Quiet

Lasr night I didn't switch the telly on, not the wireless or CD player either. I read some more Thomas Mann in the quiet of the evening.
You're lucky if you can find any but it's worth having. Usually I'd have some music on to read by. Usually I'd have the news on but it's funny how you don't miss that blundering buffoon chuntering on, saying either the opposite of what he said last time or will say next time.
I'm not the first to discover quiet and I realize the point of John Cage's 4.33, or some of it, is the extraneous sound one can't get away from. I once punctured out in the countryside when I was a cyclist and was surprrisded how quiet it was without the tyres on the road, the whirr of the gears and the wind in my ears but, once accustomed to that, I heard the vast birdsong and the racket they made. Not a racket, of course - gorgeous.
Silence is potentially terrifying but quiet is as valuable as it is rare. The reason I have so little of it is that, looking up at the bank of CD's, I think I ought to listen to them; I'm with Pliny the Elder in wanting to make use of my time by hearing something, like Paul Sinha's excellent monologue that was on R4 at bathtime last night. O, yes, I must have had the wireless on then but not afterwards.
I don't necessarily want to become all mystical about it and escape into a state of meditative non-being but less can be more.
However, one returns to sound soon enough. My attempts at music reviews often fall back on saying how long it will be before a disc is filed on the shelves and thus isn't on the 'playlist' any more. Isata Kanneh-Mason's Clara Schumann has done well. I default back to the Buxtehude Complete Works on a regular basis and there are still Mozart operas to listen to that haven't had much of an outing but it is necessary to look at what other options there are.
I don't know what I said about the Veracini Complete Sonatas (for violin) when it came out but, goodness gracious, rediscovery must be at least as good as the first time around. A contemporary of Bach, there's not so much between them that Bach should be regarded as the all-time maestro and Veracini never heard of.
Following last week's Cadogan Hall Prom of Weinberg and Bacewicz chamber music - bleak chambers though there's might be- it is similar with them, how Shostakovich is a prime candidate for Greatest Composer of the C20th while these two, who sound much like him, are perhaps only just finding some wider recognition.

 

Aizhan Muhamedzhanova - Inspiration

Aizhan Muhamedzhanova, Inspiration

Having recently acquired a poetry book by going to Sandown races, my latest surprise came in the less surprising circumstances of a poetry club meeting.
Aizhan Muhamedzhanova is a Russian poet who has translated her own poems into English.
A translation is never the same as the poem. It can't be because the language it is translated into can't replicate the music of the original language. So, should the translator favour a literal approach and show the meaning of the poem or produce a new version of the poem based on the original.
It's difficult. Poetry only really exists in its first language.
Aizhan begins a number of these translations with rhymed lines but then gets as close as she can to her meaning. They are poems of great positivity and spirit.
A favourite is Rain,


I am not so sure why
Noise of beads from cloudy sky
Knocking on my window.
Melody of droplets' sound
Opening the door of heart:
All the memories of life
I can easily rewind.

There might be more fluent versions to be made in English but they might not say what the poem дождь says.
Rain ends in brightness and these poems in general are upbeat, overcoming their perceived difficulties by going beyond the 'disorder of prosaic day' or 'self-deception' into 'bliss and paradise' or 'the radiance of new today'.
Those of us usually more sceptical, downbeat or ironic might like to take a break from ourselves and spend a few minutes with a more refreshing point of view.

But the 'poetry' exists in the Russian and even if one knows only half a dozen words of Russian (pivo, glasnost, mir, etc.), one can appreciate the energy, passion and intensity of them in their music. Luckily, we can do that on You Tube,

  One doesn't need to understand everything about poetry to enjoy it. In fact, once you do understand everything about it, it's over.

Letter from Portsmouth

Apologies for yesterday. Hope nobody tuned in and took the advice. Dreadful rehearsal for the Racetrack Wiseguy feature. A John Gosden two-year-old that didn't win last week was a rare thing but I managed to find one. Luckily for me, the Professor pointed one out for today and put me right. We all ought to be reading him.

If the Prize for the Best Weather of the Year goes to Today, a strong candidate for Best Prom was the repeat of Monday's Cadogan Hall lunchtime concert, the Silesian String Quartet playing Weinberg and Bacewicz. It didn't take me long to resume Amazon activity after that. If Classic FM's If you like that, you will like this programme was a bit more adventurous it would lead to those two composers from Shostakovich. The Complete Weinberg String Quartets is 6 discs and £50 so I'll take it gently with just the no. 7 heard today.

Thomas Mann continues to serve it up in Doktor Faustus with my notes on useful quotes now onto the second side of the envelope. I take great encouragement, as an occasional contributor of words to pop songs, that,
a poem must not be too good to furnish a good lied,

that is, the words don't need to do it all, the lyricist must leave room for the musician to make the song. Which suits me fine. Here's the idea, a title, a chorus and a couple of verses - you do the rest.

And a fine day today was augmented by James Fenton's Oxford lecture on Auden's approach to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Further preparation for my session on Shakespeare biography due in November led me to see what is to be gained from that, and there's plenty. It is writing like that that makes it all worthwhile.

Racetrack Wiseguy

We are coming to the end of the dog days of the turf calendar. It's not always easy to find things to bet on in August, or the summer in general, but it will pick up soon.
There still isn't a great deal of interest today but we might try to set off in the right direction with Anastarsia, Ascot 2.10.
John Gosden's two-year-olds have come out and won all week and today's specimen is entered in the Group One Fillies Mile, which surely signifies more than the third in a Yarmouth Maiden achieved by Pocket Square.
I was dubious about the betting, seeing the latter made favourite, and left it until midnight by which time that had changed. The stable presumably expect some improvement from Pocket Square but without somebody else's confidence to bet against, one would never get a price worth having.
We'll give it a go.

