The morning of the vote on disability benefits (Tuesday 1st of July), I received a letter from the Labour Party. It told me that the party was doing a great job, taking “tough decisions” which have resulted in all of us “turning a corner”. These choices were, said our General Secretary, “Labour choices” which reflected “Labour values”. “We hope that this makes you proud” she told me. “Max, we would love to have you back” she said. “Will you rejoin the Labour Party?”

They must be desperate. It is true that I was a member of the Labour Party for many years, many decades in fact; and, with one or two absences (the late ‘60s and the Iraq War, for example) remained so until the current Starmer regime decided that people like me were not wanted on the voyage. 

I should have resigned over Gaza, and Starmer’s statement on LBC that Israel’s right to self-defence included the right to cut off power, water, and food. I didn’t. I protested. I wrote to my Labour MP, met him, put my views forward. But I didn’t resign. Not then.

I actually resigned on the day that my MP joined the majority of Labour MPs to vote in favour cutting the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.

The announcement came out of the blue. Reeves had gone for cuts which even Osbourne’s austerity policy could not entertain. Of course, it was a Labour choice. It reflected Labour values. And it appeared to fund not the so-called black hole but Starmer’s determination to fund the defence of Ukraine.

Just before the election, we had been moved from the Warwick and Leamington constituency to the doughnut constituency of Kenilworth and Southam. It was not pleasant finding oneself being represented by a Tory.

Except that, in the winter fuel allowance debate, the Tory voted against the cuts. It was my old Labour MP who voted for it. Not only voted for it but wrote a long justification of doing so, which included drawing a parallel between the fuel allowance and his subsidised train fares to London and back. Loyalist Labour members told me that over 50% of pensioners were millionaires, and how they used to spend the fuel allowance on shoes.

And the same thing happened last Tuesday. Jeremy Wright voted against the PIP and disability cuts. Matt Western, who had originally signed the ‘reasoned amendment’, then voted unreasonably in favour of the shambolic government.

Some of you - thanks - will have noted that this is my first post for some months. Medically and mentally I have been reluctant to take on the political situation here, in Palestine, in the US.

But we need to face up to it. It’s no use turning off the news. I shall be joining a political party. 

It might be Green. It might be a new Corbyn alliance, especially if Faiza Shaheen is involved.

But it sure as hell won’t be Starmer’s Labour.
​
Today from the everysmith vaults: I have inherited a number of recordings of The Ring Cycle and am currently on the Rudolf Kempe 1957 version from Covent Garden. Despite the ‘bootleg’ quality of the recording, it is close to that of Solti. Commended.

​

My apologies for absence. The plague which I had managed to avoid for a couple of years finally caught up with me on Boxing day last year. The usual stuff: high temperature, cough, sore throat, headache, loss of taste and smell. I quit nicotine and achieved dry January. Enough already, I thought.

But like the struggle, it continued. And yes, April was the cruelest month.

There have been positive blips in the long lethargy, the drowsy numbness which pains my sense. Only now, however, have I felt up to posting for the first time this year. Why now?

Not the good news - the music, the cricket and (in the last couple of weeks) the baseball, friends and grandchildren. It’s the bad news. It’s the fucking politics.

Jill won’t listen or watch.  But I feel drawn to the spectacle; to the viciousness of the Tories and the refusal of Labour to recognise and commit to repealing the ideological nastiness.

It’s the anger and the frustration that has woken me from the drowsiness, the numbness of the last few months.

I feel better for it.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Bob’s sensational series of shows across Europe with random covers from the Dead, Van Morrison, Merle Haggard, has been a constant. But today, Bennyboy released his Best of: In the End There’s Just a Song. Even by his standards, it is a very special compilation.

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.

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.

Chateau La Coste is a vanity project created by multi-millionaire Paddy McKillen on a 600 acre estate just north of Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. It is internationally heralded as a paradise for lovers of wine, architecture and art. The wine is eminently enjoyable; the architecture and artworks not so much.

Jill and I visited last week on a day when temperatures were in excess of 40o and the rarest commodity on the domaine was shade. I eventually found some solace in a rail car, overlooking a vineyard and a couple of structures designed by Richard Rogers.

The rail car in question is an art installation by Bob Dylan. It’s a collage of iron pieces, and it’s life-size, set on rails along the perimeter of the vineyard. It’s a couple of miles from the main reception of the estate, all uphill. It’s not on the map that you are given, and it’s un-signposted. I, and a Bob fan from the States whom I met randomly when we both asked each other where it was, found it by accident and perhaps that is how it is intended to be found. A kind of serendipity.

