Collected Poems by Gary Snyder, Library of America

 

A deep dive

 In being honoured by a mighty Library of America tome, Snyder finally takes his place on the bookshelf next to the great men and women of letters of the Twentieth Century. The credit for this collection goes to his longtime collaborator Jack Shoemaker of Counterpoint; and to Anthony Hunt, who recently (that is, since the turn of the century) wrote a lengthy study of Gary’s magnum opus, Mountains and Rivers Without End.

Students of Snyder will already be familiar with his eleven mainstream works, all here. What is interesting is the work that has gone into assembling all the fragments, drafts and uncollected pieces that I am sure even Gary himself may have lost track of in the long span of his writing. These curiosities are testament to Snyder’s generosity in proving content for magazines and handmade publications from the sixties onward.

The earliest of these come from Gary’s time at Reed college, and as he was only twenty-one years old at the time, might be considered juvenilia. He has made it clear in interviews in the past that he burned most of his writing from this time, so to get a peek at what he decided to save reveals his early path. The notes on the early poems help understanding and add depth to them. For example, ‘Escaping Cambridge’, which he wrote about mountaineer George Leigh Mallory, seems familiar, and is cross-referenced with a more recent version that appeared in ‘Left Out in the Rain’.  The later version has less of the poetic whimsy that flavoured the 1951 version.

Also worth a close look is ‘Hymn to the Goddess San Francisco in Paradise’. It was written in 1965, and is the poem closest in style to Ginsberg from the same era. Strange to read Gary using the expletives that to Ginsberg cam so naturally. Many poems collected from the mid to late sixties show how much Snyder took in on his Indian travels of 1962. Shoemaker’s notes are very helpful if you’re not up to speed on your Indian deities. The mid to late sixties were also the time when Gary was most forthright politically, engaged as he was with opposition to the Vietnam War and complaining to successive Presidents.

Gary’s longevity is a joy, and to read poetry from a span of seventy years is a fascinating exercise. However, with the passing of the years comes the sadness that he has outlived nearly all his contemporaries. There are tributes, eulogies, little poems saying goodbye to Lew Welch, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg and others. The most brutal and challenging is ‘Go Now’, in which he wrote about the death of his wife Carole Koda. It pulls no punches. It’s typical of him as a writer, and something he has done his whole life – he tells the truth.

The Youngsteiger has now become the great old wise sage of the American West. It has been such a life so far; so full of travel, people and rich in exploration. A brief time with this book reveals the great scope of his experience. There is hardly a corner of the world he has not seen, hardly a wilderness that he has delved deeply into. If he never writes another line, he will have done enough.

Why I will not be watching the Qatar World Cup

 About a year ago I made a decision that I was not going to watch the Men’s FIFA World Cup when the money-making circus rolled around to Qatar in 2022.

I can say right away that I don’t expect my decision to have the tiniest effect on the global juggernaut. I know it will barely make a ripple on the cess-pool of social media. However, my conscience tells me that I must do something.

 Much of the reporting of the World Cup prior to it opening has been a muddying of moral issues to justify complete participation.

I believe that to allow a country such as Qatar that has an appalling record in human rights and a mediaeval attitude to some members of society is morally wrong. A moral issue such as this is non-negotiable.

 Such arguments include one along the lines that the decision was made to award hosting twelve years ago and nothing can be done about it now. This is not true. The tournament would be an economic failure without the participation of the major TV watching countries. All it would have taken was for the national associations of England, Germany, Spain, Brazil and France to withdraw their teams and TV companies would have started to withdraw their support. A decision such as this could have been taken at any point in the last twelve years. The reason it has not happened is that football associations stand to gain more financially from participation and fear censure from FIFA. Money means that decision makers overlook the clear faults of the host nation.

Keep your head down, get the job done, take the money.

 A second theme of media reporting has been to approach the coaches for their opinions. The most common response is that they are not politicians, and must focus on football. The fact that they have all received extensive media training and are public figures in positions of importance is glossed over.

Coaches, too, fear time in the footballing wilderness if they speak out.

