The news that Matthew Hollis is apparently now favourite for the Costa Book Award for his biography of the poet Edward Thomas is good news for poetry. It sent me back to an article Hollis wrote about the writing of ‘Adlestrop’, which is now one of the best known poems in English.

Most of Thomas’ poems were written in a furious rush in the last few years before he was killed in France in 1917, with the encouragement of the great American poet Robert Frost, who had become a firm friend. And most of them drew on his notebooks, which were full of short vivid sketches of things he’d seen.

‘Adlestrop’ was published a few weeks after his death, but the trip it was based on took place three years earlier, when he went by train with his wife to visit Frost, then staying in England. The notebook, wrote Hollis, contains this passage about the train’s halt at Adlestrop:

Then we stopped at Adlestrop, thro the willows cd be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12.45 & one thrush & no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam. Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willow herb & meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel . . . one man clears his throat – and a greater rustic silence. No house in view[.] Stop only for a minute till signal is up.

Most of the poem came quickly to him, but he struggled with the first verse. This is the published version:

Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

It took him several drafts to settle on the class of train. It started as an express, then became a steam train, then just a train. By the final version, wrestling with the fact that the train had made its unscheduled stop, he’d gone back to ‘express’. As Hollis explains:

The train had to be “express” and not “steam” if it was to pull up “unexpectedly”, he reasoned; though about this word, too, he had doubts, and tried “Against its custom”, before he hit upon exactly the word he was looking for: “unwontedly”.

Unwontedly. It’s one of those words which even native English speakers have problems with. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it in this way:

“In a strange, unwonted, or unusual manner; unusually; uncommonly”

So the manner of the stopping draws attention to the other uncommonnesses in the poem, such as the absence of people on the station (“No one left and no one came”), which reminds us that Thomas wrote only indirectly about the Great War, but it is often present through absences. “His real subjects”, wrote Robert MacFarlane in a review of Hollis’ book, “were disconnection, discrepancy and unsettledness.”

The station itself was closed in the 1960s, after Beeching’s axe destroyed chunks of the British rail network. But perhaps that doesn’t matter, for as Edward Thomas said later in the poem, he saw ‘only the name’.

The picture of Adlestrop Station at the top of this post was taken in 1961. It is from Wikipedia Commons. The copyright on this image is owned by Ben Brooksbank and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. Richard Burton cn be heard reading the poem on Youtube.

One of the first pleasures of Strictly Gershwin at the Coliseum (it was someone’s birthday treat) was seeing – as the curtain rose – that the orchestra has been lifted out the pit and placed across the back of the stage. It was, immediately, a reminder of the big bands of the Jazz Age, of which Gershwin was unaguably the greatest composer.

Do ballet and jazz mix? The answer is: mostly. Ballet and show dancing are very different, as Darcy Bussell was reminded when she set out recently to recreate some of the great dances of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. The first is straight limbs and square ends, the second is more hips and bends. The dancer’s centre of gravity is in a different place.

The ballet sequences which worked best were the ones which allowed ballet to do what it does best – a a visual and physical interpretation of a piece of music. An American in Paris was all colour and movement, a tale of love found, lost and found again. Rhapsody in Blue was more stylised, more formal (as seen in the photograph at the top of this post), but also added a dimension to the music. A moment’s digression here: Gershwin kept procrastinating over writing the piece, until the bandleader Paul Whiteman, for whom it was being written, simply announced the concert at which it would premiere, forcing Gershwin to get on and finish it.

Some of the songs didn’t respond so well to treatment. The story of The Man I Love or Someone To Watch Over Me is all in the lyric, so dancing it as well added little. On the other hand, the more open lyric of Summertime made for a fine interpretation.

The company was augmented by a couple of champion ballroom dancers, whose tango, improbably to It Ain’t Necessarily So, was one of the highlights of the show. But the warmest applause was for the tap dancers. I don’t know if it’s because tap dancing came of age at the same time as jazz, and remains one of America’s great contributions to dance, but when they were on the energy levels in the theatre increased decisively.

