Bright Star John Keats

Many friends have been to see Bright Star, the film about John Keats directed by Jane Campion. I wrote a poem about it:

Dressing for Keats

Emerging from my rock of penury
with nothing
and with no-one to inhibit me
I dressed as a poet
and took the train to see
a film about John Keats,
dressing for his memory.

On the silver screen
the storytelling mistress
flung out her mat of mystery
embroidered with flowery stitches
fabrics lifting
to petal faces
in beds of blossom.

She played his songs
in voices soft like pastel palates
words of vigorous youth that note the ghostly spectre
then hit on trees and birdsong rising from the land.
These words lift hearts with every beat
they bid us fly upon the music sweet.



What did Keats think about the purpose of poetry?

His idea of ‘Negative Capability’ now appears under the heading ‘Theory’ in relation to Keats and his poetry (see, for instance, the Wikipedia entry on Keats).

The phrase appears in a letter Keats wrote to his brothers, George and Thomas, in December 1817. He discusses a number of experiences in the letter before he comes to the phrase, and it is as if he is following a thread that leads him closer and closer towards a definition of what he values in life and in art.

He has been to see a painting called Death on the Pale Horse which he considers a ‘wonderful’ picture, especially if the painter’s age is considered ( I assume the painter, West, was young). But the painting does not satisfy him:
'…there is nothing to be intense upon, no women one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality. The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth. Examine ‘King Lear’,and you will find this exemplified throughout: but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness.'

Keats goes on to relate another experience, this time it is a social one when he dined with a group of men, some of whom he was meeting for the first time. This experience also gave him food for thought about what he really valued:
'They only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to enjoyment. These men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, in their mere handling a decanter. They talked of Kean and his low company. ‘Would I were with that company instead of yours,’ said I to myself!'

These thoughts begin to coalesce as he brings the letter to a close and moves towards that phrase which is now counted as part of Keats’s theory:
'Several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.'

The Letters of John Keats, Vols 1 & 2, are available from the Book Camel.

In with the new

Before January passes completely from view I want to move the Book Camel blog out onto the track once more.

When the English author, Graham Greene, was having his long-standing love affair with Catherine Walston in the 1940s and 50s, he gave her a notebook diary each year in which he handwrote a quotation for every day of the year. Greene was obviously a very romantic fellow.

I was thinking about that endearing habit, and reading about Greene and Walston at the beginning of January and also wondering what quotes would be appropriate for the first few days of 2010. Here in the hills north of Melbourne the new year came in with a great rush of rain and a storm of thunder and lightning. A storm bold enough to wash away the old year and bring in the new. What words could describe that marvellous scene?

Dicctionaries of quotations offer up many possibilities for describing rain, thunder, lightning and storms. I liked Shelley, from The Cloud throwing up the echo of thunder:
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder...
Then his vigorous rhymes:
I wield the flail of the lashing hail
And whiten the green plains under
And then again I dissolve it in rain
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
That, I think, will serve quite well as my quotation for the start of the new year, 2010.

The book about Greene and Walston is The Third Woman - The Secret Passion that Inspired The End of the Affair. It's by William Cash and available from the Book Camel.

What's hot?

I don't have a lot of money to spend on new books these days. But I do like to keep up with new writing and the ideas going round. My solution is to spend money on a few subscriptions to magazines and journals that keep me in the loop. Add to this a glimpse at The Age book pages on Saturdays (minimal info there, alas), a free subscription to Readings monthly magazine and blessed Radio National (especially the splendid Book Show), and I feel I have my finger slightly on the pulse of our local literary culture.

Occasionally I will buy a new book if it's something I really want to add to my collection, and I'd love to be able to buy more new books, but I try to do my bit to support the new book trade by ordering them at my regional library which provides an excellent service. I find many of the titles I want to order in the Australian Book Review which is one of the magazines I subscribe to. Apart from alerting me to books I might want to read, I enjoy the quality of the writing in the magazine's reviews, essays and poetry. My other current subscriptions are to Meanjin, Island and Overland, all of which contain a variety of interesting writing.