Reclining Figure

Much weirder than any of those by Henry Moore, though.

Interesting piece of work. What is the body language trying to tell us in this studied pose.

Blasé disregard for that going on around him, I reckon. I admit I used to have some time for his style if not his content. But I always enjoy saying, 'I was wrong, you were right'. There is something sinister about the aloofness. But he is only, at best, the second most sinister person in the UK.
That's Dominic Cummings. Here are Cliff and Percy doing Boris and Dominic's song,

 

What a Waste

From the BBC,

M6 gin crash: HGV collision closes motorway

The M6 has been closed after a lorry carrying 32,000 litres of gin was involved in a crash and began leaking its cargo on to the carriageway.

One Portsmouth poet was reported to be 'unconsolable'.

September

Whan that Septembre with its ayre coole,
those hydeous kids due back in schoole,
the herte is gladde to welcom inne
Goddes fynest monthes that, wythout synne,
he did ynamen gentil Septembre
and noblest birthday monthe, Octobre.

It always seems like an achievement to arrive at September although, like a gin and tonic, you seem to no sooner have been glad of its arrival than it's gone again.
For those who still come here because it was once a poetry website, there are new books by Michael Hofmann and Paul Muldoon. It's not my fault, it turns out, that Hofmann had fallen below the radar - it's his. His first book of poems for twenty years is an admirable state of affairs but not sufficiently attention-seeking to remain where one can be seen. I suspect One Lark, One Horse will be highly worthwhile and I ought to be ordering it now rather than 'doing a Monday night'.
Having checked out the Cheltenham Literature Festival, I realize I will miss Paul Muldoon having arranged my visit to nearby for not quite when he's there. Never mind. I saw him last time and elsewhere before. Well worth it then but not to be regretted now. Frolic and Detour might be his last chance.
It was once justifiable to say, circa 1998, that we lived 'in the Age of Muldoon', as the eminent critic wrote, and I was a keen admirer of The Annals of Chile, Incantata, Hay and where the great man had got to by then but the worst thing about being the height of fashion is that you might live long enough to outlive the fashion you contributed so much to. Ask Sigue Sigue Sputnik. No, don't. Ask Shakespeare, whose reputation has been restored since but saw the theatre move into a vogue for plays other than his before he had quite finished. Perhaps that's why he stopped.
It might be an old joke and we know the TLS will publish letters from any old pranksters these days but following their big scoop of the huge American Standard earlier this year, someone was facetious enough to ask the following week 'when was he going to publish the answers' and now that someone's been brave enough to ask, it's either time for Prof. Muldoon to come halfway to meet us or disappear  into a parody of his own elusive method. We will see if we are prepared to keep the faith but there can come a time to stop being 'brand loyal' to those one once regarded as essential.
I understand that James Joyce might have gone back to something like Dubliners after Finnegans Wake had illness not deprived him of the chance to redeem his reputation so it isn't too late until it's too late.


But while I remain devoted to some poets, some poetry and certain things about poetry and unwilling to throw away the last 40-odd years of thinking about it, I'm not devout anymore. There is something Eastern, mystical or transcendent about not doing it any more. How much wiser do I seem in my assessments of cycling, cricket or football on account of the fact I haven't done any of them for twenty years or more. Or it might just be that I'm passed it, lazy, too ready with an opinion and there's nothing remotely Buddhist about it.

But the idea occurs in Japanese literature, and I'm sure in plenty of places elsewhere, about 'going beyond' and that is what all great art should surely be trying to do. To find some release from the shackles of itself, of us being ourselves, and resolve the difficulty that made it necessary.

I'm on page 220 out of 510 in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus. It was recommended to me.
One has to size up any recommendation by assessing the recommendor, one's own pre-conceptions and make a decision. I've been eternally grateful for The Magnetic Fields, Patrick Hamilton and Richard Yates but not taken up computer games (when chess will do), science fiction or whisky.
I hoped Doktor Faustus would be a short book, like Death in Venice or any of those other European masterpieces by Gide, Turgenev, Camus or Hesse, but it's a monster.
It is a deep, hugely detailed thump of a novel that must have been C19th, when novels were like that, except it was published in 1947. There is no prospect of me embarking on another Mann novel once I've finished this because I'll need a rest but, heaven knows, there's enough to keep on mind.
During its account of 'the discord between genius and sanity', one can find one's own place among the many ideas on offer. There is Schildknapp, who 'wanted to be a poet, in his own estimation he was one', but complained 'if only I could work instead of drudging, I would show them!' but,
what he considered an obstacle was really a pretext with which he deceived himself over his lack of a genuine and telling creative impulse.

That might hurt anyone who hadn't realized it already but it falls refreshingly on those of us who knew.
So far, Doktor Faustus has mentioned Buxtehude twice which is double the number of times the only other novel I've read that did, which was The Glass Bead Game. That is a measure of how serious and clever it is. The title hints that one ought not to expect a happy ending but perhaps the thrill of what one finds out en route to the inevitable creates the illusion of it having been worthwhile.
But let's not hope to learn anything from literature or that it might make us better people. It can only be what it is for its own sake. Brilliant at its best but useless. Let's hope Paul Muldoon can sort it all out for us rather than provide something like the Listener crossword.