Emilija Karaliūtė at Lunchtime Live !

 Emilija Karaliūtė, Portsmouth Cathedral, Sept 24

One might imagine that one has heard of most musical instruments but, as with most things, I reckon there's always more one doesn't know about than one does. Thanks to Emilija Karaliūtė, those who were in Portsmouth Cathedral today can at least transfer the kanklės from the first category into the second. It is a Lithuanian flat-bed harp, related to the zither or perhaps more distantly to the dulcimer or Indian santoor. If Frank Muir defines it as such on Call My Bluff, you will know to pick him. More important than that, though, or whether what Emilija plays on it is folk or classical music, is that it is gorgeous.

One becomes absorbed in the instrument to the extent that the differences between folk pieces, Debussy and Handel that might be apparent on the piano are less noticeable. 

The stillness and mystery of The Forest Idyll by Alfonsos Mikulskis quickened into something sparkling and then another composer new to most of us, I dare say, Juozas Naujalis and his Dear Lithuania was melodic. The 'classical' part of the programme was segued into by way of the delicacy and shimmering of a Prelude by Jonas Švedas before a sumptuous On Wings of Song by Mendelssohn. It's not only a matter of two hands playing different parts, as with the pedals on a piano or harp, the strings were adjusted by hand, presumably to mute or sustain the notes.

Strictly speaking, the Passacaglia, HWV 486, might have been identifiable as Handel with its walking left hand lower line under the decorative right while The Girl with the Flaxen Hair was reflective. But then the usually reliable stock of adjectives failed me in the finale, Land by Takatsugu Muramatsu. Not beyond words but maybe more abstract and modern - the composer being born in 1978 - than evocative of anything specific if not the pure sound of the kanklės itself.

Emilija was a tremendous find for the Lunchtime Live series, deeply appreciated by a gathering, many of who, like me, must have been very glad to have taken a chance on music that could have been anything for all we knew. A rarity and a special, luminous thing. And now we do know and are grateful for the privilege of having heard it and all about it.

Not Going Out

Absolutely brilliant, going into its 15th series, second only to The Last of the Summer Wine for longevity but light years ahead of it for remaining any good.

It might provide some insight into a more recent 'generation gap' than any I was aware of in the 1970's but Lee Mack's reference point is Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, not Hunky Dory or Bolan Boogie, so whereas he is confounded by the values of a generation that supplanted his, I'm not sure which side I'm on. I thought I was meant to sympathize with him, satirizing himself as he so gallantly does, but I don't know. The moment when one anticipated it would suddenly all go quiet and he could be heard accusing them all of being 'snowflakes' was one of several genuine lol moments, so unusually being seen and heard fresh and new and not as part of an addiction to Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, The Office, Blackadder, The Royle Family, Early Doors or Only Fools and Horses.

It is sensational work that Lee Mack is continuing to do. He should be offered something on a forthcoming honours list so that he can decline it. It's just what he does, or one of the things - the best of them- and such things, when they are good enough, are their own reward.

 

Recent Acquisition - Lonely Infinite Distance

The annual Portsmouth & Hampshire Art Society exhibition in the cathedral was a few weeks ago now. Long enough, you might think, to assess my latest purchase.

I needed no time at all to like it a lot on the Sunday. I was only glad it was still inexplicably not sold when I went back on Bank Holiday Monday to buy it. When I say 'assess', I mean 'wonder what it's about'. It is ostensibly a smear of yellow in the top left corner of some dark blue.

It is Lonely Infinite Distance by Anthony Mayle, Acrylic, 29 x 29 cm. I don't know if it benefits from its title or if we are being nudged towards a meaning that we might find for ourselves, among however many others, but perhaps it helps.

Three weeks on, I'm more inclined towards a midnight winter moon than any time before sunrise when surely the sky would be a paler blue. The light is coming from behind what might be a ruined building, tentatively suggested but possibly cloud, too. But one attempts any definitive interpretation at one's peril, as one does with Hamlet, late Beethoven or Shostakovich, or Vermeer until Andrew Graham-Dixon recently spoiled all that by apparently explaining it all away.

The Moon doesn't cast yellow light and the foreground wouldn't be that shade of blue, if it ever is and so we are not invited to take it literally. 

There is immense subtlety in it that is entirely ruined by electric light, photography or even being looked at from any distance. There are tiny specks of white to be found in it alongside the detail of the brushwork and minute changes of shading when looked at up close. The colours can be enjoyed for themselves in a palette that at first might appear limited but infer the infinite in its fine nuances of shade. The distance to the source of its light is caught by the perspective that puts it well beyond that which it may or may not be emerging from behind. The loneliness might come from that sense of distance. I simply don't know if it would be better off without its evocative title.

I've been entirely happy with my two purchases from previous such exhibitions but this was the least expensive, never mind inflation, and while being the smallest, I'm not sure that paintings are priced up by measurement like Tony Hancock seems to think in The Rebel. But this is surely better, not for any potential mystical quality but for being less figurative, but not abstract either. Mainly, though, because it is gorgeous to look at and, like the music that is best to listen to and the literature that is best to read, it doesn't have to mean anything that could be set out in an essay.   