Keep your head down, get the job done, take the money.

 

It seems that the major TV companies are keen for content around this issue but don’t want to talk about the number of construction workers who have died, so interview footballers instead. The response from players that I have heard the most is that they are ‘just doing their job.’ This old chestnut is a favourite of countless people through history. ‘I didn’t realise I was persecuting people, I was just doing what I was told.’ You’ve heard it all before.

There is a suggestion that we shouldn’t put players in a difficult position by asking them difficult questions. I have very little sympathy. If someone gives Jordan Henderson a hard time, he can be consoled by the £7.2 million in wages he gets from Liverpool this year, plus his appearance fees for England. I’m sure he will get over it.

Keep your head down, get the job done, take the money.

 The tightrope walking from TV journalists has been a major feature. Gary Lineker’s careful positioning is something to behold. He will go to the games, because that is his job. He will report on the games, then return to his hotel room, and that’s it. He is fulfilling the terms of his contract(s) but no more. All admirable in its way.

If he really felt solidarity with the people who have been exploited, and the minority groups who are discriminated against in Qatar, he would donate his fee to a charity.

Keep your head down, get the job done, take the money.

 There are two things that I can’t stand about this whole charade. The first and most important is the way Qatar treats people.

The second is the joke that the Western media care at all about it. All they are doing are trying to make themselves, and everyone else, feel OK about it.

 

I will not be watching this World Cup because of the way that Qatar’s laws treat migrant workers like slaves.

I will not be watching this World Cup because FIFA is a corrupt institution that should be shunned.

I will not be watching this World Cup because Qatar has an inhuman attitude to LGBTQ+ people.

Football is a global game for everybody. It should not have been sold for the biggest bribe.

 Further reading:

 https://www.hrw.org/middle-east/north-africa/qatar

 https://www.amnesty.org.uk/issues/qatar-football-world-cup-2022

Football in the memory

 For most children in Britain, a question that follows ‘What is your earliest memory?’ is ‘What is the first match you remember?’ For some people, the two are inseparable. For most, unless memory is pushed back by a very significant match, the earliest game falls around the seventh birthday.

I would like to think I remember the 1978 World Cup, but in reality, there is no clarity there for me. The only thing that triggers synapses in the European Cup Final of the same year is the fact that the game started in spring sunlight and darkness soon fell around Wembley. I may have been sent to bed soon after kick-off, only to wake the next morning to the news of the result.

However, I do remember the 1981 League Cup Final and European Cup Final with crystal clarity. They happened in the spring that I was seven.

This memory prompted me to ponder how far back the living football memory can reach in the UK. My father remembers the 1953 FA Cup Final, the first he saw on a television. He will be eighty next year. There will be one hundred-year-old fans out there somewhere with clear memories of a game at the age of six or seven, so perhaps football’s living memory in 2022 extends back as far as the last year of the 1920s. As every year passes, those who witnessed football from that time slip away and the earliest remembered games creep forward. In the next few years, perhaps, there might be nobody left who remembers a pre-war game.

All this became relevant in recent weeks when I began compiling a list in my head of the greatest player in every position that I had ever known. It is a bread-and-butter staple of the football fan in idle moments. In times when your team is failing miserably, it provides reassurance. It is deeply nostalgic, dependent on age, and endlessly amusing as you can use so many parameters to frame your choices.

As messages flew back and forth between London and Perth, Western Australia, where my co-conspirator is based, it soon became clear that there were at least three different team sheets being compiled. Firstly, there was a team of players that have played in your lifetime. For any reasonable discussion (and definitely those fuelled by alcohol consumption) this limitation is important to maintain some sense of reality. No matter how well versed the ardent football fan might be after viewing hours of video footage, it is really difficult to honestly judge players who were active before you were born. It can be a real problem for some people, especially those in their forties and fifties, such were the long shadows cast, for example, by the Busby Babes, the Boys of 66 or the great Brazilian team of Pele and his golden shirted brothers.

