My recent absence from this blog is not a mark of faux respect for the death of the queen. But I have used the hiatus in normal life to immerse myself in the poetry of Ed Dorn, for which I am grateful to the poet Roy Kelly. A few weeks back, he posted a tweet:


The rain came down softly
a soaking thing,
a line from a book read
54 years ago, a line remembered
these 54 years, and still
to be found in pages now
tanned and brittle, pages
appropriately water-stained,
the rain still falling there,
falling forever, there and
in my word memory.


That opening couplet resonated, and stuck with me for a couple of weeks during which I Googled the lines, the final phrase, and various beat poets I thought might be responsible. Eventually I contacted Roy. Had he remembered the forgotten poem and/or the forgotten poet? Well, yes and no.

It’s a long story. He had tracked down the poet, finding a review of a public reading in which the lines were quoted. It was Ed Dorn, a poet with whom I had a brief obsession in the early ‘70s following the publication of Gunslinger. He was a prolific poet and a purchase of his Collected Poems failed to locate the lines.

Roy however has access to The Poetry Library and had a sense that the source was to be found in an ancient volume entitled New Writing in the USA. They found the publication for him and he  turned to the Ed Dorn section and read the poems. It wasn’t there.

But all was not lost. The Poetry Library offers a Find-a-Poem service, which is a kind of Apple Genius Bar for forgetful lovers of poetry. He registered his enquiry and returned New Writing in the USA. He was turning away when the Genius called him. “I’ve found it” he said.

And there it was. Not a poem. Two sentences from a prose-piece entitled 1st Avenue.

The rain comes down softly. A soaking thing.

It is prose but a reader would be forgiven for remembering it as poetry. It is poetry, isn’t it? Or is it a prose poem? Or prose which has a poetic flavour?

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. But I’m glad I now know it. And I’m grateful to Roy Kelly for recalling it, tracking it down and using it as the impetus for the exquisite poem above.


Today from the everysmith vaults: Only connect. The synapses function in this manner: from Ed Dorn to Jack Kerouac to his prose poem October in the Railroad Earth to the band Railroad Earth and Elko. That’s what’s playing as I post this.

Baron Lebedev of Hampton (in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames) and Siberia (in the Russian Federation) is engaging in a war of (so far) words with my MP. I’m on the side of my MP, Matt Western (of Warwick and Leamington) who is the underdog in this fight - not least because he is not the son of an oligarch KGB agent, nor does he own a number of major news outlets, and nor is he a friend of Boris Johnson.

Lebedev is all these things, of course. But his prominent role in British government has not been widely acknowledged. Nor has it been investigated to any significant degree by those who claim to speak truth to power.

Identifying truth was the purpose of Matt Western’s question to the prime minister back in March. He asked Boris Johnson about his attendance at a lavish party thrown by Evgeny Lebedev and the concerns reportedly expressed by MI6.

In the Commons, his question was answered (or rather not answered) with characteristic Johnsonian bluster. The real response came the following day when the Speaker received complaints about the question from both Johnson and Lebedev. Matt was called before the Speaker. Subsequently, he received a text from Lebedev.

Now you may think that this is a storm in a tea cup, or - as Johnson put it in a culinary illiterate metaphor - ‘not a crouton of substance in a minestrone of nonsense’.

In fact, it is neither. It is more serious than the party culture in Downing Street, the wallpaper stuff, the instinctive, gut-reaction untruths for which Johnson will be remembered. Nor is it merely cronyism and corruption.

It is about the security of the country.

When a psychologically disturbed man is being charged with treason for breaking into Buckingham palace, it is appropriate to consider the potentially treasonous activities of a more prominent psychologically disturbed man who happens to be prime minister but managed to evade his minders to make a solo visit to a castle in Italy.

For months, Johnson had refused to answer questions about the trip. But, eventually, in July this year, he ‘fessed up. Yes, he “probably” did attend the occasion. But “as far as I am aware, no government business was discussed”.

Did he he report the meeting to Foreign Office officials? “I think I did mention it, yes.”

So why the concerted complaints to the Speaker after Matt Western’s question?

He has “probably” got something to hide. But he hasn’t yet mentioned it. Yet.

Keep going, Matt.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Sollima LB Files  - another great recommendation from Georgia Mann on Radio 3.

