THERE IS a book out called New Writing, edited by Christopher Hope and Peter Porter (Vintage, £6.99). One of the novel contributions is by the established writer Richard Holmes: in The Dancing Mariner he remarks that Coleridge's Mariner was young at the time of the original voyage.
Well of course he was. Nobody goes on a voyage like that in old age, not unless seriously disturbed. But what use is this kind of information?
What we really need to know is why the Ancient Mariner stoppeth, or stopped, only one in three, and what excuses the other two made for evading him and his tedious story.
Such knowledge would be useful in the business of avoiding bores.
Say for example you are in the departure lounge out at Collinstown, your passport and ticket checked and all ready to head for the duty-free. The next thing you know, a scrunched-up homunculus is plucking your sleeve and preventing your progress while telling you he is a traveller "from an antique land", whatever that may be, and insisting you hear his crazed tale about two vast and trunkless legs of stone standing somewhere in an unspecified desert.
Your time for duty-free purchases is running out but there is nothing you can do without running a risk of seriously upsetting the lunatic holding your arm, and perhaps making him violent. (He is already outraged at your offer of five pounds to go away).
Worse, the insane tale he is telling you appears to contain a moral about earthly ambition and pride, and when he is finished you are clearly expected to make some kind of appreciative comment about how power fades and even a "king of kings" turns to dust. By now of course the last boarding call is being made and you are going to have to buy your liquor on the plane, always an embarrassing procedure.
How his demented outpourings then get written up and published in the form of poetry is beyond belief.
But look at the latest book by Nicholson Baker, who has made a mission out of studying life at ant's-eye level. The Size of Thoughts (Chatto and Windus, £16.99) contains an essay called "Rarity", whose opening sentence runs as follows: "Has anybody said publicly how nice it is to write on rubber with a ball-point pen? The slow, fat, ink-rich line, rolled over a surface at once dense and unyielding, makes for a multidimensional experience no single sheet can offer."
No, Nicholson. It is a fairly safe assumption that nobody has said this publicly. Anyone who did so would be likely to be locked up, and the rest of us would scarcely object. Most of us who write at all are content with the one-sheet single-dimensional experience and while we may have other quite separate multi-dimensional experiences we know how to keep quiet about them.
His observation is therefore of no use whatsoever.
In New Writing, there is also a tale by AS Byatt. "Lamia in the Cevennes" tells of an artist who builds a swimming pool at his home in France. When he fills it with mountain water straight from the hillside, a Lamia half-woman, half-serpent - is washed into the pool.
The Lamia, we are give to understand, needs a man's love to gain a soul for herself, but the painter stays aloof, preferring to concentrate his energies on the creation of art.
Obviously you can take this tall tale as a reflection on art, sex, life and maybe even the habits of the ordinary drinking man, but is there anything useful at all in it? I mean in helping the reader through life as most of us experience it?
I cannot see that there is. First of all, there is obviously no such thing as a "Lamia". The very notion of such a creature is plausible only to the seriously disturbed, such as "creative" writers, who are by definition unable to cope with the real world, or to be much interested in it.
Worse, there are no practical details whatsoever in the story. The artist, despite being able to afford a swimming pool, appears to know nothing about the need for filters to keep his water supply uncontaminated by Lamias or anything else.
If we were given a hit of background on the artist, say for example that he had a serious drink problem, we might make allowances. As it is, there is nothing worthwhile to be learned here.