Beethoven: Concerto for Piano, Violin, Cello, and Orchestra in C

This really should have been a day-after-the-symphony post. The Mobile Symphony played on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, and the program consisted of this work, Haydn's "Surprise" Symphony, and a contemporary work by a composer I'd never heard of--not that whether or not I'd heard of him says anything very significant, but contemporary classical music is, in general, not on the same level as what we call "the classics." 

I wasn't exactly on fire with enthusiasm for the concert. I knew this concerto (generally known as the triple concerto) existed, but as far as I could remember never heard it, or had much desire to hear it. My reaction to the idea was "that must be a ponderous jumble." Moreover, as I've had more than one occasion to remark here, Beethoven, great as he is, is not the composer I love most. But I did plan to go, especially as we have season tickets, so there was no decision to make about whether the concert might be worth the price or not. 

Then came a terrible discovery: the Alabama-LSU game, which I knew was on Saturday, would be a night game. I had to choose. When I mentioned the conflict to my wife, she seemed to think it pretty straightforward that the concert would and should lose. But I was undecided, and I could always go alone, if she didn't want to. The game might even still be in progress when the concert was over. 

I really couldn't get excited about hearing a Haydn symphony, even one of his better ones. Poor Haydn--everyone likes him, but few seem to love him dearly. Nor could I get excited about the contemporary piece. So I thought I should listen to the triple concerto and see whether the prospect of hearing a live performance of it was attractive enough to tip the balance.

I picked a performance more or less at random from the many available on Idagio: Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, and the Berlin Philharmonic under Guilini. I wasn't much taken with it; it seemed ordinary, Beethoven in his less inspired moments. I asked Terri, my classical music guru, about it, and she was unenthusiastic. She's also an Alabama fan, and said, given that MSO program, she would opt for the game. I wavered. I consulted Dave Hurwitz, editor of Classics Today and author of an enormous number of YouTube videos. He pronounced it "Beethoven's dullest major work" (click here for the video), and with a sort of well-if-you-really-must attitude recommended this recording:

So I listened to it, and this time I liked it much more. But I had to decide, and a situation had come up in which we could help out another couple by giving them our tickets. So we did. Decision made.

A couple of days later I listened to the concerto again--that's three times, which is my minimum for expressing anything close to a definite opinion about any piece of music. And my definite opinion is that I like it, quite a lot.

I'm very happy to be able to say that it's not ponderous and not a jumble, and most definitely not dull. It's really a very engaging work, as a matter of fact. It is a bit on the lighter side for Beethoven; in fact I would call it sunny. Of course there are sunny moments in many of Beethoven's great works, but at least in the symphonies they often seem to me a bit heavy-handed, as if they aren't really representative of the composer's real mood or temperament. 

One certainly might imagine--as I did--that the combination of three "solo" instruments and orchestra would be a muddle, but what we really have is almost an alternation between a string trio and a full orchestra. When the trio plays, the orchestra mostly slip into the background, and the conversation is mostly within the trio, not between the trio and the orchestra. And the trio sections are delightful.

It's Opus 56, which I guess makes it more or less mid-period. The Third Symphony is Opus 55, and, with its stormy heroic grandeur, is a pretty striking contrast. (I should admit here that I am not the greatest of enthusiasts for the Third.) The concerto definitely doesn't sound "early," in the sense that, say, the early piano sonatas do, as if they aren't yet Beethoven in full voice. And yet it has that lighter quality of some of the earlier work. At several points I found myself thinking that the feeling--not really the sound as such, but the vibe--is Mozartean. Yet there isn't that frothy quality which a great deal of Mozart's music has. More solid, you could say. The Fourth Symphony is Opus 60. I haven't heard it for many years, but it's a more modest affair than the Third and Fifth, and from what I recall I think this concerto may have more in common with it than with the Third. 

The structure is a little unusual. The first and third movements are roughly equal in length, in the fifteen-minute range. The second is very short, less than five minutes in most performances, and consists of a very beautiful largo for, mainly, the violin and cello, which only lasts three minutes or so. That's followed by a sort of prelude to the third movement, which then follows without any interruption. One could fairly say that it's a two-movement concerto, except that the largo is left behind completely in the rest of the very energetic, but not heavy-handed, smile-inducing final movement. 

If you don't know it, give it a chance. 

Do I regret skipping the concert? No, not really. Even though I didn't attend, it caused me to get acquainted with this work, which I might very well never have done at all.

Alabama won, very decisively. Surprisingly so. 

Sally Thomas and Micah Mattix, editors: Christian Poetry in America Since 1940

It occurred to me just now as I was typing it that I could quibble with the title of this anthology. The date refers to the lives of the poets included, not to the dating of the poems. The oldest of the poets, Paul Mariani, was born in 1940. So I doubt that any poem in the book was published before, say, 1965. But there was certainly Christian poetry published by American poets between 1940 and 1965 (and after, of course)--Robert Lowell's, for instance. So I could quibble, but I won't, because that would be petty and obnoxious. It's probably a scholarly convention and I'm revealing my ignorance. Please consider this as a pedantic clarification. Not to be confused with a quibble.

The title might come as a surprise to anyone without particular interest in both Christianity and poetry. That person might be unaware that the two have had anything much to do with each other over the past eighty years or so. And it certainly is true that most poetry that has met with any kind of positive reception in the literary world at large is either non- or anti-Christian, as is the case with literature in general. Another sort of person, one interested in poetry but not Christianity, might assume that the category of "Christian poetry" would include only or mainly devotional work, and probably not be very good. 

The first person would be mistaken, the second person very mistaken. These poets--and, implicitly, the editors--have all, consciously or instinctively, grasped the correct answer to the question, discussed to the point of being tiresome, "What is Catholic/Christian literature?" The answer is not "Christians writing about Christian things" but something closer to "the world seen through Christian eyes." In general this means that the eyes are those of a Christian, but even that isn't necessarily the case; they may belong to someone who is not Christian but is capable of seeing the world that way. Some of the poets here have a fairly loose connection to the faith: Andrew Hudgins, for instance, says "I'm not sure I would invite myself to the party" of Christian poets. But he has a poem called "Praying Drunk" which begins "Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk."

Many, perhaps most--I didn't attempt a tally--write from clear and definite belief. Some write explicitly about questions of faith, some about pretty much anything that concerns them. Robert B. Shaw, for instance, writes about "Things We Will Never Know":

What became of Krishna
the blue-point Siamese
strayed circa Nineteen
Fifty-five in Levittown

....

Why did Lester leave the Church

Why did his wife leave  him
Why didn't she leave him sooner
What made him drink like that
How much did the children know

Who built Stonehenge    Why

Notice the absence of question marks--these are not really questions, but items in the list named in the title. Only in the last of a dozen or so four-line stanzas does the poem hit us with one that affects us directly and personally, and, obliquely, hint at one of the Big Questions which Christianity poses to us all. 

Technically, the poems are all over the place. There are a good many poems in traditional forms, a good many in free verse. Some take what I think of as the typical approach of the contemporary lyric poem, which is a close look at some fairly small thing or event, usually implicitly, sometimes explicitly, suggesting some larger application or concern. Jeanne Murray Walker's "Little Blessing for My Floater" is one such. Some begin with a wider narrative or meditative scope, like David Middleton's "The Sunday School Lesson":

The room was full of thirteen-year-old boys
Unhappily constrained by polished shoes,
Bow ties, oiled hair, and orders against all noise,
And one eternal hour of Good News.

Some take on the big subjects directly, like Dana Gioia's "Prayer At Winter Solstice":

Blessed is the road the keeps us homeless.
Blessed is the mountain that blocks our way.

More than a few are funny, like Marilyn Nelson's "Incomplete Renunciation," which would have to be quoted in full for you to get it, and though it's only a dozen or so lines I probably shouldn't do that.

What they all have in common are skill, imagination, and a consciousness of the depth of the human condition. That is an echo of a definition of religion given long ago by the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich: "the dimension of depth in human life" (quoted from memory, please excuse any inaccuracy). It's a very poor and inadequate definition of religion, but it's certainly an aspect of religious consciousness. And there's not a poem here which doesn't possess it.

I think my taste skews a bit toward the older poets, those within a decade or so of my own age. But it's only a skew; there are some fine poems here by younger and much younger poets. James Matthew Wilson, for instance, who is very prominent on the Catholic literary scene these days, was born in 1975, which though it makes him young in my eyes puts him well into middle age. The last half-dozen or so poets in the collection are the age of my children. This sort of thing has been disconcerting to me since people of their age began to take on significant roles in society, and continues to disconcert me as I slip further along into irrelevant old age. 

Lovely cover, too, don't you think?

Each poet's entry is preceded by a page or two of biography and excellent commentary by the editors. (Personally I prefer to read at least one of the poems, then the commentary.) These are not credited so I don't know which editor wrote which introduction, assuming one of them didn't do them all; I didn't notice any difference in style or approach among them, but then I wasn't looking for it. I am impressed by the amount of work that went into this collection: there are several dozen poets, and most of them have published multiple books. To have read all or most of these carefully enough to choose the poems and write the introductions was a massive labor, no doubt one of love.

Sally Thomas and Micah Mattix are both deeply knowledgeable, careful, and sensitive readers. Sally is an excellent poet (and fiction writer), as I noted here a couple of years ago, and also the co-proprietor, with Joseph Bottum, of the outstanding poetry Substack Poems Ancient and Modern. Michah Mattix is poetry editor of First Things and the author of a popular literary-cultural Substack called Prufrock. I have to admit that I don't read Prufrock, but it isn't because I doubt what seems to be a widely-held regard for it, but because it is, at least in part, a sort of clearing-house for items of literary interest, and I already feel that my reading attention is so painfully fragmented that I can't deal with another set of links. (I've gone so far as to install internet-blocking software on my computer to limit my ability to browse compulsively and shallowly when I'm supposed to be working.) 

So if you have much interest in the subject, you probably need this book. And while I'm at it, let me recommend Poems Ancient and Modern at least as strongly. Poetry is my chief literary interest now (a return to my teens and early twenties), so I do read every post, which is to say every poem, there, even though there is one every weekday, and I sometimes, or often, get behind. It's a continuing and pleasurable education, even for someone who has what is probably a more-than-usual acquaintance with poetry, beginning long ago with an undergraduate degree in English and several semesters of graduate work. What I just said about the team of Sally Thomas and Micah Mattix holds for Sally Thomas and Joseph Bottum. Their tastes and knowledge are extremely wide-ranging, and they have featured a number of poets of whom I had next-to-no knowledge, and a few of whom I had never heard at all. Mehetabel Wesley Wright is one of these. You'll find both the poem and the biography at that link interesting: yes, she was related to John and Charles Wesley, as their elder sister. Unhappy marriages seem to have run in the family.

Ordinary Elephant: "Once Upon A Time"

At first glance, and even more at first hearing, this acoustic folk-ish duo might make you think of Gillian Welch ("a two-person band named Gillian Welch," according to Gillian Welch the person). And you would be quite right. The comparison is apt and, more importantly, not an over-reach. I'm pretty much in love with this song, the first track on the most recent of their three albums.

They are a husband-and-wife team, Pete and Crystal Damore. The Louisiana-looking setting of the video is not a pose, as they live there, and Crystal at least is from there. Their work is very rooted in place and people. You can read more about them and hear more music at their web site. They write and sing--I think she is the major songwriting voice, at least lyrically, and obviously the vocal center--about the things which seem ordinary but have profound significance. That sort of thing is often and fairly said of various songwriters and poets, but some do it much more powerfully than others. 

"We always tell people we named ourselves Ordinary Elephant because there’s no such thing as an ordinary elephant." And the implication is that everything is an elephant--nothing is really ordinary if you look at it right.

I heard them Saturday night, at the suggestion and in the company of my friend Stu, in a very small venue called The People's Room of Mobile. And it was great: a very small audience--I wish for the sake of the owner and the performers that it been somewhat larger--crystal-clear sound at a nice listenable volume, beautiful music from gifted artists with no show-biz airs or gimmicks, just great music and almost intimate talk about the music and the experiences behind it. There were several songs in the set that struck me, on a single hearing, as on a par with "Once Upon A Time," which I had listened to online a few times before the show.

Normally I experience a slight revulsion for anything called "The People's...." It has associations ranging from the ridiculous, as in the once-famous People's Park in Berkeley CA, to the evil, as in People's Republic of China. Apparently The People's Room was originally called The Listening Room, but was threatened with lawsuit by a Nashville place with the same name. Or so I read somewhere a day or two ago, though I can't find the link now.

But I detected no sign at all that the owner has totalitarian ambitions, unless you count the fact that he's pretty adamant that the place is a listening room. Not a drinking or eating or talking or dancing or looking at your phone room, though they will provide you with a beer or a Coke or a bottle of water. Wine, too, maybe?

I even bought a t-shirt.

Thanks to Stu for the photo. 

I'm not a great fan of the banjo, especially of the frantic bluegrass style, but I like the way Pete uses it, playing mostly single-note lines that made a nice bright contrast to Crystal's mellow guitar. He also plays an instrument that looks like a small arch-top guitar with eight strings, doubled as in a mandolin, which he says is called an octave mandolin.

"That's a duh"

Ok, this is not a post about books or music, which is what I said at the beginning of this year that I would stick to. But it's not very far removed: it's about developments in language, English in particular. This is something I notice a lot, mainly when it's a development that irritates me, such as the decline in the use of transitive verbs, or horrible mis-usages such as the current damage being done to the word "iconic." I could think of others but I'd just as soon not. 

Amit Majmudar, writing in the April 2024 issue of The New Criterion (that's a link but it may be subscriber-only) says something which alarmed me a bit. 

A rule of thumb in linguistics gives any language a thousand years. At that point, linguistic drift will have made the mother language nearly incomprehensible to its descendants. That drift is inexorable, a feature of language itself, in spite of the best efforts of an Académie française or a priestly caste. That average lifespan, a millennium in the sun, accounts for slower and faster rates of change.....