But back to the orchestra. There’s nothing quite like a 30-piece big band playing jazz standards, and the programme reveals that – as with the dancers – the ENO orchestra was augmented by jazz specialists, who led each of the horn sections. You could hear it as they traded dirty notes in some of the numbers, which reminded me of lines from Carl Sandburg‘s fine poem, Jazz Fantasia:

Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome treetops,
moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a
racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang!
you jazzmen…

Kudos, by the way, to the ENO Box Office. There was a problem with my tickets, which may have been my fault, and they swapped them in an instant for tickets elsewhere which had just as good a view, and without any of the eye-rolling or customer blaming you sometimes get in such circumstances.

The picture at the top comes via Georgina Butler’s blog, and is used with thanks.

I don’t like the Royal Academy – it’s snooty, uptight, over-sponsored yet still expensive – but despite this I went this week to see their exhibition, Building the Revolution, about the art and buildings of the Russian revolutionary era, and in particular to see the scaled-down version of Tatlin’s Tower in the (sponsored) courtyard. The Tower, famously, was only an idea, and never built, but it was intended to be both a monument to the revolution and also a working building, the home of the Third International, the organisation to promote communism internationally. As a blog at RIBA notes, it would have

had four rotating elements inside (all rotating at different speeds) to house an information centre, meeting rooms, offices and a radio transmitter which all would have served as the headquarters of the Third International.

The scale version built for the Royal Academy is 10 metres high, a 1:40 scale model of a Tower that Tatlin imagined would be 400 metres high, taller than the Eiffel Tower, spanning the river Neva in St. Petersburg, as a picture at the RA conveyed. (The image here is from a 1999 CGI reconstruction by the Japanese artist Takehiko Nagakura.) In a Russia wracked by war and then civil war the chances of securing enough steel to build it were less than zero. The mechanics were complex too; the engineers who made a reconstruction for the Hayward in 1971 had to work them out from first principles, since there are few records of the original design. Indeed, had it been built, it’s likely that the mechanics of the building would have failed – the Russian constructivists quite often found that their ideas outstripped the limits of what was then technically possible.

In Tatlin’s lifetime, his Tower was realised only as a 15 foot high scale model, which was shown in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The picture of this model, and the one above, come from John Coulthart’s { feuilleton } blog. Even so, it fired the enthusiasm of his contemporaries: Viktor Shklovsky, the critic, reported on seeing Tatlin’s model, ‘The monument is made of iron, glass and revolution.’

Indeed, the design was inherently political. As Catherine Merridale writes:

The marvels of technology were one theme, but movement was another … as well as reflecting the dynamism of the dawning age, the building could double as a slow-moving calendar and clock, perhaps even as a means of measuring stars and space. In its restlessness and transparency, the building embodied the democratic challenge to authoritarian power that Tatlin so welcomed.

Tatlin’s unbuilt Monument has fascinated artists, critics, and maybe utopians ever since he designed it: I’m writing about it here more than 90 years after he conceived it, which I wouldn’t be had it actually been built. I was at an exhibition in Estonia earlier this year at which the artist Petko Dourmana had constructed an augmented reality piece in which the Tower was projected onto the cityscape of Tallinn. In some ways, such a virtual representation seems a fittingly democratic way to see Tatlin’s Monument. The purpose of the unbuilt building, after all, is to excite the imagination.

The picture at the top of this post was taken by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

Singin’ in the Rain may be the best musical ever made – it’s certainly a candidate, and everyone who sees it remembers the (spoiler alert) big reveal in the final scene. Gene Kelly’s big dance sequence with Cyd Charisse – by this stage something of a hallmark of the MGM musical – and is probably better than its equivalent number in An American in Paris – and there are memorable moments throughout, mostly associated with the main supporting actors, Jean Hagen as the monstrous Lena Lamont and Donald O’Connor playing Kelly’s sidekick Cosmo Brown.

I’ve seen the film a few times, and watched it again a few nights ago after taping a re-run on my PVR. And realised two things. The first, to my surprise, was that I’d forgottn the entire opening sequence, with Don Lockwood (Kelly) and Lamont turning up for the first night of their latest movie – ‘film’ doesn’t quite seem to cut it – and Lockwood reprising, on the red carpet, the official version of his life story, in the days when the studios’ PR machines were a beast to be feared and admired.