I've subscribed to Meanjin on and off over the years and have been drawn back to it under its current editor, Sophie Cunningham. She's doing an excellent job with Meanjin which has been given a very pleasing new look and continues attracting some excellent writers and visual artists. The summer edition has just arrived in the mail and it's a lovely fat issue which promises hours of enjoyable reading.

The issue opens with a short essay by Chris Wallace-Crabbe in the 'Newsreel' section of the journal. Entitled Poetry and the Future, the piece explores the question, What can poetry do?- specifically, what poetry can do in response to the unhappy civic situation we find ourselves in today and a still grimmer future that appears to be opening up. For Wallace-Crabbe poetry's strength and its ability to influence its readers lies in its '...capacity to notice, and not to pass over the local or the familiar'. He offers a poem of his own, The Different Scales of Morning that ends with
Warm Gaia...grown sick of our
Casting the usual vote for selfishness
And flipping credit cards instead of thought.
This poet's keynote to the summer issue of Meanjin felt visceral as I read it on one of the hottest November days ever.

Chocolate Chip

I made chocolate chip biscuits for Orla's second birthday. The recipe is from the Aussie cooking bible, The Cook's Companion, by Stephanie Alexander. For all those who don't have the book on hand, here's the recipe.

Ingredients
125 g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
120 g roasted nuts (walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, almonds), chopped
170 g bittersweet chocolate, chopped
110 g softened unsalted butter
1/3 cup castor sugar
1/3 cup raw or brown sugar
1 egg

Method
Sift flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda into a large bowl. Add nuts and chocolate. In an electric mixer, cream butter, castor sugar and brown sugar until pale and fluffy. Add egg, then fold in chocolate mixture. Form into 2 logs about 4cm in diameter and wrap tightly in plastic film. Chill for 1 hour before baking.

Preheat oven to 175C and line a baking tray with baking paper. Unwrap logs and cut into 1.5cm thick slices. Place on baking tray, allowing room for spreading, and bake for 12 minutes. Cool on wire rack.

They're easy to make and they taste great. Stephanie adds that the mixture freezes well for at least a month. I substituted hazelnut meal for the nuts for the kids' party. That worked well too, but it makes the biscuits a little more crumbly.

Tis the season to be thrifty

What a gap I've had in blogging!

Now that Spring is finally arriving, and the footy season is finished, I hope I might get back into it with this small message that Christmas is coming along towards us and a shameless advertisement for buying secondhand books for Christmas presents in this era of austerity.

I was prompted to this thought by a list I read recently in an issue of
Zadok Perspectives, a magazine put out by the Melbourne-based, Zadok Institute for Christianity and Society. This handy list contains ideas for giving cheap, recycled, hand-made, but welcome Christmas gifts that do not chew up too many of our planet's resources. Good second-hand books are on obvious inclusion. Here's the list:

• Make a gift (make a card, frame a photo, bake some biccies, cook some chutney, collate a recipe book, write out a poem, bottle some jam - apricots are in season in December!)
• Give a voucher (babysitting, home made cake, a night at the movies)
• Recycle an old treasure (book, lamp, kitchen canisters, groovy retro plate)
• Pot a plant (take lavender, pelargonium or daisy cuttings, sow seed in a small pot ready to give away, prune and uproot an unwanted rose bush and give it to someone who'd love it)

• Reduce needless consumer spending (give a gift to a charity in someone's name, draw names instead of buying for everyone in a family, buy an edible gift and pay a fair price for it eg fair trade organic coffee).

You can also follow up with other suggestions at www.buynothingchristmas.org

My List

In some ways the last book I read is the one that influences me the most. That is, it influences my thinking, what I am thinking about at the time. Recently I read The Baader Meinhof Complex, by the German author Stefan Aust. That set me thinking again about the role of the individual in society and my own position as a subject in society and how one makes oneself into one's own subject. I've also nearly finished Peter Ackroyd's big biography of Charles Dickens. That book makes me think about the nature of the artist - that artist- and the contribution he made to the world of literature. What a man he was! And what a writer! It also has me think about the nature of biography as a form of writing, something Ackroyd specifically discusses in the book.

But when I think about the list of those books that have most influenced me I'm thinking of books that form the bedrock of my ideas. Books that shaped my world view and formed my taste for other books.

