Ian Bostridge's Schubert's Winter Journey (Faber) has obviated the necessity of the long thought-about but never attempted series here on 'The Best Book in the House'. I've just finished it and it is exactly that.What I had envisaged was a set of categories - Fiction, Poetry, Biography, Sport, Science, Music, Art, etc. - from which I'd select, say, three titles in each from the several books I have (it's probably not 2000 but might be over 1500) to make up a longlist and then somehow winnow it down to a shortlist and then one. Titles like Joyce's Dubliners, the copy of Touch signed for me by Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979, Mozart's letters, maybe one of Don Paterson's brilliant books on poetry, would have been contenders while the best biography, Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf, isn't actually in the house. But now it's all unnecessary.
Bostridge transcends his subject matter throughout. Winterreise is a starting point, with each poem set out in German and English, before he goes well beyond the songs into context, history, wide-ranging associations and a profound understanding of some valuable, liberal ideas. He is much more than a singer and I am compelled to buy one of his recordings now to set beside the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Don't be put off by the highbrow idea of a book about a Schubert song cycle, it is much more than that and I can hardly recommend it highly enough.
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And it is, of course, here that you (however few of you there are) come for book recommendations. I only read the ones I think I'll like and it is the anatomy of my own minor obsession. It's better to come here than subscribe to the TLS, which this week reviews three books mentioned here some time ago. And they do it so bloody 'properly', don't they.
The Emma Smith This is Shakespeare, the story of Faber & Faber and Jane Yeh's Discipline were all given due consideration here soon after they appeared, which is the beauty of the internet. I thought the idea of reading such a journal of much-vaunted augustness was to find out which books to read but it seems to be operating in reverse. I think it's got to go.
I'll miss the crossword, the thoughts of Sean O'Brien in his Freelance column and impressing myself when I get more than half of the crossword filled in but it's not as good as it thinks it is. I'm not convinced Gramophone is worth my while in perpetuity either but that's not Gramophone's fault.
I like a magazine. I still somehow miss The Listener from the 1970's, but not its crossword. But I don't think there is a magazine that does what I want. Book reviews, a few poems, essays, entertainment, no axe to grind, crossword, chess column. Looks like I'll have to write it myself.
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The Tour de France, which I hadn't envisaged being anything special this year, has provided two extra-ordinary days in the Alps. Yesterday was one of the greatest days of bike racing I've ever seen, notwithstanding the WTTA 12 Hours of 1994-96, while today's was potentially building to something similar when it had to be stopped due to freak weather. Very unfair on the brave Julian Alaphilippe, who will always be able to say he was still defending his yellow jersey when robbed of it; maybe it did G a favour and put a limit on his losses but who can say.
Freak weather. I've been most grateful for today's milder conditions having sweltered this week. I hope the climate change deniers will finally shut up. It is industry, capitalism and Donald Trump that cause our discomfort although, yes, we started it with our industrial revolution. We started most things but now we are not in a position to stop them.
We blunder into these situations relentlessly. I do, really, want to shut up about Boris Johnson but how can one. On top of his tax cuts, he promises a spend, spend, spend programme that would shame a Labour governnement's borrowing requirement. And they never though of promising to make Britain a paradise on Earth.
Maths is not his strong point. Beyond narcissism, not universally acknowledged as a virtue, not much is.
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What one needs is a bit of,
Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason
That is Keats, attractively offering a way of getting by. Boris certainly doesn't trouble himself with too many facts and, in a way, we could credit him with 'negative capability' but not in a good way.
It is one of many enlightening themes encompassed by Ian Bostridge and it stirred up a 40 year old idea.
Reckoning my time better spent on dissertations rather then waiting for exams at university, I readily took that option whenever available and proposed to write about 'negative capability' rather than do Romantic Literature. It was considered not suitable for an undergraduate 15000 words so I went to C17th Literature and did Marvell instead but I think there's 15000 words to do on it. My long-considered retirement might present an opportunity once the Shakespeare booklet is written and hidden on a memory stick.