The Balzac Mystery and other stories

Lately, rather than buy a book by Balzac I read Pere Goriot that I already had, had read years ago and enjoyed it so, doing all I can to put off Finnegans Wake, I decided to have my own little Balzac Festival.

Goriot is much like King Lear.

I had a vague idea that I also had a book of short stories. A lot of ideas I have these days are a bit vague. But, looking where it should be, where it might be and even some places where I wouldn't expect it to be, the stories weren't to be found and it didn't seem like something I'd give away.

So I ordered second hand paperbacks of Eugenie Grandet, The Black Sheep and Selected Short Stories. As a form of satisfying entertainment, there is no better value than three such books. Balzac should have been an accountant. His surveys of post-revolutionary, Napoleonic France are all about money which, of course, equates to social status which in turn is all they care about. It won't take long for me to finish The Black Sheep and that will be enough of that for the time being and I'll be thrust back into finding anything to get myself into to put off the final Joyce.

But the Selected Stories still seemed distantly familiar, on the very outposts of memory. More the titles than the stories, none of which I remembered having read before, but it was a bit like that feeling you get when you think you know somebody but have no idea where from or who they are. In this case, it was the opposite, knowing exactly what the stories were but not being sure if I had any previous acquaintance with them. And this is what it's like, following the Sebastian Faulks debacle in which I reached page 70-odd of one of his novels before going upstairs to find an identical copy of it. 

I don't really need to buy another book in order to fill my days with worthwhile reading. I could read any number of the ones I have and they would seem like new all over again. I have an index in my head of how good they were but not what happens. I was looking at Faulks's Paris Echo last night only to find from the synopsis that I had read it but I borrowed it so no scrutiny of the shelves would confirm that I had. I'm still hoping to read books I haven't read before, though, otherwise I won't have the joy that their arrival brings with it.

Coming soon - new poems by Andrew Motion.

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The Butcher Said, a horse, got home by the shortest of noses at Bangor today. One less inch in it and it would have been a dead heat which was a fine way to regain the winning thread after a bit of a plunge on High Definition in the big two-year-old race at the Curragh on Saturday when it came from a long way behind, having traded at 100/1 in running, to win comfortably enough by almost a length. That is what he had done first time out so either he takes a while to get into top gear or the jockeys are so confident that they are showboating on him. He is thus favourite for next year's Derby but fools rush in on such long-term gambles because whatever price he is, and it's 8/1, that is a fair price about him even running in the race at this stage never mind winning it.

--

The shifting, not quite there, qualities of language can make for fine poetry in the right hands suggesting many things in a phrase and echoing with allusions. In other disciplines, though, like law or medicine, it's for the best if everybody knows precisely what a word means.

In politics, too. If only. I'm thinking of how the terms 'libertarian' and 'liberal' sound so similar, as if being in favour of one must be the same as being in favour of the other. We need to go carefully here.

Liberal has had a hard enough time defining itself as it is with the Liberal Party being a repository at various times for ex-Labour right-wingers like the since-disgraced Cyril Smith, various devout methodists, the flawed visionary that was Jeremy Thorpe, a lot of well-intentioned idealists and the centrists like Charles Kennedy that were brave enough to be there where the likes of Blair, Major, Ken Clarke and Amber Rudd should be now. They should not be confused with the ungracious, spoilt bad boys of the fourth form whose idea of an ideology is that they should be able to do what the hell they like. Libertarianism is less an ideology than the attitude so brilliantly demonstrated in Boris Johnson that 'Freedom' is a policy and that will do. 

Freedom is an easy thing to be in favour of, from Nelson Mandela, through any number of less successful terrorists, to the misleading slogan 'arbeit macht frei'. Nobody, surely, votes against 'freedom' because it is, beyond dispute, a good thing. Except that, in some hands, it comes to mean their freedom at the expense of that of others.

I don't want to sermonize too long but the freedom to drive as fast as you like means you're going to kill somebody else, for instance. Libertarianism, which this Prime Minister, many in his government, in a weird alliance with Piers Corbyn and David Icke, would dearly love to adhere to, is mad, bad and dangerous to know and lacks all empathy with anybody else and any sense of community.

