The Sex Pistols

Last thing last night I came across The Sex Pistols on Sky Arts television. Firstly was the end of a documentary on Never Mind the Bollocks and then I watched some of the reunion concert from 2007.

It was brilliant, actually. It must be twenty years or more than that since I played a Sex Pistols record. My NMTB was lost along with Donna Summer's Greatest Hits when I didn't take the precaution of getting them back from a girlfriend before finishing with her but I do have my precious bootleg Spunk. And so it perhaps shouldn't have come as a surprise how good they were but somehow it did. I saw Public Image Limited in Manchester circa 1980/1 and they were either not much good or studiedly under-rehearsed but this reunion gig was very convincing.

The documentary went to some lengths to dispel the rumours at the time that the band couldn't play and Chris Spedding had played all the guitar parts. We know Sid couldn't play but in the reunion it was Glen Matlock and it showed that Steve Jones certainly can play.
In 2007, Steve McClaren must still have been the England football manager. Lydon asks the audience where they are from, meaning England, and says, yeah, they had a manager called McClaren once and he was **** as well before piling into a vitriolic rendering of Liar.
I'm a Lazy Sod was a sublime classic to be reminded of and I wish I could have stayed up longer to see the whole thing but it was already past my bedtime.

It could just have been the awful pull of nostalgia that made it seem so good but I don't think so. I think it was a marvellous revival of some tremendous pop records. Say what you like about John Lydon, and I sometimes have, but he was a great front man and an iconic figure (before he goes on to spend five minutes berating the very notion of being an iconic figure).

Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

I would usually avoid following one novel by reading another by the same author but the one that I had planned to read in between The Secret History and The Goldfinch hasn't turned up. It's possible that in similar books something hangs over from the first and affects one's reading of the second but in this case it didn't matter, except to highlight several features of a blueprint they seem to share.
Both novels depend on a sustained element of suspense as a Hitchcock film might. The two central characters both become involved in it having begun as innocent outsiders. In both books they encounter elite sections of American society, whether academic, aesthetic or simply wealthy. Their gradual progress into these worlds soon passes a point of no return. There is murder or violent death more than once as they both build towards a climax.
The charismatic tutor, Julian, in The Secret History is a similar older figure to Hobie in The Goldfinch, admired, influential and perhaps a surrogate father figure. In both groups of young people, drugs and chronic drinking habits are essential to their lives.
Donna Tartt is especially good at young people, their demotic mode of expression and specialist interests. They are uber cool in their decadent milieus and I was most gratified when in The Goldfinch, Pippa checks the contents of Theo's i-pod, the list is conveniently enough set at M so that Donna Tartt can nod to The Magnetic Fields, who are followed by Mazzy Star, Nico, Nirvana and Oscar Peterson but Arvo Part and Shostakovich are mentioned elsewhere. But this is a minor detail compared to the literary references and knowledge of painting and furniture that give the book an impressively learned authenticity.
If we have been allowing Thomas Hardy his plot twists, chance encounters and unlikely coincidences for well over a hundred years now then we can accept a few such necessary devices here, not least when Theo re-encounters Boris in New York.
Both books take time to reach their most dramatic final chapters but other themes build in the meantime, more perhaps in The Goldfinch where the story of the painting is apparently all but forgotten for several chapters. If The Secret History is more morality, a Lord of the Flies of contemporary delinquency, then The Goldfinch is ultimately concerned with 'the line of beauty', on themes of love and art and love of art and in the epigram to the last section, taken from Nietzsche,

We have art in order not to die from the truth.

But although superbly done throughout, there are a number of memorable passages built into the novel's large-scale structure. Theo's love for the unattainable Pippa is magificently expressed, including that,
the strange thing was: I knew that most people didn't see her as I did, if anything found her a bit odd-looking....
For some dumb reason I had always flattered myself that I was the only person in the world who really appreciated her...
that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested - ominously- a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.

And the apprehension of stark reality during withdrawal from drugs is very good, as,
The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order...And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave

But this disparaging view of humanity wasn't new to Theo. Earlier, when reluctant to take part in extra curricular activities at the liberal college he is sent to where one 'spindly twelve year old' student was 'rumoured to have an IQ of 260', he found the others,

earnest, well-meaning, undamaged, clueless.

