Down bucolic byways

These two posts, combined as one, are out of sequence. Never mind.

Could be DT or BJ.

Dirty work either
way

PROPELLED by the soporific, NightNurse, I dreamily joined Trump and a tiny sub-retinue making an improbable visit to a family in Connecticut. My ecstasy (explained in the lyric below) confused Trump and he left me alone. I asked the family for “poetic” additions to the lyric already forming in my mind. Wisely they pointed out the impossibility of defining “poetic” so I completed it without them.

Whence came the observation that
The English language is my mother-tongue?
Did I say so? Or those in subfusc suits?
My dear, I neither know nor give a damn.

What really matters, more than half a wink,
Is what I say and what I am are both
Of woman born. And that’s a small delight
To one who hates the oafish tendency.


It fits. For mothering is cherishing,
And tending to the growth of living things.
Not being soft about development
Of words that shape a self-renewing world.

And is “the mother-tongue” just girly talk
Likely to get up nostrils masculine?
Well I for one can bear the brunt of that.
You can’t? Then go and read Mickey Spillane

FROM MIDDAY Christmas Eve to late on Christmas Day grandson Zach honked explosively like a sea lion. By then he’d infected me and I was coughing so violently my chest wall hurt. My appetite departed; without food I took on an inner chill which rendered me over-sensitive to air flow. At night I fought minor delirium.

VR left for the small bedroom. I felt guilty next morning, and volunteered to adopt her quarantine. But this post isn’t about illness it’s about thermodynamics, sort of.

VR said the light duvet in the small bedroom (usually occupied by younger guests with better circulation than ours) wouldn’t keep enfeebled me warm enough.

In our own bed we operate a duvet apiece and that’s the law. The RAF kiboshed blankets – those cardboard winding sheets. Cellulars turned out to be all theory and no insulation. People whinge about duvets being unsuitable in summer but the same could be said about cotton sheets. Push the duvet aside, I say.

I added my duvet to the single bed and was warm all night even though I didn’t sleep. Subduing the pain was enough (obviously many OTC drugs had passed through my guzzard). Since duvets are mostly air they’re light and soft; this is what you want from a bed. A layered pair adds more air thus more insulation.

Youth’s resilience and a reduced coughing rate encouraged Zach to act as quizmaster in a home version of University Challenge with its near impossible questions on topological maths and ex-USSR “-stan” states. With help from daughter Professional Phlebotomist I set up my new wifi keyboard/mouse to work with the smart TV. To what end? Hey, I’ve got a hungry blog to feed.

A case of Taisez vous!

We all tend to show off when writing. And novels provide a huge opportunity. Having scanned my novel, Blest Redeemer, in draft Plutarch asked if I wasn’t overdoing the French phrases? Was un mauvais quart d’heure (literally: a bad quarter of an hour; idiomatically: an unpleasant experience) necessary given that the scene wasn’t set in France? I agreed and substituted.

In 1921 they did things differently. Aldous Huxley’s novel, Crome Yellow, is not only stuffed with unexplained French (and Italian) material but includes several untranslated stanzas of a French folk song. Did readers simply skip these passages back then or were they all polyglots?

My second novel, Risen on Wings, is set in France and the French language is one of the characters. In revising the MS recently I displayed all the French in italics and now the pages have an accusatory look. Suppose it had been set in Russia? Perhaps the book will go down well in Bordeaux.

BEETHOVEN’S violin concerto is a violent, heart-wringing piece of music. Mrs RR and I heard it yet again recently, with the Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons directing the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and another Latvian, Baibe Skride (a woman), sawing the fiddle. What was unusual was Skride’s comparatively limited dynamic range (ie, softest to loudest) which meant that many melodic lines ended very, very quietly.

And very beautifully. However she was lucky in her choice of venue. Symphony Hall in Birmingham, a modern building, has wonderful acoustics and this was the first of many concerts I’ve heard there that proved this claim without doubt. Allowing us to appreciate Skride’s solid tone down there pianississimo. Even better it discouraged those with chronic lung disease from showing their prowess. 

Is music for nerds? Yes or No?

Last week, staying a couple of nights with friends in London, we heard a recital by Jonathan Biss, an unsmiling American pianist who acknowledged applause with his hand over his heart – as if pledging allegiance to the flag. He played two Beethoven sonatas, opus 10 no. 1 and opus 81a (Les Adieux), plus a Janacek sonata (From the Street).