But I must pay tribute to my friend, Jeff, last week, who characterized Johnson as a boy in short trousers trying to think of an excuse why he hasn't done his homework. He never has but it was the most pertinent insight into the odd phenomenon since Matthew Parris's succinct summation of the 'incompetent scoundrel'.

--

It's amazing that there is still so much to be grateful for, for those of us lucky enough in late September when we really should be back at school. One has to get out of the house. Exercise is as important as sleep if not quite as enjoyable but it can be nearly so, spending such a perfect afternoon in places walkable from one's front door. The tide is receding and an hour and a half later is gone.

Angelina Kopyrina

 Angelina Kopyrina, Lunchtime Live! Portsmouth Cathedral, Thurs Sept 24th.

It's a long time since I looked forward to anything as much as this. Lockdown doesn't affect me as much as many others but live concerts are something I've been missing. Finding out just in time that Lunchtime Live was back and then seeing the programme, it couldn't come soon enough.

Due to some old, misplaced purist principle, I'd never taken much notice of the Busoni transcriptions of Bach or anybody else, it not being proper Bach but, to paraphrase The Monkees, then I heard it on the wireless recently, now I'm a believer.

It's not that Bach is diluted but one has the best of both worlds, with both The Well-Tempered Klavier and something like Liszt in one piece. One might think the same about the Brahms variations on Handel but that soon becomes Brahms with not much Handel whereas the Busoni-Bach Chaconne is more faithful to the Violin Partita it comes from. It retains the authentic Bach walking bass, the chiming effect of the celebratory passages and adds in some Liszt extravagance to make a remarkable piece that Angelina delivers with an assured flourish and great conviction. That was what I walked three miles each way for, the 7 or 8 miles I walked on Tuesday still stiff in my legs, like Bach himself walking all that way to hear Buxtehude, but I'd have gone anyway, it's just that the programme was exactly what I wanted.

But I was betting without the Rachmanninov Sonata no. 2. Being such a devotee of such things as Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, I enjoy Rachmanninov without collecting too many records of his music. That might change. The programme told us that Angelina's Ph. D. is research into 'author's editions and problems of interpretation' in the Rachmanninov Sonatas 1 and 2, so one could hardly be in better hands and nor, apparently, could the music. A piano player needs pianist's hands and Elton John didn't have them which is why Crocodile Rock was about his limit but I was early enough and thus well placed to be able to watch her hands which was an education in itself. The Sonata has its dreamy passages and even achieves moments of stillness, which Angelina captures without exploiting but her performance is always likely to be most memorable for the climactic runs they build back into. Nobody, not even Beethoven, does a crescendo quite like these and once Rachmanninov has given her licence to detonate the explosives it sounds to me as if 'Allegro molto' is an understatement. I hope the cathedral piano is enjoying some well-earned rest this afternoon after being put through such rigorous exercise. It was thrilling and both expressed one's wildest dreams while seemingly beyond them. I've seen standing ovations given for less than either of these performances and it was a shame the small, socially distanced audience weren't ideally situated to be prompted into doing so. 

It's great to see that Angelina will be back twice more in the next two months to provide more of her repertoire and it is devoutly to be hoped that no lockdown rules curtail the Lunchtime Live series, for which all gratitude is due to Sachin at the cathedral and all those performers doing them. I can't remember anything being quite so welcome.

 

Ora Singers - Spem in Alium, Vidi Aquam

 Ora Singers, Suzi Digby, Spem in Alium, Vidi Aquam (Harmonia Mundi)

I'm not short of recordings of Spem in Alium, which is a piece for the desert island, and so buying another one is not necessarily to extend the Spem section. The reason for it is James MacMillan's 40-part motet comissioned by Ora to mark the 450th anniversary.

But we begin with the Tallis, my favourite recording of which is that by King's College, Cambridge, from 1965 with David Willcocks, with its surging ocean of sound and bursts of authority in the 'Respice' and 'Domine'. Checking the versions I have, they come in at large time differences, from 8.55 to 12.14, which suggests different edits more than such a difference of tempo. Ora complete the course in a sensible 9.21, tremendously balanced, as clear as you could want and not exactly restrained but restraining themselves to below over-exuberance. It is a great account of a monumental work, achieving a more intimate than large-scale feeling.

