It's going to be quieter here for a while with no concerts to review and not many new books expected. There's Sean O'Brien due in May but otherwise, it's upstairs to find the re-reading.
La Peste proved even better than the exemplary Camus was remembered, much of it looking true but, out of all its brilliant passages, none seemed wiser than the last, that it doesn't really go away. Like the Nazism that the plague is an allegory of, it is always capable of coming back. The innocence of having lived plague-less lives thus far is no longer with us,
And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.
Then it didn't take long to enjoy Julian Barnes's The Noise of Time, about Shostakovich, again. And having put that back, I've come back down with Proust vol. 1 so wish me luck with my second attempt, the first since 1984. I reached aboutm page 1300 then but think I'd better start over again.
--
But if it's quiet here, it's weekdays daily at The David Green Show, as per the link above, a vanity project originally intended for colleagues, friends and family for the duration but, of course, join in if you want to.
Sunday 29 March 2020
Tuesday 24 March 2020
Charles Richard-Hamelin Mozart
Charles Richard-Hamelin, Les Violins du Roy, Cohen, Mozart Piano Concertos nos. 22 & 24 (Analekta)
Mozart's best known piano concertos are nos. 21, 27, 23, 25 and maybe 19, so what was he up to in the even numbers. Much the same thing but slightly less memorably.
No. 22, K.482, has 2.23 of symphonic introduction before the piano appears as if they're filling in while the maestro finds his way out of the dressing room. It takes a while before he is in his stride, tinkling pleasantly along without finding a theme to compare with the big hits. Charles Ricard-Hamelin is best once he's warmed up and fleet-fingered in the rippling flow of the standard template for a Mozart piano concerto. Not that there's anything 'standard' about Mozart but he's one of those whose 'other work' would be welcome in anybody else's oeuvre but doesn't get much of a look in against his best.
The second movement is more hesitant, maybe even sombre, with the woodwind helping towards some serenity in a piece that will benefit from more plays. The third uses a tune that might have been of use to G&S, loiters in the middle and finishes amicably.
No. 24, K.491, is subdued but not as 'tragic' as the sleeve notes who have us believe. The dark in Mozart is still luminous. Luminous and ominous at the same time is something that nobody else has ever done like him.
Having had two odd-numbered concertos played by Daniel Barenboim since a formative age, their indelible print is too much with me to ever be erased and they wouldn't be anyway. A Mozart Piano Concerto is like a Vermeer canvas or a Thomas Hardy novel, a thing in itself beyond any doubting. In a way, 22 and 24 are like new additions to those of us who might have noticed it was the odds numbers we always heard but never troubled to find what came in between, which is the reason for buying it once I noticed.
They are like the others, but in third gear. Mozart's third gear is overdrive for almost every other composer that ever lived. Richard-Hamelin positively pirouettes around the keyboard, floating like the best interpreters of this music seem to. You do need to be able to not bash it too hard to give the best rendition of such pensive gentility.
No. 22, K.482, has 2.23 of symphonic introduction before the piano appears as if they're filling in while the maestro finds his way out of the dressing room. It takes a while before he is in his stride, tinkling pleasantly along without finding a theme to compare with the big hits. Charles Ricard-Hamelin is best once he's warmed up and fleet-fingered in the rippling flow of the standard template for a Mozart piano concerto. Not that there's anything 'standard' about Mozart but he's one of those whose 'other work' would be welcome in anybody else's oeuvre but doesn't get much of a look in against his best.
The second movement is more hesitant, maybe even sombre, with the woodwind helping towards some serenity in a piece that will benefit from more plays. The third uses a tune that might have been of use to G&S, loiters in the middle and finishes amicably.
No. 24, K.491, is subdued but not as 'tragic' as the sleeve notes who have us believe. The dark in Mozart is still luminous. Luminous and ominous at the same time is something that nobody else has ever done like him.
