Here’s my first piece of self-advertisement. Miriam Obrey and I are due to read at The Red Parrot, No 46 Wine Bar, Presteigne, on the 2nd September, between 7.30 and 9.00. Not sure where Presteigne is – somewhere on those misty Welsh borders, I think? Miriam has written a wonderful sequence, giving voice to the various corbel carvings around Kilpeck church.
Am just finishing reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Thomas Hardy – much more succinct and insightful than any of the other multi-volume accounts? My immediate thoughts are 1) how snobbish the literati were until well into the middle of last Century – Hardy always seems to have been condescended to by publishers etc because of his Bockhampton upbringing as the son of a builder 2) how wonderful it was that he kept writing (and so profusely, richly) into his late eighties. (Such continued creativity anything to do with his continued sex drive, I wonder? He boasted about, and Florence Dugdale complained about, his overactive libido…) 3) How, far from “making nothing happen”, as Auden claimed, poetry/literature can really affect you into wanting to make changes…I can never read TH’s searing too-late poems of regret about having mistreated and ignored Emma for years without inwardly determining never to make the same kinds of mistake, if at all possible. Perhaps we really can learn from Literature, if only through imaginative empathy? Shakespeare’s Lear, Austen’s Emma – real examples to us all?