On Natural Selection by Charles Darwin

Penguin Great Ideas : On Natural Selection

I know that as an extract of The Origin of Species I should treat this with greater respect - but my reaction was "enough already Darwin! I get it" - it loads repetitive example one upon the other seemingly without end - and at times he offers a summary that feels as long as the chapter which it claims to precis.  Unlike many older works in the Great Ideas collection it felt stylistically to be written for a different time, and of course in making the case for a radical theory the more evidence he could offer the better, where as now it is a common place and we don't need convincing.

Idyll by Michael Hofmann

Found in Selected Poems Michael Hofmann

The windows will reflect harder, blacker, then before,
and fresh cracks will appear in the yellow brick.

There is no milkman or paper boy, but presumably
the lurid pizza flyers and brassy offers of loans

will continue to drop through the letter box.
The utilities will be turned off one by one,

As the standing orders keel over or lose their address,
though there was never much cooking or bathing or

Phoning went on here anyway - the fridge will stop its buzz,
the boiler  its spontaneous combusting - till there is nothing

But the mustiness of gas. The dust will coil and thicken
ultimately to hawsers around pipes and wires;

Ever more elaborate spiders' webs will sheet off the corners;
rust stains and mildew and rot will spread chromatically

Below the holes in the roof, radiate from the raiators;
eventually mosses and small grasses and even admirable

wild flowers, hell and elder or buddleia, push their heads
through the chinks between the boards; a useless volume of books -

Who could ever read that many - will keep the moths entertained
generations of industrious woodlice and silverfish

Will leave their corpses in the clarty work-surfaces,
and a pigeon or two will hook its feet over the tarnished sink

And brood vacantly on its queenly pink toes.

Sankes with Wings & Gold-digging Ants an extract of Herodotus' The Histories

Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants (Great Journeys)

It is amazing how fresh this account seems given that it was written some 2½ thousand years ago, although how much that is pure Herodotus and how much the hand of the translators I can not say.

I find the mix of closely observed descriptions of geography, biology, and culture are mixed seamlessly with what we see as wild myths and fantasies (although it has to be said that Herodotus does at time qualify some of those more outlandish stories that he is recounting on mere hearsay).

One comment that tickled me was in the description of the habits of the Persians when feasting "They are very fond of wine, and no one is allowed to vomit or urinate in the presence of another person." The fact Herodotus feels the need to note vomiting in front of another person is not allowed seems to imply that the audience to which he is writing would not have taken that as a given!

I do recommend these Penguin sets of extract, this one is part of the Great Journeys, they are great way to cover a lot of ground.

Seele im Raum by Michael Hofmann

Found in Selected Poems Michael Hofmann

I could probably
just about have swung a cat
in that glory-hole -

Maybe a Manx cat
or that Cheshire's gappy grin -
and for a fact I could open the dorr

And perhaps even the window
without raising myself
off the plumded-in sofa

But what really hurt
was the rugby football
deflating from lack of use,

A pair of void calendars
and the pattern of my evenings
alone on the slope

Overlooking the playground
the pladdling pool
gradually drained of childern

The bullying park attendant
crows sipping from beer cans
as if they'd read Aesop,

Sun gone, a nip in the air,
the grass purpling
and cold to the touch,

And later on, in near darkness,
watching a man's two boomerangs
materialise behind him

Out of the gloom,
like the corners of his coffin
on leading-strings.

Vecchi Versi by Michael Hofmann

Found in Selected Poems Michael Hofmann

It's just abstract, you say: when I'm not here,
I don't exist and my perspectives are warped.
Nostalgia, the bloom of recollection -
a false spring ... You can't run your life
by these conceits like productivity agreements.

... It's a holiday of some sort.
The music on the radio is for kissing.
You go to visit your thin-lipped friend,
who happens to be a musician himself.

You drink wine and sit at a table
and talk. Some things you talk around.
Then you are on the same side of the table.
He haas some Durex, you let him fuck you.
- He was kind of lonesome, as the words go.

Grass by Robin Fulton

Found in  Planet 195

Isaiah called us a lump: ALL FLESH.
How many tons of it in his day
even the chosen sort? And if flesh
is subject to real resurrection
how wide will the next life have to be,
how many names in eternity,
how cramped the privacy of each soul?

IS GRASS: but what multifarious
great families our souls could belong to,
Fescues, Bromes, Couches, Bents, Filmy Ferns...
and cousins like Yorkshire Fog, Remote
Sedge. With Luck and elbow-room we'd flow
making of many of us one wave
stroking old hurts out of the hard land.

The Letters of Noel Coward Edited by Barry Day

The Letters of Noel Coward (Diaries, Letters and Essays)

I have been reading this collection, on and off, for about 2½ years - it has taken so long for 2 main reasons, first at around 750 pages it is a bit of tome and therefore doesn't lean itself well to being a traveling companion and the train is where I do most of my reading, second by its very nature the letters give a structure that is ideal to dip in and out of and as I got towards the end I have been trying to spin it out the way that you start to ration your sweets as you get towards the bottom of the bag.