Having had two odd-numbered concertos played by Daniel Barenboim since a formative age, their indelible print is too much with me to ever be erased and they wouldn't be anyway. A Mozart Piano Concerto is like a Vermeer canvas or a Thomas Hardy novel, a thing in itself beyond any doubting. In a way, 22 and 24 are like new additions to those of us who might have noticed it was the odds numbers we always heard but never troubled to find what came in between, which is the reason for buying it once I noticed.
They are like the others, but in third gear. Mozart's third gear is overdrive for almost every other composer that ever lived. Richard-Hamelin positively pirouettes around the keyboard, floating like the best interpreters of this music seem to. You do need to be able to not bash it too hard to give the best rendition of such pensive gentility.
Sunday 22 March 2020
Coin Chess Tournament
My mate, Alan, out there sent me the details so I entered, intrepidly.
Two hours of some intensity on a Sunday afternoon but at least there was some sport to watch.
I finished 69th out of 249. Got to be happy with that.
Thanks, mate, for the action pictures.
Monday 16 March 2020
A Little History of Poetry
John Carey, A Little History of Poetry (Yale)
Little here means 300 pages but they are short pages. It is little compared to Michael Schmidt's monumental Lives of the Poets (1998) which did a similar job in much more detail.
Poetry means the canon of Western poetry in English augmented by that in other languages that fed into the process of arriving at where it finds itself now, from the point of view of an English poetry academic, of which John Carey is the doyen.
Thus beginning nearly 4000 years ago with The Epic of Gilgamesh, he provides a sweep through all those names one thinks of as 'canonical', even if in recent years there have been suggestions that there should be no such thing, as well as a cast of supporting names that many won't be familiar with. I wasn't. Being still alive appears to disqualify any poet that might have been included had they not been which leaves one thinking who they would be, or if Carey isn't prepared to confer such legitimacy on the living. But one can hardly imagine the job being done more succinctly, covering the necessary ground as best it can in such a short space and giving a sense of how the history twisted, turned and developed and how some of the poets relate to some of the others.
If you want to know how poetry managed to back itself into quite such a branch line of contemporary culture, you might have to read between the lines because it doesn't say. Perhaps it doesn't think it has.
Those who get chapters entirely to themselves, if that were an indicator of elite status, are Chaucer, Donne, Milton and Yeats. Ted and Sylvia share, as do Keats and Shelley. Auden has Spender (possibly the luckiest to get his name in) and MacNeice for company. Larkin doesn't quite dominate his chapter as much as one might think, with Gunn and Betjeman among his room-mates. Shakespeare has Marlowe and Sidney for company with Spenser bracketed with Wyatt, many of whose poems are 'unremarkable', and others.
Auden is regarded by many critics as,
the greatest English-language poet since Wordsworth,
and presumably those critics are those that think Wordsworth was the greatest English poet working back from Auden. I'm not saying I disagree but you would have gone past Keats and the more worthwhile bits of Tennyson to get there. Not much persuaded me to do all that C18th reading I've been putting off for so long despite Pope being quotable. My own idiosyncratic canon mirrors Eliot's rediscovery of 'metaphysical' poetry which, it says here, wasn't metaphysical at all because that implies it was, in the case of Donne,
interested in propounding abstruse philosophy, and he was not.
But I'm not convinced that's what it was meant to mean. I remember being asked 40 years ago, at University, what it meant and referring to Marvell's The Gallery and seeming to get away with it.
Halfway through the book we arrive at Tennyson who is not halfway through those 4000 years but that is only the same effect as the brightest stars in the sky being mostly those that are closest to us. As with our view of any such genre there seem to be more things closer to us worthy of our attention (see footnote). Without wanting to complain officially, I was disappointed that Wulf and Eadwacer didn't get a mention, and Fulke Greville might have crept in as well as a few more Romans but Carey has conspicuously and conscientiously extended the canon he would have been brought up with to include an alternative C18th, women and ethnic minorities that redress the weird, old certainties of a white male syllabus.
