Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

There is often less to write about at this time of year. Two years ago I began the series My Life in Sport, with memoirs of football, cricket and cycling. I did wonder whether to continue with running, pool, darts and chess but it hasn't got quite that desperate yet.

The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross lived up to all its much vaunting, mapping out one way through the bewildering shifts and fashions in C20th classical music. Some composers might be more significant for the theories behind what they wrote than what they wrote so some much-loved names, like Poulenc, seemed to get less coverage than I thought they deserved but, for those who know, music is apparently not important for what it sounds like.
The one CD I bought as a result of reading it was of Britten Cello Suites, which is still very kindly being rowed across the Atlantic from America for me. I had plenty of CD's of music mentioned already and although it would have been fitting to play them while reading about them, the urge was never that strong. Although I will have to give Morton Feldman another chance having read that,

 Feldman was a singular character- in Steve Reich’s words, ‘an absolutely unforgettable human being.’ As a conversationalist, he was verbose, egotistical, domineering, insulting, playful, flirtatious, and richly poetic...
and while one colleague at work agreed that is very much what they think of me, I'm not not everybody thinks that. Not 'richly poetic' anyway.
But Britten comes out of it very well, for me and I was only a bit put off the Humphrey Carpenter biography but its size and having to re-arrange delivery. I'll wait until I'm due to be home all week.
And the C20th, modernism, the avant garde. So many dead ends, many of them fascinating but ultimately period pieces now, dated by their tremendous vogue. But anything of worth feeds into the mainstream because the mainstream is all there is. Like any period, one can't imagine what happens next, surely it's now all been done and Ross does meditate on that.
It's unlikely that a new generation of composers are all going to go back to writing like Mozart. There is still a tendency towards shock and noise, as sadly documented in the BBC Music Magazine CD Best of British, youngest composer born 2000, which sounds very old hat. But Ross perhaps didn't highlight enough how Tavener's Protecting Veil, Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, James MacMillan's Seven Last Words from the Cross, amongst other things, and such composers as Michael Nyman made the end of the C20th not such a bad time. And, in Errollyn Wallen there is a composer who can do evocative modernism and produce a gorgeous Cello Concerto.
It isn't over yet.

The blurb on the back of Eleanor Cook's Elizabeth Bishop at Work is confident enough to quote at length a review that begins 'Do we need another book about Elizabeth Bishop', because if it's this one, yes we do.
It is a compelling and very useful survey of the oeuvre, well-organized and written no more academically than discussion of a poet's poet's poems needs to be. Heaven knows, it's hard to believe that a Bishop poem can have quite so much in it but it is the art that disguises art and whether the poems came readily or, as evidenced by some of the drafts in Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box, was hard won, this is how good poems need to be to be better than everybody else who ever tried.
One is almost tempted to say that the critique is as good an achievement as the poetry in such cases but it never is. Commentators are only ever on the sidelines, like autograph hunters, and getting in on the coat-tails of their subject.

And, only just begun, and I've meant to read it for years, A.N. Wilson's account of Jesus, the historical figure rather than the religious icon. It looks like he is diligently and exhastively forensic even if the preface does rely on assumptions like 'couldn't possibly have' and 'it is unimaginable that'. 
If we're going to nail this once and for all, it might need to be more forensic that than, my dear A.N., but we'll see.
It's a great thing about the CofE, you can hardly accuse them of being fanatical. They like their lovely churches, the hymns, the literature and the tradition but not so much the difficult bits, like God. 
That's liberalism. There's a lot to be said for it.