We read Shakespeare a century before the midway point of our drifting, shifting language’s lifespan. These four-hundred-year-old plays, by this time next century, will be only half-intelligible even to the few who make time for them.

Or, to look at it another way: five or six hundred years from now there may well be no such thing as a "native speaker" of anything that would be recognizable to us in conversation as English. English as we know it, which is already significantly different from English as Shakespeare knew it, will be a dead language. In the year 1000 AD, no Italian, or few, outside the Church would have been able to carry on a conversation with a Roman of 1 AD, though the Italian might not have been aware that his language was no longer that of his ancestors. Or, conversely, that it ever had been. And even churchmen probably had much of the pronunciation wrong. 

Well, that's a gloomy thought. That Shakespeare's poetry would have to be translated for everyone except specialists would be a massive loss to the world. Of course it's already a loss to the billions today who can't read English, either at all or well enough to read poetry and grasp that it is poetry. But one way or another it's almost certain to happen, whether or not the expected timetable is followed.

In spite of that fatalism, I was oddly, though only slightly, cheered the other day when someone in the comments section on National Review's web site wrote the words which are the title of this post. In case the meaning isn't obvious--it was clear in context--it means "That's obvious."

Consider the history which made that statement possible and comprehensible. First came the association of the vocalization, not really a word, "duh" with mentally handicapped people: an inarticulate response signifying incomprehension. Then it became, for people of normal intelligence, an ironic way of saying "what you just said is so obvious that a mentally incompetent person would grasp it." (Notice, by the way, that I am deliberately avoiding the use of the older and cruder words for that condition that are now considered unacceptable in polite use.)

"Football is a dangerous game."

"Well, duh!"

For a while it was usually a two-syllable thing: "duh-uh," with the first syllable stressed and a bit higher pitched than the second. It wasn't really a word, just an interjection, like "hey." Or like "well" as I just used it. 

It also has a role as a form of mockery, frequently self-mockery, meaning "you [or I] just said or did something stupid." "I was looking everywhere for my keys and they're right there on the counter. Duh." 

And now, if that instance at NR is not a solitary quirk, it is being used as a noun. Perhaps it will stick, and make it through the centuries, so that 500 years from now one philosopher will say to another something along the lines of "Your premise is a duh, but your conclusion does not follow."

What I like about this is that it's entirely a spontaneous development, driven by people using language that comes naturally, with a creativity that comes naturally, and always involving constant change. Part of what makes some of the trends which annoy me so objectionable is that they come out of commercial or journalistic practice which is manufactured in a sense that "duh" was not. They occur in language that is deliberately composed for some utilitarian purpose, and therefore ought to involve some minimal degree of skill, but instead is the work of people who are attempting to sound more literate than they actually are but are indifferent to or ignorant of standards. 

And then there's the academy, now filled with people who are deliberately trying to force language into some unnatural shape to accommodate their ideology. Oozing out into the rest of the world, that effort is responsible for a TV journalist saying "The interviewer wasn’t themselves--he was rude...." (That also was from National Review, quoting the journalist.)

To use another word that's been reshaped by popular speech: that's gross.

I had written most of the above when it occurred to me to check with the dictionary makers. Sure enough, they have recognized "duh" as an interjection. Nounhood may or may not eventually follow.

Respighi: The Pines of Rome

I will admit, somewhat defiantly, that I sometimes consciously operate on prejudice, especially with regard to the arts, and more especially with regard to music. It's generally not pure prejudice; I usually have at least some reason for supposing that my opinion of this can reasonably, or at least not unreasonably, be extended to that, which resembles it, or seems to be of the same species. One of these prejudices is against recordings of classical music which have words like "gala" or "festival" in the title. If the cover includes a picture of fireworks, it's worse. If the title includes an exclamation mark, it's much worse.

The germ of justification for this prejudice is that I think such recordings are likely to be fluff--a collection of brief and showy works of superficial appeal but small substance, yoked together for precisely those reasons. Or perhaps the pieces are more worthwhile than that, but are mere pieces in the other sense, appealing parts of significant works pulled out of their context and yoked to others similarly extracted.

(This is what I think about collections of opera arias, especially. On the one hand, I'm not an especially avid listener of opera, and it's true that certain arias are the tastiest parts of a work which might not be of the greatest interest without them. So as a matter of taste I'm not really averse to the practice. It's a bit like making a best-of album from the work of a group which has a relatively small amount of material that you really like. On the other hand, I feel some sense of duty to the composer to at least give him the opportunity to show me the aria in its dramatic context.)

And I think that broad prejudice is at the root of a more specific prejudice, which I realize I've had for a long time without noticing it, against the popular works of Ottorino Respighi. I believe, though I don't have any specific instance, that I've seen his name on recordings of that sort. Or perhaps not--perhaps it's only that one of his frequently played and recorded works is "Festivals of Rome." Now that I think about it, I notice that I also have a mild prejudice against program music, music intended to depict some scene or event, even though Smetana's "The Moldau" is such a piece and was one of the first works of classical music that really excited me. (Another was Schonberg's "Pierrot Lunaire." That pairing says a lot about my musical taste.) Program music tends either not to work at all--i.e. the thing depicted would probably never have occurred to you if you hadn't been told--or to work too well, seeming contrived and gimmicky.

Prejudice is not necessarily a bad thing. Most people are prejudiced against snakes, because a few species are deadly. I am prejudiced against Great Danes, and strongly prejudiced against two Great Danes together, having been quietly but seriously threatened by a pair of them. And knowing of a case where a pair of them killed a foolish harmless little dog that crawled under a fence into their yard to say hello.

But one ought not to take prejudice so far as, for instance, to kill on sight any snake which happens to cross one's path. And most prejudices should remain open to exceptions and even the possibility of abandonment. 

I was not thinking of any of that a few weeks ago when I was looking for a relatively short, relatively light piece of music to listen to late one night, and "Pines of Rome" caught my eye. I think I noticed it because it happens to be the first piece in that collection of 104 MP3 tracks of Eugene Ormandy's conducting, "The Original Jacket Collection," which was offered on Amazon some years ago for the absurdly low price of $9.99. But it only took one hearing to dispel my prejudice and win me over completely.

"Pines of Rome" is a delightful work. Yes, it is fairly light, but it isn't cotton candy. Nor does it have that sort of stiffness or heaviness that I sometimes feel in the work of German composers when they try to be light. It's fresh and vivid, and leaves no sense that the composer wants it to be either more or less than it is, like a woman who doesn't seem to be making an effort to be charming but who simply is charming--and whether the latter is the product of greater artifice, who knows? (I said "a woman," because the word "charming" doesn't generally occur to me in relation to men. But of course it does to women.) At any rate, this is a charming work, and I've enjoyed it several times since that first hearing, more each time. Not everything has to be profound, complex, and intense. There's a place for straightforward, not-overly-demanding music that simply gives pleasure.

The program is really quite elaborate, as this explication at Wikipedia shows. I can't imagine most of that occurring to a listener, even one who knows the places depicted in the four sections: pines of the Villa Borghese, the catacombs, the Janiculum, and the Appian Way. I've never seen them and in fact was not even sure what the first and third were until I looked them up. Still, in a broad way the titles are suggestive and not intrusive. If the first one put any image at all into my mind, it was of a clear day with a fresh breeze. The second suggests no picture, just a somber atmosphere. The third is peaceful and, if you didn't envision some natural scene, the song of the nightingale would make it clear that you were meant to. The fourth title is maybe the most successful as a directive to the listener. The music is meant to depict not just the ancient road itself but the passage of ancient Roman legions upon it, and it's certainly martial enough.

I'm looking forward to hearing the other two works in this set, "Fountains of Rome" and "Festivals of Rome," though this one seems to be the most popular. 

This is the original jacket. It does not appeal to me. It stirs that prejudice I mentioned. It looks a little festive and includes the word "festivals."

Sigrid Undset: The Wild Orchid

"Life is disappointing." That may be the only line of dialog from Yasujiru Uzo's Tokyo Story that has remained in my memory. I recall the film pretty well visually and dramatically, but there isn't a great deal of sharp and memorable dialog in it, at least when one is hearing the Japanese and reading subtitles. In the film, the remark is made by a young woman who has already seen many of her hopes crushed.

In suggesting that the line may be the theme of this novel, I'm not giving anything away; it appears in the first chapter, and is a relatively minor disappointment. But it seems to promise more such. The orchid of the title is a flower called "gymnadenia."  The protagonist of the novel, Paul Selmer, is a teenager in that opening chapter, and on a Sunday afternoon in spring he is helping his mother, Julie, with her garden.

"I'm so excited to see if anything will come of the gymnadenias I put in here last year--"

"Gymnadenia?" asked Paul. "Isn't that some kind of orchid?"

"Yes--white, with a sweet scent--I got some from Ringibu last year, from Halvdan. But you can't always be sure they'll come to anything."

Paul is filled with the promise of the flower:

Deep within him [Paul] had a feeling that the spring was something which was flowing over him, swelling from one second to the next, that it would wash over him and pass on.

"Gymadenia," he whispered softly.

A couple of months later, in July Paul returns from a trip of some weeks to find that the gymadenias have in fact done well, and his mother has put some in in his room.

There stood a little vase with some small green-looking flowers in it. Paul took it up. Frail stalks, with a few insignificant whitish little flowers growing up them. They had the faintest of scents....

He was frightfully disappointed. 

The novel is not as dreary or bleak as that might suggest, in fact it's not dreary at all, but it does deal with the inevitable failure of life to live up to hopes, and just generally to evade our expectations, for better and worse. 

 The first thing anyone who has read Undset's most famous works, the multi-volume novels of medieval Norway Kristen Lavransdatter and Olav Audunsson (better known in English as The Master of Hestviken) will want to know is how this book compares to those. Not so very favorably, I would say. Which is not to say that this one isn't good, but it doesn't have the dramatic intensity and color of the medieval stories. That is in some degree a result of the difference between the active and harsh life of medieval Norway and the comparatively dull life of the early 20th century bourgeois.

It's a pretty straightforward story of the fairly ordinary life of Paul Selmer from adolescence until his early twenties. I don't recall that the exact date is mentioned, but the story seems to open around 1904, in what would be called in an English setting the Edwardian era. This would make Paul perhaps less than ten years younger than Undset herself, who was born in 1882, so we are seeing this period in Norway as she herself experienced it. Paul's parents are divorced, and I was a little surprised to find that the circumstance was not as unusual as I would have expected: within the first chapter or so Paul is comparing his situation to that of other children of divorce whom he knows. 

His mother is an interesting character, a thoroughly progressive woman who believes that marriage, religion, and in general the conventions of society are outworn customs to which one need not and indeed should not defer. Paul is surprised to learn that it was she, and not his father, who had initiated the divorce, and it seems to have been not because she had wanted to get out from under a tyrant, like Ibsen's Nora in A Doll's House, but just because the situation seemed too far less than perfect. Yet like many human engines of social destruction she is herself an honest and responsible person: she is not, like so many women of our time who have freed themselves from marriage etc., always pathetically in pursuit of romance. As far as we are told, she has simply lived quietly and pleasantly with her children, supporting the family with a small printing business. 

Paul has a great deal of respect and affection for Julie, and is more or less as disdainful of the old ways as she is. But he is as hard-headed a judge of her advanced beliefs as she has been of convention, and regards her general philosophy of independence and rationalism as shallow, or worse. And Paul's life, as far as we witness it here, becomes a critique not of the older bourgeois ways, but of the newer ones. He is a sort of character we encounter fairly often in 20th century literature: indifferent at best to the conventions of the preceding century, but seeing no clear alternative. He is not, however, a gloomy and alienated Prufrock type, but a lively and robust young man. He is disdainful, in what I think I can accurately call a Kierkegaardian manner, of the established Lutheran church. It is not, therefore, surprising that he becomes interested in the Catholic Church--not surprising to a reader of novels, I mean, though his type may have been pretty rare in real life.

He has a friend, a young woman named Randi (which struck me as slightly odd) who is a convert. He lives for a time in a rooming house run by a Catholic family. He becomes acquainted with a priest. When Julie and others of his family detect this interest, they are alarmed. There is a fair amount of conversation about religious matters, and it would not surprise me if some readers, especially those with no particular interest in the questions, would regard this is a novelistic flaw, a diversion from the story, and from more immediate matters of character and relationships. Well, perhaps some of these discussions are a bit too abstract or a bit too lengthy for fiction. But there is nothing more fundamentally human than the questions posed by religion. 

There is one very broad sense in which this book resembles the medieval novels: it's a story of love and marriage, and a study of Christian faith. The treatment of the latter is, obviously, quite a bit different, and has to be, because of the vast psychological difference between medieval faith and modern post-Christian skepticism. And Paul's love life, which occupies a good deal of the story, is not nearly as dramatic as Kristen's or Olav's. But in the most elemental way it is still the same human drama of choices and consequences. I'll leave out any details, so as to avoid revealing too much. But he does get married, rather far into the novel, and there are reasons to believe that its sequel, The Burning Bush, will reveal problems in the marriage which seem relatively mild cause for concern here. The Wild Orchid ends at the outbreak of World War I, with Paul having given up his earlier academic plans for a career running a company which sells household goods of various sorts. This is not the downfall that it might seem: he rather enjoys business and is good at it.

Another feature of The Wild Orchid which is not so much shared with the historical novels as identical to them is Undset's fascination with, and eye for, the natural world. I remember thinking, while reading one of the big books, that the way she described landscape, light, and weather seemed immensely fecund: always vivid, always detailed, never repetitive. She was, obviously, acutely sensitive to the smallest natural things and to the constantly varying conditions around them. The very first page of the book contains a long paragraph, so long that I don't want to transcribe it, in which Paul revels in the countryside he sees from a train. And these descriptions, always made with a sense of delight, are frequent. 

Both The Wild Orchid and The Burning Bush were written in the early '30s, after Undset's conversion and after Kristen and Olav. I wonder if Undset believed that Paul's trajectory toward genuine religious belief would be common in the disillusioned times in which she was writing. She was disappointed in that, of course--or at least I assume that by the time of her death in 1949 she could see well enough that very few people were following her lead. So perhaps the remark from Tokyo Story proves applicable after all. The future, of course, as far as we have yet lived it, would belong to Julie, not to Paul.