German, French and Russian poetries are apparently included for how they impacted on Modernism in English rather than any attempt to see poetry as something that occurs in all languages. And then, after that shockwave, there are as many American names as English and international 'big names' from other anglophone places but one can see the difficulties of living up to a title like this book has.
I was glad to see the hymn writers given their due, whose poetry was tremendous in the same way as cathedral architecture is tremendous, irrespective of its intentional tribute to God.
But two things came to my notice that it might not have been Prof. Carey's intention to stress.
In Wordsworth, Edward Thomas and others, there is a recurrent impulse to return to 'the real language of men', by which he meant 'of people', including Dorothy. Poetry seems to default to sounding daft if nobody ever tries to reset it.
And poetry's intention is to go beyond itself, to be more than its language. And it's really only any good when it achieves that.
What Carey can be thanked for is pointing out that Thomas Hardy,
seems to have realized, earlier than T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, that something drastic was needed to renovate English poetry.
It's been a while since I said here how the much maligned (in places) 'mainstream' is liberal, inclusive, democratic and is actually all there is. Each generation brings with it another set of self-styled upstarts who think they are revolutionaries, in the same way that teenagers of any period think they invented sex and their ancestors didn't get it. But they did. The mainstream is constantly shifting and accepting of the new, if and when it is worthwhile. It is the autocratic avant-gardistes who consign themselves to the status of passing fads. Ask Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
It's a brilliant book, easy to read and non-academic, that both benefits and suffers from being as little as it is on such a big subject.
Footnote. Let's not include pop music in that. We all have our own standpoint for pop music, like September 1971, for instance.
Poetry means the canon of Western poetry in English augmented by that in other languages that fed into the process of arriving at where it finds itself now, from the point of view of an English poetry academic, of which John Carey is the doyen.
Thus beginning nearly 4000 years ago with The Epic of Gilgamesh, he provides a sweep through all those names one thinks of as 'canonical', even if in recent years there have been suggestions that there should be no such thing, as well as a cast of supporting names that many won't be familiar with. I wasn't. Being still alive appears to disqualify any poet that might have been included had they not been which leaves one thinking who they would be, or if Carey isn't prepared to confer such legitimacy on the living. But one can hardly imagine the job being done more succinctly, covering the necessary ground as best it can in such a short space and giving a sense of how the history twisted, turned and developed and how some of the poets relate to some of the others.
If you want to know how poetry managed to back itself into quite such a branch line of contemporary culture, you might have to read between the lines because it doesn't say. Perhaps it doesn't think it has.
Those who get chapters entirely to themselves, if that were an indicator of elite status, are Chaucer, Donne, Milton and Yeats. Ted and Sylvia share, as do Keats and Shelley. Auden has Spender (possibly the luckiest to get his name in) and MacNeice for company. Larkin doesn't quite dominate his chapter as much as one might think, with Gunn and Betjeman among his room-mates. Shakespeare has Marlowe and Sidney for company with Spenser bracketed with Wyatt, many of whose poems are 'unremarkable', and others.
Auden is regarded by many critics as,
the greatest English-language poet since Wordsworth,
and presumably those critics are those that think Wordsworth was the greatest English poet working back from Auden. I'm not saying I disagree but you would have gone past Keats and the more worthwhile bits of Tennyson to get there. Not much persuaded me to do all that C18th reading I've been putting off for so long despite Pope being quotable. My own idiosyncratic canon mirrors Eliot's rediscovery of 'metaphysical' poetry which, it says here, wasn't metaphysical at all because that implies it was, in the case of Donne,
interested in propounding abstruse philosophy, and he was not.
But I'm not convinced that's what it was meant to mean. I remember being asked 40 years ago, at University, what it meant and referring to Marvell's The Gallery and seeming to get away with it.
Halfway through the book we arrive at Tennyson who is not halfway through those 4000 years but that is only the same effect as the brightest stars in the sky being mostly those that are closest to us. As with our view of any such genre there seem to be more things closer to us worthy of our attention (see footnote). Without wanting to complain officially, I was disappointed that Wulf and Eadwacer didn't get a mention, and Fulke Greville might have crept in as well as a few more Romans but Carey has conspicuously and conscientiously extended the canon he would have been brought up with to include an alternative C18th, women and ethnic minorities that redress the weird, old certainties of a white male syllabus.