 
It’s not only holiday-makers who are suffering from the recent discharges of effluent. Remember when Rees-Mogg claimed that fish were ‘better and happier now they are British”? I wonder how they are feeling now, as they swim in waters which are full of shit.

There was a Twitter shit storm over the weekend, and it continues today. My feed was taken over by pictures of Tory MPs, each of whom had voted to allow the discharge of effluent into our waterways, posted by constituents. I devoted an hour or so to re-tweeting these name-and-shame posts, particularly those who had posed for their portrait in front of beautiful beaches or river banks which contribute significantly to the economy of their constituencies.

Just two weeks before Britain hosted COP26, the environment summit, the Lords - bless them - proposed an amendment to the Environment Bill which would have placed legal restraints on the discharge of effluent. But back in the Commons, 265 Tories voted against.

Few of them had any specific reason for their vote. They were merely lobby fodder. They had been whipped to vote the way they did, and they are still keeping quiet about their vote.

But some knew what they were doing. When questioned, they justified their action in a number of ways.

Some, including Maria Caulfield, claimed that the amendment called for “an immediate end to sewage outflows” which would have “led to sewage leaking into people’s homes”.

The majority talked about the cost, which is too much for the hard-pressed water companies. There is some truth in this. Water companies have already been forced to pay out billions to investors and millions each year to their CEOs.

But that was then. Now, when the predictions of those who supported the amendment have proved frighteningly and disgustingly accurate, some are taking to Twitter to claim that the actions of water companies are “appalling”. As someone on my Twitter feed pointed out, if you are a member of the face-eating weasel party, you can’t complain when face-eating weasels do what they do.

What is appalling is that the actions of the water companies were enabled by a Government majority. What is appalling is that we no longer have the protection of the EU regulations.

The Twitter storm had an effect. Those named-and-shamed are apparently asking Tory HQ how they can defend themselves. And on the opposite side, the Labour front bench has so far made no official statement. Thirty odd Labour MPs abstained on the night, and although abstention has become commonplace from Labour, they must have had some reason for letting the Tories and the water companies off the hook.

Who knows what that might be?

Today from the everysmith vaults: Yesterday’s Radio 4 programme, How to Play, featured Marin Alsop and Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony. So that’s what’s playin’ today.

If you place a government in a sealed box - let's call it the UK - together with something that could kill it - let's call it the unions - you would not know if the government was dead or alive until the UK was opened. Until that happens, one could say that the government was both dead and alive.

Johnson is allegedly on holiday in Slovenia, where he arrived from a round of parties at Chequers. Zahawi, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is also on holiday. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, has disappeared off the face of the tabloids. Dominic Raab, the Deputy Prime Minister, is at the time of writing in Thames Ditton. Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, is engaged full-time in her spat with Rishi Sunak. Oh, and the Leader of the Opposition is also on holiday.

There is clearly nothing for them to do at the moment. There is of course a cost of living crisis, which is casting millions into fuel and fuel poverty and which is forecast to get worse and worse in the coming months. But that can wait until September. Or maybe October or November.

So too can the climate emergency.

So too can the parlous state of the NHS.

So too can education, the housing crisis, the problems for trade in the aftermath of Brexit.

None of these, in the view of the governing and opposition parties, require immediate attention.

We used to call this the 'silly season'. Nothing happens, so newspaper headlines focus on frivolous inanities, the less serious stories.

The problem this year is that we have a succession of issues which are very serious indeed, which are profoundly important and fundamental to all of us.

Is the government alive to them? They are certainly dead to me.


Today from the everysmith vaults: TS Eliot once said (admitted? confessed?) that The Waste Land was "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling". Hearing his reading of it, I was inclined to agree. But to 'celebrate' the centenary of the poem, Drama on 3 put out He Do The Waste Land in Different Voices, a reading which while faithful to the text, shows us the different characters and different voices of what is not merely a poem but the first radio play. Quite brilliant.

James Darke is not Rick Gekoski, and Rick Gekoski is not James Darke. But sometimes they rhyme.

I have known James Darke for a mere five years - since 2017, when I saw him at his keyboard, Googling local handymen and adding to the search criteria, the word taciturn. I knew him, I understood him, immediately. Or so I thought. The paradox is that it has taken three volumes of autobiography for this anti-social misanthrope to explain and develop his contrarian - oppositional is the word used - life and lifestyle.

