My Book Seapenguin

 

I published a paperback in 2017 - it's got almost all the original blog posts in it.

https://youtube.com/shorts/YdNHC7NbbtA?si=KRYs-reVcmWGKwPq

Above is a link to a Youtube short regarding the book.

And here is the link to my Amazon author page. https://www.amazon.com/author/katesmart

Bright Shiny Things and Dirty Little Secrets

I’ve got another Diary to read*.  

This time it’s Kenneth Tynan’s.

It’s spiky and incomplete and full of quotations that caught his eye.  I’m very much enjoying it, so far (I’m on page 44, just).

The thing that popped into my head is this.  He had a bright shiny life full of dirty little…secrets.

That is not a bad thing.  Everyone has dirty little secrets.  They’re the things that drive us on.  He was only fortunate to have the bright shiny life part, as well.  I’d go so far as to say that he wouldn’t have had the bright shiny life part without the secrets. I’d perhaps venture even further, and say the dirtier the secrets, the brighter and shinier the life.

Dirty big secrets aren’t really interesting.  You want a dirty little secret.  It’s the grit in the oyster.

When you read a Diary you think you’re getting the nitty gritty. You’re really not, of course.  The only Diaries in which you’d get that are raw, pure diaries that you might find under a random pillow of a random maniac, or at the other extreme, a 1920s ‘housewife’ recording her seasonal jam-making** and such-like.  Someone who writes unself-consciously because they don’t imagine themselves a writer and who seeks simply to record the daily grind.  Which in itself is full of miracles that jump from the page as you read.  Published Diaries, of course, are carefully edited. Nevertheless they're probably my favourite type of book***.

I suppose if nobody had secrets nobody would write.  It’s secrets that drive some people to write, some people to paint, and others to hide themselves away in a cave, with a supply of custard creams, a sleeping-bag****, a flask of best brandy, and all of their secrets, dirty or otherwise, locked away in a strongbox.

I could go on.  But I won't.

*Two pounds eighty one off of Ebay, by the way, including P & P.  If ever I come into money, I'll pay full price for books.  She says shamefacedly.  Till then... 

**George Orwell recorded such things in a section of his Diaries.  A wonderful read.

***As I was typing that, I knew it was wrong. I also like biographies and, well, anything really.

**** and earplugs, to muffle the sound of the secrets fighting to escape from their prison.

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 65, Rebecca West

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 65, Rebecca West



Very interesting.  I like Rebecca West a lot, or used to - I haven't read her for many a year. I have several of her books (The Fountain Overflows,  Cousin Rosamund, among others) and I've now ordered a biography from Amazon.  I badly need some fresh reading material.

I've also ordered another Graham Chapman book, Calcium Made Interesting, because I enjoyed A Liar's Autobiography so much (see blog posts about this from, oh, goodness knows when...).  And The Haunted Hotel, by Wilkie Collins, which also sounds pretty good.

Meanwhile I'm re-reading Titus Groan.

I might give my verdict on these at some point....although, why I should bother I don't know.  Who's going to be interested?  They aren't new books, and so many others have written about them already.

Today's Walk - inside my Own Head

I haven't been outside for a couple of days, except to post a letter, as I've been feeling very ill with a fluey cold.  After one day's respite the weather has continued to be awful again anyway - chilly, steady rain, low skies, interspersed with bouts of 'wind'.  (Which reminds me - I need to summon up the strenf to rescue Tuppence from the ersatz sweat lodge sometime soon.)
Everything is muddy and wintry and Somme-like, still.  Few signs of Spring - certainly nothing much to indicate that the world is coming alive again.
I've been feeling so feeble I've barely read a thing.  However, I did finish one of my last charity shop buys - 'Hello',  Leslie Phillips' autobiography, which I expected to find interesting. I always enjoy his films. However, the book doesn't go into nearly enough detail for my liking.  About anything, really. Which is quite infuriating.  I shouldn't complain though.  I suppose he's had such a long career he would have needed to write several volumes in order to do it all justice, and I'm sure he probably couldn't be bothered.  I get the feeling too that he's probably held back a lot in order to preserve other people's secrets and dignity - and possibly his own.  There is a recent documentary about him on Youtube, I think, if you care to seek it out.
I still haven't finished my second charity shop buy - James Shapiro's '1599 - A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare'.  I tend to read last thing at night, generally, and two or three lines of '1599' and I'm off to sleep.    It's tremendously well-researched (edifying springs to mind) but not sufficiently gripping to keep me awake at 1 a.m..
Which is all to the good as far as I'm concerned.
I listened to a programme about dark matter on Radio Four this morning.  I think it was In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg.  Apparently (and think I sort of knew this before I heard the programme) dark matter is what holds the universe together, only nobody knows what it is.  They aren't even sure what it isn't.  They only know that it's there because it affects other things.  I got quite excited, listening, because that makes complete sense to me.  Or at least it gives me the feeling that it would, if only I sat down and thought about it for a while.  It could even explain human nature and the concept of Good and Evil.  It's the concept of Shadow writ large. And it's not an abstract concept - it really does seem to be that way, in the nature of the energies of which we are a part.   There is some kind of interactive dynamic, between dark and light,  and the one, so it would appear, I think, really cannot exist without the other.  Besides the obvious analogies there's a whole philosophical treatise to be written about that - to add to the hundreds if not thousands already in progress.  Nobody can have completed one because nobody yet knows what the subject really is.
I find it tremendously exciting to learn more about the Universe as I hurtle grave-wards. Perhaps I am going to return to the place 'from whence I came', i.e. Somewhere Out There, and will be recycled as a dark matter 'atom' (not that anyone knows if there are such things in dark matter).  Or perhaps I'll be a bubble in the Soup Dragon's cauldron.
I must read more about it.