German, French and Russian poetries are apparently included for how they impacted on Modernism in English rather than any attempt to see poetry as something that occurs in all languages. And then, after that shockwave, there are as many American names as English and international 'big names' from other anglophone places but one can see the difficulties of living up to a title like this book has.
I was glad to see the hymn writers given their due, whose poetry was tremendous in the same way as cathedral architecture is tremendous, irrespective of its intentional tribute to God.
But two things came to my notice that it might not have been Prof. Carey's intention to stress.
In Wordsworth, Edward Thomas and others, there is a recurrent impulse to return to 'the real language of men', by which he meant 'of people', including Dorothy. Poetry seems to default to sounding daft if nobody ever tries to reset it.
And poetry's intention is to go beyond itself, to be more than its language. And it's really only any good when it achieves that.
What Carey can be thanked for is pointing out that Thomas Hardy,
seems to have realized, earlier than T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, that something drastic was needed to renovate English poetry.
It's been a while since I said here how the much maligned (in places) 'mainstream' is liberal, inclusive, democratic and is actually all there is. Each generation brings with it another set of self-styled upstarts who think they are revolutionaries, in the same way that teenagers of any period think they invented sex and their ancestors didn't get it. But they did. The mainstream is constantly shifting and accepting of the new, if and when it is worthwhile. It is the autocratic avant-gardistes who consign themselves to the status of passing fads. Ask Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
It's a brilliant book, easy to read and non-academic, that both benefits and suffers from being as little as it is on such a big subject.
Footnote. Let's not include pop music in that. We all have our own standpoint for pop music, like September 1971, for instance.
Sunday 15 March 2020
Hygiene Aid
I am indebted to my nephew, Chris, who inserted the words to my pop song Break into this useful Plague Avoidance Device.
Perhaps we could also use a verse of two of Mister MacGonagall Lost His Hat.
Thursday 12 March 2020
Ensemble Concertante at Portsmouth Live!
Ensemble Concertante, Portsmouth Cathedral, Mar 12.
My first walk along the seafront since last September was a gusty one.
There's a lot of air down there on a day like today. Which I thought was a
good, contrived way of introducing the idea of wind instruments - Ensemble
Concertante are four clarinets, which I don't see often among the piano,
violin, cello and vocal music.
caught it better than my camera did.
After the
morning wind and the lunchtime sunlight, it was quite severely raining at
leaving time so a few minutes of stained glass and remembering George Villiers,
1st Duke of Buckingham, who was assassinated a few yards up the road in 1628,
was enough to wait for it to stop, do my bit as a typical Southsea Remain
Waitrose customer and come home to see the fruits of my best investment
decision of the week- not to put the life savings on Paisley Park in the
Stayers Hurdle. Swerving horse racing is saving me a fortune.
My first walk along the seafront since last September was a gusty one.
There's a lot of air down there on a day like today. Which I thought was a
good, contrived way of introducing the idea of wind instruments - Ensemble
Concertante are four clarinets, which I don't see often among the piano,
violin, cello and vocal music.
They
began with an arrangement of the first movement of William Boyce's Symphony
no. 1. Wonderful. I must upgrade my old cassette to a CD, it's been that
long since I listened to him. Baroque decoration in four parts. I wouldn't have
minded the whole symphony but Ensemble Concertante offer variety and the
programme moved on.
The French
Suite by Yvonne Desportes was recognizably that, and C20th and thus
'impressionistic' in its evocation of light, and perhaps Ravel. During
sunlight, at lunchtime, the stained glass casts its colours onto the stone wall
but the music
At times,
in different ways, both this and the Khasene March evoked Sidney
Bechet's 'enormous yes' without the group quite moving into the jazz that their
instruments do the flailing bits of so well. And the big one was a bass
clarinet not a saxophone's uncle.
