Kris in Concert

About 2 years ago, I saw Kris Kristofferson performing in London, in a concert where he had no band, nothing except his guitar and one of his daughters singing a few songs with him.  A very simple concert, for just one night.

It was a moving scene, this man on his own on stage, looking thin , greying, and  clearly getting older and more fragile.. with his guitar.  He talked about his days in England, how he went to Oxford and how he had boxed, there and sparred with Henry Cooper. .

I found the whole experience both wonderful and sad. I remembered my youth when I first heard many of his songs like Sunday Morning Coming down, the Preacher, Jody and the Kid, Bobby McGee.. And it was rather melancholy to think how many years had passed.
Kris’ voice is a bit “on and off” at times, as he has aged.  He doesn’t believe he is a very good singer, and has referred to himself as sounding like a bullfrog, but on that night he sang very well.
From the point of view of enjoying his singing, it was a great experience.  Kris gave value for money. I can’t remember offhand how long the concert was, but he had no support act and sang for about 2 hours I’d say.  When he left the stage, he came back and did an encore of 4 or 5 songs, taking requests from the audience.. And before he finished he shook hands with everyone in the front rows whom he could reach from the stage..  Like most “older” country singers that I’ve seen, he clearly feels that he should put in a good and reasonably long show, and that he should not ignore his fans or short change them. 
In spite of the melancholy, it was lovely to see  him.

Dorothy Sayers Part III

Some years into Dorothy’s marriage, Mac’s health and psychological problems began to make him very difficult to live with. He was getting older and his physical ailments made him bad tempered and by now, Dorothy was working extremely hard, earning a comfortable living with her writing. She gave her up her day job, in advertising, but took on more writing commitments. She overworked, but was still trying to be a good wife, putting up with Mac's moods, cheering him up and keeping him in comfort now that he was no longer able to work. But their relationship deteriorated to the point where she considered leaving him. In the end, after thinking things over, she decided to stay in her marriage, but it was clearly a compromise with her looking after him, rather than a close relationship. She concentrated more on her work, and spending time with friends in the same line of writing. She was writing longer and more “novelistic” works, and eventually she abandoned detective fiction and Lord Peter, in favour of translating Dante’s works into English, and writing many plays on religious themes. She became more involved in church work, discussing theology with friends who were also religious, and she became a church warden in St Anne’s Church Soho, which provided a religious refuge for “intelligent and unorthodox” people who were interested in Christianity. Her later life was not in personal terms all that happy. She tried to be a good mother to her son. Mac finally legally adopted him and Dorothy while she did not take him into her home, spent time with him and watched over his upbringing and education.She was able to send him to a good school and he went to Oxford. He found out that she was his natural mother, and there was some strain in their relationship. They remained in contact but were not very close. Mac died in 1950, and Dorothy sincerely mourned him but their marriage had not been a great success overall. She devoted herself to her work all the more. She had grown plump since her marriage and as she grew older, she enjoyed food all the more. She smoked, she never tried to diet and it impacted on her health. She overworked, and pushed herself too hard. Just before Christmas, 1957 she went up to London from her home in Essex, to do Christmas shopping and to see her own portrait in the National Gallery.">On coming home, she seems to have had a coronary thrombosis, and was found dead the next day. It was only after her death that most of her friends found that she had a son… she had kept her secret well. I’ve always liked Sayers’ works, and read all the Peter novels as a teenager. I admit that I find some of them rather too snobbish, and I find Harriet Vane, the detective story writer whom Peter falls in love with and marries, a tiresome figure. Sayers was accused of snobbery and anti-Semitism.  Her first novel, Whose Body, has as victim a Jewish financier who is kindly portrayed, but there are occasional remarks in her books which betray a somewhat anti-Semitic frame of mind. Some critics accused her of being “over literary” and of making attempts to “write a real novel” rather than a crime story but not being very good at it. She was accused of confusing a “fancy literary” writing style, with literary talent. Still others have attacked her later works, particularly her translation of Dante. But I think that the books speak for themselves. I still enjoy many of them - including her works on religion and feminism…Her Peter novels are still in print and read by millions. Some of the novels have been made into TV serials. Ian Carmichael played Lord Peter In the earlier adaptations in the 1970s. He was a very keen fan and tried his best to get all the novels made into TV shows, but only the pre Harriet novels were done. In the late 1980s, another set of the later novels were adapted, with as Edward Petherbridge as Peter and Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane. However the final novel Busman’s Honeymoon, while it was made into a film, has never been seen in a TV version. Jill Paton Walsh has written 4 “post Sayers” Wimsey novels, with the approval of the Sayers estate and these have met with some approval from fans. Two of them were based on Sayers’ writings, particularly her plan for a novel in 1937. She had started one, to be called “Thrones Dominations” but did not complete it. Walsh finished it and then wrote 3 more, “Presumption of Death”, “The Attenbury Emeralds “(based on Peter’s first detective case) and “The Late Scholar” set in an Oxford college.