Barry Day does an excellent job of introducing and bridging the letters, allowing you to place the letters in the context of Coward's life, but in a subtle way that gives the primary voice to Coward himself.  While it reveals that there is largely a continuity between the private persona and public personality and there is much that is jolly, witty, and delightfully bitchy, there are private moments of sadness and genuine heart ache which are moving.

Among the many many friends encountered through the letters I particularly enjoyed the insight into the lives of the Mountbattens, who Southampton claims as there own, which reminds me of the unfathomable decision of Swaythling Housing to rename Edwina House, where I lived with its associations with the glamorous and sexy last vicereine of India, Tyrrell Court after a local shop keeper, but that is, perhaps, another story...

Of the many works of or about Coward that are out there (which I haven't read) I feel sure that this must be one of the best romps through a life filled with incident and charm. If you love Coward you'll love this, if you don't love Coward, well I don't know what we are going to do with you... 

Revenant by Tristan Hughes

Revenant

This is another book reviewed in Planet - and I found it really powerful, I was caught up in it and found its narrative thrust made it hard to put down.

It is told through the voices of 3 childhood friends from a gang of 4, who are returning to the spot where the tragedy that broke up that gang occurred years before.  They also slip between their adult voices and childhood voices that they had left behind that day.  Sometimes the jump between multiple narrators can be clunky but here the strength of character of the different voices carries you from one to another seamlessly.  While it quickly becomes fairly clear what must happened that fateful day there is still a huge sense of suspense about it until the 3 comes at last both physically and emotionally to the site of where it happened.

There is much made of the fact that their childhood home was an island, and the definite boundaries that placed around their existence - however I think that almost all childhoods are lived on a metaphorical island. But maybe what the physical island did is force a rupture in the linear growth of the metaphorical island, as child our world is the home, then the street, then school, then the estate or town - the physical island mean that there came a point when to grow to the next level you had to leave the island altogether or remain trapped in the limiting geography of childhood, we could think of the writing of Laurie Lee where the boundary of "the valley" played the same role.

As the 3 return to face the event they have separately been on the run from we find that there are a host of other demons that they must face which are equal to the central event if not in fact greater than it.  Each one in turn faces some place that prompts a violent reaction - they have to strike out in order assert themselves over an event/a person who had got the better of them as a child.  As someone who moved a few times as a child, and even more so as a young adult, I got into the habit of leaving the unfinished business behind - which is ok as long as you never go back.  I remember a trip back to Barnet after an interval of years where as each stop on the Northern Line past the sense of dread built and built, when we had moved from Barnet I had encountered a sense of liberation but I now found that the freedom was a phantom.  What is needed it to look the past in the eye and then move on - if you simply run away you don't in fact get anywhere.

On a happier note, I started reading this book flying back from Aberdeen and got to the following quote as we were passing over Durham, where I will be going for a reunion in a month or so time, which made the truth of  it really strike home:
"It's funny, but once you've known someone for ages, like really ages, the hello bit's pointless.  If you've spent that much time together, the other time you've not spent together doesn't seem to count.  I mean, the second you meet it's like it doesn't exist, like it didn't happen.  And when you try to describe it it's as if you telling a story about someone else."
In the context of the book these words are spoken with a touch of ambivalence, but when this happens with friends from Durham (or Student Cross or lots of other places) for me it is a source of joy that the separation can melt away so easily and you are back united in as close a bond as you ever had.  

Solitude and Communion Edited by A. M. Allchin

SOLITUDE AND COMMUNION papers on the hermit life given at St David's, Wales


I sort this collection out because of the powerful quotes from it in the New Monasticism as Fresh Expressions
and in particular quotes from the essay by Mother Mary Clare SLG, for example the quote about St Anthony coming back from the desert, which I remark on in the review of New Monasticism again stands out for me. This collection, while over 35 years old seems to speak directly to the contemporary reality of the Church and it is telling to encounter it directly after the disappointing "Mission-Shaped Questions", in almost all the ways Mission-Shaped Questions disappointed me and left me feeling the Church was hopeless, Solitude and Communion delighted me and filled me with hope.
This is a collection while deserves a wider audience (although it seems I might of brought the last copy on Amazon - however some articles can be found in full if you search online) there is much that the approaches here can do that catch phrases and franchised enquirer course will never give the Church. 

I found within this collection a very personal encounter with themes and ideas that I have wrestled with over a number of years under the heading 'vocation' and I think this will prompt me to further reflection.  I think it should speak to the Church's own wider reflections on ministry, and raise the question of what the ordained within the Church are for.  The Church Times readers out there will have seen the recent articles on self-supporting or non-stipendiary ministry, I think one of the reasons why many SSMs are frustrated is due to the unhealthy concepts of ministry - we look too often on our clergy as group captains and social organisers and not as holy men and women "set apart" for the good of the Church and the world.  Mother Mary Clare SLG writes of solitude that it "is not a kneeling before God with folded hands of supplication, but it is a going into God and there abiding so that he may flow out through us."  It seems that the idea of the Church as Holy has very little creditability, within or without, the battles over ordination and the scandals over abuse make it hard to see beyond the worldly tarnish.  It is those who to, varying degrees, live the Hermit's life that live out the example of what the Holy Church should be - as has long be said of them 'separated from all and united to all' and this is a truth we need to see again.      
 