The
composer Matthew Holloway was there to hear his Scherzo, more
contemporary, stop-start and proof enough that the Ensemble are ensemble, with
excellent timing and togetherness.
We were kindly
put out of our anxities about where we had heard one of the two Gounod pieces
before, Marche funebre d'une marionette, and the answer was Hitchcock
Presents. Such was the blend of musical genres and between known and new.
The Dansa
Latino di Maria del Realby Patrick Hiketick wasn't quite as Latin as the French
Suite was French but provided a salsa finale to complete a real excursion
into the potential of what is a lightly niche instrument but, wait, tonight's
concert on the wireless is Brahms and Stephen Hough and all clarinet so perhaps
it's World Clarinet Day and I didn't know.
After the
morning wind and the lunchtime sunlight, it was quite severely raining at
leaving time so a few minutes of stained glass and remembering George Villiers,
1st Duke of Buckingham, who was assassinated a few yards up the road in 1628,
was enough to wait for it to stop, do my bit as a typical Southsea Remain
Waitrose customer and come home to see the fruits of my best investment
decision of the week- not to put the life savings on Paisley Park in the
Stayers Hurdle. Swerving horse racing is saving me a fortune.
Thanks very much to Ensemble Concertante for an enlightening performance
and Portsmouth Live! for being there. Maybe we can have the whole Boyce
symphony one day.
Tuesday 10 March 2020
Things It Was Good To See
It was good to see Shiskin holding on in the first at Cheltenham and an early strike for Racetrack Wiseguy from the Three Wise Men's Preview. One never worries too much when a horse of Mr. Henderson's drifts in the market but since Shiskin was a late replacement in the actual treble I did (for the beaten Benie des Dieux), it was galling not to have the 6/1 SP multiplying the others up quite lucratively. The week is all about Copperhead tomorrow for me and the treble won't be landed until Thyme Hill wins on Friday so it might not make any difference. Racing such as it was today can actually be enjoyable with not much at stake. I hadn't realized that.
--
It was good to see life imitating art, as it were, as sunlight spread onto the wall below the Hammershoi yesterday, rhyming with the effect up on the right of the painting. The light source in the painting is hard to fathom since the shadows of the furniture legs and that light on the wall seem to suggest it comes from three different angles but I'm looking at the picture a lot since it went up and I might solve its riddle yet, or accept it as poetic license.
---
It was good to see, and hear, that Bells on Sunday this week came from Crediton, more specifically the Church of the Holy Cross and the Mother of Him who Hung Thereon.
I remember some of the names of the churches when we went to Prague, in the last millennium, such as Our Lady of the Snows but Crediton is not intimidated by such poetry and goes for some syntactical exactitude.
The ringers from Exeter went and did that old party favourite, Cambridge Surprise Maximus. When all else of a fondly imagined old England has finally gone, let there still be Bells on Sunday, with its details of the bells, their tuning and history and well done to John Taylor of Loughborough for making so many of them.
---
It was good to see Montaigne keeping up his own good work as he made passing comment on poetry.
I'm sure all his readers like to recognize themselves in Montaigne and think themselves like him because, like Shakespeare, he puts into words what they thought but had ne'er so well expressed.
We can't be sure that he quite lived up to all his ideals but he is modest in his claims for how well he succeeds and they aren't really 'ideals' as much as ways to live, sensible and sceptical of others. While the essays might be full of him, he's not 'full of himself' and I can only join in the chorus of approval that comes from everybody, it seems, who has read him.
What he says about poetry is that it's a 'frivolous, subtle art, all disguise and chatter and pleasure and show', which is useful to remember when its readers and writers sometimes imagine it to be profound, 'the music of being human' and the deeply meaningful gift bestowed upon only a handful of special people. It isn't really that, is it. Not most of the time.
--
But it was good to see the Thom Gunn book grow to 1250 words.
It is my second attempt at such a thing, the first having been twenty years ago. It's a retirement project, really, but one must make a start or perhaps one never will.
