About Larkin

Dave and the schoolboys can get on with their party - this is going to be a politics-free blog.

Philip Larkin's letters to the unfortunate Monica Jones who waited for decades for the proposal of marriage which never came have been recently published.  And pretty gloomy they are too.  He was the librarian of Hull University and she a lecturer at Leicester.  Larkin seems to have spent much time bicycling around the countryside in the rain while she stayed at home looking after her mother.  All the same they are entertaining enough if dipped into at random.
This led me to look up Larkin's book on jazz.  It is packed with the entertaining comments he made while reviewing records for the Telegraph and required reading for anyone who has an interest in the subject. But is the introduction which reveals his own feelings i.e. that jazz was ruined by the coming of bop and Charlie Parker.  He goes on to say that he does not like modern anything - lumping Parker together with Pound and Picasso as examples of talented and influential people who screwed up their own particular art form. "It helps us neither to endure nor enjoy. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged; but maintains its hold only be being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power."
These words come floating back to me often when I am exposed to modern art.  I do not think that he is always right but I have come to believe that most of it is a load of crap. Comment.

Nastiness about politicians will resume shortly