And, as Theo and the Carel Fabritius masterpiece, as well as Pippa, are separated and then re-united across America and into Europe, the novel is a study of disconnection, a thriller of sorts and a love story. Both The Goldfinch and The Secret History head towards denouements that can't possibly be happily resolved.
And both end with extended codas as if Donna Tartt doesn't want to stop writing. In The Secret History it is an almost unnecessary aftermath, like footnotes so that you know how everybody went their separate ways. In The Goldfinch, a little bit self-consciously and not very satisfactorily, Theo draws some conclusions from his own narrative which he suddenly decides nobody is ever likely to read.
Life is catastrophe but one still needs to play it for what can be saved from it and from that can come a kind of joy.
Not all writers would recover from the massive success of a first novel like The Secret History but the genuine artist develops and improves and I'd have to say The Goldfinch is better.

View from the Boundary

It has been an enjoyable midwinter reading Donna Tartt. I will finish The Goldfinch this weekend and be back soon enough with some thoughts on it, and a comparison with The Secret History.  It befits a man in middle age very well to spend his weekends on the settee with a novel, the crosswords and the horse racing on the telly. Which is good because that is exactly what I've been doing.
Heaven knows how I used to get out and ride a bike up hill and down dale on the roads of southern Hampshire. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of my first 12 hour ride and so it is 18 since my last. And there ended my short and undistinguished career as a racing cyclist but, honestly, it was the best thing I ever did. It seems more than a lifteime ago now.
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The piles of unsorted CD's that have sprung up around the house don't betray an excessive habit. I've known people who bought many more than I do. But the way that any orderly arrangement of them has disintegrated suggests that I was right not to become a librarian. A library should not have to depend on the librarian being the only person who can trace an item by remembering where he saw it last.
Music was such a treasured thing for a teenager in the 1970's that vinyl items were almost sacred and cassettes of records taken from a small transistor radio with a microphone were valued. Of course, 'kids these days' don't have the same sort of interest in music as we had (we might like to think) but they can't be expected to value it as highly either with it being ubiquitously available for nothing wherever they look. That which might have been intended as disposable then has become a part of us now but what might be a masterpiece now has become disposable.
But it is so easy to get yourself delivered of the latest thing you've heard now that one can afford it whereas then being in possesssion of enough cash to buy an LP meant one had a momentous decision to make. Recently it has been Berlioz, Sweelinck, Albinoni, the Wagenseil, Thomas Baltzar and concertos mentioned below and now the Viola Sonata that Shostakovich wrote on his death bed in 1975, quoting the Moonlight Sonata in the last movement.
Shostakovich is a major contender for the title of greatest composer of the C20th, with his range from the vast symphonies to the many and varied string quartets, the Preludes and Fugues that follow Bach's model, the opera, the jazz and any amount of this spare chamber music. I am not discounting any of the other candidates but my guess is that posterity will have immense respect for Shostakovich.
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Whereas Barney Curley is an old hero of mine of an entirely different stamp. Just when you thought the old maestro had left the horse racing industry and one day a copy of his autobiography might show up at a bargain price, he is much more than implicated in the biggest betting coup for several years, with estimates of 2 million pounds being offered as the profit of their little project on Wednesday this week.
I don't know if he has ever done me any favours personally. I only ever seemed to pick up on the forays that went astray or were pulled. But he is not one to offend if you want to see how he deals with John McCririck and Luke Harvey on You Tube. But there was a good, old-fashioned player if ever there was one and I admired him for it.
This week's spectacular four-timer might be the last we see of him but you never know. Four horses who had been available at such prices as 20/1, 10/1 and 7/1 on Tuesday night won on Wednesday at prices like 9/4, even money and 4/6, the odds on chance being the one that had 'steamed' in from 20/1. Now that is what you call a steamer. I think it is three of them that had been in the care of Mr. Curley and got beaten a few times before he relinquished his training licence and then the horses returned after long lay-offs with much reduced official ratings. On a quiet Wednesday in January in inconspicuous races.
It was brilliant but today in the Racing Post it turns out that not everyone agrees. Quite rightly they point out that any punter who had backed other horses in those races did so not knowing that they didn't really stand a chance. Apparently it brings horse racing into disrepute.
On the other hand, the bookmakers needn't moan when they are taken for a large bundle of cash because it's them that want to bet. And so, equally, you can say the same for punters. Horse racing is supposed to be a bit disreputable. It always has been and that is what some of us like about it.

I think Reve de Sivola might beat Big Bucks at Cheltenham tomorrow and would be worth a go at 100/30.
But it's the weekend yet again and so hooray for Danny Baker, Donna Tartt, Shostakovich and Cheltenham races. If I can get a good start on the Times crossword, I'll pursue it and if I finish it, I'll put the solution here.