It hasn't got a title but it has got a plan. Having read Ian Sansom's work of fan appreciation about Auden last year, September 1, 1939, I thought I could do that about Gunn. So I'm giving it a go. There's no saying how long it will be before I realize it's beyond me.
I suppose it's 3/1 that I'll soldier on and finish it, 10/1 that I'll be satisfied with it and make it available and 33/1 that I'll be so pleased with it that I'll show it to a publisher who agrees with me and it sees print.
In the meantime, I have something to say I'm working on.
The Ted Hughes evening went very well with the good people of Portsmouth Poetry Society last week and, as often happens, I came back with an improved opinion of the subject under discussion having seen what others appreciated about it, which is always a Good Thing To See.
--
It was good to see the arrival of the John Eliot Gardiner L'incoronazione di Poppea having heard this devastating final love duet on the wireless,
except that Monteverdi operas are not quite as full of highlights as those of Mozart or Puccini. While the music is a very pleasant accompaniment to reading, it distracts one not very often. I should have known that from when I saw Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, which tells the long story before giving you a tune at the end. Monteverdi is a fine thing at his best and undeserving of the comparison I'm going to make. It's called 'Lost in Translation' Syndrome in which one sits through an hour and a half of inconsequential film before it inexplicably finishes with a Jesus & Mary Chain track.
--
It was good to see the faces of various real people incorporated into the architecture of Chichester Cathedral last week, having previously been introduced to Doug, who is one of them, aged 93 and the only person still living to have been so honoured. He was in charge of Works there for thirty years. I can't be sure that he's any of the three in this picture.
--
And finally, it will be good to see the arrival of John Carey's A Little History of Poetry that Amazon e-mailed to say would arrive today but as yet hasn't. But it usually does if they say it will.
86 this year, John Carey is the doyen of doyen literary commentators - I try to avoid the overtones of the word 'critic'- and famous for the essential book on Donne, Life, Mind and Art, as well as his less essential opinion of Bob Dylan as a poet. I'm sure his book, however little, will raise big questions and I'm looking forward to it. It might be reviewed here by Friday if it's short enough and it rains sufficiently to keep me happily excused from outdoors.
Because it's good to see exactly what I want of a week off. Cheltenham on the telly, the music library at hand, the books throughout with Montaigne, Rilke and Graham Swift's essays close by, the one to write on the computer, where the chess set also is. It reflects what Montaigne says about his library although he is sensible enough to warn that one does need to get out a bit, too.
--
---
It was good to see, and hear, that Bells on Sunday this week came from Crediton, more specifically the Church of the Holy Cross and the Mother of Him who Hung Thereon.
I remember some of the names of the churches when we went to Prague, in the last millennium, such as Our Lady of the Snows but Crediton is not intimidated by such poetry and goes for some syntactical exactitude.
The ringers from Exeter went and did that old party favourite, Cambridge Surprise Maximus. When all else of a fondly imagined old England has finally gone, let there still be Bells on Sunday, with its details of the bells, their tuning and history and well done to John Taylor of Loughborough for making so many of them.
---
It was good to see Montaigne keeping up his own good work as he made passing comment on poetry.
I'm sure all his readers like to recognize themselves in Montaigne and think themselves like him because, like Shakespeare, he puts into words what they thought but had ne'er so well expressed.
We can't be sure that he quite lived up to all his ideals but he is modest in his claims for how well he succeeds and they aren't really 'ideals' as much as ways to live, sensible and sceptical of others. While the essays might be full of him, he's not 'full of himself' and I can only join in the chorus of approval that comes from everybody, it seems, who has read him.
What he says about poetry is that it's a 'frivolous, subtle art, all disguise and chatter and pleasure and show', which is useful to remember when its readers and writers sometimes imagine it to be profound, 'the music of being human' and the deeply meaningful gift bestowed upon only a handful of special people. It isn't really that, is it. Not most of the time.
--
But it was good to see the Thom Gunn book grow to 1250 words.