Dorothy Sayers Part II

Dorothy’s work in advertising was the foundation for a later novel, Murder Must Advertise... She was working as a copy writer, a job which she loved at first, and enjoying a good social life.

Shel Silverstein - writer, musician and cartoonist

Shel was born to a Jewish family in Chicago, Illinois, in 1930. He had an extraordinary talent for writing and for drawing cartoons. He went to University, in Illinois and then into the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Roosevelt University. In the early 1950s he was drafted into the army and he served in Japan and Korea. He honed his drawing talents during his army service, in one of the army magazines. After leaving the military, he became a cartoonist for Playboy magazine and began to achieve a measure of fame. He became friends with Hugh Hefner and lived at the Playboy Mansion. He wrote poems for children and then began to write music, producing an enormous body of songs, mostly country, which have been recorded by numerous artists including Dr Hook, Bobby Bare and many others. Many of the songs have louche a or double meaning lyrics, yet he was also capable of writing sweet and sentimental books for children. He wrote one of Johnny Cash’s best known songs, A Boy Named Sue. He wrote most of the songs on Dr Hook’s early albums, before they turned from novelty and country influenced music to pop. Shel never married and was something of a ladies' man...but he had 2 children, a daughter who died as a child (Shoshanna) and a son Matthew. He died in Florida, in 1999. He is a very prolific writer, and his songs have been deservedly famous, such songs as “Sylvia’s Mother”, “Cover of the Rolling Stone”, “Ballad of Lucy Jordan”, “the Mermaid,” and many more- too numerous to mention. One of his funniest poems for children is Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout, would not take the Garbage out." He interests me because he is such a strange man, in some ways confident and witty, but almost childlike in his love of music and “magic”. He often gave writing credits to people who were just around when he penned a song, and felt that it was petty to argue about “who wrote what”. He recorded some of his own songs, but his voice was not exactly pretty and mostly, his songs were performed by others. Some of his funniest songs are the ones he recorded himself, such as “A Front Row Seat to Hear Old Johnny Sing” (about Johnny Cash) or “Stacy Brown Got Two” (about a very lucky man) and “I got Stoned and I missed it” (a cautionary tale about taking drugs). He wrote songs for "The Old Dogs" a supergroup formed by Waylon Jennings, Bobby Bare, Mel Tillis and Jerry Reed, when they were older.. who performed comic songs about the funny side of getting older..