For the record, I did compile a fantasy list of players born and active in any era, largely because I feel strongly that Pele should not be excluded from any selection. This, however, was reasonably rejected on grounds that we can’t ever really know what it was like to watch them. The total number of minutes of footage of Sir Stanley Matthews might only amount to five or six hours. So aside from the first list of players active in your life, the secondary list, though more fun, really might as well be an act of fantasy.

There was a third list going on at the same time of favourite players, which was even more outrageous that the fantasy time-travel line-up.

The thing to learn from all this guesswork that became clear to me is that a greatest team for a person born in 1987 will be wildly different to someone born in 1973. Growing up when I did, my team sheet was populated by British players on the early 1980s, with a smattering of Germans and Italians. It dawned on me that the great Barcelona and Real Madrid sides of the new century had completely passed me by. I had not even paid much attention to the late 1990s, despite Manchester United having a side containing the likes of Cantona and Scholes. By contrast, the team sheet of my slightly younger friend contained a more cosmopolitan mix of southern Europeans, and a greater depth of appreciation of the vast choice and diversity of wonderful footballers there have been since I stopped paying attention quite so much.

The two of us, digesting these differences, also realised that there are adults now who remember no football from the Twentieth Century whatsoever. My nephew, recently turned eighteen, is fantastically knowledgeable about football today and understands positions and tactics far more than I ever did. He has no knowledge though of what it was like to watch Zinedine Zidane command a football pitch, because he wasn’t born when it was happening.

Modern broadcasters were castigated for years for airbrushing out of history any achievements that happened Before The Premier League. In the early years of the Premier League, this was with justification, as there was a rich and recent history that was being ignored. However, all that history is more than thirty years ago. For the twelve-year-old football fan, it really is ancient history. A whole generation of football fans have grown up under my nose who only remember the Premier League, and think the League Championship is something that Norwich win every other season. If I slip up and call Europe’s second competition the UEFA Cup, I am met with blank stares. And they are not wrong. Football, like all history, edges ever on. It will not wait for me. Or you. Or even the little boy in London wearing a Ronaldo shirt, and regarding him as a miraculous old man.

Football before the Second World War has become the football of prehistory. It is understood, there is documentary evidence that it happened, but nobody is alive that can tell you what it was like.

Football from the fifties to the seventies, the era of huge nostalgia, is rapidly joining that previous era in a compartmentalised box opened only by the very old, who wish to breath the air of their youth briefly one more time.

And the eighties? You have to be nearly fifty to remember it all, so it too will quite soon be a time that is only referenced to explain why Nottingham Forest have two stars on their badge.

Don’t be sad. The techno gods will not be deleting YouTube any time soon.

Fixing the European Cup

 

In August 1964, Liverpool, as English Champions, travelled to a stadium called the Laugardalsvöllur in Reykjavik to place their first ever game in European competition. The opponents were Knattspyrnufélag, and Liverpool won the game 5-0.

In all respects it was a voyage of discovery in a time when international travel was rare for most people. The Beatles were opening up the horizons for people on Merseyside and had jetted into JFK the Februarybefore to start their own campaign of world domination.

The press reports suggest that it was a time of excitement and wonder, broadening people’s outlook and showing everyone the possibilities of international competition. English teams were rather late to the party, and the honour of being the first British team to play in Europe fell to Hibernian. It was only the great Matt Busby’s insistence and disregard for the Suits at the FA that forced Manchester United’s path to follow. The tragedy of the Munich Air Disaster was still fresh in the memory in 1964, and English teams had an uneasy relationship with European competition. Only when the victories came (from Spurs, first of all, don’t forget) did managers and chairmen really start to sit up and take notice.

What remains from the photos and grainy footage of Spurs and Liverpool is the delight of the new. English teams had started to realise that playing Burnley and Preston was one thing, but trips abroad to Bratislava and Belgrade were different and exciting.

For most British teams that qualify for the Champions’ League in the 2020s, playing a foreign team for the first time is now a rare event. Only newcomers Manchester City trouble the club statistician with the fact that they have never played a team before, and that’s because when Manchester United and Liverpool were making hay, City were skulking in the old Third Division. (In December 1998, when United were smashing their way to the Treble, City lost to York City in a league game).