It is my second attempt at such a thing, the first having been twenty years ago. It's a retirement project, really, but one must make a start or perhaps one never will.
It hasn't got a title but it has got a plan. Having read Ian Sansom's work of fan appreciation about Auden last year, September 1, 1939, I thought I could do that about Gunn. So I'm giving it a go. There's no saying how long it will be before I realize it's beyond me.
I suppose it's 3/1 that I'll soldier on and finish it, 10/1 that I'll be satisfied with it and make it available and 33/1 that I'll be so pleased with it that I'll show it to a publisher who agrees with me and it sees print.
In the meantime, I have something to say I'm working on.
The Ted Hughes evening went very well with the good people of Portsmouth Poetry Society last week and, as often happens, I came back with an improved opinion of the subject under discussion having seen what others appreciated about it, which is always a Good Thing To See.
--
It was good to see the arrival of the John Eliot Gardiner L'incoronazione di Poppea having heard this devastating final love duet on the wireless,
except that Monteverdi operas are not quite as full of highlights as those of Mozart or Puccini. While the music is a very pleasant accompaniment to reading, it distracts one not very often. I should have known that from when I saw Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, which tells the long story before giving you a tune at the end. Monteverdi is a fine thing at his best and undeserving of the comparison I'm going to make. It's called 'Lost in Translation' Syndrome in which one sits through an hour and a half of inconsequential film before it inexplicably finishes with a Jesus & Mary Chain track.
--
It was good to see the faces of various real people incorporated into the architecture of Chichester Cathedral last week, having previously been introduced to Doug, who is one of them, aged 93 and the only person still living to have been so honoured. He was in charge of Works there for thirty years. I can't be sure that he's any of the three in this picture.
--
And finally, it will be good to see the arrival of John Carey's A Little History of Poetry that Amazon e-mailed to say would arrive today but as yet hasn't. But it usually does if they say it will.
86 this year, John Carey is the doyen of doyen literary commentators - I try to avoid the overtones of the word 'critic'- and famous for the essential book on Donne, Life, Mind and Art, as well as his less essential opinion of Bob Dylan as a poet. I'm sure his book, however little, will raise big questions and I'm looking forward to it. It might be reviewed here by Friday if it's short enough and it rains sufficiently to keep me happily excused from outdoors.
Because it's good to see exactly what I want of a week off. Cheltenham on the telly, the music library at hand, the books throughout with Montaigne, Rilke and Graham Swift's essays close by, the one to write on the computer, where the chess set also is. It reflects what Montaigne says about his library although he is sensible enough to warn that one does need to get out a bit, too.
Friday 6 March 2020
Oh, Babe, What Would You Say
Frankly, you can keep Van Morrison, Jim Morrison and all that moody attitude. In between the 'day job' of engineering such twaddle as Dark Side of the Moon, Norman 'Hurricane' Smith made use of Pink Floyd's tea-breaks by using the studio time to make some vaudeville masterpieces. I've continued to celebrate that he did by adopting one of his titles.
-
Meanwhile, back with the reading list. An old Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, won't ever let you down. I should have gone straight for the 1344 pages of the complete essays rather than the mere sampler of the Selection because if you're going to have any of somebody you like you might as well have the lot. Any selection, or 'selected', is somebody else's choice and you might have chosen differently. I'd like to decide for myself.
It's not as if I didn't know about Montaigne, or you didn't either. Shakespeare did, too, we are told. It's not a tip. I've only just caught up with Rilke, through Martyn Crucefix's relaxed (I think) translations of the Duino Elegies. I've known 'about' him for decades without knowing much about him.
To get involved with these things needs a trigger, and luckily I've had them recently.
Montaigne is not the least bit forbidding to read, which being C16th and in translation, you might think he would be. At least in the Screech version, combining three available texts like a compact variorum edition, he is clear, eminently sensible and, like it says, like he's sat next to you on a quiet afternoon, maybe having a Guinness or two.