Poetry, and Psychogenic Osmosis

It was National Poetry Day yesterday.  I love poetry. But there's nothing worse than looking at your Twitter timeline and seeing folk banging on about it.  I dislike the feeling of being churlish and sour of spirit (where's the harm in tweeting poetry?), while at the same time I think it's quite a sane reaction; Twitter is no place to be, if you want to 'create' anything other than kitten pictures, puns and one-liners. The inner disquiet produced by all this, is enough to put me off writing, completely.  Well, for about five minutes.  Almost!
It's not really that though.  For me, the whole literary thing feels a bit distasteful and uncomfortable.  There are a couple of exceptions though.  There's a John Betjeman account I like, and a Richard Jefferies.
My favourite poet is probably Coleridge.  I'm fondest of him anyway.  It's probably the opium.  I've most likely absorbed quantities of it via his poems, through some form of psychogenic osmosis.
Frost at Midnight is probably my favourite Coleridge poem.  'The Frost performs its secret ministry,  Unhelped by any wind*.' 
I'm unlikely to have discovered it had I not bought a small second hand edition of a selection of his poems after browsing in a second hand bookshop about twenty years ago.  The bookshop closed ten years ago, at least, and now there is nowhere to browse, unless I go to a city.
Don't start me off complaining again, but you can't browse books on the internet.  You just can't.


There once was a girl with a plan
To cook with an old frying pan
She fried up some bread
And stood on her head
In a market in Uzbekhistan.

S.T. Coleridge (after)

*titters at the word wind

Now Reading - A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine by Tony Benn

I'm quite enjoying this book, which I borrowed from the local library.  It's infuriatingly unusual these days, for me to find a book that I actually want to read, in the library.  The library is no longer a place whose purpose is to encourage 'book learning'.  It is multi-functional.  It is noisy.  It hosts playgroups and old peoples groups and job clubs and computers.  And worst of all - it has a really terrible and rapidly-depleting selection of books.  As I've said before.
I'd like to read Benn's earlier Diaries.  He had so much irreplaceable knowledge and experience of our country's politics and the ways of government.  This final one is quite unavoidably depressing, because his health is clearly deteriorating, he's dealing admirably and bravely and realistically with a host of problems relating to his age, and he feels (understandably, at 82) that he's 'on his way out'.
I'm 54 and I often feel that I'm 'on my way out', as well.  But that's another matter. (or is it??) Growing old is no fun, but it's better than the alternative, as someone once said.
Anyway, it's a very interesting read.  I enjoy following politics, though I'm not a member of any particular party.  It begins in 2007 around the start of Gordon Brown's stint as PM and the financial meltdown.  Benn witnesses the demise of the Labour Party as he knew it, and the concurrent rise of the global economy.  He expects UKIP to thrive in such an environment, as indeed they do.  Nationalism, he says, is not the way forward - democracy is. He describes Brown as a 'managing director' of Britain - a Britain devoid of Trade Union power - but he writes more positively about him than Blair, saying that when he sees Blair and that 'awful smile', his 'blood runs cold'.   All in all, he's very depressed by the state of politics and who can blame him?  Just about everything ghastly he expected to happen, has.
I'm only on page 95 by the way.  However - I just, in the middle of writing this - skipped to the last chapter, 'Life after Diaries', in which he describes, with far more grace than I can envisage mustering in such circumstances, moving out of the family home and into a flat where he receives round the clock care.  Still little nuggets of information relevant to today's politics shine out - for example, he was Energy Minister in 1975 when North Sea oil was discovered, and he set up a system whereby 25% of the oil belonged to the Treasury rather than the oil companies.  This, had it been retained, would have ensured an 'oil fund' which could have been used in times of austerity - however, Thatcher sold it off.
Not the greedy and evil 'Westminster' we heard so much about during the referendum.  Thatcher.
Yes, that's the Thatcher upon whose back, by and large, because the Scottish electorate disliked her so, and they defined themselves against her, the SNP clambered to power.  After helping her INTO power, in the first place, of course.   That's the SNP whose membership has just overtaken that of the entire Libdems, and who are bankrolled by the unspeakable Brian Souter and two people spending their lottery winnings.
In my day the SNP were a joke. They had no policies, no underpinning philosophy except nationalism.  I don't think they've changed except they have much more power and influence, unfortunately.  People are off their heads and I only hope they gain some insight soon.
I'll say no more about politics.  Unless further referendum-style ghastliness ensues which seems likely to affect the warp and weft of my daily life.

