Henning Kraggerud - Munch Suite

Henning Kraggerud, Munch Suite (Simax)

This special limited edition CD comes with a set of postcard reproductions of the 15 Munch paintings that the music is based on in a black box the size of which suggests it contains cigars. It seems a little bit more than is required.
I had been expecting music composed by Kraggerud because as well as being the violinist in the Tchaikovsky concerto at the Proms a few years ago, he encored there with a composition of his own. That, plus the Brodsky Quartet, in their Wheel of Fortune show, had a Kraggerud piece as one of the options when we in Portsmouth got the Golijov.
So it wasn't quite what I was anticipating. I must pay more attention. However, the music is exactly how I thought it would be. 15 composers were invited to contribute a piece based on a different painting from an exhibition of Munch. The solo violin music on CD in my house goes straight from Bach to Ysaye and then Bartok, Ligeti and Kurtag. With these more recent composers, the trend has finally moved back slightly towards harmonics while retaining much of the fractured structure of the modernist period. For me, on the fourth hearing, they could all be by the same composer. But that is not necessarily a bad thing.
It's me, isn't it. I don't really see very far into the relationship between paint and sound. Of course, Munch's paintings are about trauma, anxiety and the sub-conscious but the paintings are varied in subject matter and the pieces could be exchanged around between them like horoscopes in cheap magazines for readers who are determined to see themselves in any vague prediction. Without concentrating on which picture it is one is listening to, the 15 items could merge into one long piece, which is again not the end of the world. The music does fit the paintings but perhaps no more so than lots of other music that wasn't written specifically for the purpose.
The one where I first made a connection of sorts was Moonlight over the Sea by Alissa Firsova but that is as much due to the note provided as any,
a distinctive glissando motif portays the moon's reflection at the centre of the painting...The theme is repeated pizzicato, as if mirrored in the water
So, okay, I can do it when I try but the music is engaging enough, the playing so sensitively delivered, that I'm enjoying it as much as I'm ever going to without going to those lengths.
The later pictures are the highlights. Two Women on the Shore are a golden haired girl in a white dress standing and looking out to see with a ghastly figure in dark clothes sitting at her side somehow attentive. Athanasia Tzanou's music provides a commentary but any of the other shimmering, desolate, spare compositions would have done it equally well.
Munch's figures are by turns grim, staring blankly, faceless or looking away from us. The music has passages of lyricism in places but none that last long enough to let us think we have ever escaped the insecurities and neuroses that lurk never far below the surface. We finish as serenely as can be allowed with Laurent Petitgirard's Trees on the Beach.
It lasts for an hour and it is an hour well spent but possibly not always for the reasons intended.

The Saturday Nap

There's a choice of top class flat or very good jumping racing tomorrow, at Ascot and Cheltenham, but my main interest will be at Kempton on Sunday where The New One makes his seasonal reappearance. With only Rock On Ruby to beat there by the looks of it, though, we can't expect much of a price. I'm sure he will win and will be very disappointed if he doesn't but we have to look at Saturday for something more adventurous.
There are a number of names that suggest themselves, each of which face obvious dangers. Nicholls' Dark Lover in the 5.00 at Cheltenham is tempting but I risk making a long term enemy of Balder Succes who won nicely at Chepstow last week. Lady Cecil's Hot Snap in the mares race at Ascot is 5/1, Charlie Longsdon's Vulcanite is 4/1 favourite in the handicap chase at Cheltenham and Cirrus des Aigles looked too good to be true for a 7 year old last time.
But you have to be taking something on to win money so I will take on Nicholls' Sametegal with Handazan in the 3.10 at Cheltenham.

The Perfect Murder Kindle Edition

David Green (Books) strides confidently into the digital age with the issue of The Perfect Murder in a kindle edition. It will be free to download from tomorrow- 17th October- for five days. I'm sorry but the facility doesn't allow any more than that. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00FX8XVVY/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=B00FX8XVVY&linkCode=as2&tag=wwwalandacouk-21
Walking on Water will follow in the same format later so that you can read The Cathedrals of Liverpool in convenient digital form wherever you go.
Have I got a kindle?
No, I haven't.