Claudio Abbado

It seems the only thing to do at the moment is stayed tuned to Radio 3's tea-time programme to hear thoughts about and memories of Claudio Abbado, who has died, aged 80.
I am by no means a connoisseur of conductors. But I had a Deutsche Grammophon poster of Claudio on my wall as a teenager and subsequently as a student, probably more on account of his Bryan Ferry looks than my appreciation of his recordings. In fact, my favourite recording of the time was really Giulini's Beethoven Pastoral Symphony. But he was an icon and a hero to me in those days and went on to Berlin and La Scala, as well as establishing orchestras of musicians personally selected for excellence and was arguably as well as probably in fact the pre-eminent conductor of his generation, following Karajan from the generation before.
And so it feels as if he qualifies for that rather quirky tribute of an obituary on my website. It is an accolade awarded to only a select few.

Recent Acquistions

Thomas Baltzar, Complete Works for Unaccompanied Violin, Patrick Wood (MSR)

At 33 minutes, one might think that this disc was somewhat miserly but if this is the complete solo violin work then one can only bemoan the fact that Thomas Baltzar didn't write more of it.
Born in Lubeck roughly contemporary with Buxtehude, his working life was spent mainly in England but he died young. During that time, though, the same suspicion fell upon him as later it did on Paganini or Tartini, that he was as talented as the devil himself.
This wonderful set of short pieces pre-dates the Bach solo violin music by several decades and some employ the scordatura tunings associated more with Biber 10 years ahead of them. And those are the stratospheric comparisons that he is worthy of in these beautifully done recordings by Patrick Wood.
No piece is longer than four minutes, Allemandes and Sarabandes for the most part, that are of course far more than dance music. They are for virtuoso and, as in the Bach Sonatas and Partitas, it is remarkable to think that one is listening to one instrument and easy to forget. Music has the advantage over words that it isn't tied to meaning and so can mean both nothing or everything.
I'm grateful to have stumbled across the Early Music Show when he was featured there recently otherwise I would never have known.

Harp Concertos, Dussek, Wagenseil, Krumpholtz, Roberta Alessandrini/Orcherta di Mantova (Naxos); Trombone Concerti, Albrechtsberger, Wagenseil, Leoplod Mozart, Michael Haydn, Alain Trudel, Northern Sinfonia (Naxos)

I was interested to see that the plural of Harp Concerto is Harp Concertos while the plural of Trombone Concerto is Trombone Concerti.
In seeking out further music by Wagenseil, these inexpensive used discs brought with them some further lesser known names from the C18th. The harp, as it is won't to do, tinkles and glitters across the whole disc, most memorably in the Krumpholtz, Concerto no. 6, op.9. The classical period was one we might now think happily less concerned with individual expression and personality. Certainly I imagine we recognize Mozart when we hear him but most provided exquisite, orderly composition without too much concern for putting themselves into the music. It is refreshing and makes the Romantic attitude appear wanton in comparison.
One of the two Dussek pieces here is a sonata rather than a concerto which concentrates us even more on its sublime tone. The music is a joy, which is at odds with a story joining up the two composers. Krumphlotz's wife eloped with Dussek after which Krumpholtz drowned himself in the Seine, which might seem to add some forlorn Romantic glamour but I just think is a very sad footnote to the music.
The trombone disc contains all there is of the C18th trombone concerto repertoire, a point that the notes suggest is odd because it is an instrument that accomodates all chromatic ranges where the other brass cannot. It is a more delicate instrument in the hands of these composers, including Mozart's father and Haydn's brother, than those of us who grew up with it as a trad jazz instrument and George Chisholm. It is capable of the ornamentation and flexibility required of this sylized period and if something of a novelty, it is by no means a distraction. Unlke my other CD by Albrechtsberger which is the Concertos for Jew's Harp.
These were absolutes steals at the price of two used dics for less than one budget priced new one. If and when you see such such things, featuring these less famous composers, they really need to be bought and played.

The Language of Poetry Reviews

I tuned in specially to Radio 3 on Tuesday night under the misapprehension that a whole programme was going to be devoted to poetry.
Perhaps I should have known better. In fact, the last ten minutes were given over to an interview with the prize-winning poet whose book I had read with great pleasure and admired very much. But if I hadn't known which book they were talking about, I thought that there were long passages in the interview in which I would not have guessed or even that it wouldn't have mattered.
There is nowadays, and possibly it is a development of recent decades and the creative writing industry, a language that has developed for use in the discussion of poetry. It is characteristically recondite, seemingly moving away from the work under discussion rather than further into it, or possibly so far into it than one no longer sees what is actually there. It is not the poet's fault. For most of them their poems stand free of extraneous discussion, one might hope.
But most poetry reviewers are poets themselves and perhaps find it hard to resist use of their own bursting bag of words and ideas. Commentary and reviewing becomes a secondary art and I suspect one review is pressed to achieve finer perceptions, subtler appreciation and profounder insights than those that have gone before.
It is a trend. There is no particular reviewer I have in mind and so I will invent my own example,

Fennella Bloom's Seven Pieces in Memory of Jerome Badiewicz explore the space between their own shifting lexis and the contingent world.....the poet inhabits a lacuna in the shared consciousness of their community.