I have known Rick for rather longer, since 1987. And yes, he is also “bookish”, a man of letters, someone for whom books - reading them, writing them, trading them - has been both the business and the pleasure of his life. In the process, he has arrived, as has James, at some judgements of writers which are not mainstream; in fact, might be perceived as being deliberately against the mainstream.

It is tempting, when one knows both author and his character, to read the book with an expectation, even a hope, of finding parallels between the two. (I did so in After Darke when reminded of a weekend at Goddards, a Lutyens house in Surrey, to which James takes his family.) That such parallels exist throughout the Darke trilogy is incontrovertible, but they are irrelevant, even misleading, because James springs into our world fully formed with that single and singular addition to his search criteria.

That was five years ago. And into those five years is condensed an extraordinarily diverse series of events. I am trying to avoid spoilers, but it is noteworthy how his grief in the first volume has been mitigated by genuine wit in the third. Not cynicism; not sarcasm. He is no longer angry, even if he continues to be ‘oppositionsl’.

For example: The attempted hoax on the publishing trade is a fine conceit - a witty concept, wittily executed. And perhaps it is prompted by the author’s own experiences with agents and editors and publishers, which goes back to 1998 and the publication of Staying Up.

Or perhaps not. Only James Darke knows and he won’t tell, because we have come to the end of this chapter, this novel, this trilogy.

I, for one, will miss him. Immensely.

Today from the everysmith vaults: A random choice from the Rough & Rowdy Ways Tour from LA last month. A special delight is the encore, a fine version of Friend of the Devil.

I’ve recently become involved in a considerate and considered discussion on my local Labour forum. That in itself is noteworthy; not that I was involved - that’s pretty much par for the course, but that the posts were, without exception, courteous and thoughtful. The theme of the thread was the leadership of the Labour Party.​

It’s no secret that whenever two or three members of the party meet, the conversation will turn to the leadership situation and they will all have different views on Starmer and his successor. But this is not merely an issue for Labour. It is vital for everyone.

That is why the Survation poll in The Observer on Sunday, which showed that Johnson is considered to be a better choice of prime minister than Starmer, is so concerning. Especially as the  poll came shortly after Johnson was booed by the attending Royalists at the Jubilee celebrations and, a few moments later, Starmer was - well, ignored. Barely recognised.

And then came this. The word cloud. Which words would you use to describe Sir Keir Starmer? The larger the type, the more frequently the word was used.

Boring. Bland. Untrustworthy. Useless. Weak. Dull. Unknown.

Of the most prominent descriptions, only honest figures. With which I disagree, having on my noticeboard the 10 Pledges which he published in his leadership campaign and subsequently repudiated.

So if not Starmer, to whom does the party turn?

Andy Burnham has shown, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, that, released from the Westminster bubble, he can fight for the people. But he is longer an MP.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow Chancellor, would move Labour substantially to the right of the Tories.

Lisa Nandy ditto.

Ed Miliband has rediscovered his wit and anger in recent months, but he has had his chance.

Angela Rayner confuses me. She is clearly positioning herself for the leadership but her policy U-turns and vicious attacks on the left (especially the Jewish left) are not likely to convince me or the membership.

My choice, for the moment, is Emily Thornberry. I have met Emily. She he is bright, committed, has a sense of humour, hard-working and has a great relationship with Matt Western, our MP, who deserves promotion and needs it to make an even greater impact.

Today from the everysmith vaults: The Jacques Loussier Trio Plays Debussy, recommended by Doctor Dark last week, has now arrived and lives up to its pre-publicity. I’ve played it a great deal in the last few days, with an end-of-the-day glass of wine in the garden, alternating with Les Nuits d’Eté sung by the wondrous Frederica von Stadt. Summer is icumen in.

Every time I see Devers, or Story, or Big Papi, or Manny hit the ball out of the park, I am reminded that Ted Williams reckoned it was the most difficult skill in sports. (Even Bob Dylan knew it was beyond him. “I wish I could hit a 100mph fastball” he said, “but you have to stick to what you know”.)

I never saw Williams play. I never read his book The Science of Hitting. In fact, I had never heard of him until I read a piece in the New Yorker by John Updike, entitled Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, and I only read that because it was by John Updike, whose laconic prose style and risqué story-telling was a phase I was going through back in the '60s.