Before we arrive at MacMillan's work, we have a programme of further C16th, Tudor church music from England, though not necessarily by English composers. William Byrd might be a familiar name but Derrick Gerarde, Alfonso Ferrobosco and Philip van Wilder are less so. Byrd will never let you down and provides more from where his masses for 3-, 4- and 5 voices came from in Domine, salva nos. Van Wilder's Paster Noster is the old incantation one used to recite without much reflection or understanding at school made much more gorgeous for, as far as I can tell, three voices- soprano, alto and tenor in Julie Coper, Elisabeth Paul and Jeremy Budd, and is a highlight.

Ferrabosco's Decantabat popoulus Israel is more exuberant, certainly compared to the mercifully very short interludes of claustrophobic plainchant that are, effectively, downtime. Byrd returns with the delicately woven Fac cum servo tuo making one wonder if one really should have the complete works of Byrd to do him justice or if a handful of pieces are sufficient to appreciate what he does apparently so effortlessly.

I don't know if Sir James is still widely known as Jimmy but one arrives at his Vidi Aquam in a state of some anticipation. His music was the reason I gave for belatedly succumbing to CD when some of his records were released on CD only in the 1990's. His Seven Last Words from the Cross has been a long-standing contemporary favourite and it's not the only one, having seen him conduct Veni, Veni Immanuel in Portsmouth with Evelyn Glennie as percussion soloist, amongst some of the other immediate masterpieces that make him the obvious choice to take on the 40-part motet job, if anybody could.

It seems that Tallis wrote Spem in response to the Striggio piece published shortly before, and won in a good contest.

James starts on the same note, I think, and provides a 'reflection' of Spem without ever quoting it but using the same sound. He doesn't quite take on the challenge but reflects it respectfully and faithfully, going more his own way after rising to some intensity at halfway. It's a wise decision not take take Tallis on, toe to toe, as it were, because that would invite disaster. It's a game you couldn't win. But Vidi Aquam, using a text from Ezekiel rather than that from the apocryphal Book of Judith, is everything anybody could have hoped of it and a job well done. 

One has to wonder at the professed penitence, supplication and humility of these, as it happens, Catholic musicians being expresssed quite so elaborately, luxuriating in the glow of their showy invention. An alternative approach is to say one is not worthy and be a bit more humble than assume one's tribute is enough to bother the eternal divinity with. 

Ah, foolish man, that wouldst debase with them,

And mortal glory, Heaven's diadem!

as Andrew Marvell points out in The Coronet, and since both Tallis and MacMillan by now have experience of a plague, it might be fitting to ask the Lord what he's doing about it because Trump and Boris haven't got a clue so now would be a good time for all worthwhile divinities to come to the aid of the party.

That isn't the point, of course. Just because it is Catholic music doesn't mean it isn't tremendous music. With a DVD including performances of the Tallis and the MacMillan, plus a short 'making of' documentary and a succinct interview with James by Suzi, this is a complete package and not far short of essential.

One problem with it is whether to file it eventually with the MacMillan or the Tallis.

It will go alongside the other Tallis but not just yet.

Live Music returns to Portsmouth

 Simply the best news of the year.

Not the Times crossword. Not landing the double with Addeybb at Ayr and Soldier of Love at Newton Abbot.

Lunchtime Live back in Portsmouth Cathedral on Thursdays. And, Goodness Gracious, with Angelina Kopyrina playing the Bach-Busoni, like this,

I'm not sure I could make up any better news if I tried.

The autumn programme is here,

Portsmouth Lunchtime Live Programme 

 

Angelina's programmes

Today's Times Crossword Solution

 Knocked off in fairly quick time with no dictionaries or internet so I'm pleased with a return to form.

Would be even more pleased with Addeybb in the 1.55 at Ayr, which is the next job.

The Writing Process

Talking to one of my poetry-related friends yesterday, she said she'll sit down to write a poem and stare at the blank wall in order to do so. It reminded me of another who previously said he would sit down at 9 a.m. and stay there until 12 and write, or work on, poems.

It's not for me to say it doesn't work like that because it clearly does for them. I admire both of their work. But it wouldn't work for me, it's unthinkable. I'd sit down and do nothing until it was time to stand up again. I wouldn't sit down until I had an idea of what I was going to write. And I wouldn't sit, either. I'd lie on the settee with a Parker pen and one of the many old envelopes saved for the purpose.

