More Cambridge bookshops

A bookshop that focuses on whodunnits, especially local ones. It's in Botolph's Lane, just opposite the Pitt Building. See their website

Near Market Square. Despite the sign, it's not just "Antiquarian Books". There are many interesting odds and ends outside - Mr Men books, maps, etc. See their website

This specialises in children’s and illustrated books. It's only a few yards from G David. See their web site

There's often a bookstall in Market Square. There's an Oxfam bookshop in town. Down Mill Road there's "Books for Amnesty" (an Amnesty International bookshop) at the city end (see their website), and over the bridge there's an RSPCA bookshop.

CB1 - Stav Poleg and Leo Boix

On 7th Dec I attended a CB1 poetry event at yet another new venue - the Brew House. About 40 people attended. I hadn't heard of either of the headline poets. Leo Boix read from his book of 100 sonnets. Stav Poleg lives in Cambridge and has been in The New Yorker among other places. Her work sounded more substantial - rather heavy going for a reading, but a name worth adding to my reading list. Her "Memory and Geography" poem was excellent.

The open-mic readers took up over half the evening and were more varied than ever. A few of them had never performed poetry before. One person read a piece that they hadn't looked at since they wrote it in 5 minutes. Another read his piece that has just won 2nd prize in the Bridport (£1000). I read an old piece that I think I've read before. It's about time I read something new.

Family history

My maternal grandparents came from at least 400 years of south Dorset stock. Here they seem to have just come out of hiding after years underground. Maybe they hadn't seen a camera before. I don't think she ever set foot outside Dorset. He was a hansom cab driver I think.

My paternal grandmother had over 400 years of Dorset heritage too - which doesn't mean that she knew how to have fun on the beach. My paternal grandfather's ancestors for centuries lived in the Coventry area. He came to Dorset (Bovington) as a soldier and never returned north. He was good at sport and drinking, getting banned from the odd pub (allegedly). He was a pipelayer - he dug holes. He smoked to the bitter end.

In short, I have an inauspicious family tree. More interesting are the "uncles" who don't appear in the official family tree, adopted at birth by a relative (a fact that they weren't always aware of until adulthood). One of them had a piano and started sing-alongs when we visited. His wife had a strong Spanish accent - they met in the war. They, more than my other relatives, have been source material for me.

Symbo-dumps and Spatial form

[moved to https://litrefsarticles.blogspot.com/2025/12/symbo-dumps-and-spatial-form.html]

Lavenham

You may not have been to Lavenham (Suffolk - follow the link to see photos) but you've probably seen it in Harry Potter films. In medieval times it was a wealthy town (in the UK top 20) but now fewer than 2000 people live there. It has over 300 listed buildings and still feels medieval.

When I visited the Guildhall (built around 1530) it had recently been raining. The building overlooks the square where John Lennon and Yoko Ono filmed part of "Apotheosis".

The oldest building goes back to the 1300s. The bookshop isn't so old. It sells far more than books. John Constable's school (dating from the 1500s) is round the corner. The setting for the "Hay Wain" is a drive away

More similes/metaphors from novels

Here's a continuation of a list I posted in June. Without the context it's rather unfair to assess the following fragments. From what I recall, they're mostly in the author/narrator's voice. Do they work in prose? If they fail, why? Would they be more suited to poetry or stand-up?

1. "We hide in our own pleasure" (Jodi Picoult)
2. "truth vibrates when it's drawn across the bow of pain" (Jodi Picoult)
3. a calf in the road with "the affronted look of someone caught looting" (Nikki Gemmell)
4. "Daisy wore a clingy black dress with a neckline so deep it could tutor philosophy" (Harlan Coben)
5. "breathing like a ruptured accordian" (Stuart MacBride)
6. "slithering about like a snake in a sack of milk" (Stuart MacBride)
7. "he removed the covering from the sandwiches like someone removing their cap for a passing hearse" (Andrew McMillan)
8. "trying to pin down her last abode was like attempting to discover the whereabouts of Atlantis with a boyscout's compass." (Jane Costello)
9. "sweat-pants with an arse so saggy you could bungee-jump off a suspension bridge with it" (Jane Costello)
10. a noise like "I'd poured battery acid on a dalek and chucked it down a mountain" (Jane Costello) (character-PoV)
11. "He liked the noise of business and politics, it was an adult reassurance, like the chatter of parents on a night journey, meaningless, fragmentary, and consoling to the sleepy child on the back seat" (Alan Hollinghurst)
12. "Hank's eyes dart about like scared birds trying to find a place to land" (Harlan Coben) (character-PoV)

For me,

• 1 would work in a poem.
• 2 doesn't work because a bow is drawn across something, not the other way around
• 4 sounds like parody - maybe it's supposed to
• 5 is effective - short and expressive
• 6 puzzles me. Why a sack of milk?
• 8 is fun
• 11 has a ring of truth - a comparison that might be harder to make the most of in poetry.
• 12 has been used before - which may not be a problem

Recitativo secco and poetry

I know very little about opera, but I think "Recitativo secco" is what opera singers sometimes do between songs - minimal orchestration: more talking than singing. In musicals they would talk.

I can't find much online about the pros/cons of recitative. It can involve a few instruments. "secco" (dry) is the most minimal style. Here are a few quotes -

• "It increases the interest of Scenes which, deprived of the resources of the Orchestra, might become tedious: but it seriously diminishes the amount of contrast attainable in effects of colouring and chiaroscuro" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Music_and_Musicians/Secco_Recitative)
• secco recitative gave way to full recitative by 1820 in serious operas, and became standard in comic operas during the following decade (New Grove Dictionary)
• "Typically, the earlier the opera is, the easier it is to distinguish between recitative and other operatic sections, such as arias or ensemble pieces" (https://www.operasense.com/tag/recitativo-secco/

In books like Tim Steele's "Towards a winter solstice" the rhyme/meter keeps ticking over even when the poetry's having a rest. In free verse books like "Bycatch" (Caroline Smith) (a good book) there are stanzas (indeed, whole poems) where the line-breaks carry on even though the text is prose. It's like those joggers who run on the spot waiting for the lights to turn green.

So what's wrong with talking instead of (gratuitous?) singing? What's wrong with passages of prose? Maybe

1. the work feels more of a unified whole if the music/form is sustained
2. there is a hierarchy of arts - music is higher than words; poetry is higher than prose - and people prefer the higher arts
3. there's a thin-end-of-the-wedge fear - if you start leaving out line-breaks where will it end? Flash?

Let's deal with those issues in literature -

1. The haibun form is hybrid. It hasn't really taken off - perhaps because people feel they should stick to the rules of having a prose travelogue and a haiku. People are more flexibly combining prose and poems nowadays. However, I don't think the hybrid forms are going to be popular any time soon.
2. Are hierarchies breaking down? Rhyming poetry doesn't have a status advantage over free verse nowadays, but I think that poetry still has a higher status than prose. Flash's status is rising in the prose world.
3. Given the 2 points above, I can see why authors don't slip some prose into a poem, or combine prose pieces and poems in the same book (I think John Updike did it, but it's rare). That said, the border between free verse and prose is becoming more porous, with some writers (Carolyn Forche, Michael Loveday, etc) re-categorising some of their old poems as Flash. I can imagine a day when people who would have produced a poetry book in the past could write a book of Flash instead, using much the same material.