The translation is by Arthur Chater, who also translated The Master of Hestviken. Chater was English, and so naturally his translation of 20th century Norwegian speech comes out sounding pretty English-y. I found this just a bit disconcerting at first: would a Norwegian in 1908 call someone a bounder? But that's of course completely irrational on my part.

The edition I read is a recent reprint from Cluny Media, and it's a pleasure to read: well-made and handsome. I'm currently reading, also in their reprint, The Burning Bush, and will report on it in due course.

First Night of the New Symphony Season

I refer to the Mobile Symphony Orchestra. As I've had more than one occasion to mention here, there is something in the experience of live music that just can't be had by listening to recordings at home, no matter  how good the recording or the system reproducing it. The orchestra doesn't have to be one of the world's greatest--a capable, enthusiastic, and hard-working one in a medium-sized city which is hardly a major cultural center is enough to give you that something. 

The MSO plays at the Saenger Theater in downtown Mobile, which is where what people generally refer to as "nightlife" happens. On weekend nights especially, it's thronged with young and youngish people going to restaurants, clubs and bars. On symphony nights, of which there are only a half-dozen or so in the year, you also see a certain number of incongruous-looking older people, some of them downright elderly, many dressed much more formally than the young crowds. They--or we--look, and some of us feel, rather out of place--but some don't appear to feel that way at all, being well-to-do Old Mobilians who seem to regard themselves as the rightful proprietors of the area. By "Old Mobilians" I don't mean old people who live in Mobile but people who are of the families who have lived there for generations, or who are in the extensive network of friends, business associates, and others who might be called the ruling class of the city.

It's a shame that I can so easily identify symphony-goers by their age and class. But it is unfortunately the case that people who are interested in classical music tend to be older and more affluent. I don't think this is necessarily a sign of doom, though, as some think. It's somewhat natural that classical music would become more appealing to some people as they get older and, perhaps, more open to music with deeper and more lasting appeal than pop. Perhaps. Or perhaps attendance at the symphony is a bit of a status marker, or a mainly social event. I do sometimes overhear conversations which suggest to me that the speaker actually has little interest in the music itself. Well, that's ok: I'm glad they paid for a ticket and hope they keep doing it, and that they're getting some enjoyment out of it.

And the audience is by no means entirely made up of older people. There are quite a few younger ones, not the majority perhaps but a not-insignificant minority. A group of half a dozen or so who seemed to be quite young, probably not, or maybe just barely, out of their teens, was hanging out in the lobby at intermission, taking pictures of each other, and seeming to be having a great time. They didn't seem to be posturing or sneering or sulking or anything else except being young and lively. They asked me to take a picture of the entire group, which I was very pleased to do, for the sight of them had cheered me. Why were they there? It's fairly likely that they were music students.

Which does not necessarily mean that they are music enthusiasts. I think music students are sometimes required to go to concerts. The most hilariously un-enthusiastic remark I've ever heard at one of these concerts came from a group of music students who were sitting behind me in the very cheapest seats, way up in the balcony. Surveying the program before the concert started, one of them noted the symphony that would be the second half of the program and wailed to her friends "Y'all, they're going to play all four movements! We'll be here all night!" If I remember correctly they spared themselves that ordeal and left at intermission.

So much for social observations. What about the music? The first piece was Benjamin Britten's "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra," which as you probably know is meant to exhibit all the instruments in the orchestra, one by one, in a theme-and-variations. I'm pretty sure I'd heard it once or twice over the years and wasn't expecting much. But it's a much more substantial piece than I had thought. The theme is a grand tune from Purcell, and the variations are really pretty remarkable. They quickly went much further afield than I was able to follow, and the piece ends with what struck me as a rather wild fugue, and a restatement of the theme. If you can get over any patronizing sense that it's a merely pedagogical tool, this is a pretty impressive piece of music. 

Next was the Barber Violin Concerto, with Randall Goosby as the soloist. A week or so before the concert I listened to a recording of the concerto, thinking that I had never heard it before and would at least get a little acquainted with it. But I immediately recognized the main melodies of the first movement, so obviously I had. And one of those melodies is now, four days later, sounding in my head, which means it ranks with some pop music in memorable tunefulness. I love that first movement, and may with a few more hearings love the whole concerto. The second movement has so far not made a strong impression, but the third is pretty striking: it's a very short, only four minutes or so, fast and furious thing, going at breakneck speed from start to finish, and, it seems to me as a non-violinist, making some pretty strong demands on the soloist. To my unexpert ears Goosby seemed to have no problems with it.

Then came a delightful surprise. Goosby's encore (much demanded) was a piece I had never heard of by a composer I had perhaps vaguely heard of, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. It's called "Louisiana Blues Strut" and is just 100% enjoyable for someone like me who likes the blues as much as he likes classical music. See what you think:

Here's a little about the composer.

The second half of the concert consisted of Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances (op. 45). This was the last thing Rachmaninoff wrote before his death--which, I was a bit shocked to hear, occurred in 1940. Yes, I knew he had been born fairly late in the late 19th century (1873) and had lived and worked well into the 20th, but I somehow had the notion that he had not lived past its first couple of decades. Maybe that's because I think of him as a late Romantic composer. (If you do the arithmetic you'll note that this was not an exceptionally long life: 67  years. But the vast changes that occurred during that period make it, in effect, longer.)

I had not heard this piece before, and didn't have time to give it a hearing before the concert. So all I have is a first impression, which is that it's big and colorful and spectacular, but not especially profound or moving. That may be a totally unfair judgment--I repeat that it's tentative. It certainly has some materials for profundity, reaching into Rachmaninoff's personal history as well as Christian sources both Eastern and Western on the themes of death and resurrection. In any case it was very enjoyable, and I think is the kind of piece that the Mobile Symphony does well. Its conductor, Scott Speck, is a very energetic and enthusiastic person, and this performance was definitely both of those. I greatly enjoyed it, and it seemed that the entire audience did, too.

Jonathan Geltner: Absolute Music

The moment I saw the cover of this book I wanted to read it. 

It isn't just that she's a pretty girl, or even that she seems miraculously suspended in space. Presumably she's jumping on a trampoline, and the image we see is only a bare instant in one of those jumps, frozen by the camera. The power of the image is in the look on her face, that her eyes seem to be on or searching for something in the far distance, and that she seems to be not just suspended but ascending. Or levitating. Maybe that's it--it's like those medieval saints who were said to levitate. 

Did the novel live up to the promise of that picture? Well, not really. But that only shows the power described in the old saying: a picture is worth a thousand words. That's generally true but almost necessarily true if the words are an attempt to describe, or provide an equivalent of, the picture.  How could words, no matter how brilliantly chosen and placed, do just what that image does? Words must be read in sequence, over some period of time, while the image has its effect in an instant, and this is a picture of an instant.

More to the point, is it a good novel? Yes, it is. 

I can't help associating the girl in the picture with a crucial character in the novel, who hardly appears at all but is very significant. Her name is Hannah, and she and the narrator, who is in his middle or late thirties, had been childhood friends. (It's mentioned in passing that she did in fact have a trampoline.) As they entered their teens he fell in love with her, but never had a chance to do anything about it because she died suddenly of an unsuspected brain aneurysm on New Year's Eve of 1995, just shy of her fourteenth birthday. On that night he might have made, in fact had more or less intended to make, some kind of approach or declaration to her. But he chose, instead of going to the New Year's Eve party at her house, to play Dungeons and Dragons with friends (and drink beer, his first experience of drunkenness). 

The novel opens in 2017, and the first-person narrator has not thought much about Hannah for many years. Then the sight of honey locust trees on an October evening sparks his sudden recollection of the night of her death:  

...my mind without warning or apparent cause [was] seized by the memory that despite every reason to be by her side I spent the night that my childhood love Hannah died far away from her, playing a game of fantasy and getting drunk.

This sudden surge of memory is the catalyst for a series of recollections amounting to a review of his whole life since adolescence, and to events which lead to major upsets in his marriage and his life in general. 

The narrator is, we are told, a writer of fantasy novels, but I admit I was never quite convinced of that--I mean, convinced that he had actually written popular fantasy. Certainly he is extremely interested in fantasy, but the interest seems more that of a reader and a thinker than of a practitioner. I would in fact describe him first as an intellectual, but a polymath, not a specialist: very widely read, very much preoccupied with ideas, having a useful knowledge of multiple languages, a cellist accomplished enough to play Bach's cello suites, and a composer of music, at least in his student days.

And this is a very cerebral novel. It's almost the exact opposite of the last book I wrote about here, Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War. That novel, though not lacking in thought, and implying much more, is primarily a story of action, often very robust (to say the very least) physical action. This one, though not lacking in physical action, is primarily one of thought, often fairly abstract thought. And whereas the main body of Soldier is one continual sequential narrative, Absolute Music is a sort of mosaic of memories of different times and places, moving among the latter in a connected but not sequential fashion, though always within the framework of the events following that moment in 2017. 

This sometimes leads to memories within memories, a technique which I found somewhat confusing at times. I've just glanced back at a section which begins from the point of view of 2017, looks back into 2001, and from there into 1989. As these recollections are often, or usually, accompanied by some more or less abstract philosophical or theological reflection, it is easy--or at least it was easy for me--to lose track of where and when we are.

And I could have done with less explicit philosophizing, though the complaint is a little unfair, as that is clearly the nature of the narrator. But though it may be at times a little confusing to me, the novel itself is not confused. It's in fact pretty tightly structured. Its structure is based on that of Bach's cello suites, a conscious and explicit decision by the narrator, who refers to the narrative as "suites." There are six of these, one for each of the cello suites. And each suite is divided into seven parts, corresponding to the dances, or pseudo-dances, of Bach's work: Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, two Minuets or Bourrees or Gavottes, Gigue. I would be surprised if there is not some significant relationship of the "dances" of the novel's suites to Bach's, but I did not make the effort of figuring it out. (And I don't know the cello suites so well that the relationship is obvious.) And I'm pretty sure that themes and ideas are worked into the novel as musical themes are worked into a symphony or other substantial work, though, again, I did not attempt to dig them out and analyze them. 

So. We have an elaborately woven picture of a man's mind and life, including the intimate presences of friends, family, lovers, and wives--two of the latter. And places: I would be culpably negligent if I failed to mention the important role which place and love of place have in this novel. Much of it is set in Cincinnati, and I have to admit that I had not thought of Cincinnati as a place inspiring deep affection and study. But I believe it here. In saying that the novel is cerebral I don't mean to imply that it is indifferent to the physical, which is portrayed vividly. Those honey locusts in the opening pages, for instance, are described in detail, not only those specific trees at that moment, but the species at large.

What does this picture portray? What is most significant in it? This is a complex novel and that's not a question to which I would attempt to give a full answer in a blog-length review, or in fact without reading the book a second time, which I may do--I think it would be worth re-reading. It is a startlingly full book, though it isn't quite 300 pages long; it's crammed with incident and thought and people and places. It would take me another thousand words just to name the characters and their relationships. One of the blurbs on the back cover emphasizes its focus on the elemental human relationship, man and woman. And that's a fair reading. But I think these few sentences, which occur near the end of the book, are closer to the heart of it:

It seemed to me in that dim midday that only in the pure music I had long since renounced, the absolute music that reaches into the world behind the world, can the artist master time, set a time signature at will and free of words. But even that was an illusion, wasn't it? For only in performance...only then is the composer's time realized, only then--in time.

I wanted to believe that singing in my veins and sinews from one autumn to the next there had been many kinds of music that made up one great music. Who then was the composer, and for whom did he compose?

*

With A Soldier of the Great War still fresh in my mind, it occurs to me that the experience of reading it, a mostly straightforward linear narrative, provides something closer to the experience of music than does the musically organized Absolute Music. Like music, a story as such is experienced in time, and moreover it is, you might say, a simulation of time: it depicts events, which by definition exist in the stream of time and therefore in the only sequence of which we have knowledge and experience, the only one we can truly call sequence, the one we call chronological, They may not be presented in that order, but if the result is to be a story in any useful sense of the term, it must at least be susceptible of that ordering. In a non-linear narrative, at least one in which the non-linearity is the norm and not an occasional effect, we see temporally disconnected pieces of the story. There is no continual flow, and we can only grasp the story as a story after we've received all the pieces, i.e. out of time. Some assembly required. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and may be very effective artistically. But it is a different sort of experience from the elemental one of hearing a story. 

Beth Gibbons: Lives Outgrown

Supposedly, I don't buy music on physical media anymore. There are various reasons for that, lack of storage space being the major one. But I listened to this album once on Pandora and then ordered the LP. (I assumed my local record stores would not have it, which perhaps I should not have done.) And the main reason was not so much to own the object as to support the artist. When I like something as much as I like this, I don't want to just more or less freeload on a streaming service, for which the artist only gets a fraction of a penny for every play. (See this chart for the grim reality.) I want to lay out some cash as a gesture of support, and because the artist deserves to be compensated for her work. 

For those who don't recognize the name, Beth Gibbons is the singer for the band Portishead, providing the distinctive voice which is an absolutely essential element of their sound. (Those who don't recognize the name Portishead should fill that gap in their musical interests as soon as possible. Well, at least check them out, as I recognize they are not to everyone's taste. Here's a link to "Sour Times," from their first album, Dummy.)

Apart from Gibbons's voice, the music on Lives Outgrown has almost nothing in common with Portishead's. It's a subdued and I think entirely acoustic album, but hardly the simple, possibly bland, "folkie" affair that description might suggest. The songs are melancholy and in themselves not very remarkable. By that I don't mean they aren't good, because they are, but that it's not their quality as songs that stands out. That is, they are not the kind of composition that can stand alone performed by, say, one ordinary singer, strumming a guitar in an ordinary way--great songs no matter who sings them or how. That one singer would probably have to be Beth Gibbons to make it work. It's the brilliant arrangements, which are of a piece with the material, that make the entire artifact, so to speak, brilliant. 