The Housekeeper

Rose Tremain, The Housekeeper (Chatto & Windus)

There's a sketch in A Bit of Fry & Laurie in which two critics try to outbid each other in how many 'levels' they found in a work under discussion. They could have found plenty in The Housekeeper. It is a novel about a fictional affair Daphne du Maurier didn't have that resulted in her writing Rebecca, which in turn reverses the original story to make the famous book.

The housekeeper is Danni, a Polish Jew, who tells the story not too unreliably of her affair with the writer who spends a summer at Manderville Hall and the echoes of Mrs. Danvers and Manderley are already in place. In its first half, their clandestine love is a paradise of release from their respective roles as highly dependable domestic and unhappily married, successful upper class author but events at a renewal of the Big Bash party that had been a highlight of society life when the Lady of the house had been alive begin a devastating unravelling of their dangerous liaison.

In some ways the Mrs. Danvers character is Miss Adelaide, the daughter due to inherit the hall, who understands none of its tradition and whose selfishness is as sinister and cruel as anything in du Maurier's work. It is at the Big Bash that she inadvertently comes in on Danni and Daphne and stumbles on their secret. But her privileged meanness of spirit is outdone by the way that Daphne drops Danni and reverts to her marriage for the sake of her public reputation. In a book full of convincing writing, the passages in which what had appeared to be sublime love and the satisfying of a desperate need turn into such bleak rejection make one wonder at the human capacity for enthralment.

Danni is telling her story in instalments from her subsequent work as an expert seamstress so it is fitting how many thematic threads are woven into Rose Tremain's work, representing yet another level by which any critic would have to be impressed. One wonders at the daring and ingenuity that make the model for Mrs. Danvers not Danni but Daphne du Maurier herself.

It seems I got lucky, deciding that this was a new novel worth reading when I read so few. It's not very likely I'll read any others this year but I don't rate my chances of finding a better one if I read a cartload. I will have to see what else looks promising in the Tremain back catalogue, never mind seeing what I might have missed in the du Maurier. The Housekeeper compares with anything from the last couple of decades- Mothering Sunday, The Sense of an Ending, The Goldfinch. I don't know if there are still suggestions about that the novel as an art form is finished but it quite clearly isn't.

Middlemarch and other stories

I was rewarded for my diligent scanning of the TV schedules when finding the 1994 dramatisation of Middlemarch by Andrew Davies on Wednesday night and the next two. It is a masterpiece of the genre.

I 'read' it as part of Victorian Lit at university but much of it passed me by, aged 19, it being far too mature a book for someone so jejune. Re-reading it several years ago led me into a year of George Eliot and I appreciated it a bit more but still this easy-access serving of it 'on a plate' is very much worth having. I realize it is not, as someone told me last year, 'just a soap opera' but one of the most complete novels in the language although I'll never have been adequately prepared to talk about it with our tutor, Prof. David Carroll, whose major achievement was editing the variorum edition.  

My sympathies are first with the gentle scholar, Edward Casaubon, and for a bit longer than they should be when he is revealed as a moody obsessive whose work is an escape from life designed not to have an ending. Dorothea is compromised between her frustrated devotion to him and the more dangerous glamour of Ladislaw. Her sister, Celia, is characterised in the succinct line that he is 'fonder of geraniums', in which the lack of ambition is a safeguard against hope, ambition and disappointment.

Juliet Aubrey is surely a bit too good-looking to be Dorothea, who must in some part be the scholarly Mary Ann Evans, but needs must in a TV drama and actors need to be much sexier than the characters they are playing or else there's a danger we won't sympathize with them enough. 

 

I remember Prof. Carroll telling us how he realized that Middlemarch would be his life's work and it must be great to have such a project. At Lancaster, a bit of a low grade backwater in the university system in the late 1970's, one could hardly blame the academic staff for using the opportunity to pursue careers beyond the teaching of students who hadn't been accepted by anywhere more prestigious. Richard Dutton worked on Ben Jonson, Norman Sherry on Graham Greene and Bill Murray talked about whatever he felt like which was often himself. 

I like the idea of having such a specialist area but there is too much of everything to spend too much time on one thing. Three books arrived this week that immediately go ahead of the two remaining Henry James books left over from that over-ordering. It turned out to be easy to decide in what order to read them.

The Anatomy of Melancholy can be looked at from time to time, in extracts, maybe by the bedside, and is too daunting to read from beginning to end. Considered by some 'the best book ever written', one needs to know about it in the knowledge that one is never going to know all about it. 

A biography is sometimes a better way into a writer than reading their books and Wittgenstein is likely to be a paragon example of that. So, potentially heavy going as it may be, it was obvious that The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain was the one to pick up first. 

A good decision. It will be good to have a review of a brand new novel on here shortly and then, quite likely, look through the back catalogue of Rose Tremain to find what I'd been missing.