Dorothy Sayers Part I

Dorothy L Sayers, translator, writer, poet and detective story writer, was born in Oxford in 1893. Her father was a Church of England Clergyman who encouraged his only child to develop her great gifts of intelligence and imagination. She grew up in the Fenlands, when her father went to a parish there, very much isolated from children of her own class. She was mostly in company with adults, who fostered her tendency to be proud of her own cleverness, priggish and a little intolerant of others. She loved music and reading.. and clearly was a child who would benefit from a good education.As a girl, she was sent to a good boarding school, to prepare her for the Oxford exams, and she hoped to have a career - at a time when it was not common for middle class girls. She was rather a misfit at boarding school, being fonder of her studies and music and the drama than games, but she was reasonably happy and entered Oxford in 1912. When World War One broke out, she toyed with the idea of doing war work, but instead remained in college. She graduated with First class Honours, but at that time women were not allowed to take their degrees. After college, she worked briefly as a teacher but disliked the work. She found children hard to relate to and she felt that her brain would “get rusty” from working at this level. She returned to Oxford preferring to work in publishing than to stay as a teacher. She became an apprentice with Blackwell Press (Now a very famous publishers) She was to learn the job, from the ground up, and she lived in the city for 2 years. However, while she enjoyed working in Oxford, in the academic atmosphere, she fell in love with Eric Whelpton, a young man who had been injured in World War One. He was friendly with her but did not return her love. Working in publishing became unsatisfying when Blackwell’s took to publishing mainly textbooks and Dorothy had no outlet for her creativity. She had continued to write poetry and had some published. She also translated French poetry and kept up her intellectual interests. Eric Whelpton had set up a scheme for a school in France where English boys could go to learn French. Dorothy went to France with him as his secretary and organiser. She enjoyed the work and the French atmosphere. All her life she was to see France as a place of sophistication and charm. The secretarial work was light and she read many detective stories, soaking up information that would help her to create her own detective. She wanted to write a detective story because “that was where the money was". Her relationship with Whelpton however did not progress and after a time, she returned to England to try and find work there. Whelpton had by then become seriously involved with another woman. Dorothy tried teaching again, and made a bare living doing translations of documents. She published some poetry, but the struggle to earn a living was paramount. She lived in Bloomsbury and while she was herself naturally conservative minded she mixed with the Bohemian and left wing set there at times. Life was difficult and she almost gave up on living in London, and taking a permanent teaching job...Mixing with people in Bohemian London, she fell in love with another writer, John Cournos, a young man some years her senior, of Russian extraction. He refused to marry her, saying he didn’t believe in conventional marriage. Dorothy was soon deeply in love with him and tried to persuade him to change his mind. He rather exploited her affection, staying in her flat while she was away, and coming round for meals. But the relationship was not going anywhere and after some time she broke up with him. He went back to America. On the rebound, she entered into a light affair with a young man who was not intellectually minded, who sold motors for a living. (Cournous would later become the model for Philip Boyes, a character in her novel, Strong Poison). She was writing her first “Lord Peter” novel at this stage “Whose Body”. She then secured a job in advertising, which she enjoyed and had a talent for, and which was a new field for women at the time.

Snippet From Rough Music By Nadine Sutton

The band were fond of “winding down” after gigs or a tour by partying, drinking, taking drugs, and crazy antics.  There were a few hotels where they’d been banned, because of behavior like trashing rooms or engaging in fist fights or mock gun battles.   But the “over the top” antics had happened less often.  They always took their music seriously and it was harder to play well, when stoned, as your brain slowed down.  That was enough incentive for them to drink less and to cut down even on the soft drugs... 

They had always enjoyed themselves and there were girls hanging round after each gig, to be bedded.  All the same, Jeff had been one of the quieter ones, and he had tried to keep their “crazy” behavior under control.  He usually stuck to one girl at a time, and mostly, he had picked a groupie or fan and taken her to his room to screw her in private.   So the weekend bender they’d had in Texas as the end of the last tour had been a little out of the ordinary.  They had been invited by a wealthy fan, who had a large house there.  They had spent three days, with a bunch of girls and a few fans, who had been around at the right time to get an invitation, and half the rich guy’s family. 