Typically, Updike's essay on the final appearance of Ted Williams, the Kid, was more about his relationship with his current mistress, who had cancelled a tryst that afternoon and Updike had sought solace at Fenway Park, where he was privileged to see Williams sign off with a home run, hit into the Sox bullpen in right centre field.

It was the last of 521 homers that he hit for the Red Sox in a career which, interrupted by World War 11 and the  Korean War, spanned 21 years, of which nearly five were on military service. A new book, by Bill Nowlin, celebrates not all of them but those which were 'winning' HRs. By the criteria applied by Nowlin, there were 110 of them. His final hit, in his final game, was a deep drive to right field on a pitch by Jack Fisher. There were only 10,000 fans in the park, but they gave him a two minute ovation.

Williams being Williams, with a famously ambivalent relationship with what became the Red Sox Nation, he did not emerge from the dugout to tip his cap. As Updike said, “Gods do not answer letters.”

Bill Nowlin is no John Updike. But he has written half a dozen or so books about The Kid and more about the Sox. He was also the co-founder of Rounder Records, specialists in country and bluegrass music and released the first Alison Kraus album as well as re-releases of recordings by the Carter Family, Jelly Roll Morton, Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie.

His thoroughness is awesome. His prose style less so, but that's because he is dealing in facts. Facts - and stats - are what American sports writing are about, unless you are John Updike or Bernard Malamud or Philip Roth or (my favourite) Don DeLillo. And this book* - The Kid Blasts a Winner - is a winner, not least because, by definition, it concerns itself with all Ted's game-winning (or to be accurate, game-deciding) home runs.

Which, by definition, means the Sox won every game he writes about.

For me, that makes it a great read. From beginning to end.

I was lucky. From the moment this Englishman’s obsession with the Sox began,  I only had to wait just a few years for my first World Series championship. Ted Williams played in only one series, in 1946 when, injured, he was ineffectual. But his couple of decades in a Red Sox uniform were a time that I wish I had been part of.

Bill Nowlin was right there, to the extent that he once put a mitt on a Ted home run to the centre field bleachers.

What's more, I wish I had divided my time between Fenway and the recording studio in which Alison Krauss was singing. Bill Nowlin did.

So, maybe, I wish I was Bill Nowlin. But you have to stick to what you know.

* I am grateful to Summer Game Books for my pre-publication opportunity to read this book. I loved it.

Today from the everysmith vaults:​ In the early years of this century, Phil Lesh put together a quintet which took improvisation to new levels. This morning, I am attempting (again) to get to the heart of this extraordinary stuff.

On the 17th of May 1649, three leading Levellers - Private John Church, Corporal Perkins, and Cornet James Thompson - were executed by firing squad in the churchyard at Burford. This event, which achieved its objective of diminishing and almost eliminating Leveller influence within the New Model Army, is commemorated each year in the town

This year, for the first time since the pandemic, it reverted to a live demonstration in defence of democracy and the right to protest. Speakers included the Reverend Canon Professor Mark Chapman, Ann Hughes - whose study of the Civil War in my county of Warwickshire is seminal, John Rees author of the definitive The Leveller Revolution, Richard Burgon MP and, loudest of all, Attila the Stockbroker.

The attendance - a few hundred - did not match some previous, pre-pandemic, years but it was representative of almost every strand of socialist thought - from communists and clerics to academics and activists, from Greens to Labour, from trades unionists and the International Brigades Trust to a plethora of maverick radicals like me.

This demographic and political diversity is appropriate. The Levellers were equally diverse. Those who wore the sea-green colours came from many social classes and espoused many political aspirations. The Diggers originally called themselves The True Levellers. And Henry Denne, in 1649, wrote that “We were an heterogeneal body, consisting of parts very diverse from one another, settled upon principles inconsistent with one another.”

But they united in the common cause.

Today, few of us can argue with any of the demands outlined in the Agreement of the People. And nor did those who organised around it in The Saracen’s Head.

They may have had different emphases, disagreements over detail, more ambitious objectives for the long-term. But in their debates, no-one accused another of factionalism. Such accusations were the tactics of those who would be prominent in the counter-revolution, the Grandees, and the most prominent of their actions is surely the Cromwell’s order and the executions at Burford.

