Showmanship

 A.N. Wilson will have to have a label of his own on here even if it means trying to find where he's mentioned in the past and adding them in. The Elizabethans, finished this morning, is as brilliant as anything else of his I've read, which is very brilliant. He is in the top echelon of my favourite writers. It is primarily scholarship but it's more than that, too. There is a usually understated humour to much of it and a sort of showmanship that might be self-conscious or might be only what such an intellect does naturally.

The Elizabethans ends with a wonderful chapter on Hamlet and hendiadys, its only flaw being that it finds it necessary to repeat the assumption that the boy Hamnet is anything to do with the play or, indeed, its author. Shakespeare is known for the wide vocabulary used in his work and the large number of new coinages. Wilson attributes 30% of modern Italian to Dante which makes one wonder how anyone understood poetry in which three out of every ten words was a new invention but that's not quite what it says and I won't worry about it now. But if 'fructiferous' was showy, at least I knew what it meant. My shorter OED was no help with 'basilolatrous' and the internet doesn't find much but 'eupeptic' wasn't Wilson, it was quoted from C.S. Lewis, though no doubt remembered for its esoteric panache.

I moved on to the novel, Love Unknown, this afternoon which is highly readable and it's already half read. It is a comedy laced with much familiar Wilson reference points - a vicar, publishers, Betjeman and a certain English version of loucheness. 

It augurs well for further Wilson novels which, from their summaries, are wide-ranging but Our Times is next on the orders from the library catalogue and likely to be finished and returned by Christmas by which time I'll be on to the next thing. 

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I see the TLS has their Boks of the Year feature this week. I might be on book 51 by now but not very many of them have been new. Some of what Claire Harman says about the Thom Gunn letters is fair enough but for me it reduced Gunn's stature from life-long poetry role model to something good but less than god-like. We should be wary of knowing our heroes too well. 

John Sutherland's Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her life and long loves gets two nominations so I dare say I'm happy to go along with that, sad though it may be. It does Larkin no favours but by now we are used to that and must accept that a fine writer doesn't necessarily make a fine human being.

Of interest and for the notebook are The Poet's Mistake by Erica McApline. We've all made them, even the best of us. Bohemia doesn't have a coastline. And there is a Derek Mahon compendium of all he thought worth saving for posterity. I would think everything in that is already on the shelves.

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But today, one of those packages one had forgotten one had ordered, Buxtehude by Arrangement, transcriptions of organ pieces for piano by August Stradal, played by Meilin Ai.

It is the album I dreamed into being after hearing Frescobaldi played on the piano. I wondered if anybody had done the same for Buxtehude. Surely not. Well, they have. August Stradal (1860-1930) was to Buxtehude what Busoni was to Bach and it entirely works. It could have fooled me that it was more Well-Tempered Klavier, the Passacaglia in D minor, for example, unrolling deliberately and gently towards something grander in gesture. The Chaconne in C minor was also an instant hit with its little waterfall but I'm sure this disc will be on the turntable for some time. I can even persuade myself that there's long distant pre-echoes of the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues in there. I would have thought mine is the only copy of this disc in my street, my neighbourhood and I'm not sure how many there'd be in the whole of Portsmouth. I'm back where I was in 1972, listening to Sounds of the 70's on Radio 1 paying special attention to the most obscure music I could discover.