Every essay I've read so far makes me want to quote him. I'm not going to do that, of course. I only wish one could not only upbraid the Stoics for their ultimate absurdity - who had come out of Daisy Dunn's book on Pliny so well- and accept mortality so equably without any of that terrifying stuff from Larkin's Aubade.
I wish such renowned classicists as Boris Johnson had read and understood a fraction as much of Roman literature as Montaigne had, like his unarguable objections to cruelty to animals invloved in the hunt.
Never mind persuading Workington, Bolsover and parts of the North East of England to vote for that vague, mumbling pack of lies that constituted a General Election campaign. Any party that thinks it's okay to charge around the countryside hoping to murder our fellow animals for fun is unelectable.
I was once sent a box of books by someone who was off-loading them and I was grateful for many of them, and they've been of much use but On Hunting by Roger Scruton, was, I'm sure, put in among them as a wind-up. It wasn't given house room here for long.
Montaigne would not have voted Conservative.
But I'll quote him On Drunkenness. It's good for you, once in a while. Don't worry about it.
But it's a mistake to refine the palate to appreciate only good quality wine because you will then only be disappointed by ordinary wine,
To be a good drinker you must not have too tender a palate. The Germans enjoy drinking virtually any wine. Their aim is to gulp it rather than to taste it. They get a better bargain. Their pleasure is more abundant and closer at hand.
Philosophy can be dull reading. In fact, it's bloody dreadful but Montaigne is bright and refreshing, more than 400 years on. Like a crisp Soave.
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So, actually, Montaigne and Rilke will keep me going for a while even if they seem like occasional reading. I'm subliminally looking for something else. The pile on top of the CD shelves only consists of the second half of the Northanger Abbey/Persuasion double-header and Jane's first book didn't do enough to make me weant to read her last; Les Monnayeurs in French so I can see what Camus really wrote except it's been so long since I read The Counterfeiters, I've forgotten where, and the long halted biography of Delmore Schwartz that got left behind when more important things arrived.
Please don't make me have to go back to Proust.
Perhaps the purer form of music, rather than books for the sake of books, is actually a higher form of detachment from the worldly world that only ever disappoints us.The Beethoven Piano Sonatas by the completely brilliant Stephen Kovacevich arrived a few days ago. 9 CD's. Surely that's enough for a while.
Cheltenham Update
First rule of tipping- back it yourself before you tell everybody else.
It does, though, constitute a revised nap for the whole of next week given the apparent confidence behind it.
We keep Thyme Hill onside for the Albert Bartlett on Friday.
We don't desert anything but we note that Shiskin is taken on by Envoi Allen in the Supreme on Tuesday and so side with Mr. Henderson against the Irish challenge more conservatively.
With confidence at a low but caring little, it will be a few speculative combinations involving Vinndication, Brewin'upastorm on day one, Goshen on Friday and hoping that the long wait to see Santini in the Gold Cup is worth it even if one is always afraid of the great Davy Russell and realize that, wherever Santini is on the way up the hill, Delta Work will not be far away.
Tomorrow, with Sandown abandoned, is a great day to have off with next week coming up. Stab at any old thing on the ITV7 and, who knows, if you only have seven winners all year they might all come in in those races and you can spend as long as you like luxuriating and enjoying the delights of Waterlooville, that gorgeous Chelmsford of the South.
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It would have been most remiss of me to update my selections without inviting the two wise men to do the same.
Spenno writes,
Cheltenham
is a nightmare this year. Still like my 3 main picks, although would probably
add A Plus Tard in the Ryanair, for a winning Yankee!
And the Professor goes,
A couple more in the lesser races. Palladium in the Boodles Hurdle. Has won nicely in his last two races. Won't mind very soft ground.
Birchdale in the coral cup. Didn't look in love with chasing but may have protected his hurdles mark at the same time so looks to have a decent chance.
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I didn't bother saying that Paisley Park and Tiger Roll are being used to hold yankees together rather than Benie des Dieux. An odds on shot is not really a tip.
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