I did once, several years ago now, accidentally get caught up in a workshop. In this instance, each poet was invited to pick a postcard.  I think they then had to write down various things about the picture on their postcard and then those things were made into a poem in about twenty minutes, the specific details don't matter. I produced a couple of stanzas of iambic pentametric doggerel before hoping to get out of that nightmare but it seemed to work for others, the poems and the event itself were acclaimed as great successes and most people, it seemed, went home fulfilled, happy and feeling very creative. I'm not short of recurring nightmares so I never dream about that mild trauma.

Part of my point is that there are enough poems already in the world and continuing to be produced without the need of factories dedicated to making more in laboratory conditions. There might be more of a case for taking unfinished work for discussion with like-minded others in some sort of mutual assistance group but I can't face that, either. I no more want to share the delicate process of the composition of my poem with anybody else than I want to intrude on theirs. It's not that I regard it as cheating or that I want to protect my own process from industrial espionage but until I've realized what I want to do, I don't know either so nobody else is going to be able to help.

I've read a number of wise practitioners saying things like the poem is the thing you produce during the writing, not the thing you set out to do, that if you only end up with what you had to begin with then you haven't achieved anything and that what you discover in the making is the worthwhile bit, etc. That seems fine to me but it needs to be the poet that does it for themselves. The one thing that others can helpfully do for you is cross things out. My only viable workshop would be one from which everybody goes home with less than they arrived with and a few manuscripts with bad bits having lines put through them.

Monica Jones did suggest 'blazon' for Larkin's Arundel Tomb which, for me, strictly speaking makes that poem by Larkin ft. Monica Jones but it's not really about thinking of the words. They are all there in the dictionary, the thesaurus and on a Word document if you highlight the word, right click and select Synonyms. I found out about that at work once when reading my manager's annual assessment of me and said, ' you didn't think of that word, did you'. 'No',  he said, he had put in a not-so-good word and used his computer knowledge to find the better one which I knew wasn't naturally a part of his lexical range.

The making of a poem, if I have to be reluctantly prescriptive about such a wide and varied activity, is about something like the 'integrity' of the whole thing. For me it often involves waiting for a second idea to join with the first to create some kind of 'dynamic' but already I'm talking spurious nonsense. It's mainly in the rhythm and the 'music', please let's not say 'voice', the sort of thing that makes Seamus Heaney sound as naturally glorious as Mozart habitually does. And it's not about this word or that word but all the words put together to work in a way that make them worth returning to more than once.

I'm not convinced I'd like to be able to sit down to write a poem in the knowledge that some time later I'd have one. If no poem about 'pebbles' had occured to me I would happily have gone without but, luckily, as it happened, one did but there wouldn't have been a poem had it not been for the suggestion that we might write such a thing. So I'm glad of that because the poem below is one for any Selected there might be of my modest, frugal oeuvre. Such as it is.

But, for the most part, poems tell you when they need to be written rather than get written when you need to write one. Some of my favourite poets - Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin, Rosemary Tonks - didn't write many but didn't write many bad ones, either. A middleweight, or even quite slim, Collected is a sign of discrimination, in that valuable sense of the word that has been almost lost under the welter burden of all the bad discrimination it is associated with. That is not to say that some prolific poets weren't also very good but nobody, not even Shakespeare, not David Bowie and perhaps not even Bach, produced masterpieces all the time, and so it can't all be good.

And the winner this time is me

 The promise shown by being short-listed for the Portsmouth Poetry competition recently was fulfilled by winning next time out in the Portsmouth Poetry Society competition - there is a difference.

On a theme of 'pebbles', I first thought it too limiting and came up with nothing for several weeks until something I was reading reminded me of Prague and the Old Jewish Cemetery. There's the poem, I immediately thought, and pretty soon, there it was, having almost written itself.

There might only be a dozen or so entries but it's not that easy to win, the PPS people being good at what they do and you never know what the judge is going to like, which makes any such competition a bit of a lottery. I hope this doesn't mean I've used all my luck up for this month. I don't want to miss out on the Premium Bonds.