For Manchester United (current troubles put aside), Chelsea, Juventus, Barcelona and many others, the Champions’ League money tree throws up year after year of fixtures against the same teams in the same super stadiums with the same theme tune and associated computer game products. In a way, the European Super League attempted land grab is not really needed, because with a few exceptions, the competition is a closed shop. The chance of the Maltese, Luxembourgish or Latvian champions ever playing at the group stage of the competition is almost zero. They have so many hoops to leap through that they know that they will never look forward to a group stage home and away moneymaker at the Camp Nou.

It wasn’t always like this. Until perhaps the ban after the Heysel disaster and the resulting domination of Italian club sides, there was a very real possibility of being drawn against a minnow and being bundled out. It happened to Liverpool, once in Tbilisi and once in Lodz. They were given equal weighting in the knockout draw, and there was no group stage safety net. To win the European Cup, you had to be wise to the possibility of an awkward trip behind the iron curtain to an unknown team. It is not hard to imagine how the preened show ponies of today would have coped with a visit to Bucharest, a stay in a hotel controlled by the military, and little communication with the outside world. Nottingham Forest took their own food, only to have it confiscated.

They were harder days, but fairer for the teams from smaller countries. They had a chance.

 

Is it possible to fix the European Cup in order to give all the true league champions a fairer shot at the competition? Of course it is. Money is the single factor that prevents any radical change. It does not mean it is against the law to imagine, though.

 

If I had the choice, I would scrap all three of the current formats of European competition. I would return the European Cup to a knock-out competition, competed for only by the holders and the national champions, and I would run it from January to May. It wouldn’t need to start any earlier than that because there would be far fewer games.

I would have a secondary competition, and would make it regional. It would run from September to February, and be open to the second placed team from each national league and the cup winners. Instead of a competition across the whole of Europe, I would hold four to six smaller regional ones to find local European champions. An Atlantic League could include teams from Scotland, Scandinavia and the Low Countries. A Mediterranean League could invite teams from Spain, France and Italy. A Saxon league could include Germany and all its neighbours. The winners of each league would be prestigious in their own right, and could play off against each other if money really was doing the talking and TV audiences wanted more.

 

A revised, purer Champions’ Cup could begin to redistribute players and wealth around Europe. Why choose Juventus, if there was an equal chance of competing by playing for a team like Feyenoord or Anderlecht? Perhaps players, pampered as they are, would choose teams not on the certainty of appearing on the biggest stage like today, but instead on the desirability of the city. Maybe in this utopian place, FC Copenhagen and Bologna would attract the talent. It is good to dream.

What of the regional competitions? It would do two things. Firstly, teams like Rangers, Celtic and Ajax would have a great shot at winning silverware. Secondly, it would restore some sense of purpose to Europe’s second competition, which for so long has been a token effort that no team really wants to be involved in.  

 

We can, and will, go on just as it is at the moment. In the next ten years, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern will appear in three finals each, Man City four, and Chelsea five. How exciting. I can hardly wait.

The White Ship by Charles Spencer

 

The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I's Dream by Charles Spencer

(2020). London: William Collins

 

Charles Spencer has written an unusual book about KingHenry I. It is unusual because it is unbalanced – the title suggests that it is about the sinking of The White Ship in 1120. In fact, it is a more general study of the whole period. I feel that it would have been more instructive to either adapt the contents slightly and write a whole book about Henry I, who is often overlooked in favour of William the Conqueror or Henry II, or to focus on the events of 1120 more closely. Perhaps the historical sources cannot justify a whole book on the sinking of The White Ship.

For an experienced reader of this period there is little that is new in the first five or six chapters, which explain the coming of the North Men to France and the establishment of Normandy. It also gives time and space to William the Conqueror. It is possible to give too much background information and setting of the scene. William took the crown of England fifty-four years before his grandson drowned in Barfleur.