Two names that I don't recognize, James Ford and Lee Harris, seem to be, along with Gibbons herself, in some large degree responsible for those arrangements. Harris shares songwriting credit on four tracks. Judging by the credits it would be fair to call the album the work of a group and give them a collective name. 

The instrumentation is generally sparse and low in pitch, which contributes greatly to the subdued quality. Tempos are mainly slow to moderate. There's a lot of percussion, but it's mostly deep and resonant--the standard drum kit is not present at all, as far as I can tell. In fact there are a lot of instruments, period, but they're deployed with a lot of space. The credits often list a dozen or more instruments for a track that doesn't sound in the least busy. There are (bowed) strings, also sparse and carefully, almost minimally, placed. The word "careful" could apply throughout, and yet in general the arrangements strike me as very imaginative. 

The overall coloring is dark, both musically and lyrically. The lyrics and general emotional tone run from wistful to near-despairing, as in "Rewind":

And we all know what's coming
Gone too far
Too far to rewind

It tends toward the darker as it goes along. The next-to-last track, "Beyond the Sun," has something close to a driving beat, and includes a brief passage which I can only describe as a free-jazz freakout, the only bit on the album that could be called noisy. And the lyrics end with

The loss of faith
Filled with doubt
No relief
Can be found

But the sun comes out with the last song, "Whispering Love," where a gentle and pretty flute tune evokes, for me, some of the more innocent and  hopeful music of the late '60s--something by Donovan, maybe. The lyrics take a hopeful turn:

Leaves of our tree of life
Where the summer sun...always
Shines through...the trees of wisdom
Where the light is so pure....
          (the ellipses are in the printed lyrics)

And the album fades away into bird calls and other natural sounds, which some might find gimmicky, but I don't.

Enough talk. This is the first track, and not necessarily the best, but representative.  

Back in February, a couple of months before the album was released in May, a video for "Floating On A Moment" appeared. I wrote about it here. If I had to choose a "best" from the album, that might be it, though I didn't like the video (which is included in that post). It includes a haunting chorus of children sweetly singing "All going to nowhere," a striking and slightly chilling effect.

In 2003 Gibbons released another non-Portishead album, Out of Season, a collaboration with "Rustin Man," who apparently is Paul Webb. I don't think I heard it until maybe ten years after it was released, and although I liked it I was not nearly as enthusiastic about it as I am about this one. I took it out again to see if my opinion had changed. Not really. It's very good, but Lives Outgrown strikes me as great. 

The Steve Miller Band: Your Saving Grace

I would subtitle this "Another LP From the Closet," except that since we moved in 2022 my LPs are no longer stuffed inconveniently into a closet, but are now out on shelves in full view and easily accessible. Metaphorically the subtitle is still applicable, as I thought of it as referring to pop/rock/whatever LPs that I have owned for many years--since the '60s, some of them--but haven't listened to in this century, perhaps not since the 1970s.   

This is one that I can't recall having heard since the early '70s. It was released in 1969, and I once spent several weeks of isolation and idleness with only a few books and records, of which this was one, and so heard it a lot. Of those few records, there were at least a couple that I didn't like at all, further limiting my choice. That was when I first heard Grand Funk Railroad, and couldn't understand why they were so popular. The music resembled superficially some of the hard rock bands of the late '60s--they were a trio like Cream, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience--but to my ears they just sounded thin and colorless. They became a sort of sign for me that the '60s were ending.

But I liked Your Saving Grace very much. One look at the cover tells you that the '60s were certainly not over for the Steve Miller Band. Well, they weren't over for anybody in 1969, obviously. But you know what I mean.

It's an eclectic album, if you want to be generous, or a jumble, if you don't. I think the band's personnel were somewhat in flux at the time. There are several pretty straightforward bluesy rock songs, more blues than rock--this was definitely not an entry in the "hard rock" contest that was currently being won by Led Zeppelin--and Grand Funk Railroad. The instrumentation is light and supple, almost jazzy, with a strong acoustic element. But it was two songs that were not rock at all that I most liked. One was a slow dreamy treatment of the folk hymn "Motherless Children," a bit "psychedelic" in that it included some electronic effects.

The other was "Baby's House," which prompts some non-musical reflection. Today's cultural-political left owes a great deal to the twin forces of rebellion in the '60s, the hippie counter-culture and the Marxist left. There was a lot of overlap between them, in the end a fusion, but they weren't always identical. There was always in the hippie culture an emphasis on the natural, seen as a healthy alternative to industrial civilization. And for at least some hippies that included a very healthy regard for having children as a good and natural thing. That's often forgotten now that the left has coalesced into something that is grimly and loudly committed to  abortion as the essential right guaranteeing the unlimited personal freedom which was also a hippie ideal. 

As testimony that it wasn't all always and altogether that way, "Baby's House" is an open and to my mind beautiful celebration of love and fertility. The house of the title is both the place where the woman lives and the womb in which the life of her child begins. The piece is long for a pop song--right around eight minutes--and the arrangement is certainly unusual. It's mostly twelve-string guitar, piano, and organ. Drums come in at a couple of points for drama, but are silent through most of the track. I think I hear bass guitar in that long fade-out. Much of the credit for the arrangement sure goes to keyboardist Nicky Hopkins, famous for his session work with many artists. He's also given songwriting credit along with Miller.

I can't think of anything comparable in the pop music of the time. I suppose it must have been occasioned by events in Steve Miller's own life, but have no idea whether that's actually the case or not. And as for our time--well, let me know if you know of anything as naively romantic and life-affirming. 

What do I think of the album now? Well, I still like it, but, as I said of R.E.M.'s Murmur a few weeks ago, it doesn't move me as it once did. I'll repeat what I said about Murmur: hearing it again "was a bit like running into someone who had been at one time a good friend but whom you haven't seen for a long time, and realizing that you don't really have a lot to say to each other anymore. Nothing especially negative, no hostility, just a certain distance."

But "Baby's House" and "Motherless Children" are worth coming back to now and again, as is the final and title track.

Sibelius: Violin Concerto in D Minor

Quite a few years ago, though within this century, I heard this concerto performed live. As I recall, I didn't have a strong reaction to it, which was disappointing, because I had expected, being a great lover of some of Sibelius's symphonies, to like it very much. And though I don't remember it well at all and I don't recall having listened to it since then, I assumed it would reasonably have a place in this tour of great Romantic violin concertos that I began a while back. First it was just the Germans: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch, and Brahms, in response to a remark by the famous 19th century violinist Joseph Joachim in which he compared them, calling the Mendelssohn "the heart's jewel." Those done, I included other Romantic concertos: Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, and now Sibelius.

Or what I thought to be Romantic concertos: the Sibelius, I discovered immediately, really doesn't belong with the others. "Post-Romantic" or even "early Modern" would be more accurate. This is a somewhat strange work. I listened to it once and, as with that long-ago concert performance, felt that I had heard quite a bit of music, most of which, apart from a few lovely melodies, had swept by leaving little impression.

Then I listened to it again, and it began to open up somewhat. Then once more, and I really enjoyed it. On a fourth hearing (all these over a period of two or three weeks) I was totally carried away, getting up out of my comfortable listening chair, walking around the room excitedly and muttering about how great it was. (I would have said "jumping up" out of my chair, but I'm not really capable of that anymore. In my mind I jumped.)

Compared to the others, this concerto is darker--brooding, uneasy, restless, often stormy. The first movement is intense, with shifts of tone, tempo, and mood that may be part of the reason why it seems different structurally, from the others--less conventionally ordered, though certainly not chaotic. The violin itself is often electrifying, especially in a sort of cadenza that occurs well before its usual place toward the end of a concerto. 

I listened, as I sometimes do, with a pad and pen handy for jotting down impressions for a future blog post, and among those jottings is the phrase "cry or scream." Some pop music fans may recognize that from the Dire Straits song "Sultans of Swing," which says of a chord-oriented jazz guitarist that "he doesn't care to make it cry or scream." Well, Sibelius, in the hands of David Oistrakh, very definitely makes it cry and scream (more about the recording in a moment).

The orchestra is prominent, often featuring very powerful brass. I was reminded of Mahler at several points. The movement ends in a way that I can only describe as "punchy." Instead of the drawn-out finale so typical of 19th century orchestral works, this one comes quickly: it's full-on until the very end, which comes abruptly in two loud chords. 

Mahler came to mind again in the second movement. Yes, it's an adagio, as usual, but most of it's not pretty and serene. I wrote "hesitant" and "questioning." And again the word "uneasy" comes to mind. But it does end peacefully.

During the third movement, I wrote only "totentanz" and "scary harmonics." If the concerto as a whole should be described as a bit strange, this movement is the decidedly strange part. "Totentanz," as you probably know, means "death-dance" in German, which I only know because it turns up in other 19th century contexts, though offhand I can't tell you where. (Liszt, maybe?) It certainly seems to be a sort of dance, and it struck me as a dark one. It's followed by sunnier passages. The ending is exhilarating, similar to that of the first movement, brief, pointed, and somehow joyful. 

As for the scary harmonics--I'm referring to what I think of as high notes with a sort of whistling sound, which I think are not natural tones but, if they're like harmonics on the guitar, made by touching a string but not pressing it down. At any rate, in the context of this movement, they sounded wild, almost deranged, breaking out in the midst of the death-dance as if trying to jack up the somewhat frenzied atmosphere.

I generally try not to read anything about an unfamiliar work before getting acquainted with it directly, without too many prejudices or expectations. So I avoided reading the liner notes on the LP until after that fourth hearing. I had wondered if I was making too much of, or even making up entirely, the dark quality of that third-movement dance. No, it's not just me:

It is undoubtedly an exciting dance, far showier than the other movements, but there is a curious unease beneath the wild prancing.... Sibelius himself referred to the movement as a danse macabre. 

The notes are credited to Bill Parker, whose name I don't recognize. 

Like much of Mahler's work, this concerto seems caught between the 19th and 20th centuries, as if looking over a wall separating them, with a view of the other side which is indistinct but which makes him uneasy. I was surprised to learn that it was written soon after the Second Symphony, which is very much in the Romantic tradition and, as far as I recall (haven't heard it for a while) pretty conventional.

This is the recording I have, and the only one I listened to:

This is not, however, the cover of my edition, which is ugly, featuring a very grim bust of Sibelius, with closed eyes, looking like a death mask. Back in the '60s Angel Records had some kind of distribution deal with Melodiya, the official Soviet recording company (if "company" is the right word). There were a lot of these joint-venture LPs around then. As best I can tell from Discogs, this performance was originally issued by Melodiya in 1965, with the Angel/Melodiya edition coming out in 1967. Somehow it made its way onto the budget label Quintessence in 1982, and that's the edition I have. In spite of the unattractive cover, it's a gem. The sound is fantastic and to my ears so are the orchestra and soloist. I don't recall having heard the conductor's name before. Even the liner notes are very good, which is unusual with budget labels. As with the Dvorak and Tchaikovsky concertos, I felt, and feel, no need to seek out another performance. 

The back cover, by the way, quotes a 1968 reviewer in High Fidelity as saying that Oistrakh's playing "risks, but always misses, technical disaster," and is a "virtuoso flirtation with danger." Doesn't sound that way to me.

I haven't listened to the two Humoresques that fill out the second side of the LP. When that third movement ends, I don't want to hear any more music for a while. 

Mark Helprin: A Soldier of the Great War

I hardly know what to say about this novel. I can say that I did not know what to expect of it, but must immediately contradict that remark by saying that it was not what I expected. Whatever else those very vague expectations may have been, they did not include the combination of realist and visionary qualities that the book actually possesses.

In 1964, just outside of Rome, late in the afternoon of August 9th, a 74-year-old man and a 19-year-old boy find themselves thrown together by a need and desire to walk 70 kilometers (over 40 miles). The old man, Alessandro, is the title character, the soldier. Alessandro is a professor "of aesthetics." I'm not sure exactly what that means in practice--a sort of generalist of the arts, a critic without boundaries, and a theorizer, I suppose. The boy, Nicolo, works in a factory making airplane propellers and is vastly ignorant. He doesn't even know that the Great War, the First World War, happened, and is curious about it. The old man doesn't really want to talk about it, except in general historical terms. 

Alessandro alternately encourages the boy, berates him for his ignorance and naivete, or provokes him with cryptic remarks. When Nicolo, piqued at Alessandro's refusal to answer a question about the war, points out that he wasn't "the only one ever to be in a war," Alessandro replies:

"I know, but I survived. That puts me on a lower plane."

"A lower plane?"

"Lower than those who perished. It was their war, not mine."

And he goes on to expand on that remark in a way which only confuses Nicolo.

I found Alessandro a bit annoying, a bit sententious, and for the first hundred pages or so thought I wasn't going to like the book very much: am I going to have 700-plus pages of this old man philosophizing and reminiscing? The conversation takes place amid vivid descriptions of the landscape and the changing light, but no amount of beauty in the setting would keep it from getting tiresome after a few hundred pages.

I'm a little ashamed to admit this, but the phrase "the joy of being alive" has always bothered me a bit.  I'm not sure why this is so, because I am very familiar with the sensation and grateful for it. Perhaps the reason is only that it's something of a cliché, and so no longer really communicates what it says. Or--now that I think about it--maybe it's because I think of it as the voice of someone who has no reason not to be very happy with his circumstances, and if he did have such a reason would probably sing a different tune. At any rate I receive it somewhat cynically. And I thought this book was going to be all about The Joy of Being Alive and The Wisdom of Experience, and that I wasn't going to care much for it. And in fact those descriptors are justified, or at least justifiable, but, being clichés and rather vapid, they would do more harm than good as a commentary.

At a pause in their journey Alessandro's memory makes an excursion into his childhood, to a curious incident involving an Austrian princess at a ski lodge in the Alps. Then, as day breaks after the long night's trek:

The sun rose on the left and turned the glossy leaves of the poplars into a blinding haze of light too bright to behold until the wind coursed through the trees and they began to bend and sway, softening the glare.