Book of the Week: Gruts, by Ivor Cutler

I got this from Amazon ( as usual).  I think it's probably out of print, although it shouldn't be.  This edition dates from 1962 and is published by The Museum Press.  Price 7s. and 6d. on inside of dust cover.  It cost me £6.37 which is a heck of a lot more than I usually pay for a book, as anyone who reads the blog will know, so you will understand how much I wanted it.  And that was by far the cheapest option available by the way.  It was sent from the U.S.A., oddly enough.
Anyway, it's a book I will treasure.  It contains a load of tales,  poems, drawings, songs and stories, some of which I already know.  For example,  'Old Cups of Tea', and 'The Dirty Dinner'.  ''OH!  What's that on the dining-room table?  Jim!  Jim!  Come here.  What's that on the dining-room table?''  ''It's a big pile of dirt, Mammy.''
And so it goes on.  'The rent had not been paid for 31 years and the landlord was becoming restive.'  A gem.  I would write more, only I don't have time.

Two of my favourite book illustrations

from Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows, illustrated by EH Shepard

from The Gashleycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey

Ambitions of Age #1. The Road... is Everlong...

I was half-watching a programme on BBC4 about the A303 when the presenter mentioned a quote from Hilaire Belloc's 1923 book, The Road.  It appealed to me tremendously and I looked it up immediately.  Ah, the miracle of the internet.  Within a couple of clicks I had ordered the book from Amazon (yes,  I know...)

"There are primal things which move us. Fire has the character of a free companion that has travelled with us from the first exile; only to see a fire, whether he need it or no, comforts every man. Again, to hear two voices outside at night after a silence, even in crowded cities, transforms the mind. A Roof also, large and mothering, satisfies us here in the north much more than modern necessity can explain; so we built in the beginning: the only way to carry off our rains and to bear the weight of our winter snows. A Tower far off arrests a man’s eye always: it is more than a break in the sky-line; it is an enemy’s watch or the rallying of a defence to whose aid we are summoned. Nor are these emotions a memory or a reversion only as one crude theory might pretend; we craved these things - the camp, the refuge, the sentinels in the dark, the hearth - before we made them; they are part of our human manner, and when this civilisation has perished they will reappear.
"Of these primal things the least obvious but the most important is The Road. It does not strike the sense as do those others I have mentioned; we are slow to feel its influence. We take it so much for granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men, indeed, whose pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own country on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They feel a meaning in it; it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it explains its own vagaries, and it gives a unity to all that has arisen along its way. But for the mass The Road is silent; it is the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest and most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest of our race. It was the most imperative and the first of our necessities. It is older than building and than wells; before we were quite men we knew it, for the animals still have it to-day; they seek their food and their drinking-places, and, as I believe, their assemblies, by known tracks which they have made."

One of my long-held ambitions is to follow one of the ancient pilgrims' roads.  There's something about travelling slowly, and walking.  It's good for the soul.  Perhaps travelling in a fast car or high speed train is also good for the soul.  But it's different. Obviously.  A bit like the difference between looking in a real library, or in a real bookshop, perhaps even travelling to a different town or city to find a certain book or bookshop, as I used to do when young; and finding and ordering a book within thirty seconds of hearing about it....