What is useful is a broad-brush view of all of the stresses placed on the monarch at the time, and how the Normans were too successful for their own good – there were too many pretenders to the throne, and no amount of advance planning could avoid the struggle of the different claimants each time the throne fell vacant. Henry’s race to secure the throne on the death of William Rufus is well described, as are the great lengths that Henry went to try to establish his daughter Matilda as a recognised heir. Even Henry, as an absolute monarch, could not dictate from beyond the grave.

An interesting bit-part player in the drama is WilliamClito, son of Robert Curthouse, who was the strongest direct line descendant of The Conqueror. His early death strengthened the claims of Henry’s children and created the perfect storm of competing factions that led to The Anarchy that followed Henry’s death.

Perhaps there are two books here – one outlining how England became a Norman possession, and giving greater space to the lives of William Rufus and Robert Curthouse – and another that describes The Anarchy of Stephen and Matilda with the sinking of The White Ship as a starting point. As one book, it certainly covers a lot of history briefly.

Charles Spencer writes well on a subject that is potentially a muddle – there are four men named William and several queens and princesses called Matilda, so care and patience are needed to follow. It is handy to have Alison Weir’s guide to Britain’s Royal families to hand to refer to. His scholarship is thorough, and the bibliography extensive. He thanks Arabella Pike at his publisher for a lot of the structuring of his book.

This is a good book for a general reader, and a useful starting point for those interested in reading further.

The Way Home – Tales from a life without technology by Mark Boyle

 

It is quite fitting that I did not pay any money for this book. It is stranger and more appropriate too that I found it on a wall in an alleyway.

I walk to work every day, and my route takes me away from traffic and down a series of quite safe alleyways between rows of houses. There is frequent fly tipping that I have to dodge. On one such occasion in October last year I saw a pile of fly tipped bags, and the fly-tipper with a conscience had obviously decided to put the books he was throwing away visible on a wall so that someone might take them and re-use them. It was about to rain, so taking pity I picked one up. It’s certainly the strangest circumstances in which I have chosen a book to read.

 It turns out I knew of the author already. Mark Boyle has cause a stir in recent years, and I first came across him in an episode of ‘New Lives in the Wild’ on Channel 5, presented by the impossible-not-to-like Ben Fogle. At the time, Mark was experimenting with a life without money.

 As the title suggests, he has taken his way of living a little further and now lives in a house he built himself; with no electricity, running water, internet or heating other than wood fires. Here’s the rub: he’s not doing it to change the world. He knows that for almost everyone else it would be impossible and that we can’t all live the way he does. He’s doing it not to escape the world but to approach nature and live a more real life.

 He is particularly cutting in his criticism of smartphones and the way that many people seem to now be addicted to them. It must be an interesting perspective to stand outside and watch all of this happening. There are few other people who have divorced themselves more completely from the technology of the Twenty-First Century. He explains that it is all by degrees, and that life is a question of where you draw your line in the sand. For example, he uses a spade to dig the soil in order to grow food. I hadn’t even thought of a spade as technology, and yet it is a device designed to make our lives easier, just like almost everything else.

 His perspective also allows him to see some of the hypocrisies of people’s behaviour. He notes wryly that when he was an eco-warrior running a health food shop he sold vegan products to happy customers which was shrink-wrapped in plastic. The food they were eating, although vegan, was factory produced and imported from another country.

 There is an ambiguity about money in this book. His progression from ‘No-Money-Mark’ to a person rejecting technology brought publicity, a column in The Guardian and requests for interviews. He seems to have stoically replied by letter, and written in pencil. However, there are frequent references to evenings of craic and beer, so it must be assumed that he either has generous friends with whom he exchanges work or food for favours, or that he does spend some money.

 He is a frequent reference of previous thinkers on ecology and it is good to read that he has a deep knowledge of Thoreau, Wendell Berry and others. I will certainly be looking up Aldo Leopold, who I was unaware of before. There is a good Further Reading list at the end of the book.

The final irony of this book is that he hand-wrote it by candlelight, but realised that unlike Wendell Berry (whose wife types his manuscripts, an act of love) he could not impose on anyone to type up his book so he compromised and sat for seven days to prepare his manuscript for publication by word-processing it.