Alessandro felt the world take fire. His heart repaired to the past and he barely touched the ground as he walked between trees that now were shimmering in the dawn. No matter that distant thunder is muted and slow, it comes through the air more clearly. After half a century and more, he was going to take one last look. He no longer cared what it might do to him. He just wanted to go back. And he did. 

(I cannot help inserting here that I either don't understand or don't believe that remark about distant thunder, but never mind.)

That's the end of the first of ten fairly lengthy chapters. The next one, "Race to the Sea," won me over, and had me reading the rest of the book eagerly and with great enjoyment. Alessandro's initial return is to his youth, probably around 1908 or so. He is the son of a fairly affluent Roman family, well off but not aristocratic. He is an expert rider with a very fine horse. He learns mountaineering. He's in love with a neighbor girl, and one summer day encounters her as she is about to ride to the seashore. He wants to go with her, but he isn't ready, and she leaves without him. Starting out a half-hour later, he races to get there before her; that's the race of the chapter's title. 

I have been on horseback maybe half a dozen times in my life, for no more than an hour each time, and never at any pace faster than a slow trot (or is canter the right term?). So although (or because?) I have absolutely no experience of wild horseback rides, I found the account of this one exhilarating. At that point I was fully drawn into the narrative, and continued so until it was over. The middle eight of the ten chapters tell the story of Alessandro's youth, his years in the war, and some of the aftermath. The last chapter returns to Alessandro and Nicolo, nearing the end of their long walk.

When I say "the story" I mean to include all the resonances of that term. This is a story in the grand mode, almost the epic mode, except that it is also very naturalistic. It's difficult to believe that the novel was written by someone in his mid-30s who had not (as far as I know*) experienced war, or indeed many of the physical situations described. Both Alessandro's horsemanship and his mountaineering skills prove to be important in his survival of the war. 

Alessandro is a hero, and his heroism--which consists not only of courage, but also of skill and resourcefulness--sometimes strains credulity. But this does not come at the cost of any downplaying of the ugly madness of war, still less any glorification of it. The heroics, and certain other features, such as a number of highly improbable coincidences (one involving that childhood encounter with the Austrian princess), near-miraculous escapes, and moments of implausible good luck, make the book one which can fairly be categorized as a romance: a tale of great adventures with a more or less happy ending for the hero.

I said the story is naturalistic, and it is in its details. At the same time, the coincidences and the supreme good luck sometimes give the story a little of the flavor of magic realism. It could be called whimsy, but that suggests lightness. The whimsy is that of the pagan gods, "who kill us for their sport." (That's from Lear, I think.) There is at the center of many plot turns a mad dwarf who exercises an extraordinary influence on events. He is real, but his actions and his ravings suggest that there is something other than the natural at work. At times it seems that madness is the only plausible explanation of the war, in which some are carried through great danger by courage and luck, only to be undone by something outside their control, perhaps accident or mere coincidence, or, in one case, a soldier's misunderstanding of an order. 

There is a semi-mystical sense of time, fate, and order operating in a meaningful pattern. There is a definite religiosity without any very specific content beyond an enormous sense of wonder and a confidence that beauty means something, and is not just an accident. Countering the madness and influence of the dwarf is a painting by Giorgione, La Tempesta, The Tempest (click here for what I hope is a pretty good reproduction). It is an enigmatic picture, and Alessandro is mildly obsessed with it, seeing some mysteriously ordering principle embodied in it. The principle is mysterious, and the order it produces is mysterious, very often seeming to be no order at all, perhaps more promised than realized. The story is not a tragedy, but it includes a great deal of sorrow. 

I suggest that you read it. I don't think you'll be sorry. 

---

* The few biographical notes that I've read say that Helprin served in the Israeli Defense Forces, but do not mention any combat experience.

By the way, the author is not to be confused with Mark Halperin, the journalist.

Robert Frost, In the Clearing, for International Book Lovers Day

Nobody could keep up with all the declared National or International Such-And-Such Days, or Weeks, or Months. But I happened to notice this one, and I took "book" quite literally: as referring not to the content of a book, the words and the ideas or stories or pictures and whatever else may be the abstract thing that is "the book" as distinct from any physical thing that incarnates the book, but an actual material object. 

(Pedantically, I don't say "physical or electronic," because the workings of the latter are just as physical as paper, though they are invisible. This gets in my way sometimes when I want to differentiate with a word or maybe two a paper from an electronic book, or a CD or LP from an MP3.)

Love of the physical book is the reason I'm currently reading this one:

I haven't had it for very long and have already forgotten where I got it. Perhaps at an open-air used-book stall in D.C. the last time I was there; at any rate it was either cheap or free. And I did not need it. I've had a copy of Frost's complete poetry, published after his death and so including In the Clearing, which was his last book, published when he was eighty-eight, for many years and could have read these poems at any time. In fact I have never done much more than scratch the surface of his work, knowing a dozen or two of his best poems very well and hundreds of others not at all. 

But I started reading this one a week or so ago because I wanted to handle the book itself. I think I can say with some confidence that this would be a very bad place to begin one's reading of Frost. It is not, so far, a very good book. It's an odd one, or at least it contains a lot of poems that strike me as very odd, and not so very good. There is, for instance, a poem called "Kitty Hawk" which is fifteen pages of irregularly rhymed three-beat lines, which I have to say was a bit of a trial, and which left me a bit puzzled. The puzzlement may have more to do with the fact that I was reading it in bed and started falling asleep partway through my first reading than with the poem itself (which I did finish the next night), but I'm not much inclined to put more effort into it.

I've read most of it now, and there are a few gems, including one you may remember (I do) from the classroom, "In A Glass of Cider." But on the whole there's just not much here of what makes Frost so highly and rightly regarded. (See this entry at Poems Ancient and Modern for an instance of just how technically skilled he could be while maintaining a very American conversational voice.)

Some great part of my enjoyment of the book is the sort of physical book it is, I mean even apart from its physicality. It's not that I'm any sort of collector or connoisseur--a slightly embarrassing number of my books are library discards, and look it. But I have a particular weakness for books that were published between, say, 1920 and 1960 (1962 in this case): books that constituted adult reading when I was a child and adolescent. And the physical condition of the book doesn't really matter that much. The attraction is a form of nostalgia, containing, I suppose, the memory of something which at the time represented to me maturity and intelligence, a world of which I wanted to be a part. I'm fairly sure I didn't think any such thing at the age of fifteen or so, but it was present as a vague sense of wanting to be a substantial sort of person. To be a grown-up. There's an ideal which seems pretty close to vanishing from our culture. And maybe that knowledge, too, figures into the nostalgia.

And then there are the closing lines of the poem Frost wrote for John F. Kennedy's inauguration, greeting

A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.

Frost did not live to see the savage response of history to that hope, though he did live a few months past Kennedy's assassination, which was a pretty good first serving of what was to come. 

Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D

"The piece was written in Clarens, a Swiss resort on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Tchaikovsky had gone to recover from the depression brought on by his disastrous marriage to Antonina Miliukova. "

So says Wikipedia. The poor man. And poor Antonina, too. It seems to be a generally accepted view that Tchaikovsky was homosexual. Whether the marriage was ventured upon as a way of covering up that fact, or he really thought it could work, or she knew and accepted the situation for reasons of her own, I will leave to those who are more interested in the biography than I am. I mention it because one would suppose that the concerto would be deeply melancholy, at least. But it isn't. It isn't exactly sunny, either, but it doesn't come near the heartbreak and gloom of, for instance, the Sixth Symphony. But then, whatever Tchaikovsky felt about the ending of the marriage, it probably wasn't heartbreak. 

In one very broad aspect it resembles the Beethoven and Brahms concertos: its first movement is much longer than the other two, roughly as long as the second and third combined. Maybe there was some sense of what a concerto is supposed to be that plays a part in this, but if it was not unusual it wasn't exactly a convention, either, as Mendelssohn and Bruch and Dvorak didn't follow it. 

The first movement includes two "big tunes," as I think of them: grand, beautiful, memorable, often famous melodies. These are, to put it flippantly, played around with in various ways until there is a climax which brings them together in what the Wikipedia article describes as an "arrival," a good term, and one of those heart-grabbing, possibly tear-jerking, moments which any music lover loves. Not the tears of pathos, but the good tears similar to those produced by eucatastrophe, the term invented (it seems) by Tolkien to describe a sudden unexpected turn for the good in a story. I'm partial to cadenzas, and this one is wonderful, including a passage of those high-pitched whistling tones which I think are harmonics and which must be extremely difficult to play. 

The second movement is a deeply mournful theme, turning into a sort of slow gentle waltz which seems to me to convey resignation. Here, perhaps, is something connected to the marriage. There is no break between the second movement's Andante and the third's Allegro vivacissimo, and I will venture to complain about that. It's too sudden and startling, downright unpleasant in my opinion. I'll get used to it. Or perhaps implement my own pause as I listen to it on CD or MP3. At any rate, if there is any connection between the concerto and the marriage, this movement suggests that the composer got over his distress about the latter. As with the Beethoven, this movement seems a bit of a letdown to me, which seems a possibility built into the dominance of the first movement. 

The recording I listened to is, in fact, on MP3. It's an older one: Isaac Stern, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. As with the Dvorak, I felt no need to investigate other recordings, though I probably will eventually. As best I can tell from Discogs it was originally recorded in 1959, which makes its outstanding sound even more impressive. It's part of the MP3 version of a boxed CD set, a set of boxed sets, called The Original Jacket Collection, this being the Ormandy and Philadelphia box, a 10-CD set, presumably someone's idea of the best work of that conductor and orchestra. Some number of years ago, greater than five and less than twenty, an MP3 version was offered for some ridiculously low price, probably on Amazon, and I grabbed it. It's 104 separate files of absolutely wonderful music. I haven't heard all of it, but I'm sure it's wonderful.

R.E.M.: Murmur

I had a very minor little argument online recently with someone of the age classified, in that silly system that we seem to be stuck with, as "Generation X", on the subject of the music of the 1980s. "Boomers" like me, he said, could not understand, could not "relate to," that music as people of his age do. We Boomers had been simply too old for it to have made on us the kind of impression that it had on them.

Well, in some ways that's true. As anyone who's at all susceptible knows, the popular music of one's youth, like everything else in one's youth, makes an impression, has an intense impact, in a way that later similar experiences generally do not. The reason is obvious: the experience is, for that person, the first of its kind, and the person is still newly alert and sensitive, still in some sense a child.  People speak of the popular music of their youth as "the soundtrack of my life," a phrase which I understand but find a little disturbing for its implication that one's life needs or ought to have a soundtrack. Still, that's the condition of life in a culture where recorded music is everywhere.

Tears for Fears, the band we were discussing, said my acquaintance, simply could not be for me what it was for him: the soundtrack of his formative experiences as he passed through adolescence and into adulthood: his first love, his growing awareness of the world, and so forth. And, again, that's obviously true. I was already in my mid 30s, married with children, when Tears for Fears was popular. Nevertheless, some of the music of that time did get thoroughly bound up with my life--was, in a necessarily more limited way than when I was in high school or college, the soundtrack of my life. Tears for Fears was part of it, though not a large part: a friend included some of their stuff on a mixtape, and although I have not heard that music for thirty years or so I still recall a few excellent songs, and their somewhat bitter lyrics:

I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
          ("Mad World")

For the most part that soundtrack played when I was in the car, commuting back and forth to work or on the occasional long drive alone. And R.E.M. is one of the bands I think of first when I recall those times. I found their first two (full-length) albums, Murmur and Reckoning, as exciting as the music of the mid- and late 1960s had been. That was true of other bands of the time as well: Big Country, U2, Ultravox, the Psychedelic Furs, others whose names don't spring quite as readily to mind. 

But time went on, life went on, pop music went on, with the flood of inexpensively available music making it possible for me to range far more widely in my listening. And I realized recently that I have not heard most of that music for thirty-plus years, and wondered if it was as good as I remembered. It was time to give it another listen.

Murmur was the first I chose. I would have put it near the top of my list of favorites of the time. It was a peculiar album: the music catchy, and yet having an odd emotional seriousness, partly as a result of Michael Stipe's voice, which really didn't sound like anyone else's. It had a bit of a back-to-basics feel, with a touch of '60s folk-rock, influenced no doubt by the punk impulse but sounding nothing like any punk rock I ever heard. It wasn't bluesy at all, wasn't aggressive at all, miles away from the hard rock and glam metal that dominated guitar-based rock. In comparison to those, it seemed relatively gentle, though it was very energetic, even hard-driving. And it had a mysterious quality, which was not entirely due to the lyrics that were only partially intelligible at best (and even when intelligible not making much sense).

So. Listening to it again--in the vinyl that I bought so many years ago--was a bit like running into someone who had been at one time a good friend but whom you haven't seen for a long time, and realizing that you don't really have a lot to say to each other anymore. Nothing especially negative, no hostility, just a certain distance. I haven't changed my opinion of this album,  I would still rate it very highly, but I don't respond to it as I once did. I enjoyed hearing it, but I don't know whether I'll ever hear it again--as it might be with that friend, whom you enjoy seeing but make no plans to see again. 

"Radio Free Europe" is the first track on the album, an instant grabber, and one of my favorites

I find myself wondering: have I finally, at age 75, outgrown rock-and-roll? Of late, by which I mean recent months, I seem to want to hear only classical music. It could be just a phase I'm going through.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, Editor: Flannery O'Connor's Why Do the Heathen Rage?

Why Do the Heathen Rage? is Jessica Hooten Wilson's attempt to salvage the novel of the same name on which Flannery O'Connor was working at her death. Last month I attended the Global Catholic Literature Project's online seminar/discussion of the book, so I have read it and listened to a good deal of talk about it, including an extensive introductory lecture by Dr. Wilson.

