Anatomy and other stories

The last time I saw Jeff Turner, he said The Anatomy of Melancholy was his favourite book. It might have been prompted by me saying it looked forbidding and I'd done a dissertation on Andrew Marvell at university rather than have to read it as part of C17th Lit. Nonetheless, I took it as a recommendation, promoted it up my list of forthcoming reading and now it is underway. It will be a leisurely project, mindful of the advice that it can be read selectively rather than from cover to cover.

It's nowhere near as forbidding as its size and title might make one think. Burton portrays himself as Democritus Junior. Democritus was the philosopher who laughed at human folly and Burton finds the same attitude as an antidote to his melancholy. In a torrent of classical references, he comes across like Dr. Johnson or Montaigne as sane and reasonable in the mad world of human ambition and endeavour. The book would be much reduced in length if his quotations from the Latin and Greek were not followed by a translation but if we could only have one or the other, most of us would prefer the translation. 

Like Johnson and Montaigne, he is good company. Not necessarily what one would expect of someone who spent their whole C17th adult life at Oxford University. But his melancholy was real and the remedy, which was to write the book, seems to work. As Johnson also advises, keeping busy is good for you and lassitude a bad thing so the Anatomy very neatly provides the answer to its own question.

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Meanwhile, now into The Gustav Sonata, Rose Tremain's books don't yet look like stalling on me like Henry James did. So far, three quite different novels have similar underlying themes. She does intense love very well, and then undermines it.

In Absolutely & Forever, it is clearly nothing of the sort as Marianne is so totally given to Simon until they marry other people less than happily but, as it turns out, wouldn't have been much more successful marrying each other in the circumstances.

Good novels can still be written after Ulysses and the Wake which had seemed to take the form and blow it up. If Adorno didn't actually say that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz, he might have implied that it shouldn't be but much good work followed on from re-adjustments after two World Wars. Pop music raced from Bill Haley to the overblown late 60's, prog and punk but still emerged to keep on producing for fifty more years to date. It might be hard to compare Rose Tremain and Julian Barnes, say, with Virginia Woolf as 'high art' but they are brilliant at what they do within their more limited ambitions.

It took me more than three books to come to a standstill with Henry James. Two more volumes look resentfully down at me from the stockpile on the top shelf. But Music & Silence, sure to be taken from there before they are, looks different again by being 'historical'. Now that I've found her I won't her go. I won't build my world around her. The biography of Wittgenstein will fit in somewhere. But it would have been a great pity if the du Maurier book hadn't led me to her.

How would we ever know what we had missed. We have to trust that in the time we had, we found as much as we could. 

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The replacement of the headphones damaged beyond repair when some ceiling fell in last winter has resulted in me playing some long unplayed discs. I've not been playing 'pop' discs for years.

Garbage, the Jesus & Mary Chain, Matchbox Twenty, Joni Mitchell. Impressive things too good to be left lying around disused forever. Hejira is complicated stuff, Garbage Version 2.0 a little bit posturing but the interest is often in the texture of the sound the bands make more than the words.

I was reminded about when I was pointedly asked in the office 'if I still liked Matchbox Twenty' by one whose idea of 'cool' still included Pink Floyd. I most vibrantly replied that I did. Rob Thomas is a brilliant, passionate songwriter and singer who once said their ambition was to be Fleetwood Mac and that's a fine thing to want to be. I think the point my interrogator might have been trying to make was that they aren't regarded as quite as 'cool' as the Velvet Underground, the J&MC, Wyclef Jean, the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and suchlike.

But now, DGBooks Radio presses on towards 1000 tracks. There's Cliff, the Osmonds, What Are You Doing Sunday? by Dawn and The Archies. Pop, pop, pop music. To be enjoyed, not rated on a 'cool meter' where, anyway, Floyd struggle to get 3/10, Queen hardly get off the mark and Zappa is less than zero.