Bob says that it “represents perception and reality at the same time. All the iron is re-contextualised to represent peace, serenity and stillness.”

It does.

From across the vineyard it is monumental. Massive. But come closer and one sees that it is also delicate, with the motifs - tools, wheels, ladders - intricately positioned to create a form a tracery of branches, veins, offshoots. It’s a form of topiary I guess, with Bob inspired or at least prompted by the location on the old Roman road that meanders through the forest at La Coste.

Alongside the rail car (alongside in terms of time rather than geography - the two are on opposite sides of the huge estate) is an exhibition of a couple of dozen original paintings from the Drawn Blank series.

Most of us know these from viewing or owning the prints. To see the originals is to see that Bob is a very painterly painter. His works are shown with works by Monet and Matisse, Chagall, Pissarro and Picasso.

The hanging is a brave thing to do, even for Bob. But the love of the Provençal landscape exhibited (literally and figuratively) by all these painters made a show which, collectively, works. As does the rail car itself. Part Bob, part Provence. Part nature, part fabrication.

"Part perception, part reality."
​
It was well worth the schlepp. And to prove it, go to www.halcyongallery.com and watch the professional video.

Today from the everysmith vaults: ​Shadow Kingdom, the on-line show that Bob put out during the pandemic to keep us sane. Just seems appropriate.

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.

"When we genuinely speak we do not have the words ready to do our bidding, we have to find them. And we do not know exactly what we are going to say until we have said it, and we say and hear something new that has never been said or heard before." 

​This counterpoint to Wittgenstein's famous 7th proposition in TLP is from Auden's Secondary Worlds published in 1968. I wish I had read it then.

In recent years, I have used this blog and these posts to work out positions and identify issues. Not exclusively, but primarily. Seldom do I have a preconceived argument to advance in advance, and my faux-Oulipian approach (500-ish words and no more than an hour at the keyboard) is intended to sharpen my focus.

It also serves to establish priorities. In the last few weeks, there has been and remains much to consider. Ukraine, of course, but also Syria and Afghanistan; the expulsion of a friend and comrade from the Labour Party for anti-semitism (yes, of course he's Jewish); the awesome shows from Dylan on the Spring leg of the Rough & Rowdy Ways tour; the imminence of a new baseball season (we play the Yankees in the Bronx tomorrow); the selling-off of Channel 4; the fact that Covid has preventing me seeing many of my grandchildren for months; the culling of a beautiful tree in a nearby garden.

​You will note that, even half way through this post, I still do not have the words ready to do my bidding. In fact, I have not yet even an inkling of what my bidding should be. So some random thoughts on a recent discovery.

I have stumbled on a series of books by Timothy Venning, entitled An Alternative History of Britain. I started with the English Civil War.

Venning concerns himself with the ‘what-ifs’ of history. In the volume I have read, the chapter headings give the game away. His Edgehill chapter, for example, is entitled Could the war have been won quickly by the King?  The year 1644 is headed Was the war winnable in 1644 - by the King, or by parliament without resorting to the creation of the New Model Army?

Not snappily worded, I agree. But good questions. And inside these larger questions are small details of what might have happened has something happened or not happened.

A new one for me is the fact that Parliamentary cavalry commander Stapleton had a clear shot, at close quarters, at the charismatic Prince Rupert during the first battle of Newbury. His pistol misfired.

Would Rupert's death have destroyed morale in the Royalist cause? Would the King have given in? Or would he continued his stubborn approach? Would he, perhaps, have refused to engage at Marston Moor?

​Venning describes it as “the most vital what if of the battle”. Of such mishaps is history made.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Not actually in the vaults but it will be. It is PJ Proby reading from Eliot’s The Waste Land and its bloody brilliant. The recommendation comes from the poet Roy Kelly (@stanfan49) who writes: “Summer and PJ surprised us.” Thanks, Roy.

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.

“Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.” Like everyone, I am waiting. Waiting for Putin to invade the Ukraine. Waiting for the MLB lockdown to end. Waiting for the Forde Report. Waiting for the reinstatement of Corbyn. Waiting for the publication of Sue Gray’s enquiry. And waiting for the resignation of the Prime Minister.

These are merely a few of the various sources of angst which I am currently experiencing. And they are all issues over which I have no influence.

