a read for its own sake, quite apart from its importance as a cultural document. At least for British poets, this is the book that reassured them that it was allowable to write poetry if you hadn't been to university, that poetry and rock music do go together, that poems can have as many "rude words" in them as you like, and that subjects like bus-conductors and Woodbines and the East Lancs Road may even be a better use of the poet's time than writing about daffodils and Grantchester. Which was very liberating, but has also demonstrated that not everyone is as good at writing about the ordinary as these guys were.
Mersey, that area of our island that spawned the Beatles also brought us these modern poets that spoke to a generation of baby boomers which helped to define the sixties.
Liverpool was, of course, where it was all happening in the 1960s. Or, at least, thanks to the Beatles it was a place where outsiders were paying attention to things that might otherwise have passed unnoticed in the big wide world. One of these things that suddenly started to seem important was that in the trendily run-down neighbourhood of Liverpool 8 there were a number of basement clubs where young people sat around drinking frothy foreign coffee and listening to homegrown poets reading (and even - alarmingly - improvising) their works, for all the world as though they were in New York or San Francisco.
The three men who rose to fame as "the Liverpool Poets" (there were others, of course) were all from working-class, Catholic, Liverpool families, and they brought a particular Scouse flavour to their work, the instinct to make fun of themselves and everybody else, to fill their poems with earthy, everyday references, and at all costs to stay away from bombast and pomposity.
Adrian Henri was a surrealist painter and art teacher, and his particular contribution to the group seems to have been his connection both with the visual arts and with the American Beats (it was he who arranged Allen Ginsberg's Papal Visit to Liverpool in 1965). He also brought Warhol-style art Happenings to Liverpool.
Roger McGough started out as a teacher as well, but he was also a musician, performing with Mike McGear (Paul McCartney's brother) and John Gorman in the group The Scaffold, who were responsible for some of the most persistent earworms of the sixties, notably "Lily the Pink". McGough later became a very familiar voice on BBC poetry programmes and a senior figure of the poetry "establishment" in the UK.
Brian Patten is now known especially for his writing for children, but in 1967 he was barely out of his teens himself. He had left school at 15 to become a reporter on the Bootle Times, and he was the editor of the little magazine in which McGough's and Henri's poetry first appeared in print.
Obviously, some of the subject-matters has shifted a bit in the way we read it - bus-conductors and Woodbines and Mary Quant are no longer part of the register of everyday life. The politics, as far as it goes, looks a bit crude: war is a bad thing, nuclear war is worse, and most of the evils of the world are caused by an undifferentiated group of oldmen-in-power, who range from First World War generals to Kennedy, MacMillan and Wilson. Patten is the only one who talks about racism at all, satirising Enoch Powell's attempts to exploit the racism of voters in "I'm dreaming of a white Smethwick", a poem that is clearly heartfelt but just as clearly written to meet one specific set of events. Actually, perhaps not much has changed here.
On sexism, they don't do any better than most of their male contemporaries. Women seem to appear in the poems only if they can be considered young and pretty enough to be potential sex-partners, and it is only Patten, in particular, seems to be almost mature in the way he writes about women.
So still worth a read for its own sake, quite apart from its importance as a cultural document. At least for British poets, this is the book that reassured them that it was allowable to write poetry if you hadn't been to university, that poetry and rock music do go together, that poems can have as many "rude words" in them as you like, and that subjects like bus-conductors and Woodbines and the East Lancs Road may even be a better use of the poet's time than writing about daffodils and Grantchester. Which was very liberating, but has also demonstrated that not everyone is as good at writing about the ordinary as these guys were.
Holiday Wishes
Dec. 11th, 2018 05:48 pmHello, I am Dave and live in ye olde England.
For my sins, I am a mystery shopper.
This means that sometimes because the work is ad hoc work some months are better and some months are very quiet. November and December, strangely enough, is the thinnest.
This is the period where my meagre funds are really stretched to the limit.
Often I find Xmas period bleak and hope that being the good person I have been in the past, I present my wish list!
1/ LJ subscription is not due til Feb but I would love some help here.
2/ Amazon gift cards are always welcome, as they carry pretty much everything one could need.
OR alternatively anything from my Amazon wish list www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/dl/invite/0kgVw7h
3/ I am an avid book reader so I am hoping if you have a really old book or two (particularly a music-related book ) that you don't want any more? I collect old music books. Old books are a treasure and would be found a good home as I volunteer once a month at a charity organisation (Well, pretty much any book will, but really old books and new books in perfect condition are the most sought-after at the monthly charity sale.)
4/ deleted.
5/ I would love some Xmas cards. I will PM address to you on request.
6/ Almost forgot. A record turntable deck similar to this with its own speakers.
7/ Perhaps the most difficult - peace in the world.
That is it. Thank you for reading.
For my sins, I am a mystery shopper.
This means that sometimes because the work is ad hoc work some months are better and some months are very quiet. November and December, strangely enough, is the thinnest.
This is the period where my meagre funds are really stretched to the limit.
Often I find Xmas period bleak and hope that being the good person I have been in the past, I present my wish list!
1/ LJ subscription is not due til Feb but I would love some help here.
2/ Amazon gift cards are always welcome, as they carry pretty much everything one could need.
OR alternatively anything from my Amazon wish list www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/dl/invite/0kgVw7h
3/ I am an avid book reader so I am hoping if you have a really old book or two (particularly a music-related book ) that you don't want any more? I collect old music books. Old books are a treasure and would be found a good home as I volunteer once a month at a charity organisation (Well, pretty much any book will, but really old books and new books in perfect condition are the most sought-after at the monthly charity sale.)
4/ deleted.
5/ I would love some Xmas cards. I will PM address to you on request.
6/ Almost forgot. A record turntable deck similar to this with its own speakers.
7/ Perhaps the most difficult - peace in the world.
That is it. Thank you for reading.
Book 94 - Prof. Jim Al -Khalili "Paradox"
Dec. 11th, 2018 06:01 pmProf. Jim Al-Khalili "Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics" (Black Swan)
With the popularity of shows like "The Big Bang Theory" it's not surprising that books of this sort are making their way increasingly into the awareness of the reading public. In a nutshell, I think this book tries to cover too much ground in too little time. For most of the topics covered a 300-page book just for one topic is not usually sufficient so to attempt to summarize this much material in 220 pages for 9 such topics is a breathtakingly complex undertaking. That said, it is reasonably executed given the Herculean nature of the task.
In summation, I think that like any book of this type it's straddling a fine line. As someone who has been reading books of this ilk for ages, it's just a rehash of topics I've read half a dozen times before. There's no new information here. For the uninitiated I think it tries to be too broad in scope and will leave a lot of head scratching. I will say though that with the exception of the first chapter the author has successfully eradicated the mathematics from these topics. That in itself is an accomplishment not to be sneezed at.
With the popularity of shows like "The Big Bang Theory" it's not surprising that books of this sort are making their way increasingly into the awareness of the reading public. In a nutshell, I think this book tries to cover too much ground in too little time. For most of the topics covered a 300-page book just for one topic is not usually sufficient so to attempt to summarize this much material in 220 pages for 9 such topics is a breathtakingly complex undertaking. That said, it is reasonably executed given the Herculean nature of the task.
In summation, I think that like any book of this type it's straddling a fine line. As someone who has been reading books of this ilk for ages, it's just a rehash of topics I've read half a dozen times before. There's no new information here. For the uninitiated I think it tries to be too broad in scope and will leave a lot of head scratching. I will say though that with the exception of the first chapter the author has successfully eradicated the mathematics from these topics. That in itself is an accomplishment not to be sneezed at.
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