Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

The shops near where I work now are lacklustre but what can one expect beyond charity shops, convenience stores, Tesco and bookmakers. I'd not usually go into W.H.Smith, which was once a bookshop and stationers but is now not much of a shop at all but at least it has the BBC Music magazine with its 'free' disc. When it's Bach on the front, one ought to buy it, because it does also list lots of new releases and re-issues that one won't find out about on the radio or the weekend newspapers.
So, some solo violin music by Telemann is on its way to go with all the other solo violin music of the period that is, for one or other reason, not Bach's sonatas or partitas. Telemann doesn't need my pity but it seemed I'd been neglecting him recently and he is always welcome and then I remembered I did get his Wassermusic earlier this year.
But the free disc is a chamber orchestra version of The Art of Fugue and I am going to have to admit that, for all its technical greatness, Bach did not write only masterpieces and this academic exercise is eventually dull. I don't particularly mind that it doesn't mean anything but music needs to be more than just mathematics you can listen to.

A non-literary excursion in books has been Barney Curley's Giving a Little Back, which I very much doubt if he wrote himself. The redoubtable gambler, trainer and moralist is a compelling figure and not one to cross. He is contrite more often than you might think but self-possessed even more than that. The book, as far as it takes us, is part confession and part chronicle of a life fearlessly spent in pursuit of backing winners and riling the racing and bettiing industries with all the wrongs he perceives in it, like the fact that layers were reluctant to lay fancy prices about the horses that he, by his own admission a very successful gambler, wanted to back. It's hard to see why he is surprised by that.

It will thus soon be time to pick the next book from my waiting pile but Oliver Sack's On the Move, mainly bought to see what he says about Thom Gunn, and I've looked those bits up; Brenda Maddox's biography of Yeats and the hefty Pimlott Harold Wilson can all wait a bit longer. My house was surely not complete, as it won't be until I've won enough to buy the Buxtehude Opera Omnia, without Saxo Grammaticus. He wrote the history of Denmark early on but, more importantly to some of us, the Revenge of Amleth, a source for one of the most enthralling works in all of English literature. I think the next priority, while still brooding over which out of the four short-listed books of poems I like best, will be to see what Saxo gave Shakespeare to work with.

Meanwhile, Portsmouth Poetry Society made a wonderful job of reading Tomas Transtromer this week. I thought it was going to be difficult but it was superb, thanks not only to Transtromer and his several translators but the excellent work that the admirable PPS members put into it. I am never disappointed by the open and honest way they approach such subjects and always come away feeling more enthused and the wiser for it. Get there if you can.