But then life is a series of compromises.

A fascinating and thought-provoking book. I’m glad I found it.

George V Never A Dull Moment by Jane Ridley

 

The last major appraisal of the life of George V, the grandfather of the present monarch, was by Kenneth Rose and published in 1983. The time is right for a reappraisal, as Rose and his most significant predecessor Sir Harold Nicholson were both mindful of the opinions of the surviving members of the royal family. Nicholson’s book in 1952 was censored in part.

 

Jane Ridley is a skilled and entertaining biographer who has already tackled the life of Edward VII, George’s father. This new study draws extensively on previous work but has the advantage of a longer period of hindsight. Only the present queen remains of anyone who knew George.

A valuable source not available in the past is George’s personal diary. As a naval man it is not a reflective journal, more a record in list form of the people he met and the thousands of birds that he shot when visiting the Great Houses of England.

 

So what is there to learn about this king, who oversaw the First World War and the Great Depression? It seems that previous history has been unkind to him. Most people regarded him as a dull and uninspiring man. Jane Ridley suggests that ‘normal’ may be a better adjective than ‘dull’, and that this image was intentional. In turbulent times Britain needed a steady, calm king and it was lucky that George was able to fill this role.

Many of the significant events of the first half of the Twentieth Century that are usually attributed to politicians have George’s influence. Particularly noteworthy is the way that he influenced the career of James Ramsay MacDonald. Privately George’s politics were that of a Tory country squire, but it seems that he didn’t let these views affect his impartiality in matters of national importance. Ramsay MacDonald was the first Labour Prime Minister, and developed a good relationship with his monarch. When he should really have resigned from the head of the National Government he was encouraged to remain in place by George, and to continue to steer a largely Tory cabinet.

 

Jane Ridley makes it clear that this book could have been a double biography – Mary, or May, was George’s lifelong companion. She had been engaged first to Eddy, George’s troubled older brother. However, it is wise that George was the focus because there simply isn’t enough information about Mary to justify half of this book. Some interesting revelations emerge. Mary was a kleptomaniac, and responsible for many of the riches currently enjoyed by the House of Windsor. She was acquisitive in the extreme. It was not by accident that some of the Romanov jewels ended up in her hands.

In her later years Ridley shows how vital May was for George, and how she perhaps was the first modern member of the royal family who knew how to manipulate her limited influence to maximum affect.

 

The poor relationship between Hanoverian monarchs and their children has become quite a cliché. George was the father of David (later Edward VIII), Bertie (George VI), George (Duke of Kent), Harry (Duke of Gloucester), Mary (The Princess Royal) and Johnnie.

It seems that George had a great affection for his children, in contrast to many of his ancestors. His relationship with David deteriorated rapidly in the 1930s, but prior to the distress caused to George by David’s liaison with Wallis Simpson, he was nurturing and tried to prepare his son for kingship. He was a kind and generous father to Bertie. The only dysfunctional relationship was the one that George and May had with their youngest son, John. They distanced themselves from him and only saw him occasionally. Ridley suggests that his early demise may have been a relief for his parents. It is a sad chapter in their lives and easy to impose twenty-first century values onto the situation when George and May were Victorian.

 

George’s early life is particularly well written, and goes a long way to explain how he was shaped by a poor education and unloving parents. After the death of Eddy and the realisation that he was destined for the throne, Victoria became a prime influence on George. For nearly ten years her will was exercised and George was a compliant grandson. However, the appalling education he received was the most significant factor that limited him in later life.

 

The last years of his life were tinged with sadness, and Jane Ridley has presented his declining health well. Tobacco was the main killer, in a time when there were few pointers to the effect that smoking had on health. Indeed, one measure that George had of his recovery after major surgery was that he was able to smoke a cigarette. His sons were similarly cursed.

 

George emerges from this latest reassessment of his life slightly better than before. His noisy charm, love of his family, and careful diplomacy have been reaffirmed. It is a thoughtful portrait, and worthwhile as it adds colour and depth to the first half of the Twentieth Century.