But the waiting does give us an opportunity to muse on the essence of those issues, to consider precisely why we feel so helpless: why we are denied the opportunity to act. We can think. We can feel. But what we think and feel is impotence, an inability to influence events, a lack of engagement with the processes that affect our lives.

We are not even in control of our ourselves. As Sartre says, we are ‘trapped in existence’.

Trapped in existence, Jill and I lead a moderately comfortable life: children, grandchildren, good friends, a nice house. All that good stuff.

But that does not eliminate anxiety. It merely mitigates. And I am waiting still for the freedom that Sartre promised would be the outcome of that anxiety.

True, it is about choice and the inability or unwillingness to make choices (which is, of course, in itself, a kind of choice). 

Unfortunately, choices - meaningful choices - are usually false or fraudulent. They are hostages to fortune. And those who make those choices are making the wrong ones.

Which makes me even more anxious. And even more angry.

Sorry about all this. You’ve caught me on a bad day.

Today from the everysmith vaults:​ In keeping with my mood, Shostakovich Symphony #15. Kirill Kondrashin and the Moscow Philharmonic.

In October 1818, John Keats responded to a letter from Richard Woodhouse complimenting him on a review of Endymion which had appeared in the Quarterly Review. He wrote: “As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself - it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated - It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet." He goes on to point out that “A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity.” He has “no self”.

The parallel is clear. John Bauldie’s posthumously published book, titled The Chameleon Poet and sub-titled Bob Dylan’s Search for Self is a tardy but nonetheless interesting contribution to the faux Dylan-Keats debate of decades ago, a debate in which I engaged at the time but always with an understanding that, although I was a lover of Keats and remain so to this day, the quarrel was of no relevance to an appreciation of either. Then, it was about defending the genius of Dylan against the snobbery of people like AS Byatt and, crucially, defending the song against the poem. It was about defining poetry.

Bob of course, Bob being Bob, he was ambivalent. “Yippee, I’m a poet and I know it” he sang, before adding (just in case he was being taken seriously) “Hope I don’t blow it!” And when asked directly if he regarded himself as a poet, he replied “I think of myself as just a song & dance man”. Michael Gray, the pioneer of Dylan studies, seized on this conceit in his seminal triptych, Song & Dance Man, the first volume of which was published as far back as 1972 and in which I am not aware of any mention of John Keats. 

According to Bill Allison’s excellent (and for me, informative) introduction to The Chameleon Poet, Michael’s first volume inspired Bauldie. Reading it, he realised he wanted to be more of a Dylanologist than a Bobcat (although he is credited with the coinage of the latter term, which refers to those who follow the shows as compared with the desk-bound scholars). Certainly, Bauldie makes no reference to shows, to music, to performances. His emphasis is almost exclusively on textual analysis, including the movies and - importantly - Bob’s writings on the back cover of the sleeves. It's practical criticism. Throw in his degree in English and his experience as a teacher of English, and you have the nub of Bauldie’s approach.

It is, in many ways, a schoolmasterly book. You see how I started this piece talking about Keats and only by association moved onto Bob himself? That’s a trick Bauldie uses in this book as he must have done many times in classrooms as both student and teacher. One chapter, ostensibly concerned with Bob’s early work, begins with a lengthy exegesis of King Lear. Others reference Hesse, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Jung. Even if one didn’t know about Bauldie’s untimely death, one could make an informed guess at the date of the manuscript of this book.

Bauldie was older than me. By five days. We were both born in the last days of the summer holidays in 1949. We both combined our love of Bob with support for under-performing football teams. His interests were my interests at that time and the compare-and-contrast methodology with which we had been imbued is a way of thinking and explaining adopted by all of us in and out of the classroom.

He is not as meticulous in his readings as Michael Gray, who, in turn, is not as meticulous as Christopher Ricks. But who is? Nevertheless, there are some keen insights here. He is particularly good on Planet Waves and John Wesley Harding. And, passim, he is excellent in his distinguishing of the noumenal Bob from the phenomenal, the inner from the outer, the masked and anonymous from the simple and direct.

I wish I had known John Bauldie. But I know him well enough now through this book. And I am reminded of one of my favourite Bob stories.

“You don’t know me, but I know you” said a fan, outside a show.

“Let’s keep it that way” said Bob.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Bob’s first show back on the road, in Milwaukee, on Tuesday night. A wonderful show, with eight songs from Rough & Rowdy Ways and the sound of Shadow Kingdom. It’s only been in the vault for 48 hours but it is currently playing for the fourth time around.