Owed To A Nightingale

Writing a magazine piece about Rome has reminded me of standing recently in the room where John Keats died. And at the same time Bob Dylan's "Duquesne Whistle" is blowing through my mind.

The great debate about whether Dylan was as good as Keats (or vice versa) was handled beautifully by Professor Christopher Ricks in his ambitious book "Dylan's Visions Of Sin", when he looked at Keats' "Ode To A Nightingale" and Dylan's "Not Dark Yet".

Was the way these two wove in and out of each other lyrically and philosophically a mere coincidence?

"Coincidences can be deep things," says Ricks, "and if two artists were to arrive independently at so many similar turns of phrase, figures of speech, felicities of rhyming, then my sense of humanity might go up a plane." [There is a strained pun here that will be appreciated — and groaned at — only by Dylanophiles.]

Ricks goes on more elegantly to say there was no coincidence. He believes Dylan had the "Ode" in mind "even if not consciously or deliberately" when he "created his own re-creation of so much of it".

I think he's right. Few poems or songs of mortality can touch "Not Dark Yet". And it was the song that came into my mind as I stood in Keats' room.

Keats was just 25 when he died – against his will. Dylan was 25 when he had his motorcycle accident – maybe not against his will?

Dylan is 71. It's not dark yet, but it's getting there...

Bread, Circuses And Patriotism

Is it me? Or is it slightly barking to be spending £50million on a "national commemoration" of the First World War?

Even if the UK could afford it, what exactly is the point? I suppose the old adage about patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel could provide some of the answer.

Do we need anything further to remind us that this war was a catastrophic waste of countless lives? Or that war (remember Iraq? remember that Afghanistan has been going on for 11 years?) solves nothing?

The main cause of the Second World War? The First World War.

And here is David Cameron: "This was the extraordinary sacrifice of a generation. It was a sacrifice they made for us, and it is right that we should remember them." 

Perhaps it is enough to remember that this generation was sacrificed by its own military and political leaders.

Perhaps it is also worth remembering that the First World War was 100 years ago. What about the Boer War, the Crimean War? Should we still be commemorating them? And their careless, cruel and incompetent "sacrifice" of more young lives?

If this is the best that the UK government can come up with to re-run the "bread and circuses" effect of the Olympics, it does feel a lot like that scoundrel's last refuge.

Prophet Of Loss

I guess you never forget the first paper you worked for... and it looks like that paper hasn't forgotten me entirely.

It was great to see a mention of "Like A Flower" on the website of the Northamptonshire Telegraph, the place where I started to learn my journalistic craft a few decades ago.

Of course, in those days (and up until recently) it was the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph. But now it appears only weekly.

I still remember my first day in the newsroom and being taken on a tour of the place by the chief reporter. He led me past the sub-editors' desk and then through the double doors to the typesetting machines.

"One day," he told me, over the noise of the machines, "they say all this will be done by computers. And when that happens, it will all be over."

As far as the romance of working on newspapers is concerned, I'm afraid he was right.

Modest Success?

Here's the more modest version of the cover for my novel "Like A Flower", due out as an eBook at the beginning of November. Well, if I can't plug it here, where can I?

My publisher, Magus Digital, has worked long and diligently on both text and cover, and I'm grateful for all their efforts.

For a slightly racier version of the cover, see my earlier post Life, Death, Love... And Gardening. And for surprises both visual and verbal... well, you'll have to buy the book.

Trouble In Store

I've just been standing in the queue at my local supermarket. And from where I stood, I could not see a shelf containing anything but alcohol, chocolate or tobacco.

Oh, plus a stack of pumpkins... being sold to be played with (for Halloween) rather than eaten.

So, basically no food in sight. And nothing that would really do you much good from a nutritional point of view.

In fact, even if you ventured into the foodier sections of the same establishment, you'd be hard-pressed to find any food that was either fresh or good for you.

As renegade medic Dr Vernon Coleman once pointed out in typically pithy style: "If you eat crap in packets, you'll feel like a packet of crap."

And crap in packets is so often all that surrounds us. It's depressing.

Vile Memories

Jimmy Savile. Well, there's a lot of people coming out of the woodwork, so I thought I should do too.

I confess I always thought the worst of him, based on nothing but his public persona, let alone what he got up to in private.

Throughout long years of my working on newspapers, when he was a ubiquitous celebrity, Savile was one of those names you had to know the correct spelling of. Was it Savile or Saville? I always remembered it by the fact that the last syllable of his name was "vile".

For some reason, that always worked for me.

Life, Death, Love... And Gardening

The publisher has already produced several versions of the cover for my novel "Like A Flower", which will be available online from early November 2012.

The one pictured above is the "middle way" cover... there was one that was a bit more (unintentionally) suggestive and there is one that is not quite so explicit.

There have also been countless versions of the text. But I think that we're nearly there now with all the last-minute tweaks and changes. 

"Like A Flower" (ISBN: 978-1-909047-07-5) will be on sale, pieced £4.99, on Amazon (for Kindle) and will also be available on Apple's iBookstore and WH Smith's eBooks, and other websites. More details in a couple of weeks.

Screen Test

I currently have the luck of a man who should already be in north London but is driving through Brixton at night in incessant rain when his driver's-side windscreen wiper detaches itself and starts making its way down the side of his car...

This is not some Blackadder-esque hyperbole.... This happened to me on the way to a gig in Dalston... I wound down my side window and caught the wiper as it went past, but while I was doing that, I almost drove head-on into a car coming the other way... and all this BEFORE I actually played the gig...

I can't describe how uncomfortable it is driving while sitting in the driver's seat and leaning over to the passenger side to see through the only clear patch of windscreen... I not only had to do this all the way through central London, but also (after the gig) all the way back out of London and down the M23.

So is it worth doing this? The owner of Dalston Jazz Bar seemed to think so. He said Russ Payne and the Shark Dentists were the best band he'd seen in the past 10 years... Oh well, I'd better get the wiper fixed for the next gig...

Giant Shadows

I've had the pleasure of interviewing Simon Nicol (Fairport Convention, Albion Band) a couple of times. The last time we spoke was when he was playing with the Dylan Project.

Master guitarist Nicol explained the reason he gave up trying to write his own songs was because he listened to Bob Dylan's and decided he could never write anything as good as those, so what would be the point?

I've just started reading Haruki Murakami's three-volume "1Q84" and I think I'm feeling similar... What would be the point of trying to write the great novel, when one could never match Murakami's genius?

(Mind you, I did once manage to find a "third way", by paying tribute to Murakami in music... with a song called Murakami's Blues.)