Which is why Levellers’ Day is important. At Burford, on the Saturday nearest to the 17th of May, the broad left can put aside differences and show solidarity not merely with the three martyrs but the commitment of hundreds of thousands of people of all persuasions to the greater good.

We can learn from them.

And if I have one key take-away from the day, it is this from Richard Burgon MP:

“The Tories know what they are doing” he said. “We must be as class conscious as they are.”

Today from the everysmith vaults: I used to love Jacques Loussier’s transcriptions of Bach but seldom play them any more. But I have recently discovered that he has given Erik Satie the same treatment. Playing now are the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. Exquisite.

“Congratulations Boris. You have managed to smuggle TWO truths past the team.” The parallels between David Mitchell’s The Unbelievable Truth on Radio 4 and PMQs become clearer with each week that passes.

If you are not familiar with the programme, the idea is that contestants deliver a short essay on a given topic, the majority of which will be false but which will include random truths to be identified.

So, for example, the topic might be the Patel policy of exporting asylum seekers to Rwanda for ‘processing’. It’s a policy which has drawn criticism from labour, Lib Dems, SNP and the Church of England.

None of these organisations, however, has pointed out that Johnson was right, at least in this: that the originator of this policy was not Patel but David Blanket, the Labour Home Secretary under Tony Blair. Blanket described this policy, at the turn of the millennium, as “a 21st century innovation” to solve the “problem” of immigration.

(Johnson went on to describe Starmer as a “Corbynista in a smart Islington suit”. This may not be true now, but it was certainly true when Starmer stood for the Labour leadership. He stood on a programme which adopted the 2019 manifesto but which promised that, with his haircut and tailoring, he was more electable.)

The issue here is Labour’s complicity in the creation of an anti-immigration stance, the “hostile environment” which has empowered Patel and Johnson to put this vile and immoral strategy into practice.

I raise it not merely because I am ashamed and embarrassed by the current Labour party. I raise it because I am ashamed and embarrassed by the state of our politics in general. The government is a shambles of corruption. The opposition is fighting its own activists with more resources and vitriol than it does the government.

Which leaves us where, exactly?

We are nowhere. Nothing shall come of nothing. We are under the hegemony of a political elite which includes both “major” parties, plus the press, plus the broadcasters, plus the church, plus the global oligarchs and financial markets.

I shall work for my local MP - an honourable exception to the above - at the next election. And I will almost certainly continue to howl against the dying of the light in this blog.

But I warn you: It’s not dark yet. But it’s getting there.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Shostakovich of course - the magnificent 10th symphony performed by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic.

I don’t think I told you, but we moved house last year. We exchanged an elegant garden apartment in a Regency square in Leamington for a Victorian terrace in Warwick. But it’s not just any Victorian terrace. This one has history.

Our new home was once part of the Warwick County Mental Asylum - that’s what psychiatric hospitals were called in those days - and was built in the Gothic style on a grand scale.

It was opened in 1852 and rapidly expanded, gradually acquiring neighbouring farms, and developed into what amounted to a self-contained village with a blacksmith, a chapel, cricket and football grounds, an orchestra, hairdresser and beautician, water from its own spring. It extended over nearly 500 acres and was pretty much self-sufficient, with patients growing and cooking their own food, putting on plays and hosting an annual fête.

If all this seems very different from our ideas of Victorian asylums, that is because it was very different.

The activities and the grounds in which they took place were part of the treatment regime. Occupational therapy we would call it now. But although the treatments were ahead of their time in some respects, they were also of their time. For example, Electro-Convulsive Therapy was used; so was LSD.

Nevertheless, under the direction of John Connolly and William Parsey, pioneers in the humane treatment of mental illness, Central Hospital (as it was renamed) became, relatively speaking, a centre of innovation and excellence, visited by specialists from all over the world.

In 1995, Central Hospital closed with patients transferred to a modern, purpose built facility in Warwick itself. And then the developers moved in.

But as you can see, they did a pretty good job. Yes, there are many new houses built, but much of the landscaped grounds was retained and the original building sympathetically converted into homes.

One of which is now ours. Location, location, location - and the rest is history.


Today from the everysmith vaults: I’m listening to Close by James Knight. It’s a song cycle and it’s about as personal and heart-rending as any piece of music as I know. Including Four Last Songs and the Last Quartets.