Oh! Weakness of Joy

"Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,

With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,

I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn. "

Just this year I discovered the British poet John Betjeman and all his wonderful eccentric rhymes and playfulness. Betjeman was a contemporary of many of the poets I teach (TS Eliot, WH Auden), yet he isn't included in the Norton Anthology of British Literature. Philip Larkin said that "The quickest way to start a punch-up between two British literary critics is to ask them what they think of the poems of Sir John Betjeman. For while their author has attained nearly every honour open to a writer of verse in this country, his work and its reputation still evoke a remarkable variety of response here."

I want to throw the first punch in support of Betjeman's work, specifically the poem "A Subaltern's Love Song" (an excerpt from the poem begins this post, and I'll include the entire poem at the end).

Why do I like this poem? Let me count the ways: first, it's a comic love poem, and I love British humor (humour?!). Secondly, it rhymes in ways that invite me to laugh and bounce along with it, like a tennis ball gaily hopping across the surface of a grass court on a country estate in rural England. Thirdly, I love the ways the words feel in my mouth when I read it out loud. The diction is impudent and surprising: this is the only poem I've ever read to use the word "euonymus," and I love the line "Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand!" And lastly, there's the satisfying ironic twist of an ending. So read and enjoy--and lament that Betjeman, despite being poet laureate, isn't viewed as "serious" enough to join the Official Canon of British Literature as selected by Norton--or Longman. He's just too accessible, too much fun?

A Subaltern's Love Song
by John Betjeman

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,

Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,

What strenuous singles we played after tea,

We in the tournament - you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,

With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,

I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,

How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won,
The warm-handled racket is back in its press,

But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.

Her father's euonymus shines as we walk,

And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk,

And cool the verandah that welcomes us in

To the six-o'clock news and a lime-juice and gin.

The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,

The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,

As I struggle with double-end evening tie,

For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.

On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts,

And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports,

And westering, questioning settles the sun,

On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

The Hillman is waiting, the light's in the hall,

The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall,

My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair

And there on the landing's the light on your hair.

By roads "not adopted", by woodlanded ways,

She drove to the club in the late summer haze,

Into nine-o-clock Camberley, heavy with bells

And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,

I can hear from the car park the dance has begun,

Oh! full Surrey twilight! importunate band!

Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand!

Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,

Above us the intimate roof of the car,

And here on my right is the girl of my choice,

With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.

And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,

And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.

We sat in the car park till twenty to one

And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

Book Hoarding

I collect books the way my daughter collects shoes: I am the Imelda Marcos of paperbacks. Sometimes, when I don't have time to read, I browse used bookstores and gather books for a more relaxed future when there will be time (and indeed, there will be time, as Eliot says). If I don't own at least fifteen paperbacks that are on my "to be read" list, I get twitchy. Libraries are fine for the latest hardcovers, but it's paperbacks that I love to own, paperbacks that can be stuffed in a purse, tossed into a glove compartment, left on an airplane when I've finished.

And paperbacks are great for lending to others, although my friends are in default on many loans. And that's another reasonable excuse for hoarding books, for collecting multiple copies of my favorites: if one doesn't find its way back home, there's an insurance copy on the shelf.

Virtually Reading

Location, location, location. It's not just real estate, it's also about reading. It's an interesting question: where do you read? I read in restaurants (while I'm eating alone), in the car (while I'm driving, or at least in stop-and-go traffic), in checkout lines, in beach chairs, in gardens, on airplanes, and best of all, in bed. And since I'm a blogger, I obviously read on computers. But thus far, there's not much about the new electronic books (like the Kindle) that interests me. Do I really want to read a "device"? Sure, for long trips, it might be nice to slip one little electronic device into my purse instead of cramming a stack of books into a corner of my suitcase, but there are so many odd pleasures to the stack of books that I would miss: the search for paperbacks that can be left like gifts in airports and on trains when I've finished with them, the guilty pleasure in cracking a book's spine or turning down the corner of a page, and the opportunity to underline, draw smiley faces, or pose questions in the margins. I own books so that I can write in books. And writing electronic notes in the margins doesn't seem to allow for drawings and doodles, nor does it allow for the quirky pleasures of reading someone else's marginalia. There's a tactile pleasure to books, a physical presence that is seductive: I love the smell of old books; the feel of leather bindings; the heft of fat, meaty texts; the measuring of a bookmark that says "almost done now."

Increasingly, we're living in a virtual world of ubiquitous electronic communications. And the new literacies have their own appeal: I've e-mailed my college-aged daughter long, chatty missives far more often than I would have in the days of snail mail letter-writing; blogs offer a wonderful mixed media venue for sharing words and images; and at last night's high school Class Night, students and parents were received breaking text-message updates on the score and action of the Stanley Cup hockey final as the superintendent droned on and on.

But I draw the line at electronic books. While Kindles and their kin may offer convenience, like plastic gnomes (as opposed to those crafted from ceramic or cast iron), they have no souls.

In Defense of Trash Novels

“In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possible come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,

The child whose love is here, at least doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

I should still prefer the live dog to the dead lion…”

• From C.S. Lewis's "Lilies that Fester"

I've been thinking about summer reading and beach novels, and I've been wondering if I shouldn't buy a book cover to hide the washboard abs of the young man featured on the front of the latest book I'm reading, my first "summer-time reading." After all, English teachers are supposed to read Pulitzer Prize winners and Booker award-winning fiction, and I always wince a bit when asked "What's that you're reading?" when the cover of the book I'm holding is pink and the content is fluff. But then I remembered this CS Lewis quotation, and I realized that there are a lot of live dogs that I love: Watermelon by Marion Keys, Lucky You by Carl Hiaassen, Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, The Terracotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri, and Knave's Wager by Loretta Chase. And then there are the dead lions whose corpses I never want to revisit: Little Dorritt by Charles Dickens, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Prairie by James Fennimore Cooper, most of Catcher in the Rye and nearly every novel that Hemingway ever wrote.

So I want to start this blog by defending bad books, books that may have not been censored, but which have been mocked and dismissed. This summer, Iwhile I'll read some classics and prize winners, I also plan to take a bad book to the beach, tuck a trash novel into my purse, and curl up on the couch with a really predictable bit of banal writing. And I want to post the "Readers' Bill of Rights" as set forth by Daniel Pennac in Better than Life:

Readers' Bill of Rights
Allow yourself...
1. The right not to read.

2. The right to skip pages.

3. The right to not finish.

4. The right to reread.

5. The right to read anything.

6. The right to escapism.

7. The right to read anywhere.

8. The right to browse.

9. The right to read out loud.

10. The right to not defend your tastes