It was clearly a labor of great devotion to O'Connor on on her part. And it's not a criticism of her, or of the other presenters and participants in that seminar, to say that it confirmed my suspicion that there's really not that much to the book, because O'Connor didn't leave that much to work with. If the novel had been anywhere near completion, "unfinished" in the same way as, for instance, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, someone would long ago have published it. The publisher's prominent blurb on the cover, "The Unfinished Novel In Print For the First Time," is misleading at best. The actual subtitle is much more accurate: "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At a Work In Progress." 

It seems that O'Connor left only draft fragments, and apparently there are multiple versions of many of them. Wilson has selected and arranged these to provide an incomplete skeleton of what would presumably have been early chapters of the book, providing characters and a situation. Where the story might have gone from there can, obviously, only be a matter of speculation. The book is only 182 pages long, not including footnotes, and, without actually counting, I'm guessing that only about half of the words are O'Connor's. The rest are Wilson's commentary and her "presumptuous attempt to end the novel." (I'm not going to comment on that, because I never had enough sense of what the story might have been to judge of whether her ending was plausible.)

The main characters are mostly familiar O'Connor types:  a bookish young man along the lines of Asbury in "The Enduring Chill"; his father, a somewhat brutish hick partly incapacitated by a stroke; his extremely practical mother, who now runs the farm and is outraged by her son's idleness. And there's a character who's a new type, of whom more in a moment. It appears that O'Connor was trying to go in a new direction, one striking indication of which is that unlike the violent conversions, or at least collisions with grace, in her other work, this one--which is that of the young man, Walter--takes place early on (or so I thought--it isn't really clear), and rather quietly and abruptly (as far as we can tell). On the basis of what we have here it doesn't strike me as very convincing. That's hardly fair, but the brief scene describing it is all I have to go on.

Walter has a peculiar pastime: he writes letters, more or less as pranks, to people whose names he encounters in the news and elsewhere, usually because they annoy him. Then, depending on the response, he may play with them--for instance by praising a poet whose work he actually detests. But:

Whenever one of his correspondents, from being a caricature, turned into a human being, pathetic, undemanding, full of ridiculous encroaching love, Walter wrote DECEASED across the letter he had just received and put it back in the mail.

One such victim is a young woman, Oona Gibbs, a left-wing activist/dreamer, writer for a radical New York magazine. (I immediately thought of Myrna Minkoff in A Confederacy of Dunces, a character of whom O'Connor would not have known, since she didn't appear in print until 19180.) Walter imagines her as an early '60s bohemian sort:

Oona Gibbs would wear sandals and a peasant skirt and be a veteran of Mississippi jails.

He could visualize the whole lot of them, the whole pack of lean, hungry-eyed young people, moving from place to place on the scent of injustice. The very thought of them generated a peculiar fury in him, even though, as far as the moral issues were concerned, he was more or less on their side.

I thought the name "Oona" an odd and possibly poor choice, wondering if it was invented. But it is indeed a name in actual use, having originated with an Irish word for "lamb." (Eugene O'Neill had a daughter named Oona; she married Charlie Chaplin.) That etymology suggests, in light of what we learn about Oona, that it was carefully chosen. 

We don't see Walter's first letter to her, in which he apparently presents himself as being enthusiastic about her ideals. She responds with a wildly gushing letter, full of the excitement of her own liberation and the thought that she has found a kindred spirit. A sample:

I've broken through the ceiling of everything that suffocated me--conventions, manners, religion--and have suddenly like breaking into outer space, understood that nothing matters but that you be open to everything and everybody. For the first time in my life, I'm afraid of nothing.

Well, that sure sounds like the sort of revolution of consciousness for which there was so much enthusiasm among some in the '60s. Walter is repulsed, and apparently decides to put her to the test. He replies that as much as he appreciates her offer of friendship: 

...I don't believe you can give that friendship to me, and I'll tell you why.... Miss Oona Gibbs, I am a Negro!

Wilson suggests, very plausibly, that this device may have been suggested to O'Connor by Black Like Me, a book in which the writer, John Howard Griffin, blackened his face and traveled the South to see what the experience of being black was really like. O'Connor does mention the book and the writer in her letters, so we know she was aware of it.

Thrilled, Oona resolves to hurry down to Georgia and meet this person on whom she can exercise all her fascination for the downtrodden and exotic. She writes to Walter that she is coming, and he tries to warn her off by claiming he has hepatitis: "VERY DANGEROUS. Do not come." But she is already on her way:

She was even then only sixty miles away, speeding forward as deadly and innocent as a flame in her little red automobile.

Now, that sentence is a real Flannery O'Connor gem, the most striking in the book for me. But those brilliant touches are relatively few here. And I'm skeptical that that the novel would have been successful. The premise is outlandish, but not in a way that strikes me as plausible--especially if, as seems the case, the execution was to go in a direction more serious than comic. That seems to have been meant to include a love story.

One reason for my skepticism is that, on the basis of the work we have, O'Connor's range was limited. I think most people who love her work acknowledge that her range is deep but narrow. One obvious possibility--obvious to me, anyway--is that these limits were fundamental: that is, not just the effect of her illness and truncated life, but an intrinsic limitation of her gifts. I find it a little difficult to imagine her writing a serious love story. I find it much easier to imagine her making wild comedy of the collision of Oona and Walter. 

It's Wilson's view, a very plausible one, that O'Connor was trying, or planning to try, to take on some of the social questions of the time (the mid-1960s), specifically the racial problem. We would like to think that, had she lived, she would have, one way or another, covered new ground: different situations, different characters, different concerns. Wilson seems to believe that these fragments represent just such a movement. It's certainly plausible; let's grant that it was indeed O'Connor's intention. As I say, I'm a little skeptical that it would have been successful. But I have just re-read a longish section in which Oona is introduced, and it strikes me now as being much better than I had thought. If I had written this review without taking a second look at the book, I would have said "Don't bother." But I did take that look, and now I find myself feeling a little sad that there won't ever be any more of it. I almost said "I hope I'll be proved wrong."

No, there isn't much here, and if you're not an O'Connor enthusiast I would still say "Don't bother." But if you are, and I mean an enthusiast not only for her fiction but for her letters, her thought, her whole persona, it's worth your while.

One thing that I don't consider to be worth much of anybody's attention is picking at the question of O'Connor's views on race, on which Wilson spends too much time. Considering the intellectual and ethical wreck that is current academic-progressive thinking on race, I just don't have any patience for it. And there's a certain resemblance here to the nice folks who were scandalized by O'Connor's work and wanted her to write "something uplifting." I think I said what I want to say about that some weeks ago, in this post: A Note On Flannery O'Connor And Race

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Dvorak: Violin Concerto in Am

I've been rather busy for the past week or so, and will be for several more days, so I'm going to make this brief.

Continuing my tour of the great 19th century violin concertos, sparked by Joseph Joachim's judgment of the four great German ones (Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch, Brahms), I've branched out from the Germans. I was only vaguely aware that Dvorak had even written a violin concerto. Apparently, according to Dave Hurvitz (see video below), my ignorance was until relatively recently not that unusual: all the attention went to the cello concerto. Well, people were really missing something.

I described the Brahms concerto as being somehow larger than the other three named by Joachim. By a similar measure, I would describe the Dvorak as somehow smaller than the Brahms and Beethoven. It is in length literally smaller than those: three movements of comparable and modest length, very unlike the, so to speak, front-loaded Brahms and Beethoven, with their very long first movements. It's also lighter than the Germans, including Bruch and Mendelssohn. It doesn't seem to strike as deeply as the others, in their most intense moments, do. In spite of the fact that it's in a minor key, it's more bright and fiery than somber in the first movement, very sweet in the second (which flows without a pause from the first), and in the third simply joyous. And in that third movement it stands out from all the others. 

In all the others the third movement is either a little less impressive than the first and second, perhaps just a bit of a letdown, or, in the case of Beethoven, a definite letdown. But this one is possibly, depending on your mood, the best of the concerto. I don't see how anyone can listen to it without being lifted up into its high spirits. It makes me smile.

Is this a great work? Well, maybe not in that quasi-physical sense of the term which I applied to the Brahms. But in the sense of being a classic, a work that stands with the best work of its time as deserving of attention and commanding love, yes, it's great. 

I was going to go to Dave Hurvitz for advice on which recording to try, but as it turned out I didn't listen to his recommendation until I had heard the concerto several times. That was because I discovered that I have a recording, an LP from 1980--this one:

As far as I recall, I had not even heard of this violinist before. I figured I would listen to the LP once, then see what Hurvitz would recommend and probably try it (or them). But I just kept listening to the LP. It's perfectly satisfying to me. What can I say, with my limited vocabulary? It's just beautiful, crystal clear, lively, sure, and precise. 

I did finally listen to Hurvitz, just a little while ago, and learned, as I mentioned, some things about the concerto which I hadn't known. I found Hurvitz annoying when someone first recommended him to me, but I've come to like him now. Perhaps I'll listen to the recording he recommends, a Supraphon recording from the '60s, Josef Suk, Karel Ančerl, and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Or perhaps not. 

I see that there is no lack of performances of the concerto on YouTube. I will leave you to pick one of those if YouTube is your preference.

Now on to Tchaikovsky.

Lord of the World Revisited

As I mentioned in the previous (but one) post, I've been wanting to re-read Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, which I first read almost exactly eleven years ago. Since it concerns the Antichrist and the end of the world, the subject matter seems even more timely now than it did then. I wrote about it at the time--click here to read that post--and for the most part what I said there still applies after this reading. But I enjoyed it much more, and think it's a better book, this time.

Some part of this upgrade, so to speak, may be due to the fact that I read an actual printed book this time, the nicely printed and bound one from Cluny Media, rather than a Kindle version. I just don't much like reading anything more than a couple of thousand words on an electronic device. And some part may be due to my having given it more attention this time. Whatever the reason, I found it more involving on every level than I did before. I didn't find the lack of narrative drama that I complained about before, and I found myself more involved with the characters than before. In particular the story of one character, Mabel Brand, wife of a major political leader, is quite moving. I can't say much more about that without giving too much away. It's still not a great work from the literary point of view, but it's a good one, a better one than I thought on first reading.

I still find--I'll try to keep this vague--that some parts of the actual spiritual and physical collision of Christ and Antichrist are vaguely depicted, which is not a surprising flaw in such an attempt. And the extent to which Benson imagines the 21st century Catholic Church to be more or less the same as it was in his time remains a striking feature--not necessarily a defect, just strikingly not what has actually happened. Which is true of most of his imagined 20th century history. And almost ludicrously, he envisions the establishment of a new compulsory secular worship as requiring the assistance of an apostate priest who designs ceremonies as elaborate and minutely choreographed as a High Mass in the Vatican in Benson's time. If that is to be the way things go at the actual end, it must be a long way off yet. (The apostate priest, by the way, is named Francis, which amused me.)

The story, as I mentioned, is also more timely, which makes it more interesting. The idea of a compulsory secular worship is not as far-fetched as it was only eleven years ago, with corporations and governments and universities making life difficult for anyone who does not actively join in the celebration of "Pride" (!).  And moves by the federal government in the past few years to put some Christians under surveillance as potential terrorists make the persecution described in the book much more easily imagined. 

Note: I feel obliged to say that I don't think the word "persecution" is accurate as applied to Christians in this country right now. We may see the potential for it, but it isn't here now, and to claim that it is here is the mistake we refer to as "crying wolf." 

And, just for the record, I do believe--in fact I think it's obvious, in fact I think it would be difficult and foolish to deny--that the spirit of Antichrist is very much active in Western culture right now. Whether this means we actually might be near the end of the world is not a question on which I have anything like a definite opinion--not for public expression, and not even in my own mind. 

NOTE: the Cluny edition is a hardback and thus on the expensive side. But as of this writing it and many other titles are going for 20% off, which makes this one $26.36 vs. $32.95. I don't know how long this will be the case. You'll see the discount applied in your cart before you check out.

UPDATE: THE SALE IS OVER NOW.

Brahms: Violin Concerto

With this concerto, I've finished what I call my Joachim project: to get to know the four concertos named by Joseph Joachim (the very famous 19th century violinist) in this remark:

The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's.

And possibly, with hesitation and deference, to see whether I agreed with him. The answer is: well, not exactly. I wouldn't say I disagree, exactly; I'm only going to say that his description of the Mendelssohn is not mine, nor would I pick any of the four as a "heart's jewel."

You will note that Joachim's statements are not rankings. He's not saying that there is a semi-objective superiority of one over the others. Yes, he does say that Beethoven's is the greatest, but considering what he says of the others, I don't think he means absolutely superior, but rather the grandest, the largest. By virtue of their inclusion in his list, all four are "great" in the more casual sense. But Mendelssohn's, it seems, is especially beloved. To say that one has a favorite flower does not disparage other flowers, and it seems reasonable to say that this was Joachim's personal favorite.

In truth, my most accurate response to the question "Which of these is your favorite?" would be "The one I'm listening to now." But I'll put it another way with another question: if you had to pick one, if could only ever again hear one, which would it be? Right now I would pick Brahms, and it's not only because it's the one I heard most recently. That was a couple of weeks ago, so I'm not under its immediate influence. My reason may be the same thing that Joachim sees in the Beethoven. The word "majesty" occurred to me several times as I listened. It just seems somehow a little larger, a little more powerful, perhaps a little deeper, than the others, while lacking nothing in basic musical appeal when compared to them. 

I would probably declare myself unable to choose between Beethoven and Brahms except that I'm not fond of Beethoven's third movement. Like the Beethoven, the Brahms is way out of balance in favor of the first movement, which in both is as long or longer than the second and third two combined. This is not true of the other two concertos. That makes me wonder whether Brahms was consciously emulating Beethoven or not. A biography might answer that question. 

Joachim's list completed, I'm now extending the project to include two other great Romantic violin concertos, those of Tchaikovsky and Sibelius. Wait, Dvorak wrote one, too, which as far as I remember I haven't heard. Joachim's list was limited to German composers, so Dvorak's absence is not necessarily significant. So, three others.

I'm glad to see that it seems to be generally acceptable now to say "concertos" instead of "concerti." The latter, at least when I tried to use it, always sounded pretentious or snobbish. But if I didn't use it I felt like a hick who just didn't know any better. The word has long completed the journey to full Anglophone citizenship, and can be pluralized like other English words. Or so I say. 

I was a little surprised, when reading Bleak House a few months ago, to see "restaurant" italicized, as is normally done with foreign words and phrases that remain foreign. I don't know when that ceased. I'm amused by the idea that the concept was apparently foreign. England certainly had long had its pubs and other places where one could have a meal (Samuel Johnson frequents a "chop house"), but there must have been something different about the French approach. 

Cluny Media, and a Couple of Other Literary Things

Cluny Media is a publisher whose main line of business is the reprinting of Catholic classics, or classics which are in some way connected to and compatible with the Catholic tradition. And when I say reprinting I don't mean a sloppy scan of an old book run through a print-on-demand process. I mean very high-quality work. Here's how they describe their enterprise:

Our publishing philosophy is simple: A book, from cover to cover, should be an artifact, a work of art. Because our business is primarily to take the old and make it new, this philosophy demands a particular, careful process. Unlike the facsimile “republications” of other, similarly motivated publishers, Cluny editions are restorations. The restorative spirit especially animates the production and design elements of the publishing process.

Their "About Us" page goes into more detail about what they do, and why and how they do it. It's worth reading. And supporting. 

Over the past four or five months I've bought several of their books, and can vouch for their quality: Caryl Houselander's Letters, Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, and no less than five of Sigrid Undset's works that aren't gigantic novels set in medieval Norway.

This mini-binge began with my desire to re-read Lord of the World. I had read it ten years ago in one of those free Kindle editions which are not well formatted, which meant that it had two strikes against it before I even started reading: strike one was the fact that it was on the Kindle, as I don't like reading anything substantial on an electronic device anyway. I felt like I'd somehow missed something. The topic--the Antichrist and the Apocalypse--has been on my mind, and I wanted to read an actual on-paper edition this time. I shopped around and was led to the Cluny site, which led to the purchase of that book and then the others. 

I can pretty confidently say that you'll be impressed with their list (click here), and pleased with the quality of the books. And I'm going to make one specific recommendation, of a title I was very surprised to see: Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall. 

I was surprised because I would have assumed it's still under copyright, and that whoever owns the copyright would not readily allow anyone else to publish an edition. It was first published in 1928, so maybe the copyright has expired. In any case it's a very good and very funny novel, my favorite of his comic novels. And isn't that cover great?

I'll mention another title which I was a little surprised, and very pleased, to see: the three-volume A History of the Church by Philip Hughes. I'm not in the market for this set, because I own it, in a Sheed & Ward edition of the 1930s and '40s, and I have a strong attachment to it. Back around 1980, when I was seriously considering leaving the Episcopal Church for Rome, I wanted to read something substantial about the history of the Church. Somehow I decided on this one--I have absolutely no memory now of how that came about--and went to some trouble to get hold of it from an out-of-print books dealer. It did its job, and I proceeded. 

It's very well-written, as you would expect of an educated Catholic priest of his time (1895-1967). Contemporary historians would probably consider that it goes way too easy on the Church--"triumphalist," they might say, or worse. There's something to that. But I thought it was very fair to the opponents of the Church, and unsparing of the Church's own failings, though it doesn't dwell on the shocking.

And it ends with Luther. The three volumes were originally to be titled The World In Which the Church Was Founded, The Church and the World It Created, and The Church and the Christian World's Revolt Against It. That basic plan was carried out, but I just noticed, in a footnote to the third volume, that it was intended only as "the first half of this third part." I don't know what the story of that is. But Hughes did later publish A Popular History of the Reformation, also available from Cluny. I have a copy but have never read it.

*

There's a new online poetry magazine: New Verse Review. It's published on Substack, which is very much the thing these days. I recognize several of the names associated with it, especially Sally Thomas, whose book of poems I praised here. I like the fact that the new publication not only favors metrical verse but narrative, and, I assume, longer lyric poems. Modern poetry tends to focus on a single epiphanic moment, and I'm in favor of stretching out a bit. Provided, obviously, that that doesn't mean making a not-very-interesting poem even less so by making it longer.

*

There's a new anthology of Rene Girard's writing: All Desire is A Desire For Being. That's a quote from Girard, and it knocked me out. It's something I've been trying to get at in a poem I've been working on (a longish poem, coincidentally), so I immediately wanted to read the book. I've only read one Girard work, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, and I don't think that sentence occurs in it. The anthology was assembled and edited by Cynthia Haven, who knew Girard personally, knows his work, and has published a biography of him, Evolution of Desire. Here's an article in Church Life Journal, "We Do Not Come In Peace," which seems to be meant as a sort of introduction to the anthology.

New Criterion Article on The Art of the Fugue

It seems to be the practice these days to leave out the second "the" and refer to the work as The Art of Fugue. I don't know the reason for that. The German title is "Die Kunst der Fuge," which according to my high school (and little bit of college) German is literally "the art the fugue." (I don't know how English came by that second "u," or why the German doesn't include one of those "of"-type words, like "auf.") The two recordings of it or parts of it that I have, by Glenn Gould and Gustav Leonhardt, were made in 1962 and 1969 respectively, and reissued in the 1980s, and both say "the fugue." I assume there is some good linguistic reason for  discarding the "the," though it sounds off to me. I also assume that's why this article by Jonathan Gaisman, in the May issue of The New Criterion is called "The Heart of Fugue."

I have a sort of compulsion, which I'm trying to break, to read every magazine to which I subscribe from cover to cover, in order. It was hard for me not to defy that compulsion in this case, as the fugue article is the last one in this issue, and I was eager to read it, because I have a problem with the fugue as a musical form and am always vaguely hoping for some sort of breakthrough in that difficulty.

I've always found the form somewhat...I hate to use this term...dry. Almost inaccessible. Around this time last year I started the project of listening thoroughly to the entire Well-Tempered Clavier (see this post). My intention was to listen to every prelude-and-fugue pair at least three times. I knew I would like the preludes, in general, but had my doubts, based on past experience, about the fugues:

With a few exceptions, the form has left me cold. It seemed dry, abstract, academic. You get the statement of the subject--which is frequently not all that interesting in itself--three or four times, and at that point I usually lose the thread: the piece just becomes a lot of wandering counterpoint, with the subject emerging from time to time. 

I don't think I ever reported on the completion of that project, but I did complete it, with many stops and starts, probably six months or so after I started it. And I very much enjoyed it. And the pattern of very much liking the preludes and being unenthusiastic about the fugues continued throughout. I did, as my listening continued, find that I was enjoying the fugues more, but still they continued to seem, well, all the things that I just mentioned.

The New Criterion article pointed me toward a possible resolution of the problem: just give up. I think it's an excellent brief introduction to the form, and to The Art. But it makes clear to me that a true appreciation and enjoyment of it is beyond me, because my ears and brain are not capable of grasping the structures that make it so impressive and fascinating to those who can grasp it.

I'm very well aware that there are subtleties and complexities in most classical music that I don't and can't grasp. And that some of these are accessible only to those who have substantial training in music theory and very good ears. That undoubtedly limits but does not present a major obstacle to my enjoyment; to be brought to raptures by a piece of music is sufficient, even if I'm missing a lot.

Why is the fugue different? The opening of the article is a simple observation:

Many people, if they wonder how music is made up, suppose that it consists of a tune and an accompaniment. The paradigmatic guitarist in front of a campfire croons the melody, while his hands create the harmonies that give it color.

Well, yeah, but I'm more sophisticated than that, I thought, mildly annoyed. But Gaisman goes on with more elaborate examples: 

Frédéric Chopin admired Bellini, and his nocturnes reproduce the same model: the right hand unfurls a line of singing melody on the piano, and the left provides (in his case) exquisite harmonic support.

Yes, a long way from the campfire guitar, but the basic concept is there in Chopin. Counterpoint, on the other hand, is:

... a compositional method in which there is not a dominating tune and a subsidiary accompaniment, but contrariwise a democratic parity between the voices. (They are called voices even when they are instrumental, not sung.) A choral piece by Johann Sebastian Bach or Handel typically shares out the elements equally between soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, so that the distinction between melody and harmony does not apply; every line contributes to both.

This may seem pretty obvious. It is pretty obvious, in essence. But in this case, as often happens, I had missed the implications of the obvious: on reflection, I realized that almost all the music that I really enjoy exhibits to some degree that voice-and-accompaniment relationship. I would call it, in more elaborate music, a foreground and background relationship. The foreground usually involves melody, a single distinct line or perhaps a mingling of multiple lines, which may be one or two instruments or a whole section of an orchestra or even the orchestra as a whole, with harmony and/or subordinate melody and/or rhythm less prominent. There may be and often is a lot going on in this supporting stuff, but it isn't generally the center of attention. The relationships between foreground and background are far more complex than Gaisman's first simple voice-and-guitar instance, but they do participate in a structure where not everything is of equal prominence (I don't say "importance"--that's no doubt a tricky judgment). 

"... the distinction between melody and harmony does not apply...." That's the key, I guess. When I listen to a fugue, my ears keep searching for that prominent voice, the stirring tunes sailing over an ever-varying sea of harmony and rhythm, passages connected by transitions that in themselves keep my interest. And not only do my ears not find those things, they don't really grasp what they do hear. They hear a great many notes, but they don't grasp, they don't feel, the interrelationships among them.

All the fourteen fugues and four canons in The Art of Fugue derive in some way from a single theme or “motto” in D minor, but, following an initial treatment that almost wilfully eschews the usual devices, their ingenuity and increasing complexity amount to one of the great intellectual and artistic achievements of Western civilization...

Alas for me, I cannot hear that "ingenuity and increasing complexity." 

If this interests you at all, please read the whole article. It does make me wish I could experience what the author describes. The credit on that article, by the way, says only that "Jonathan Gaisman is a King’s Counsel, practicing in commercial law." Having gone into law after obtaining an undergraduate degree in music, perhaps. 

If you read all the above and think you deserve a reward, here it is. If you didn't, my feelings are hurt, but here's your reward anyway. I didn't bother making notes of which pieces in the Well-Tempered Clavier I especially liked, but I think the F minor prelude and fugue from Book 2 were among them.

 

Four Mystery Novels

The first three of these were audiobooks, listened to on several lengthy trips over the past few months.

Tony Hillerman: The Fallen Man

As you probably know, Tony Hillerman wrote a series of detective novels set in the Southwest, mostly on the Navajo Nation, in the area known as the Four Corners, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet. I like them a lot, and I'm not sure exactly why. I mean, they're very good, but as detective novels go they're not extraordinarily so. I think it has something to do with a fascination, going back to childhood and Western movies and TV shows, with the landscape of the Southwest. 

After the first book or two, the crime-solvers are Navajo members of the Navajo Tribal Police, beginning with Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, later adding Leaphorn's subordinate, Jim Chee, and the stories often involve Navajo culture and its interactions with mainstream "white" America. One of the pleasures of the series is that the main characters develop in time. They age, their relationship to each other changes, their positions in the police force change, new characters appear, but previous ones sometimes remain in one way or another. This is the twelfth of eighteen books in the series, and it finds Leaphorn in retirement, and Chee taking on the central detecting role, frequently consulting Leaphorn. And it involves the fading of Janet Pete, Jim's fiancé, and the arrival of a young female police officer, Bernadette Manuelito, who will be increasingly important. 

That broader story emerged as a patchwork for me, because I didn't read them in order. I haven't actually read many of them; they have, rather, been my first choice when I wanted an audio book to listen to on a long drive. For the most part the choice was determined by whatever the local library had on hand in audio format at the moment when I wanted one, going all the way back to those dim years when "audio book" meant Books On Tape. It would be fun to go back and read them, on paper, in their right order. That sounds like a good project for retirement, but now that I am officially retired, I don't want to devote that much time to them, with so many better works yet unread. 

I don't consider this one of Hillerman's best, but in my experience they're all worth reading. Perhaps part of the reason is that Navajo ways play a lesser role here than in some of the others, making Fallen Man a bit less distinctive. The story opens with two rock climbers on the justly famous Shiprock. One of them takes a very risky look over the edge of the ledge they're standing on, and sees, far below, the skeletal remains of a man in climbing gear. He turns out to be a young man who had disappeared several years earlier just before his thirtieth birthday, when he would have come into full ownership of the family's substantial property. That becomes, of course, a complex story involving the land, lots of money, and far-away financial interests. There's a subplot involving cattle rustling, and I've already forgotten whether it's connected to the murder case. Perhaps only in that Officer Manuelito, investigating the rustling, notices some things that prove significant to the other matter.

Not the best place to start with Hillerman, but certainly a good read. 

I have been a little disappointed in the last few Hillerman audio books that I've listened to. It seemed that the narrator was somehow not as engaging as I expected. Eventually I realized that I had been accustomed to the narration of George Guidall, whereas the newer ones are by Christian Baskous. There was something about Guidall's voice, a dry and wry quality, that seemed to fit the books better than Baskous's. I think I'll see if the library has any of the older Guidall ones. 

Ann Cleeves: White Nights and Red Bones 

These are the next two novels in the series set in the Shetland Islands with Detective Jimmy Perez as the central character. I wrote about the first one, Raven Black, back around the turn of the year, in this post. Of these two, I liked Red Bones better. Much of the plot of White Nights never really quite made sense to me. My fault, possibly. (The title refers to the summer nights which at Shetland's latitude never get entirely dark.) I didn't find the characters all that interesting, either. It begins with a bizarre incident in which a man attending an art exhibition has an emotional breakdown in front of a particular painting, and is later found dead, an apparent suicide, but of course...well, this is a detective novel. That sounds kind of promising, doesn't it? Like I said, maybe my lack of response was just me. Or maybe the book needed to be read, not listened to.

Red Bones was more engaging. It revolves around an archaeological dig almost in someone's front yard. The dig sounds interesting in itself, the site being that of a wealthy medieval merchant's home. We get a glimpse only, but an intriguing one, of the world that the merchant would have inhabited. The students doing the digging are sympathetic characters, one of them a serious student, another more of a playgirl. Guess which one becomes a murder victim. (You probably guessed wrong.) Some human remains are found in the dig. Guess when the death took place. 