I sort of know most Beethoven piano sonatas but beforehand I let Alfred Brendel refresh opus 10 for me. Les Adieux is famous and I tasted several versions on YouTube. The sonata’s opening bars consist of well separated notes and chords which must be made to hang together as a slow melody. Guiomar Novaes and Solomon managed this, Wilhelm Backhaus did not.

In further preparation I listened to Elias-Axel Pettersson play the Janacek in his final doctoral recital last year at Montreal University. I didn’t know the piece but he played with authority, especially the slow stuff. I emailed to see whether he got his doctorate. He said yes and I was glad.

Forward to Biss. Technically no problems but the opus 10 sounded too loud given its comparative simplicity. I’d have preferred a fortepiano. Facing those initial fragments in Les Adieux Biss avoided the problems by playing faster; legitimate but not as breathtaking. Biss’s Janacek was harsher than Pettersson’s but did it proud. Our friends also hearing the J for the first time liked it and that was good news.

But I was left feeling nerdish. Isn’t such preparation overdoing it? Like boning up on the dictionary before tackling Aldous Huxley. It’s only music. Elsewhere in the world people are really suffering – being denied sub-titled French movies.

Worth the effort

GROSSE FUGE, part one. Aged sixteen I heard a Bach cantata and my interest in posh* music was born. Two years later, triggered by literary cross-currents (I read more widely then), I bought Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge string quartet and discovered music could be rather more than la-la-ing along with broad memorable tunes.

Analogies are as fatal to music as to physics but LvB’s late quartets are like having the irritable bastard telling you personally what matters. They are not for everyday. They’re for the foreground not the background. Some, especially the Grosse Fuge, don’t initially sound musical although the themes – as with GF – are often quite simple.

Let the superb Takacs Quartet, whom I heard in their infancy, be your perfect guide.

Plutarch says I mentioned the GF on the top deck of a London bus forty years ago. I don’t remember but I’m pleased he did. Here it’s the key to one of his previously unpublished poems.

How to keep cheerful
Adjust with care, the instructions in the handbook say,
For misalignments and breakdowns can occur,
Where balanced wheels are expected to engage and play,

Where the seesaw race begins, the dim, obsessive chime,
The winding up and unwinding of the spring.
Within the escapement’s clutch, the seagulls scream

Notes of survival and the constancy of loss.
Yet yeasts ferment and prompt in the memory
How the Grosse Fugue’s galloping colloquy goes

Further than sense can go, where laughter’s the lingo:
Swifter than intelligence, deeper than instinct,
You won’t know sad from glad then, or need to know.

Pick up this theme: even if our revels all are ended,
A crack in the wall will open like an estuary,
And spread its waters where oysters have long bred
And wading birds among the reeds tasted the sea.
Plutarch

*Posh. Substitute for detested “classical”.

Strap on the crampons

POP EXPLORED. Part one. This will be a great climb. Not Everest (described once as “a dull trudge”) but technically hard like K2 or Kanchenjunga.

My problems are several. Left to myself I only become aware of pop songs twenty years after their emergence. Yesterday I listened to Elton John and Kiki Dee singing “Don’t go breaking my heart.” OK, but it has whiskers. I need to know 2011.

But who can I talk to? Pop lovers are inarticulate. None could define Garage Rock (Does it deserve capitals?) for me. And I’m not referring to teenage I-phone flippers, I’ve asked adults knowledgeable about particle physics and/or schisms in left-wing groupuscules. Their vocabulary shrinks, they “er” and “um” when asked about Bjork.

Luckily I have a springboard. Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, doesn’t just write about Messiaen but also about youthful, evanescent guitar-strummers. His book Listen to This includes long articles about the aforesaid Bjork (Apparently seminal, except for having survived decades in a field where longevity is suspicious) and about Radiohead.

I’ll put Bjork to one side for now, listen to Radiohead, and report back. Here’s what Ross says about Radiohead’s Colin Green: “Lavishly well read, he can talk at length about almost any topic – Belgian fashion, the stories of John Cheever, the effect of different kinds of charcoal on barbecued meat – but he gets embarrassed by his erudition.”

My kind of guy. Better still: “(Green) seized hold of his brother’s tune that had set the song in motion. The doubling of the theme, a very Led Zeppelin move, had thunderous logic, as if an equation had been solved.” So pop is analysable. Let’s see if my erudition is up to it.

FROM MY SHELVES
With pianists slow movements are what count. Any fule can play slow, but does it hang together? Solomon, blasted by a stroke at the peak of his powers, always made sure it did