Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Readership appears to be up at DGBooks recently if one gives any credence to the figures on Google Analytics. So, thanks to anybody new to it and welcome but it has to be said that once I seem to be in danger of success at anything I tend to pack it up. Football, cycling, pool and other careers are all behind me, their potential archived and their actual achievements providing much to be modest about. This week I deleted all the DGBooks titles at Nielsen, the ISBN agency, so as not to be bothered by orders from any commercial outlet. Not that I've ever been inundated but I'm in the copyright libraries now, I've used up my allocation of ISBN's and further titles would thus need a publisher with all their requirements of sales, editing, design, promotion et al and there's not much to be gained by all that.

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One can't realistically make one's way through the Complete Bach without playing the organ music in due course. It's possibly an area of itself, by no means my favourite but if one must have organ music then it's best it's by Bach. The first disc I put on shone through even the cheap, underpowered CD player I have upstairs which hardly does justice to good recordings. Electric Light was a Seamus Heaney title but it came to mind in some of this dazzle.

I must concentrate and not allow this project to lapse although all such projects will save for later. I'm not sure I finished all the Complete Satie having been transfixed by the opera, Socrate. And so it is with doubts aforethought that I contemplate 40 discs of Tatiana Nikolayeva- well-backed fav to be officially my favourite pianist- at £120.

It's what I want so I should have it. But there are are still nearly 150 discs of Bach not played yet and all the rest of music history, in my account of it, stored on the shelves. Do I need both of her sets of the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues when I have one of them already, a good candidate for Top 6 Albums as it is.

It's a 'first world problem', conscience tells me. But people who are spoilt only want to be spoilt a bit more.

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Having found a last title by John Burnside - due to be delivered here any time today- I looked up to see what had happened to Agenda, the high-class magazine that he had recently become editor of before he died. It looks like it's gone with him which is a great shame, not that I was a regular reader, but it looks to me as if such a journal has run out of anybody with the heft to edit it. Where are they now, the serious people prepared to do serious work? I might well side with those counter-reformationists like Larkin and Dana Gioia who reset attitudes after some of the wilder excesses of Modernism but Modernism took itself seriously, was made of highbrow ideas and intentions and maybe one can't have it both ways although some of us might continue to try.