The reviewer sits back to admire their work, lights his or her pipe, and congratulates themself on some impressive sentence writing but one isn't always sure they have told you anything, whether it was specific to the poems in question or could have been said about virtually any poetry. It is a little bit precious. It might have been better if they had written a poem rather than a review. But I'm not looking for scapegoats and I don't suggest the practice should stop. It is an art form in itself and provides a mild entertainment for the reader as well as, I'm sure, a great sense of satisfaction for the author.
I would, though, suggest we don't need reviewers or any other commentator to provide us with rules about what poetry should be or do and what it shouldn't. Manifesto makers have always been with us and the recent tendency has been to make lists of do's and don'ts, often perilously or even patronizingly aimed at aspiring poets.
The latest one I saw was hardly an original idea- that poetry should surprise the reader. We know about foregrounding, the disruption of a pattern and all such rules, how effective onomatopeia, assonance and alliteration can be.
But a collection of poems might consist of 60 pages. Does the reader expect to be surprised on every page and, if they have been surprised on 58 pages, are they still surprised to be surprised on page 59. Or would it be a surprise if page 59 contained no surprises. Perhaps every next word is a surprise in itself or perhaps my own threshold of surprise is morbidly high.
But please don't make up rules like that if you can help it. Each new poem succeeds or fails on its own terms. It might be acutely aware of every poem that ever came before it or it might not know anything about any of them.
Which rather conveniently brings me to the one rule that could be introduced. Not so much a rule but a law or a decree. And this time I do have specific offenders in mind but it is the same ones as it usually is. Anyone who needs to distinguish between a mainstream and something other than mainstream should be banished to an island where they can all celebrate their cherished novelty with like-minded others. It will be like Whicker Island, or the existentialists in Tony Hancock's film The Rebel, or like it was at university in 1978 where everyone expressed their individuality by wearing the same denim jeans. Meanwhile, back on the mainland, in the mainstream, everybody else can accept that diversity means that we are all in a minority of one, that individuality is something that one is born with and doesn't need to be worked at. Anybody who needs to insist on their own difference is trying too hard.
There is no need to invent a new language. The ones we have already work very well. They are a constant source of amusement and interest. You can even write poems with them.  

Wagenseil

Wagenseil,  Quartets for low strings, Piccolo Concerto Wien/Sensi (Accent)

Georg Christoph Wagenseil was born in 1715 which puts him nearly halfway between J.S. Bach and Mozart but contemporary with Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach.
Although a prolific composer in his time, there's not very much to be easily found on disc but I'm very glad I was inquisitive enough to get myself this recent release.
String quartets without violins are like an equivalent of a football team without strikers but nonetheless are a surprisingly sophisticated and satisfactory way of going about things.
If the original scoring for three cellos and bass has been interpreted in half of these sonatas with two violas, Roberto Sensi makes his case for doing so both in the notes and in the performance.
Wagenseil is slightly closer to the senior Bach in age but his music is closer to Mozart's. If the layers of the first subject in Sonata IV could be recognizably baroque chamber music, for the most part we are bridging the gap to classical music, a period apparently so dominated by Mozart and Haydn that other composers of the period are overshadowed. But that obviously isn't because there were no others worthy of note. Several parts of this double-CD set have enough instant appeal to be used as theme tunes for period dramas and any number of BBC programmes about antiques.
Mozart, it is reported anecdotally, was familiar with Wagenseil's music as a child and he might have learned much about arranging a jaunty tune or a line of decorous melancholy from these very pieces.
While the main line is carried by the violas and cellos, the star is quite possibly the bass part that shudders, reverberates or winds along subcutaneously to great effect.
This set hasn't been off my CD player yet and might not be until the next couple of bargains I have found arrive which are concertos from harp and trombone, separately rather than together you understand, and Wagenseil is a happy addition to my growing collection of lesser known composers.

The Goldfinch

I can't bear to be separated from my copy of The Goldfinch, that I began this evening and so I will be sleeping with it tonight.
I've slept with books before. It's not my first.

--

I used to like to sleep with women

But now prefer to sleep with books.

In both cases, it’s what they say,

The feel of them and their good looks.