August Kleinzahler - The Hotel Oneira

August Kleinzahler, The Hotel Oneira (Farrar, Staruss and Giroux)

When Thom Gunn died ten years ago I was left no longer knowing who my favourite living poet was. I never really got around to picking one, either. Possibly it was because there were a number of differently but equally well- qualified candidates for the post but more likely because in middle age it is less essential to have favourite football teams, pop singers, colours, drinks or poets to help you identify who you think you are. However, August Kleinzahler was one of the main contenders for the honour had I needed to award it.
The Hotel Oneira retains all the qualities that made him such an idol and possibly, even at the age of 64, is it, enhances them. All the old reference points are in again - the virtuoso, bravura performance using a full range of language from the highly erudite, through exotic names to a demotic register that makes us feel spoken to by someone familiar. The book is prefaced by a quote from Kenneth Cox that refers us beyond the 'play of words' to the 'taste' of language and that is what Kleinzahler takes as a manifesto.
Perhaps as the years go by, he is less muscular, there is a little less swagger and machismo. There is still the melancholy, the elegiac longing, a rapture in a sense of loss and there is still tremendous energy in places but I wonder if it is paced a little more steadily now. We still hear about the aeroplanes overhead coming in to land, the state of the ball game, flowers fading, the sense of the river nearby as well as the jazz clubs and personalities and Chinese culture. Not much has diminished. In fact, it might even be the better for it. The vagabond spirit is perhaps slowing a little and relishing the experience all the more.
Closing it Down on the Palisades recalls a prevoius poem, Gray Light in May, except that the two parts of it are set in September and October but its regret at nothing more particular perhaps than the passing of time, is the same. The title poem is another return - not much happens, in fact he says it is a story he chooses not to know but, good grief, here is a description of heavy goods being moved in the night,

Last night, what at first looked like a giant coelacanth
strapped to a flatbed rattled slowly past,
but it was merely the enfoldings of a tarp catching the streetlight.

Summer Journal is ten and a half pages of mainly short entries, a genre I usually harbour doubts about, but here we get,

The vast, bruise-coloured fogbank
sitting out there,
spread across the horizon like some dreadful prophecy
waiting to blow in.

Time and again, it's good and yet you know it would be better to hear Kleinzahler reading it. He is one of the most compelling readers of his own work among contemporary poets and I really should be finding a CD of him doing it.
There is a pastiche of a Roman satirist, possibly Juvenal, in Epistle XXXIX but it would appear that Thomas Appletree, the Edgiock weather diarist, was real and Kleinzahler's version of him is not fictional. The Rapture of Vachel Lindsay is a baroque extravaganza perhaps loosely on American history. But we are best off on recognizable ground with A Wine Tale, about an old caretaker,

of no particular ambition, wit or aptitude,
whose destiny has been to lift things up, clean them off,
and put them back down again where they belong
in Paradise?

And I notice that Kleinzahler has been listening to Heinrich Biber, mentioning his name once, the Rosary Sonatas specifically and a passacaglia. And so one instinctively knows he must be right. I could see why he might be compared with John Ashbery for his playful associative streams of thought but I've never seen it done and I wouldn't want to do it myself. And I did once see the most inane of associations with Billy Collins but that was made by a scurrilous web forum contributor who was trying but failing to be provocative, as usual. Kleinzahler is, as far as I can see, of his own type and inimitable, a trace of beat poet with his own idiosyncratic mass of allusions and orientations.
If I ever need to say who my favourite living poet is, it will be him.

Kathryn Simmonds - The Visitations

Kathryn Simmonds, The Visitations (Seren)

I have been looking forward to this book, Kathryn Simmonds' second book of poems, ever since reading her first. It seemed to me that her poems were pitched at exactly the right level between seriousness and lightness, formality and informality and well up towards the accessible end of the accessible/inaccesible scale.
These poems are relaxed more than anything else, which is not to say careless or slapdash. Their attitudes and structures could have been the result of long and painstaking work. But the villanelle, The Great Divide, doesn't insist on the recurrence of two whole lines throughout but varies them and To her Unconscious suitably brings back phrases or half-lines that make its form a cousin of the sestina. Perhaps it was going to be one once but I doubt it since Simmods' forms are not usually as fixed or rigorous as that although they are there. And that is a good thing.
What is best about her work is the facility for phrase-making that keeps them coming vividly and captivatingly throughout.
                                        the giant weed plant
waves to me like fallen royalty.

And there is the brilliant, shuffled picture book of dream.

Although, of course, one can admire poems for technical excellence or admirable achievements like these without necessarily sympathizing with what they say, I'm sure it is unavoidable that one's favourites are those that express something one finds common ground with or does something one approves of. 'Favourite' is usually preferable to 'best' and they are by no means always the same thing.