Brandon was then due to go home to spend a couple of months with Angela.  She had then near to giving birth to their second child, and he had wanted to prove to himself that he wasn’t completely tied down in the boring life of marriage and fatherhood, not just yet.  When he had arrived in Boston and found a very pregnant Angela, and his little girl, waiting for him, he’d felt somewhat ashamed.  It had been fun, the party, at the time, but later on, it seemed a bit crazy.

Invented names

I’m writing a short blog today on unusual and invented names. One that I came across recently was “Uma” which was apparently invented by the writer Robert Louis Stevenson. The meaning is unclear. But it is the name of the film actress, Uma Thurman. However another novelist invented a name which did become very popular for some time. Thelma was created by the Victorian novelist Marie Corelli... who seems to have modified the Greek word “Thelema” meaning wish or will. It appeared in one of her novels and was well liked in the earlier 20th Century. Another name used by Corelli is “Mavis” which also became very popular though it has now gone out of fashion. It is based on a name for the songbird, the thrush and is sometimes confused with the Irish name Maeve. Another literary name, Oriana, was invented by Elizabethan poets as a name for Queen Elizabeth I. It was also used by Tennyson in a long ballad poem but has never become popular in England, though occasionally used in France – the French version is Oriane…It comes from the Latin and means dawn or Sunrise.  There is a character called Oriane in Proust's novels...Wendy is a name that was liked, but now may seem bit old fashioned. It was invented by the playwright J M Barrie... based on a child calling him her “Frendy-Wendy”. It was used in Peter Pan and also popularized by the poet John Betjeman, as the name of a little girl in one of his poems about children playing.

Alan Jackson

Alan Jackson was born in Georgia, in 1958...and is a well-known neo traditionalist country singer. His family was not well off…. He sang in church as a child and his family listened mainly to gospel music. He started his own band, soon after high school and married... In the mid-1980s, he and his wife Denise moved to Nashville. He found a job in the Nashville Network’s mailroom and his wife happened to meet Glen Campbell… Glen helped him to get a start in the music business.He got a contract with a record company... and as the 1990s progressed, he became more and more successful. In the early 2000's he and George Strait performed "Murder Down in Music Row" which was something of a cut at the record company executives who were moving from "real" old fashioned country music to commercialised pop and rock country which had little to do with the genre's orgins.

Rupert Brooke Poet Part I

Rupert Brooke was born in 1887…to William Brooke, a schoolmaster and his wife, who was a school matron. The family was respectably middle class. His father moved to a post at the famous public School, Rugby, before his birth and Rupert was born there... His father had a post as House master. Schools were divided into houses. They ate and slept in these houses and the head master of each house would be expected to provide something of a home atmosphere for them, during their school days. Rupert was intelligent and grew to be a good looking young man. He had 2 brothers and one sister Edith. Rupert went to a preparatory school, which was designed for younger boys, to prepare them for public school. Then he went to Rugby. He was interested in literature and drama and wrote a thesis on Elizabethan drama, which secured him a scholarship to Kings College Cambridge. When up at Cambridge, he was keen on Socialism and joined the Fabian Society. He also became friends with women who were the first generation of women to study at University.He had had several romantic relationships with boys and young men and seems to have been bisexual. His longest relationship with a woman was with Katherine “Ka” Cox... who was the daughter of a liberally minded stockbroker who had encouraged her to go to University. Rupert was determined to be a writer and on leaving Cambridge, began to write poems.. being part of the "Georgian School"..He fitted in well with the romantic image of a poet, especially one who wrote about rural life. The Georgian school of poetry covered traditional subjects and was more traditional in its writing style than the new school of Modernists who cultivated simplicity, directness and such style as free verse. Brooke’s poems were occasionally mildly shocking in their subject matter and soemtimes slighty "black comedy" but he was not an innovator.