Mission-shaped Questions Edited by Steven Croft

Mission-shaped Questions: Defining Issues for Today's Church

Overall I found this collection a big disappointment - in many of the essays the level of scholarship appeared weak and the arguments put forward were little more than a string of buzz-words with out any depth.  Also I think that Steven Croft needed to take a stronger editorial hand as there were large sections of the essays that covered exactly the same ground as one another.

If you have ever read anything about fresh expressions or Mission-shaped Church then I wouldn't bother with this book as you are unlikely to find anything new here. There were two essays that for me stood out, unsurprisingly I guess were those that took a 'catholic' view on fresh expressions.  These were Bishop Lindsay Urwin's discussion on sacramental content of fresh expressions and Angela Tilby's consideration of the dialogue between Catholic ecclesiology and fresh expressions.  But if you have an interest in these topics I think you would be better off getting hold of a copy of Ancient Faith Future Mission: Fresh Expressions in the Sacramental Tradition.

Spookfish by Tom Fourgs

Spookfish

This is another book read off the back of it being reviewed in Planet. It is a collection of short stories, and is a mixed bag both in terms of quality and in terms of style and subject.

It is strongest when the subject involves the development of a psychosis building to an extreme act of violence - in these cases the writing is gripping and you are drawn into a vivid world - although it is out that is uncomfortable and disturbing.  The opening story of the collection is one such example, with a range of acts of mindless cruelty being inflicted on animals - it was a challenge to get through it but it was compelling and there was an air of something like the Wasp Factory about it - however perhaps it was a mistake to have read it on the bus on the way to church as it certainly wasn't not the ideal fare for getting oneself in the disposition to encounter the Holy Mysteries.

At the other extreme there is 'Banana Squirrel' which is a charming, although not brilliant, tale of Fluffy the squirrel, and could easily but the text for a colourful children' book - although it was read with a little tension as given the earlier stories I thought there must have been some gruesome twist coming - but it wasn't.

As is should be the case with shorts they left you wanting more and overall this is a great advert for the talents of a writer - I would happily read more by Tom Fourgs if he hit the standard of the best of this collection - and hopefully he will have the support and guidance of editor/publisher to give a greater level of quality control either to future collections of shorts or full length novels.  

If you meet Goerge Herbet on the Road, Kill Him. By Justin Lewis-Anthony

If You Meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him: Radically Re-thinking Priestly Ministry

It is not always a good idea to read a book simply on the basis that the title grabbed you - however in this case it turned out ok. The idea that you should kill George Herbert is borrowed from the Zen saying "if you meet the Buddha on the Road Kill Him" and calls to light the tyranny that a 'hero' of the church like Herbert places over so many clergy, whose self-understanding framed largely by their failure to life up to the invented ideal.

As is often the case the first part of this book, where we deal with the 'problem' is the most engaging, with an examination of the actual life of Herbert and the evolution of priestly ministry within the Church of England until today, showing even Herbert didn't live up to the Herbertian ideal and even if the ideal was perhaps in the past achievable it is now neither achievable nor even desirable.

However Justin Lewis-Anthony must be commended because the following parts of the book that look at the alternative do hold their own and are also concrete and pragmatic - too often a writer brilliantly elucidates a problem but leaves you ask - "so what now?".  By his own admission there is little genuinely 'radical' about what he puts forward, all of it is solid advice which one hopes is offered to clergy via various means. What we are given here is an orderly and accessible packaging of that advice - and I think this would be an excellent book for curates to read at the start of their third year, when the idealism of theological college has been knocked out of them but there is time to begin putting good habits in place to sustain them once they move on to an incumbency.

If I was to make one criticism - it is that Justin Lewis-Anthony in debunking Herbert point to the fact that he spend just 3 years in full time service of a Parish and so he could be seen as having only served in a 'honeymoon period' (although many would be jealous of this having found their own honeymoon period in a parish lasted slightly less time than the service of induction...) however he later sets great store in Bonhoeffer's work at the Finkenwalde seminary, yet this work lasted but 2 years before Nazi's closed it down, and so, like Herbert, it is just as problematic as a basis for sustaining the normal experience of long years of ministry.   

If I was to make a second criticism it would be that at time the writing is very heavy on quotations, it has the feel that the work may have began as an academic thesis, and this slows the pace somewhat and results in you missing out on Justin Lewis-Anthony's distinctive voice, which when heard is rich and insightful.

Having complained about the number of quotes I will end we two that touched me:
"Some wise priest once said to me... I have no problem in believing in the Church Universal... or in the Church Triumphant, those faithful saints in heaven; it is the Church Militant that causes me difficulty"  

Antine de Saint-Exupery (author of The Little Prince) "If you want to build a ship, don't summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean."