READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

Email from Max Richards, 5 th April 2011: This is the title of a short essay in Craig Raine, Haydn & the Valve Trumpet , Faber 1990. Read it, accept it, and call off your projected gathering on the topic! On the other hand, read it, demolish it and then do your thing... Just chanced on my copy of Raine in a box tother day, and only just now looked down the contents page. How goes it, anyway? To my surprise I spent time Sunday morning in the Castlemaine Anglican church, because my friend Lorender Freeman of Barkers Creek is a keen Anglican there, and an old longlost friend who now lives in C., was to be playing the cello with a small group for just that session. Bob Long, doctor and cellist. The session was for children first, and they sat on the floor up front and were engaged in conversation by the junior priest. The senior one is the great Rev Ken, whose surname will come to me in a moment. Ken has done much for J. S. Neilson in the past and introduces art and lit i

Yes is the author’s last word, linked by its ess to Stately. Yes is much easier to understand than Stately. Why did he choose the word, standing like an ornate boss at the opening? The story is set neither in blossoming April nor shilly-shallying September, but in what Italians call Estate. The first character veers Wildely between stately and plump, as does the female lead, though we do not laugh at the words’ incongruity when referred to her. We peer widely, rather. Stately forewarns us of the State of Ireland, of which we’ll hear much, coming about out of famine.