The Private Life of the Socialist Walnut

Oh dear! What book shall I read next. I have far too many open at the moment and I should be concentrating on just one. Actually I have just finished the Spike/Robert letters and have started on the proper Robert Graves Biography but so many other things are distracting me. That together with a whirlwind of social engagements this weekend (mostly courtesy of my daughter's friends it must be said) I am quite tired out, and then today I have been driving all over the North West trying to find a decent pie ... er ... actually not a pie but something actually productive in terms of what I am actually employed to do. If I said The Simpsons that might be too much of a clue as to what it was.

A financial advantage again this month so I might perrchayse one of those silvery, music-disk thingies again. I'll et you know when I've worked out how to get the needle on it and there will be a review forthcoming.

Duirt me leat go raibh me breoite

Two more books delivered courtesy of Sefton Library services – Dear Robert, Dear Spike – The Graves-Milligan Correspondence and Robert Graves : Life on the Edge by Miranda Seymour.

I am also most taken with Graves’ poetry collection called Fairies and Fusiliers which in every poem seems to sum-up the default image created in my mind by that title. All the poems are available online at that link.

I also have a poem of my own which came fully-formed in a dream – well maybe not quite fully-formed but it is a Limerick which is very unusual.

I went to sea with Dirk Bogarde,
And a man who looked like Dirk Bogarde,
A girl with a chimp,
A boy with a limp,
And another who looked like Dirk Bogarde.

If you stress it right it’s not nonsense at all. I suppose there aren’t many rhymes for Bogarde and I can only blame myself even if it did come from a dream. I could at least have tried for some assonance – getting the rhyme wrong dear! Spike is safe from any competition from me.

Six-Part Rice Pudding? I Was Coming to That.

Congratulations Ed.

Due to some financial advantage I took the plunge and bought a new copy of Godel, Escher, Bach at the weekend and felt heartened that it was worth it just for the preface to the new edition, which I read with increasing excitement at the up-coming delights of the rest of the book. I was then disappointed to discover that the book was misbound with the first 19 pages replaced with ones from somewhere near the back which means that as I bought it in a Bricks-and-mortar outlet I have to wait until the weekend to get a new copy or just get the money back. Well the only reason I got it from a shop was because I felt a bit of a cheat looking at the quality of the pages which had been criticised in the online reviews and then getting it from the internet. Anyway, return it and save 10 quid I think. I am slightly bugged that GEB being a book in part about strange loops, the missing pages might actually be part of the structure and I have kept looking for them elsewhere. I don't remember them missing in my first copy.

I am now reading Goodbye to All That, the autobiography of Robert Graves. I was, like one of the reviewers on Amazon; slightly worried that it might be a bit too literary for me but it is not. Instead it gives an eloquent and funny description of times long gone with a very contemporary feel. So far I have not been able to get a handle on how much of it is irony and how much straight talk. I will let you know if I feel like it. It might have sparked me into actually reading I, Claudius though of course the best thing that Robert Graves ever wrote is Welsh Incident. Though this page to be read in a good, Welsh Accent, I think it should say a good, North welsh accent which makes much more sense that using Richard Burton or Hannibal Hopkins who were suite donly for Under Milk Wood. I Can do a very good North Welsh accent having stayed many times near where Robert Graves used to stay in Harlech. Well it's recognisably Welsh rather than any of the stock accents which Welsh usually becomes. My mother could actually speak Welsh for some strange reason.