Paul Scott writer

Paul Scott was born in London in 1920, the son of a Yorkshire man who had a business as a commercial artist. Paul was sent to a good private school but his father’s business failed when he was 14, and he had to leave. He took office jobs, to try and earn a living... But he had no real qualifications- . He learned book keeping but tried to write in his spare time. War broke out in 1939 and Scott was conscripted… He went in as a private soldier but was commissioned in 1943. He was sent to India, and was working in the Intelligence Corps, ending the War as a captain.
He found India overwhelming, the heat, the poverty and the masses of people shook him. But he grew to love the country and he was appalled by the racist attitudes of the British who were in the Civil service and army there…. India gave him inspiration to write. He had married early in the War and was to have 2 daughters. After the ending of the War, he took a job as accountant to two small publishing houses and moved on to a literary agency. However, his own early novels did not do very well… Most of his novels were set in India or the East and covered themes like male friendship, and racial issues. He believed that he had a “great novel” on India within him but was forced to try and keep on earning a living. In 1964, he made a visit to India for the first time in many years. He hoped it would inspire him. He had suffered form ill-health for some years and while he was glad to see the Independent India again...he was by now a very heavy drinker. His wife had always been loyal to him, but as time passed, his drinking and occasional bouts of violence led her to separate from him. Paul wrote the first Volume of the Raj Quartet in 1964, after his return from India (The Jewel in the Crown). It had some resemblance to EM Forster’s novel about India, A Passage to India... in that it was about The British in India and centred on a possible rape. In Passage to India, Adela Quested, a young English woman who wants to “see the real India”, goes to visit the country. She tries to be friendly with the Indians and is bothered by her fiancé’s dismissive attitude to them. She then believes that she has been sexually assaulted in a cave, on an outing... And her initial reaction is shock and horror.
 Scott’s novels are set during World War II, and again centre on an English woman and her interactions with the Indian people. His heroine, Daphne Manners does fall in love with an Indian man, Hari Kumar, who has been educated in England and is anglicized. Because of the situation in India, it is difficult for them to find places they can meet socially. Hari feels he does not fit in, in his home country but he is looked down on by the British. To the Indians, he is too English..and to the British, he is just another Indian and not seen in any way as an equal. Eventually, they make love after a quarrel,... in a public garden at night...
 But they are attacked by some Indian men who rape Daphne. From this event, there are repercussions. Hari Kumar is blamed for it, though Daphne insists that it was not him who raped her... Scott’s 4 novels cover the War and its aftermath, coming up to the ending of “British India “ and the riots and killings that happened when India became independent and was partitioned.
The last Novel is called “Division of the Spoils." The conflict over the rape leads eventually to the death of the unsympathetic but intriguing Merrick, an Englishman in the police service…Merrick is of a lower class than most of the "British in India " and the police service does not have the cachet of the Army or the Civil Service. So when he meets the well spoken Hari Kumar he is angry and envious....The novels were published in the 1960s and 1970s, but were not that popular with the public though they attracted some critical admiration. Paul Scott was living in Hampstead at the time of the writing. He was working very hard, and his health was getting worse but he continued to labor on until his death..at the early age of 57. He wrote “Staying On” which was a sort of coda to the Quartet in 1978 and it was televised, drawing attention to his works.  It was set years after the end of the Raj, about an elderly English couple who had “stayed on” in India after independence... The husband Tusker dies, leaving his wife Lucy alone. The TV adaptation was well liked and led to the commissioning of a large scale TV Adaptation of the Raj Quartet which aired in the 1980s... It made stars of many actors including Art Malik and Geraldine James... Malik played Hari Kumar and James played Sarah Layton, the daughter of a colonel in the Army…and Tim Piggott Smith played Merrick…. The TV adaptation was shot in India, and was massively successful and led to a greater interest in India and in Paul Scott’s work. Scott's life was tragic in many ways, with his heavy drinking, leading to a break up in his marriage, and the long years of struggle before he managed to write his great work...