Starý židovský Hřbitov

The Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague

It’s never summer. They don’t leave flowers.
The birds high in the silhouetted trees
do not concern themselves with their dying
or their dead. Time is deep and history
has parked its solemn cargo where it waits,
as careworn and dishevelled as lost gods.
They leave them pebbles. Any stone will do.
Pebbles that won’t wither like flowers would,
a dumb communication with beyond
in case this was not a last resting place,
in case the wandering goes on for good.

My Life in Sport - Chess

 

 At the weekend it may have been a daft thing to do to take the rook. I think I should have promoted the pawn. Surely I have chances of winning from there, if only when her time runs out, or at least a draw. I think it wins. I have 17.28 on my clock and she has less than two minutes. So I lost but never mind. She promotes the d pawn and captures the rook. Sometimes, when players register in their real name rather than a nom de guerre, you can find out who they are and it looks like this player took part in the Azerbaijan Youth Championships in 2017 so she's probably not bad. That's a mighty long way from the Gloucester Primary Schools Chess Congress of 1970 where, in my first game, I was beaten by the traditional 4-move Fool's Mate having never seen such a devious trick before.

But I learnt quickly over those three days, including drawing by stalemate when I greedily promoted three pawns to Queen and left my opponent with nowhere to move without being in check where he was. I've since retrieved various lost positions by playing on and successfully tempting others to do that to me. But I gained 5 and a half points out of eight which put me on a lower board for the Gloucester v. Bristol match which involved a coach trip to Bristol and a win and a draw from two games there.

Some of subsequent summer holidays were spent playing through old games from books borrowed from the library, my favourite being Jose Capablanca, a stylish virtuoso from Cuba who was World Champion from 1921-27.

The paranoia and madness of Fischer-Spassky in Reyjavik in 1972 was compelling without necssarily understanding the significance of every move which has since made me wonder how much the spectators of any other sport really understand what's going on out there. Although it seems to me that surely, eventually, all possible chess games will have been played, Garry Kasparov has assured us that there are more possible chess positions than there are stars in the universe, and that is unimaginably beyond being unimaginable if he's right so we need not worry yet. But, what with the moon landings, Concorde and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, there was enough on the News to keep a boy interested and, alongside the spatial, strategic and tactical elements of chess itself, it added to the mystique of all things Russian.

There wasn't such a thing as a lower school chess team but a match was arranged with another school in which I played board 4 out of 6 and drew before it transpired that they had switched their order around in the hope of stealing a couple of points and maybe I'd played one that they had hoped to win with.

For years it remained a sporadic thing, playing one afternoon in Eastbourne Chess Club, in Glasgow and for a three-man team in a little league we arranged in Southampton where I kept the cup provided having won 9 out of 9.

However, in the 1990's the opportunity presented itself to play in the regional heats of the Civil Service tournament, in Winchester and why not. Because such tournaments are designed to provide the right winner and so no-hopers get drawn against proper players before getting a chance to play other beaten players, where I scraped a draw in the first year. I think they call it a Swiss tournament. But the following year I won in the third round and was invited to go to London a couple of times to represent the Civil Service, a representative match not meaning it was the best teams available but one catering for all levels. My 100% record playing chess for the Civil Service consisted of a walk-over v. the RAF when their board 14, out of 16, was the only player who didn't turn up. And then, the next year, not wanting to go all the way to London and back to get beaten, I volunteered to play on board 16 and played an elderly man who forgot to use the clock so I was playing in his time for several moves and he conceded what was becoming a lost position for him in 'time trouble'.

I did play against machines but that isn't satisfactory at all. The availability of chess on the internet was a wonderful thing on various websites, against real people in other times zones, most recently at Chess24 and Lichess.

I was introduced to Lichess by my mate out in Malaga who saw that the annual tornament there was being held online during lockdown and I did okay during two hours of high pressure thinking one Sunday afternoon. I've lodged my ratings for 5 and 10 minute games above the 1900, as they are at Chess24 and, not wanting to risk them, now play 30-minute games and float between 1800-1860, not knowing most of the time who it is I'm playing but thinking they're not bad, being on the fringe of the top 10% who have taken the trouble to register, that maybe I'd survive okay over the board in the local league Division 2, for somebody's B team. It's the only competitive sport I still play. And it is competitive because you are drawn against players of a similar rating. Never mind all that running about, fitness, hand and eye co-ordination and athletic prowess, chess might be the game I was best at. It certainly lasted me the longest.