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...