Heavy Going

I've been reading Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior in fits and starts for well over a week. Whilst I can recognise at least some of its qualities, for some reason I'm just not held, not really involved. Possibly things will pick up when I get to the second half.

I'll certainly do it at least some justice by getting to the end. But I suspect I'll be glad to put it behind me.

Going With The Flow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I got to thinking about water just now. Glad I did. Lovely stuff. Especially in abundance.

Just Great

An astonishing picture at Open Culture today. It turns out that Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone were schoolmates in Primary School back in 1937. What are the odds? (Similar to those of John & Paul meeting up and Paulie joining John's band back in Liverpool, I reckon.)

And Open Culture feature a nice tribute piece to the departed Maestro, though like nearly all that have been appearing in the last couple of days I don't think they quite grasp the scale of what he accomplished. (Not sure why music from The Godfather features in the Open Culture piece, though.) It's been refreshing to witness the fact that Morricone's genius is now so widely acknowledged - especially given just how long it took the Academy to recognise it and actually give him an Oscar - but it's rare the tributes have covered the extraordinarily experimental music he wrote in the early days for all those Italian movies. Some of it is so much of the avant-garde it makes Stockhausen sound conservative - and, of course, it always worked in whatever film it was intended for.

I reckon the greatest composer of film music by a country mile, and the greatest aural imagination ever.

No Takers

There wasn't much that was elegant about Sam Johnson's near contemporary, the madman William Blake: Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy...

It doesn't get much more bitterly inelegant than that. Nor much truer.

A Bit Of Elegance

After reading Rasselas a while back it struck me as a good scheme to keep my Oxford Authors compendium of various works by the Great Cham at hand for dipping into when I needed the balance of an elegant sentence or two or three to right my own - balance, not sentences. Following this scheme in a relaxed fashion I've just finished the abridgement of A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in that selection and I must say it served its purpose. Whatever magisterial judgement Sam Johnson is passing on whatever aspect of life has happened to catch his eye, you can be sure it will sound great and, somehow, that's enough.

But it would be a mistake to assume that sounding great is what Doc Johnson means by 'elegance'. The word obviously has resonances for him that we've lost something of over the centuries. Here he is on his Journey in Aberdeen reflecting on the learning of Boethius: The first race of scholars, in the fifteenth century, and some time after, were, for the most part, learning to speak, rather than to think, and were therefore more studious of elegance than of truth. Whilst Johnson's elegance is seen as distinct from truth, it has the heft to, at least in some sense, weigh against it in some kind of balance. And does so for more than a century in relation to a kind of scholarship for which Johnson has some respect. 

Anyway, it seems we could do with a bit of elegance here and now, and more than a bit of Johnsonian wisdom.

The Present

 

What do you get for the man who's got pretty much everything he really wants? That's the problem the Missus faces every year around the time of my birthday yet she always manages to find something I didn't know I wanted but which it turns out I needed. This year has been no exception - indeed, a particular triumph in this regard.

My birthday took place a few months back, of course, at the time of the lockdown going into operation. Noi mentioned to me then that she intended to get some ear-phones for me, some posh ones with what I think is referred to as 'bluetooth'. The idea sounded okay, but I wasn't exactly raving with excitement. Fast forward to yesterday, and now we're a bit freer to move around she pops out and purchases what she had in mind, presenting to me the earphones in the afternoon.

It turns out I had to charge them first (who knew?) so I didn't actually don them until today, when I discovered what I'd been missing in terms of clarity of sound and glorious mobility. The symphonies of Malcolm Arnold have never sounded better - as you can tell from the pictorial evidence above, in which I am listening to the eminently depressing 7th Symphony and reacting as you might expect me to.

In contrast, the pic below suggests something of the delight I feel as the proud possessor of the more than splendid earphones in question:

A Bit Of A Treat

I treated myself to no fewer than three pieces for tv by Alan Bennett today, two from the 4DVD set of Bennett at the BBC and a Talking Heads monologue off Youtube, featuring Bennett himself. In the course of wallowing in the brilliance of the writing it struck me that it really wouldn't be stretching it to claim him as Britain's greatest dramatist, yet one tends to think of his work as just being great because it is Alan Bennett, as if we've been gifted an extraordinary talent that somehow lies outside of normal run of the mill drama/literature.

Not all of the three pieces actually counted as lit, I suppose. The documentary he made featuring the big art gallery in Leeds, Portrait or Bust, which I watched for the first time today, seems to me the best thing I've ever seen about appreciation of the arts in general, and certainly the funniest. The strange thing is that the quite ordinary folk filmed going round the gallery manage to talk exactly like characters in the plays.

Problems

Needed to deal with a couple of niggling problems today, one of which was entirely of my own making. Then later in the day met an old friend dealing with a major and painful problem of health which is very likely related to stress resulting from an equally major problem in his current circumstances. This both put my very minor concerns into sensible perspective and served as a reminder of how useful such little upsets are in providing a further reminder of our essential, inevitable, vulnerabilities.

Overwhelmed

I feel guilty for saying this, but it's the truth, so here goes: the lockdown (wherever it is, taking different forms as it does internationally) has brought with it absolute treasures in terms of fabulous stuff appearing on-line that probably wouldn't have got there otherwise. Has that made the misfortunes and downright suffering of so many worthwhile? No. Absolutely not. But it's a small truth in a huge picture of many truths jostling against each other for attention.

And when that small truth manifests in the form of the great Richard Thompson performing Facebook concerts from the comfort of his home it looms large in the consciousness of RT fanboys like myself. Funnily enough though, I haven't managed to watch one all the way through yet. Will be putting that right soon, you can bet. But I have managed to watch bits of all of them, and today's bit served as a reminder of the astonishing range of his catalogue.

He begins Facebook Live Concert #3 with a lovely version of Sam Jones, a song I've never heard him do outside of the album version. I'd sort of forgotten the existence of the song to be honest. It's ages since I've played you? me? us? the album it appears on (on disc 2, the acoustic nude CD.) And when I heard this earlier today (goofing off for 10 minutes ahead of doing a bit of teaching) it suddenly brought back to me just good you? me? us? actually is. And here's the strange thing: I seem to be one of the few people (RT fans included) who think so. Generally it got reasonably appreciative but low-key almost tepid reviews when it came out. Which means my feeling for it as a master-work - a feeling that has grown over time, rather than diminishing, and grew a little more today - is probably wrong in some way, which is deeply puzzling given my pretty much perfect taste in these matters.

That's the thing about genius. It overwhelms. Even the supposedly minor stuff can become major, if you allow it.

On Fire

Can great poetry emerge from the righteous anger felt in relation to dreadful social injustice, from the most current of current affairs? Yes, I'm sure it can and I have the latest pick from Carol Rumens's unfailingly thought-provoking Poem of the Week to prove it. Incendiary Art: Ferguson 2014 seems to me to fulfil EP's great dictum of poetry as News that stays News, and it's difficult to imagine any reader disagreeing.