I am s-ee-k to death of Albert

Reading David Kennedy's book of poems from Salt, "The Roads" , and drawn in by a poem at the grave of someone I'd not heard of - Anton Walbrook at St John's in Hampstead.

A little investigation turned up the Good German Officer from Colonel Blimp, an Austrian half - Jewish actor who fled to England and was in many of the afternoon matinee films people like me remember from their childhood Sundays. He died in Bavaria but had asked to be buried here in London.

An interview with him is here

He had been a number of Austrian and German heroes -- Johann Strauss, Ludwig 1, Prince Albert, acted in La Ronde, The Red Shoes, even as Esterhazy in J'Accuse.

I won't break Kennedy's copyright by reprinting his poem here; suffice to say it's a grower (like his whole volume) , available from Salt Publishing, and Anton's ghost gives utterance.

Note to self: DK also dedicates a poem to Jack Beeching. It ends with him drinking with the fictitious Australian poet Ern Malley. Priceless.

So today at 44 I discover for the first time Walbrook, Beeching and Malley. Education by poet.

Thai wax festival

A suitable passtime for the rainy season. Film of it is here:

Face down on the slab

Credit: Wellcome Library, London
An écorché figure (life-size), lying prone on a table: the right arm hangs down below the table. Red chalk and pencil drawing, with bodycolour, by C. Landseer, 1813 (?).
1813 By: Charles Landseer
Size: sheet 54.5 x 75.2 cm.
Collection: Iconographic Collections
Library reference no.: Iconographic Collection 583992i
Full Bibliographic Record Link to Wellcome Library Catalogue

1813! Our corpse is likely to be a hanged man, although nothing disturbs the elegance of that nape. This is one of the choice exhibits in the Wellcome Collection's "Skin" exhibition, and I was pleased today to see the actual drawing which I have long admired in reproduction.

The red chalk is added after the pose has been laid in lightly in black chalk , which is how the muscle fibres are so confident, so taut. The pose, its back to the sky, is quadrupedal and reminds one of the gleaming racehorses and greyhounds of Charles's more famous brother. The red flanks are groomed like a pelt, visually edited to exclude the ooze , fat, vessels and imperfections of a real dissection.

The strokes which describe the choppy hair and the shadows concealing the face are skilled and schooled - hours spent in the Academy rendering plaster busts and light on geometric solids have trained the life out of that part of the drawing. It's not the bit Charles is interested in; he's after the sleek organic mechanism, the life that's just been suspended, the abjection (face down on the slab!) which makes the handsome form all the more denuded, the hump in the spine that tells you the body's weight and pliability. The beastlike pose makes you wonder what this individual did not live to regret.

From the Strasbourg museum

The Glory of the Trenches

By Coningsby Dawson.
Each night we panted till the runners came,
Bearing your letters through the battle-smoke.
Their path lay up Death Valley spouting flame,
Across the ridge where the Hun's anger spoke
In bursting shells and cataracts of pain;
Then down the road where no one goes by day,
And so into the tortured, pockmarked plain
Where dead men clasp their wounds and point the way.
Here gas lurks treacherously and the wire
Of old defences tangles up the feet;
Faces and hands strain upward through the mire,
Speaking the anguish of the Hun's retreat.
Sometimes no letters came; the evening hate
Dragged on till dawn. The ridge in flying spray
Of hissing shrapnel told the runners' fate;
We knew we should not hear from you that day--
From you, who from the trenches of the mind
Hurl back despair, smiling with sobbing breath,
Writing your souls on paper to be kind,
That you for us may take the sting from Death.

Candles at Selfridge's