Painting Paris
Copies of my fourth novel ‘Painting Paris’ arrived and it looks good. So now I’m planning for the launch in September and preparing with social media, essay/blog posts and just the slog of letting people know that the novel is available. I like the trailer produced by the publishers.
Have a look.
– John Simmons (John’s novel is for sale via Austin Macauley Publishers)
#CopywritersUnite
26er Sarah Farley is hosting a #CopywritersUnite night in London next month:
6.30pm, Monday 1 September
The Windmill
86 The Cut
London SE1 8LW
CopywritersUnite nights are informal drinks with copywriters and copy lovers. No tickets, no agenda, no speakers. Just lots of friendly copy chat. It’s free to pop along – we buy our own drinks.
If you can’t make it to this one, there’s lots of chances to go to others thanks to other copywriters who are hosting them all around the world. Follow the #CopywritersUnite hashtag on social media to connect with them and hear about their events.
– Sarah Farley
Take him, earth, for cherishing
In Rob Self-Pierson’s article this month, he talks a little about Kipling – how the author responded through his writing to the loss of his children, Josephine and John. It reminded me of Herbert Howells’ 1967 choral anthem, Take him, earth, for cherishing.
Howells wrote the following in his sleeve note for the first recording:
Within the year following the tragic death of President Kennedy I was asked to compose an a cappella work for the commemoration. The text was mine to choose, Biblical or other. Choice was settled when I recalled a poem by Prudentius (AD 348–413). […] Here was the perfect text – the Prudentius “Hymnus circa exsequias defuncti.”
“I recalled a poem…” is a very stiff-upper-lip way of glossing over something far more personal and long-lasting. In 1935, Howells’ nine-year-old son Michael contracted polio during a family holiday and died. Howells discovered the text shortly after and remained drawn to it throughout his life (“a personal, almost secret document”). In May 1958 he wrote in his diary:
Rain and Gloom. But the rain turned away with a sheer beauty of light. Prudentius’ “Hymnus Circa Exsequias Defuncti” kept my mind in safe refuge – as once it did in Sept. 1935 for love of Michael.
After my podcast for 26 last month on Words and Music, this seems a lovely example of music not as accompaniment to text, but as a culmination of it; of music and text together as both a means of refuge from and a passionate expression of sorrow.