Low Grade

The worst kind of self-examination is the one that you fail.

Just Pretending

Now and then I read old posts from this Far Place and I reckon there are some fairly wise things being said. And then I wonder, Who is this imposter?

Show Me The Money

I'm absolutely loving the second half of Trollope's The Prime Minister. It's just so unpredictable. Now at the final 150 pages or so, I honestly haven't a clue where the narrative is going. The suicide of Lopez didn't exactly take me by surprise, but that's only because Trollope makes it seem inevitable in the four or five chapters preceding it, and doesn't cheat at all in terms of the overall trajectory of the character. The only thing that jars is the depiction of Emily - she's so perfectly passive - but even that can be linked psychologically with the kind of passive-aggressive behaviour you might expect from a Victorian lady trapped in an appalling marriage - and, boy, doesn't our author make you feel how absolute that trap must have been for 'nice' girls like her.

Where Trollope seems to me stronger than any of his contemporaries is in his precision regarding the reality of money and its power over us. Part of the savage power of the narrative charting Lopez's decline and fall is that you get to know exactly how much money he needs and exactly when he needs it in order to stay afloat. You feel yourself drowning along with him in the desperate whirlpool of need his speculations create. There's something uncannily modern and unsettling about all this.

Something Lasting

It's a year to the day since Mum died. I think of her often, and usually in conjunction with thoughts about Dad. This might sound a touch morbid, but it doesn't feel remotely so as there's hardly any sense of sadness attached to these memories. The only thing that evokes any sense of regret at all is my growing awareness of just how young Dad was when he died and the fact that they were parted from each other so early.

The last time we saw Mum in her flat, the year we visited with Fifi and Fafa in tow, there was a curious little incident with Mum, if you can call it an incident, that shed light upon just how much she missed Dad. I happened to be alone with her in the little living room when her attention seemed to be caught by something over by the window. I realised that she was looking intently at the rather faded picture of Dad on there, the only one we had of him. It was an enlargement of a shot of Dad amiably grinning, not a terribly good one, from a wedding picture of my sister - her first marriage. Mum had it done when he died so it had always been around. She was unusually excited, happy almost, oddly radiant - like a young girl - and she said to me, He was a lovely fellah, wasn't he? It was as if she sought for corroboration of an important fact, to make sure she wasn't going doolally. (She was acutely, frighteningly aware that she was losing her mental faculties at that time.) It was easy to reassure her that, He was, because he was, and for a moment we stood out of time.

I hope in the last difficult years she had more of those moments than we knew. I suspect she did.

In Performance

Noi and I have just been listening to a recording of Fafa's school's symphonic band performing their pieces for the SYF. Our niece is in there playing bassoon. It seems she's troubled by making a mistake in one segment, but we couldn't hear it. As with any school's band's performance it's difficult to think of a more joyous, precious noise being made anywhere. And now these performances are regularly captured in digital recordings it seems to me they are likely to be more precious than ever.

Whenever we're doing any kind of drama in school I'm at pains to draw my students' attention to the process they're part of, to illustrate just how much there is to be learned from the experience. Heck, I've been doing this for some thirty years and I'm still learning. Yet despite all the invaluable lessons that one might cite to justify the time and effort spent making drama, or music, or dance, or any other form of art, the truth is that what really matters in the end is the product, the work itself. And this matters not in quantitative terms, but simply in terms of itself, as something that transcends time and reminds us of our place in eternity.

Eternity is in love with the productions of time, as a crazy, little-regarded, dirt-poor engraver once etched upon our consciousnesses - for ever.

In Public

One of the many great things about listening to music played 'live' is the understanding the experience engenders that the music needs to be made and one's increased awareness of the skill and effort needed to do so.. This ties in with the sense of something close to celebration, certainly gratitude, that live performance brings along with it. The sustained applause given to last night's performance of Britten's War Requiem was evidence of that.