And that was the second realisation: that the sequence – in which the story that Lockwood tells is undercut by the much seedier story we’re seeing onscreen – sets up the theme of Singin’ in the Rain. I hadn’t realised it before, and it seems obvious when you write it down, but Singin’ in the Rain, set in the days of the transition from silent to talking pictures, is a film about deception, or more exactly, deception revealed.

Film is an inherently deceptive medium of course, and this story weaves deception throughout after the opening sequence. To quickly run through the others, Kathy Selden (played by Debbie Reynolds, who the studio were trying to build into a star) pretends to Lockwood, as he falls into her car, that she knows nothing of Hollywood and doesn’t read the fan magazines. As the studio tries to salvage The Duelling Cavalier, working around Lena’s Brooklyn twang by having Kathy re-record, secretly, Lena’s lines, Lena bursts in on the recording session, having been tipped off by another actress: (‘Lena:  “Zelda told me everything.”  Don:  “Thanks, Zelda. You’re a real pal.”‘)

And then of course, the most famous revelation of them (massive spoiler alert) as the studo boss ‘RF’, together with Lockwood and Cosmo  Brown pull back the curtain to reveal that Kathy is Lena’s singing voice, creating a new star as they destroy an old one.

in his essential monograph on the film, Peter Wollen argues that this sequence allows the lies to end; the voice of Kathy is reunited with herr body, while Lockwood can stop pretending, for the benefit of the studio’s PR, that he is in love with Lena, and be united with Kathy.

In telling this film story, though, Wollen lets us in on Singin’ in the Rain‘s last great deception. Debbie Reynolds, for all her star potential, was neither a great dancer, nor a great singer. She mastered her dance numbers through hard work and application, but the version of the song heard at the film’s climax is actually sung (and how good is this?) by Jean Hagen, the actress who played Lena Lamont.

Reynolds spells it out in her autobiography: ‘Jean’s real voice, however, was lovely, and she dubbed herself’. And as Wollen observes, ‘what we see and hear is the unveiling of a mystery that subverts its own appearance of authenticity’.

I’m fussy about my notebooks. Small enough for a coat pocket, big enough for diagrams as well as notes, plain not lined. I also write in fountain pen quite often, so the paper has to be heavy enough for ink (not true of the ubiquitous moleskine).

So when I found myself short of something to write in while in Brecon recently, I was intrigued to come across a line of notebooks called Rebound Books. I’d not seen them elsewhere. They had covers of actual published books, and some pages from the actual book interleaved with new blank pages, made from surprisingly good quality reclaimed paper.

It turns out that they’re made by the Brecon branch of an international charity, L’Arche, which creates communities for people with learning disabilities, helping them by providing meaningful work. For the charity, the rebound books are a way of re-using books which had no secondhand resale value, and which would otherwise end up in landfill (I drafted this post in a Rebound notebook made from a Romanian language guide to a monastery). The project won first prize earlier this year at the Hay Festival’s Dragons’ Den event.

From a user’s perspective there’s something quite stimulating about turning a page and finding an illustration or a fragment of a story on it. The idea probably doesn’t scale that well, but I’d have thought that the charity will want to spread the idea from Brecon to their other communities. And maybe other social enterprises might want to franchise the idea.

You can have a look online. They also do mail order.

The pictures in this post were taken by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

My own chess career was modest: I made it as far as number 4 board in a moderately good school team. But that was enough to give me a respect for the game, and especially the way in which quite small advantages in ability were almost inevitably transformed into winning positions.

So I enjoyed the account by the journalist Stephen Moss of covering the launch of a chess initiative at the House of Commons, hosted by Rachel Reeves MP, now Shadow Treasury Secretary, who two decades ago was the British girls’ Under-14 champion. Moss challenged her to a game of blitz chess (10 minutes per player for all moves) and finding her “a little rusty” duly beats her.

But then the story takes a twist, in the shape of the former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, who was also attending the launch:

He quickly sizes up the situation – that Reeves, his host for the day and the new standard-bearer of chess in schools – has been walloped, and suggests a rematch. He will, he says, intervene on her behalf just three times.