Philip Larkin Part II

Larkin started writing but many of his works were spoof semi-pornographic parodies of “girls school stories”. Critics have felt that he was at times trying to work out his confused sexuality and compensating for a certain lack of success with women. His home background had not been a very happy one, in some ways.  Although his parents were indulgent, they were not on good terms and there was a lack of warm affection in the household. He remained dutifully attached to his mother but she was demanding and difficult. His father had been domineering and had had sympathy with Nazism. Coupled with his shyness and awkwardness, this made Larkin very clumsy with women and also very reluctant to commit to anyone. When at Belfast, he started the series of affairs that went on for most of his life. He had at least 3 women whom he saw simultaneously, being unwilling to marry or settle for any one of them. The first woman was Monica Jones, a lecturer and he then started a relationship with Maeve Brennan, an Irishwoman who worked in Hull University’s library. She was a devout Catholic but in time, she became his mistress. He also began a relationship with Betty who was his personal secretary at the library, which continued for 20 years. In spite of his very “ordinary” middle class lifestyle, he seems to have stubbornly refused to “do the conventional middle class thing” and get married and have a family….. He wrote a couple of short novels at Oxford (as well as the spoof school stories)... and started to write poetry, under the influence of Yeats’ more symbolistic works… However in Belfast he began to find his own voice as a poet. He wrote of ordinary things, had a gloomy and pessimistic viewpoint and used slangy and vulgar language at times in the poems. He believed that the image of England as a rural meaningful place where there was a sense of national community was passing away, and would not come back...and he was sad about it. He saw the country as increasingly fragmented and empty... He wrote sadly about families... stating baldly that “They F-ck you up, your Mum and Dad”… the poem ends with the gloomy lines “Get out as early as you can.. and don’t have any kids yourself”….which seems to fit in with his own refusal to marry and have children.

Philip Larkin Part I

Philip Larkin is one of the better English poets of the 20th century... but is also famous for having controversial views and for his profession of Librarian. He led a very dull life, in many ways, working as a University librarian rather than anything more glamorous like a TV pundit or academic lecturer….He spent much of his life in the provincial university of Hull... (Unlike the older Universities like Oxford and Cambridge). He was born in Coventry in the heart of the English provinces and seemed to be born to lead a dull provincial life. His parents were Sydney Larkin and his wife.. They lived in Radford, part of Coventry. His father was comfortably middle class with a good job in local government. His mother was a rather difficult passively demanding woman. She was dominated by her husband but their marriage was not a very happy one... Probably this was why Philip was always reluctant to commit wholly to marriage or any woman. He had one sister who was a lot older than him. His father was very right wing and had a serious interest in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Sydney attended Nuremberg Rallies and sympathized with the Germans. He had swastikas decorating his house, and did not apparently take them down till War was declared in 1939. It was not a warm household and the Larkins did not mix much with friends or neighbors. But Philip seemed happy enough with his family, when young.  He went to grammar school and did very well, making friends and enjoying school. He loved Jazz and his parents were indulgent enough to buy him a drum kit.  He didn’t do well in his first exams at 16, but he stayed on at school and then passed his entrance exams for Oxford. Philip went to Oxford in 1940 when he was 18. He had poor eyesight and so was not able to join the army and was able to undertake a full degree course. Many of the male students were on shorter courses due to war service. He was a highly intelligent young man but was rather awkward and plain looking with a bit of a stammer. He made friends, including the novelist Kingsley Amis... But he was not very successful with girls. After college, he started to train as a librarian and got a job in Wellington Shropshire. When he qualified as a university librarian he got another job in a college in Leicester. He seemed to fit into provincial Britain of the 40s and 50s. She had won the War but had “lost the Peace” being left with enormous debts, suffering from poverty, bomb damage and a general feeling of depression. His father died of cancer in 1948, and Philp proposed to his then girlfriend, Ruth Bowman but their relationship broke up when he got another job at Queen’s University Belfast and moved there.