With live music also comes a sense of drama. No matter how well you know a piece it is still being made before your eyes, or rather ears, and in the case of a composer like Britten with his extraordinary sense of the dramatic (all those operas didn't come about by accident) this effect seems to be happily, sometimes exhilaratingly, multiplied. To take one simple example from last night: the way the final choral 'Amen', and all that it signified, faded lingeringly into silence, invested the conclusion of the oratorio (if that's what it really is) with a meaning beyond either the music or the words. In fact, Britten seems to me to be more acutely aware of the reality of silence than any other composer I can think of.

The remarkable range of sonorities encompassed by the War Requiem also seems to me essentially dramatic rather than musical.

Unfortunately part of the wonder of yesterday evening evaporated, in my case at least, due to the unexpected accompaniment to the music of a chattering little girl sitting three seats away. And that's a reminder of another quality of live music: its brittle vulnerability in the face of inappropriate competition.

Off To War

18.23

We'll be making our way down to the Esplanade in  a few minutes, where Ben Britten's War Requiem lies in wait. A great end to the working week.

22.53

Safely home from our little outing. Some thoughts on the drama of it all tomorrow, I think.

Blundering Along

I knew, given my exertions of previous weeks, that, once our production was out of the way, I was going to feel weary in the extreme. It has been so, such grey, dreary, weariness characterising the last few days.

But I forgot that, having managed to remember reasonably well for a sustained period a plenitude of the details attendant upon my exertions, I was likely to compensate for this success by forgetting the most obvious, fundamental points of routine around which my little life revolves. And it has been so. At one time I would have been concerned, mightily so, about such forgetfulness, especially with regard to the way the sudden gaps undermine pretty much everything I do. But, happily, I seem to have forgotten how to care about such things. There's something very soothing about embracing your own fallibility.

Sheer Torment

It's not exactly a secret that I have little, if any, sympathy for the British royal family. And if anything my fiercely republican views have grown more intractable with time. Yet even I couldn't help but feel a twinge of something approaching genuine pity for them this evening.

This arose from one of those little musical fillers they run on what used to be the Granada channel available through Starhub, now mysteriously evolved into ITV Choice, though it appears to be running exactly the same sort of programmes it always has done. And the same musical fillers, one of which, featuring a bevy of young ladies known as Girls Aloud, which I've never seen before, aired just now. It seems that the clip came from the Royal Variety Show, which, for readers who may not be familiar with the term, is a form of 'entertainment' (I use the term in the loosest possible sense) featuring a variety of generally stunningly mundane performances enacted before various royal luminaries. (To be honest, I thought they'd done away with this years ago - but I was wrong.)

And this leads me to my point. To imagine anyone, even an egregious royal, having to sit and listen to the aforementioned young ladies, would soften even the hardest heart. And then to consider that the poor royals (there, I said it) have to look like they're actually enjoying the experience.... Talk about the turn of the screw.

Hooked

I'm at the halfway stage of The Prime Minister and utterly hooked, not an unusual situation to encounter when reading Trollope, in my experience. I love the pace of the story-telling. Unhurried, allowing time for the narrative to breathe. The development of Lopez into an entirely plausible villain has been done with great delicacy, a quality that seems to be rarely associated with our novelist, so often regarded - entirely falsely - as the meat and potatoes man of the Victorian novel.

I see him as much more akin to Jane Austen than any of his contemporaries. Even though the key female character Emily Wharton is a bit of a wet blanket compered to Trollope's more vivacious heroines, she still commands a subtle sympathy in terms of the horrendous marriage she is trapped in. And her being trapped is wholly believable. I'd challenge any reader to read the opening hundred pages and figure she's in the process of making a terrible decision, yet there's no cheating at all. Lopez is what he is from the beginning. And the wonderful Glencora - who more than compensates for Emily's lack of oomph - makes a similar kind of mistake.

The wonderful thing is that at this point I really have little or no idea as to where the story is going to go. And I'm very happy to have Trollope take me there.