My list starts with The Bible. This is one of the first books I was introduced to when I went to Sunday School as a little kid. I particularly remember falling in love with a picture in the Bible which was the picture of Moses in the Bullrushes (see Exodus Chapter 2). As an adopted child I was undoubtedly predisposed to the image of a child being found by a protective person and it drew me into the idea of books as a place of refuge and comfort. I also loved fairy tales and comics as a young child. On Saturdays my dad took me to the Victoria Market where he bought me a few comics each week. I always chose the Classic comics which told the great european classic stories in words and pictures. These texts shaped my love of literature. My reading of the Bible persists. I'm always having to look it up to understand or write a poem and I have made a habit of reading the New Testament during Lent.

I first read War and Peace by the Russian, Leo Tolstoy, in my late teens. That book showed me how ambitious a novel could be and affirmed my idea that all beings were equally important in this world. It encouraged me to keep on questioning all statements about great men; great anything. Tolstoy makes plain the inter-dependence of all people. I read it again in a new translation last year and was astonished by its genius.

Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger showed me a funny, cheeky, voice in the world. I love all Salinger's books.

Monkey Grip by Helen Garner was the first book I read in the moment when I appreciated the full impact of the time and place in which it was written. I was working in a bookshop when the novel was published. It was eagerly awaited. I bought two copies and P and I sat on our front verandah for couple of days in beautiful summer heat, reading the novel side by side. Here was a voice from our generation, speaking the streets of Melbourne. That book set my temperature for finding out the books of my time in my own place.

T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets is another book I associate with reading with my loved ones. P and I went camping with our little girls on Mt. Kosciuszko one Easter. As we sat around the campfire the ABC radio broadcast a reading of Eliot's great poem. I treasure the memory of that time: the frosty air, the clear sky, the darlings, and Eliot's poetry:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.


These are books that have influenced me.

I invite others to give me their list.

Best Books- Carol's list

Louise got me interested when she told me how she'd written out of a list of the best books she had ever read and given it to a neighbour for a birthday present. She'd lost the list and couldn't remember what was on it but it set me thinking that I'd like to contact friends and ask them to set down those 5-10 books, more or less, that had influenced them most, or they most loved, or found most memorable (are all of these categories the same thing?).

Carol has already come good with her list, and with her reasons for loving these books.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. (Published 1866) Carol says: 'This was the first book I read where I was so aware of the subjective voice and thoughts of the protagonist. I liked very much the moral questions and dilemmas raised for Raskolnikov and his inward questioning...'.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. (Published 1939) 'Again I read this when I was very young and it was probably my first introduction to American literature. The theme is daunting- and presented a world that had not been so clearly delineated for me before. The author's voice is both urgent and compassionate. I was very impressed and after 45 years or more can recall the ending of the story with clarity.'

The Outsider by Albert Camus. (Published 1942) 'I identified with the outsider and liked, (although liked is not quite the right word), the detached voice of the narrator and the vivid, yet harsh, description of the landscape. I have read the book three times: I know bits verbatim: When I looked up I was aware of the indifference of the universe.'

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. (Published 1949) 'Again it is the quality of the writing: the description of the Northern African landscape and the theme were close to my sensibilities.'

The Tree of Man by Patrick White. (Published 1955) 'A great theme...and for me it made the rest of Patrick White's novels accessible. It opened up a whole new world of literature.'

World's Fair by E. L. Doctorow. (Published 1985) 'This story is told through the eyes of a young boy. He most passionately wants to visit the World Fair that is on in New York at the time and the story is about how he achieves this and of courses the story includes many aspects of his life experiences as he is growing up. The narration of this story is therefore simple but profoundly rich and satisfying.'

That's a great list. Thank you Carol. I liked all of those books too, but haven't read World's Fair.

I hope Book Camel readers might leave lists either in the comments section or email them to me and I'll make a feature of them. Carol's list came by snailmail and I'm very happy to receive lists that way too and then type them out. Or stop me in the street and tell me your list. I'll make a note of it.

As it happens Carol's list is all novels. But the books that have influenced you most might be poetry, or essays; philosophy, art, how to do things...what are your best books?