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snap Is no one but me allowed to define Englishmen dismissively with limits, Bloomsbury, Oxbridge? Nobody's Oxbridge - they take sides. Is no one but me allowed to remember establishment brothers on bored country Sundays, rushed, refined visits to Bloomsbury? To make a life elsewhere, submerged awareness of their habits and foibles, those different choices in different climes turned back on me? Culture without fuss, without narrators or steamers, or European hotels, without smart dining and conversations self-satisfied? Books damp or crumbled my thought free of pointless edicts in standard dictionaries whose compilers take port in an ancient hall? Here, I can spare this bookmark my father left in a book by an Englishman. I have halls enough, grounds enough. Flowers and words grow wild. Sally Evans http://www.desktopsallye.com http://www.poetryscotland.co.uk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Max Richards" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 7:22 PM Subject: snap: a bookmark A Bookmark The previous owner of this book used for marker this blurry snap. It seems to show from above a hotel pool, palm-trees, a white surf beach, long combers swelling lined-up for their beach assault, deepening blue beyond intensifying to a dark horizon, pale sky, feathery spread of cloud. The heads and pink shoulders of four sunburn-risking bathers can be made out. Someone's holiday, receding from that snapped moment into vagueness. The book? 'A Dance to the Music of Time', which for me so far begins in vagueness, characters stunted, noted by a dim narrator. Four pink Englishmen shoulder to shoulder stare from the cover. Holiday reading? disposable after merely killing a few hours? Yet the author laboured till twelve novels queue forever for their slow assault. I'm told they'll become an ocean I'll fondly swim in and even feel at home in. So be it. To think I once longed to be an Englishman, Oxbridge, Bloomsbury, a 'New Statesman' reviewer, toddling over constantly to Paris, Florence, Madrid, Granada. Dining in season on 'pheasants from the best estates', p'raps even helping slay them. Not missing the warm southern beaches of home. 'Don't go there', a doctor told me, certifying in Edinburgh I was employable in Melbourne. 'The heat will addle your brain. You'll never achieve anything.' How right he was. I taught the unteachable, Wordsworth in the sub-tropics, Pope to the haters of wit, Eliot to the enjoyers of their waste land, Hawthorne to the unhaunted. I lean over the dazzling balcony here, book in hand, classless, detached, dim, dismayingly free. Wednesday 21 January 2009 Max Richards Doncaster, Victoria ------------------------------------------------------------ This email was sent from Netspace Webmail: http://www.netspace.net.au