We play again. … As the game gets more interesting he can’t help lending Reeves a hand. “I’m just offering general advice,” he insists as her position improves while mine deteriorates. … “Now final, final, final shot,” says Kasparov as my position becomes dire. He has seen a way to win my queen, and Reeves eventually sees it too. Amid much laughter and applause I resign.

“I think that’s one of the best games I’ve ever played,” says Reeves with neat self-deprecation.

The image at the top comes from Chess Right, and is used with thanks.

John Adams’ insistent piece ‘A Short Ride in  a Fast Machine’ popped up on my Shuffle this week, which reminded me of its fated history with the Last Night of the BBC’s Proms. ‘A Short Ride’ is a little over four minutes long, driven along at pace for most of that time by an urgent percussion which cuts through the orchestra.

It’s been scheduled twice for the Last Night of the Proms, and pulled each time. On the first occasion Diana died in a car crash just before the concert; on the second, the planes went in to the Twin Towers. The Proms planners held their nerve and it has been featured twice since on concerts for a younger audience, the Blue Peter Prom in 2004 and the Dr Who prom in 2010. But will  Fast Ride In A Short Machine ever be scheduled again for The Proms’ last night? Depends on how superstitious you are.

Publishers mostly believe – probably rightly – that their brands make little difference to book buying habits, because readers are more interested in authors. But this isn’t always true. There are moments when publishers break these surly bonds: one thinks of Penguin, especially in the days of their colour-coded jackets, of Picador in the ’70s, of Calder and Boyars. Design always has something to do with it.

I was thinking of this because I noticed some science fiction and fantasy reissues – in the distinctive Gollancz yellow – to mark the 50th anniversary of Gollancz. (They seem to have been out for a few months but I noticed them only because of the ‘serendipity search function’ of a bookshop window.)

I read more science fiction when I was young than I now care to remember, much of it from the library, and the Gollancz yellow jackets did for a title exactly what good branding is supposed to do; they acted as assurance in a market where quality was variable. A yellow Gollancz science fiction title was invariably worth reading.

The list of the Gollancz 50 reissues can be found here. I’ve written here about Pavane by Keith Roberts, one of the 50.

The pictures in this post were taken by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

I was prompted by an interview with Bobby Gillespie to dig out a copy of Screamadelica, a record I’ve always liked. Listening to it again after a while I was struck by – and maybe this is obvious – the extent to which it sounds like  mid-period Rolling Stones reinvented through a haze of ecstasy. (I’m talking Exile on Main Street-era Stones here; the comparison is not a dismissive one). Certainly tracks like ‘Movin’ On Up or Loaded or Damaged could have been covered by the Stones before they descended into caricature, and without seeming out of place.

Primal Scream, of course, have marked the 20th anniversary of Screamadelica by reforming and playing the album in concert. Personally, I usually find this depressing: in the words of the Irish poet Paul Muldoon in Hay,

All great artists are their own greatest threat

As when they aim an industrial laser

At themselves and cut themselves back to the root

But I’m going to argue with myself here and cut Primal Scream a little slack. Perhaps playing concert versions of Screamadelica is just a way of acknowledging that they understand, in their 40s, that for a moment back then they were touched by greatness.

The picture at the top of the post is from the Bagging Area blog, and is used with thanks.

I like porridge, especially as the days get colder. But I get put off by the instructions.  Take these, from a packet of Quaker Oats, for example:

Mix 45g of Quaker Oats with 340ml of milk or cold water in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Simmer for 5 minutes.

45g? 340ml? You need to get the scales out, and a measuring jug, unless you happen to have a brain that’s finely tuned to metric measurements. In a rush, on a cold morning, that doesn’t happen. You guess, and you hope.

So you can imagine my pleasure when I bought a bag of Pimhill’s porridge oats, and found these instructions:

For creamy porridge use 1 level cup of Pimhill Porridge Oats and 2 cups pf cold water or milk.

Cups? Cups! Everyone has cups, and they’re usually close at hand in a kitchen. You don’t have to be on Masterchef to realise that you can use small cups or large cups depending on how much porridge you’re planning to make, as long as you use the same cup for both oats and liquid. And it’s so simple that once you’ve read it you’ll remember it – even when faced with instructions that expect people to think like computers. A wonderfully simple piece of user-based information.

The picture at the top of this post was taken by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.