The Idler no. 44, 17 Feb 1759

Continuing with the Best Books in the House, I took the Selected Essays of Dr. Samuel Johnson with me to help recent train journeys pass. Those pieces are ideal for such purposes. He is never less than good company but sometimes one looks, looks again and wonders when his jobbing journalism becomes something like a poem one wants to learn word perfectly.  

The Idler no. 44, 17 Feb 1759, on memory, is such a thing. 

Its paragraph in which,

From the vexation of pupillage men commonly set themselves free about the middle of life, by shutting up the avenues of intelligence, and resolving to rest in their present state,

resonated almost like no other passage I've ever read.

First of all it sounded very loosely like my idea that poets- some of them- reach 'maturity' at 30 but either start to repeat themselves or pack it in at 60. It is such a baggy theory as to be meaningless but, having thought it once, I still credit it with the merest shred of validity.

More than that, though, it sounds like the age at which pop music stopped for me and I shut up the avenues of intelligence and resolved to rest in my present state. I due course, the same has applied to new poetry. There must be pop music and poems worth having by young people out there somewhere but I'm not sure I could find it for looking. The books and records I have already, DGBooks Radio on Spotify and the anthology I have in my head are plenty enough for me.

Dr. Johnson's brilliant discursion on the role of memory leads him to perhaps favour the art of Forgetfulness and I entirely appreciate his reasons for doing so when he means leaving behind those things in the past that come with associations one might not want to remember. Except that by now I prefer the past to the future and with age there can come more forgetfulness than one might have wished for.

But, yes, like an old raincoat, Dr. Johnson won't ever let you down. He entirely belongs among the Best Books in the House but I won't give up entirely on books I've not read before because, like when Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered, it was thought there might yet be a bit more out there.

So, Rose Tremain's new novel about Daphne du Maurier, a biography of Wittgenstein and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy should arrive on Thursday. To the tune of Dana's Cold, Cold Christmas - it's gonna be a highbrow Autumn with those books, dreaming of all those I could have re-read instead.

Oxford Open Doors

 It's a long ride from Swindon but it's free with the senior bus pass. There were places it might be worth looking inside. I was in good form and had finished the Times crossword just beyond Faringdon, taking care to only fill it in when one wasn't being thrown about by the prolifically pot-holed roads.

Neither of the student guides I asked in St. John's College had the faintest idea where Larkin's rooms might have been and some of the more recent architecture was a bit like that at Lancaster, so not uplifting. I've been in a couple of unprepossessing Oxford colleges before and was hoping for more.

Magdalen is surely that but I might have been expecting too much. The nameplate at the bottom of a staircase presumably indicated the accommodation of a professor that lived there and it brought to mind the dessicated-looking elderly dons who came in to sit at top table for dinner in halls at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1979, taking half an hour from their Herodotus for some bleak sustenance. It was so-so.

The main object of interest was the Painted Room in Cornmarket Street where Shakespeare may or may not have stayed with the Davenants on his journeys between London and Stratford. Not in that room, the guides didn't think, because they thought the Davenants served wine and might not have taken paying guests but William probably stayed at an inn nearby. I decided against enquiring what they thought about the prospects of him having fathered William Davenant while he was passing through. But one wants to see these places when the rare opportunity presents itself. It may not help much but there's a vague sense of feeling slightly more a part of it by having been. For example, I hadn't realized that the Davenant's premises included a branch of BetFred. Had Shakespeare been in Oxford on St. Leger day, he might have had his couple of ducats each way on the 11/1 winner.

But the main action of Oxford Open Doors for me was extra curricular. It was necessary to queue to see the Painted Room, only 15 being allowed in at a time. Time was on my side so I did, disappointed to be 16th in line for the next intake but at least glad to have a bit of wall to lean on to read the Times Saturday Review while I waited.

There appeared, in a blaze of entitlement and extreme self-confidence, a lurid caricature of Bullingdon Club and Brideshead Oxford who, to be fair to him, might not have noticed the 45 minute queue but took alarmingly quick exception to being informed of the procedure by the lady in charge of crowd control, not that such a role ought to be too demanding at such an esoteric attraction.

He immediately asked for the lady's name and she offered a variation of the Sicilian Defence by asking for his. He said that he didn't like her manner.

At that point I looked up from my reading matter and said that she had been perfectly civil to him and it was him that was being rude.

Excuse me, he said, are you reading your newspaper or listening to our conversation?

I said I'd been pretending to read the paper but had in fact been listening to him being rude. His reaction was to push his hand into my face thus causing my hat to fall from my head and onto the ground and then he exited stage left in some haste.

What a man. I'm not sure I've witnessed such outlandish gaucheness in the flesh before. Perhaps not even on telly in the blond Etonian, Bullingdonian, Oxfordian Prime Minister we had a few years ago whose behaviour was consistently boorish. 

I would be glad to renew our acquaintance and perhaps interview him but unless he finds this reference, recognizes himself and makes contact, it seems highly unlikely. I don't want to press charges for assault- that idea hadn't even crossed my mind until someone else suggested it. We had a lorra lorra fun there in the name of Englishness and our cultural heritage. I'd really like to find out more about him.