In Apocryphal, there is a world-weary acceptance of the ordinary in the face of events that are not only apocryphal but majorly apocalyptic, but

The end of time, ah yes, it slips the mind,
there's only so much wisdom can be flung at it. Only so many quips.
Here it comes
                in is ten-league boots
                                        trampling all over our honorary degrees.

I'm not really a big fan of this way of spreading lines across a page like that any more but it doesn't matter, there is a lot in the off-hand attitude to the ultimate moment and not the least of it is contained in the 'honorary degrees' which are so much vainglorious pomp.
There are more immediate concerns and if Kathryn Simmonds is somehow lapsed in her religious observance - and Sunday Morning reports that she gets more done now she's stopped praying - then it is to the benefit of a more domestic way of life in which larger questions will have to look after themselves,
Oh God, we should amend our lives,
all of us who sleep in rented beds and deafen
at the mention of a pension plan;
all of us who've lived our best days
in the imagination's potting shed.

If any one thing establishes a divide between poems by men and those by women in the old question, it must be that nearly all poems about childbirth and babies are written by women and it isn't a subject I'm entirely taken up by but whereas others have failed to convince me, Julia Copus did a couple of years ago and Kathryn is good on the subject here, too, and so it can be a matter of poetry over subject matter. But Kathryn's section of poems here on the 'life coach' make me wonder if those are the poems that come over better at a live reading.
But this has been a book worth waiting for, for Simmonds' grounded common sense, acknowledgement of a sort of empirical limit of where to stop, as in the jolly, Audenesque song, Experience,

Give up what is lost if you can't fish it back
Just keep walking. And that's all I know, my dear. 

The Saturday Nap

We were lucky last week that Novellist was unfit to run in the Arc because it's very doubtful that he would have beaten Treve.
So, in the hopes that a reprieve gives us a second chance at getting off to a winning start, I'm going with trainer form and the red-hot Charlie Longsdon whose Killala Quay attempts to defy a penalty at Chepstow, 3.00, where we might get 6/4 although there are no prices up yet.

Breakfast with Lucian

Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian (Jonathan Cape)

I didn't know who Geordie Greig was until opening this book while the radio mentioned his name in relation to the recent regrettable conduct of the Mail regarding Ralph Milliband. I don't know what part Mr. Greig played in that but one doesn't imagine he was on the side of the angels. However, it doesn't have much bearing on his authorship of this book because at the level of the life and art of Lucian Freud we are beyond morality and into an amoral, purely aesthetic range of values.
Greig was one of a select coterie invited to take breakfast with Lucian Freud regularly over many years and this is a memoir of those times. It becomes a biography of sorts of a painter whose life isn't done any justice by words like 'extraordinary'.
It might not have been so, though, as an intervention from the highest parts of government made his family's escape from Germany possible with only two weeks to spare in 1939.
 After that, any number of stories that would stand on their own as remarkable join in concert to form a life story that makes for a gripping read with Lucian at the centre of it, apparently charismatic, more than incorrigible, cruel and relentless in his appetites. Officially recognized as the father of 14 children, two of them by a wife, other estimates reach up to 40. But, even though his affairs and encounters, nearly all of which were heterosexual, were countless and with the choicest of upper class women,
he did say that one man he would like to go to bed with was Lester Piggott!

He might have been a jockey himself at one time and slept with horses at school but his gambling habit was of similar proportions to his prolific sex life and devotion to painting. He's right when he says the attraction of gambling diminishes when one is so rich it doesn't matter if one loses but it wasn't always thus. On making an agreement with yet another art dealer, part of it involves the dealer settling a debt with a bookmaker. The dealer goes off to meet The Big Man for lunch thinking that the debt might be as much as a hundred grand but finds that it is 2.7 million.

Freud's paintings are obviously unblinkingly challenging, the product of obsessive dedication and a particular, unromantic view of the world but they aren't the sort of thing that everyone would want on their wall to look at. He seems the same in life, attracting unquestioning loyalty and love from friends, lovers and admirers but with a charm that is hard to appreciate seen through these stories alone. His treatment of girlfriends, asssociates and his children can be gracious but can equally be cold and worse than that. Random acts of violence were not uncommon. He didn't speak to his brother, Clement, for forty years. Which nonetheless makes for a book that one can't wait to get back to, that continues to provide astonishing anecdotes, possibly some insight but, most of all, ends all to soon.