Recent Acquisitions

I was indebted to a correspondent for a tip for the film, Reaching for the Moon (2013), a dramatisation of the relationship between Elizabeth Bishop and Lota Soares. It might not be quite essential to any Bishop devotee but it's well worth seeing.

It makes use of the villanelle, One Art, and The Shampoo and seeing it again might reveal more of the poems in it. She tells Robert Lowell that she'd like her epitaph to say she was the 'loneliest person in the world' and, accused by Lota of being somewhat emotionally unforthcoming she replies that,

you can't expect someone born in the desert to swim like a fish.

Perhaps, since I'm 150 pages into volume 2 of Robert Crawford's life of T.S. Eliot, there is mileage to be had out of poetry, or indeed all art, seen as an outlet for the emotionally restricted.

Lota is clearly the 'alpha' half of the relationship but it's always triangular, at least an isosceles triangle, with Lota's previous partner, Mary, never far away.

As can happen with such films, or anything else, one can begin unconvinced but, after 114 minutes, can be lured in and moved by it in the end. It will certainly stand another look.

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Stephen Hough's 2-disc Liszt Piano Music is by no means all as diabolic and showy as the Mephisto Waltz that it opens with and make Liszt such a compelling composer in live performance. There is some of that but having seen such pieces in concert in recent months, one misses the visual stimulus of seeing how they do it with only the disc. However, compensation is to be had from a number of much softer pieces, such as Les jeux d'eau a la Villa d'Este and they provide meditative accompaniment to reading as well as being silkily gotgeous and make the stormy maestro a fuller character through these lesser-heard pieces.

No. 2 is the more melodic and memorable of the String Quartets on the Lindsays' recording of those by Borodin, occupying a place somewhere near Tchaikovsky on the musical map, perhaps, but is another welcome addition to the shelves that will get a few more plays before being filed there to take its chances.

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We await with interest the outcome of the Conservative MPs' opportunity to express confidence in their leader. Paddy Power are no longer offering odds about it which suggests the conclusion is foregone but the market fluctuated throughout the day with 'no confidence' as short as 2/1 at one stage.

I note that my MP, Penny Mordaunt, is joint third favourite to be the next party leader, which might not be the same thing as Prime Minister, and it would be useful to know who votes which way because when the current Prime Minister is eventually removed and his diminishing band of supporters look towards their next career moves, we'd like to know who it was that saw fit to keep him in place.

There probably will be some kind of future post-Trump, post-plague, post-Boris and post-economic crisis but what we won't be needing is the likes of the Moggs who so resolutely defended the indefensible. Even rats have the sense to leave sinking ships.