Here, from Ann Cleeves's web site, are some remarks about the use of this novel as the basis of the first season of the Shetland TV series (see my post at the link two paragraphs above for more remarks on that):

Red Bones, the third instalment of Ann Cleeves' Shetland Quartet, is set in spring: a time of rebirth and celebration. And a time of death... for April is the cruelest month.

Perhaps that's why Red Bones was chosen as the basis for Shetland, a new two-part crime drama set in Scotland and starring Douglas Henshall. A special Shetland preview on November 21st was well received by the local audience, and Ann Cleeves gave it her approval too: "It's great," she said. "It's not faithful to the book but it's faithful to the atmosphere and spirit of the book. It's important that it's a good piece of TV rather than stick rigidly to the book."

I agree, Ms. Cleeves. I note, by the way, that the first novel in this series was set in winter, the second in summer, the third in spring. I haven't checked to see whether the fourth is set in autumn. (UPDATE: it is, and also the title is two words consisting of an adjective which is the name of a color and a noun: Blue Lightning.)

Ross Macdonald: The Barbarous Coast

This is one I read, in the beat-up old paperback which I bought long ago. I have most of the Archer novels, and they are, as a group, the most unsightly books on our shelves. Which seems appropriate. 

I said a good deal about Ross Macdonald in one of the 52 Authors posts, so I don't need to repeat my general opinion of and enthusiasm for his work. This novel is not his best, but since I like all of his Lew Archer novels, that's only a mild criticism. As with the Hillerman book above, I would not recommend this as the best place to start if you don't know the author's work. It's a relatively early one, and some of the later ones are better--this one appeared in 1956. But then the very first one, The Moving Target, is one of his best. 

It's a fairly typical Macdonald story: sad people who have seen their hopes thwarted--sometimes by their own foolish decisions, sometimes by the actions of others, sometimes by fortune--do things that make them even sadder, or dead. Archer moves among them, stern but compassionate. 

Something that bothered me, and which has bothered me in crime dramas generally, is the protagonist's impossible resilience and recovery after violence. The action of this book takes place over a few days. If my memory is correct, Archer receives at least two very brutal beatings which leave him unconscious. That he bounces back from these within hours and continues to work on the case, barely eating or sleeping, is implausible. .

One notable feature of this book is its bitter contempt for the movie industry. Macdonald seemed to share that with Raymond Chandler. Hollywood and Las Vegas form what you might call an axis of evil for him. In this conversation Archer is eavesdropping on a couple, a young woman, her profile "young and pretty and smooth as glass," and an older man, "an aging clown I'd seen in twenty movies":

"You said you'd catch me if I fell," she said.

"I was feeling stronger then."

"You said you'd marry me if it ever happened."

"You got more sense than to take me seriously. I'm two years behind on alimony now."

"You're very romantic, aren't you?"

"That's putting it mildly, sweetheart. I got some sense of responsibility, though. I'll do what I can for you, give you a telephone number. And you can tell him to send the bill to me."

"I don't want your dirty telephone number. I don't want your dirty money."

"Be reasonable. Think of it like it was a tumor or something--that is, if it really exists. Another drink?"

"Make mine prussic acid," she said dully.

The real import of this exchange didn't hit me until I'd read a few sentences into the next paragraph. If that guy lived into the '60s and '70s he probably had lots more fun of this sort. Sometimes it just amazes me that moviemakers consider themselves in a position to give moral lectures to the world. 

This is a very ugly cover, and only partly fitting. The diving girl is justifiable because one of the young female characters is a competition diver. I presume she did not dive naked, though. I guess that red curvy thing is a boxing glove, which is fitting enough. 

Bruch: Violin Concerto #1 in G Minor

I have underrated this concerto. I've listened to it three times over the past week or so, as part of my little project involving Joseph Joachim's view of the greatest violin concertos:

The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's.

I had not heard it for many years, and though I remembered liking it I thought of it as above all a technical showpiece, impressive but not necessarily deeply affecting. And on the first of these three hearings that expectation was, if not fulfilled exactly, then not contradicted, either. 

As far as I could recall, I did not own a recording, so I went to Idagio and settled on one, one of very many: Arthur Grumiaux and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw conducted by Bernard Haitink. I enjoyed it, of course, but in a casual sort of way. Very impressive. Oh, that's lovely. I like that tune. Great finale. But I was pretty sure it was not going to end up at the top of my Joachim ranking. 

Thinking I would try a different recording, just out of curiosity, I went to Classics Today and found a recommendation for another Grumiaux recording, this one with Heinz Wallberg conducting the New Philharmonia Orchestra. (The recommendation, by the way, is from David Hurwitz, whose reviews on YouTube I've mentioned before. I've also mentioned that I found him a little annoying to watch and listen to, but he's grown on me. I've begun to enjoy his quirks, his humor, and his generally unpretentious style.)

My reaction to the second Grumiaux recording one was pretty similar: beautiful, not a rival to Mendelssohn's. 

Then I discovered, while looking for something else, that I have an LP that includes this concerto. How did I not know that I have it? Well, two reasons: one, it has both the Bruch and Mendelssohn concertos, and I never know how to shelve multi-composer recordings. I have a good many of these, probably between fifty and a hundred, and they're shelved in very rough chronological order, since such albums usually include works of more or less the same period. That doesn't work very well, though it's better than nothing. And two: several years ago I came into possession of several hundred LPs that were going to go to Goodwill if I didn't take them (see this post). And most of those have hardly been organized at all. Or played. This was one of them: 

(Image from Discogs; my copy is STEREO, to be played only with a stereo cartridge and needle to avoid damage)

The New Philharmonia Orchestra is not the same as the Philharmonia Orchestra though they are related (seems to be a long story). I don't know whether it was just the fact that this was my third hearing of the concerto within a week or so, or the nature of the performance, or my state of mind at the moment, but this time I was bowled over. It's a great concerto, fully worthy of Joachim's placement of it among the greatest. "Richest, most seductive"? Not the adjectives I would choose, but very powerful in any case and certainly among the greats.

This is a 1961 recording, and as I mentioned, it's an LP: analog all the way. The other two I heard were digital, though they're old enough that they were probably recorded in analog. And they weren't at the highest possible resolution. Whether any of that had to do with my reaction I can't say. Maybe it was Milstein himself. 

Now on to Brahms. I've heard that one fairly recently, and really thought that there had been a discussion about it here, but I can't find it. I already know that I love it. I think it's going to be hard to say that I prize any one of these over the others. 

Also, I'm adding Sibelius to this project, which at that point will put me outside of Joachim's list by nationality--he did say "the Germans"--and although the composition of the Sibelius concerto just barely falls within Joachim's lifetime, we can assume he never heard it. I've heard it, but only once or twice, and I didn't feel like I had really gotten it. Maybe I should add Tchaikovsky, too?

King Crimson in the '80s

I was not always a fan of prog ("progressive") rock. In its early-to-mid 1970s heyday I was in fact dismissive of it: pretentious, over-complicated, sacrificing good songwriting for an emphasis on virtuosity not really suited for rock music. In short, it seemed to be trying to be something that rock music isn't and shouldn't be: of interest on purely musical grounds, where it was never going to be able to compete with jazz and classical. It was twenty years later that I gave it a second look, for a non-musical reason: my then-adolescent children had gotten interested in popular music (i.e. rock) and I was trying to steer them away from the uglier stuff. 

That didn't work, but it did change my mind. That is, my basic criticisms were justifiable and remained intact, but I enjoyed the music anyway, which led me to listen, in most cases for the first time, to Yes and King Crimson, and to develop quite a liking for them. There were a few others, but I only made a point of hearing most of the 1970s work of those two. And of them, KC seemed to have had the most interesting post-'70s career. 

But that's not really fair. Yes was a band with a fairly consistent lineup and a very consistent sound, at least through their first decade, and seem to have faded away after that, with the exception of one commercially successful and reportedly very atypical album in the early '80s. King Crimson, on the other hand, has not been a proper band at all through much of its fifty-plus years, but rather the ever-changing musical project of Robert Fripp, in which he has included various other musicians as suits his interests and purposes. It's been the exact opposite of consistent lineup and sound--Fripp tended to disband the group, at least partially, after every album or two, and reassemble it, at least partially, and go off in a somewhat different musical direction.

As a band, King Crimson was officially dead as of about 1975. But after half a decade or so Fripp revived the name for a group  of instrumental virtuosos consisting of himself, guitarist Adrian Belew, bass player Tony Levin, and drummer Bill Bruford (formerly of Yes). This band recorded three albums, Discipline (1981), Beat (1982), and Three of A Perfect Pair (1984). 

I would suppose that fans of progressive rock in general and King Crimson in particular were disappointed in these. One of the hallmarks of prog is long compositions with a lot of virtuoso instrumental work, and, despite the very high level of technical skill of all four players, that's not what these albums are. Most of the songs are in fact songs, of fairly typical pop song length, of a piece, with little instrumental stretching out. But that doesn't mean they're simple. They're not great songs as such--you don't come away humming them, or moved by the combination of words and music. But they're interesting. Rather than the complex twists and turns more typical of prog, or the basically simple and repetitive chord changes and beat of most pop, these songs have a static sort of quality--complex, and shifting slowly rather than driving forward. If I felt more confident of my technical understanding of music I would try to describe that more precisely. 

But I can say with confidence that one fairly constant feature is the use of complex repetitive hyperactive guitar figures that slowly shift rhythmically. I find it very hard to follow them for very long. I think I've got it and then suddenly it's wait, where did the accent go? "Frame by Frame," from Discipline, is a good example.

The bass and drums are also doing a lot of complicated things with rhythm there. It's as if the whole emphasis on complexity which characterizes the progressive rock concept is focused on rhythm. Basically, this band invented "math rock" (from Wikipedia) : "a style of alternative and indie rock with roots in bands such as King Crimson and Rush. It is characterized by complex, atypical rhythmic structures (including irregular stopping and starting), counterpoint, odd time signatures, and extended chords. " A week or so ago I found a YouTube video in which Adrian Belew explains this sort of thing, the way the guitar parts shift in and out of phase, so to speak, with one player starting one of these figures, the other playing it but with one note left out, and so on, so that the beat begins to float. But I just spent thirty minutes looking and can't find the video now. 

All this may seem a long way from the long and elaborate suites so often found in '70s prog. But if you listen to "21st Century Schizoid Man," the very first track on the very first KC album, In the Court of the Crimson King (1969), you find that the connecting thread is very clear. 

To call a work of art "interesting" is sometimes to damn with faint praise, at least on my part. And the word does pretty well summarize my opinion of these three albums. But I mean it quite literally. This is not my favorite music, but it is in fact interesting, interesting enough to return to now and then. There seems to be a consensus among critics and fans that the chronological sequence of the three albums is also the sequence of their quality, the first (Discipline) being the best. I agree with that. But if one likes the style at all, they're all worth hearing. 

A group consisting of Belew, Levin, Steve Vai (a name known to anyone interested in rock guitar), and Danny Carey, drummer of the band Tool, is doing a tour under the name BEAT performing this music. They're not coming anywhere very near me, but if they did I'd go. 

Two Bleak House Dramatizations

Both are from the BBC, naturally, and are serials made for television, each running roughly eight hours in total. The first was made in 1985, the second in 2005. Both are worth seeing, but all in all I think the second is superior and the best choice if you're only going to watch one.

The 1985 one, like the Dombey and Son dramatization I mentioned recently, took me back to Sunday evenings in the '70s and '80s watching PBS's Masterpiece Theatre. Comparing those with more recent similar efforts, you can sort of see the improvements in technology and, probably, financing. Visually, for instance, Bleak House 1985 is often less sharp, clear, and bright than Bleak House 2005. (I think I'll refer to them just as "1985" and "2005" for the rest of this post.) This is especially true in outdoor scenes, especially in London, where it actually is effective: the creators apparently wanted to portray the city as extremely dim and murky (which is certainly consistent with the book), and they succeeded. The slum called Tom-All-Alone's is nightmarish, as such places probably were in reality.

The two are pretty different cinematographically, and I don't know how much of the difference is technological and how much a stylistic choice. I recall, watching 2005 when it was originally released (almost twenty years ago!), thinking that the way the faces of characters often filled the screen almost entirely was a little annoying, reducing or almost eliminating a sense of the space in which they existed. But on this viewing I didn't really notice that, which makes me think it's a change in style to which I've become accustomed in other works. There was one small but irritating thing in 2005 which I think was a sort of fashionable device at the time, perhaps, and I hope, out of fashion now. That's a way of doing transitions with a literal bang. We're switching from London to Bleak House, say: wide shot of house BANG; quick cut less wide shot of house BANG; quick cut to closer shot of house BANG. Then on into the actual scene. After maybe half the episodes I got used to it, but I did wonder why someone thought it was a good idea. Maybe appropriate in some kind of noisy hyperactive contemporary movie, but for Dickens?

Changes in acting style are also apparent. In general the approach in 1985 is a little broader and more blunt. It seems, on one level, more acted, or stagey, while 2005 is perhaps more subtle--but then I don't know enough about acting to talk about it intelligently in a general way, so I would do better to compare specific characters. 

Like any male of my age, I am an admirer of Emma Peel Diana Rigg, and so it pains me a little to say that she did not make as powerful a Lady Dedlock as Gillian Anderson, whom I had of course enjoyed as Agent Dana Scully in The X-Files, but whose ability as a more serious actress I had doubted. The big difference is that Gillian Anderson does icy very, very well, while Diana Rigg--whether by nature or by actor and director choice I don't know--is warmer and more openly vulnerable. I vaguely recall from my first viewing of 2005 that I thought Anderson's performance was a little weak compared to the others, and that her English accent seemed somewhat forced and not entirely real. Well, I didn't feel that way this time. A little stiff, maybe, is the worse I would say about the accent. I was very critical of it in her more recent portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, as well as in the crime drama The Fall in 2013. I don't know what to make of that--surely her accent didn't get less authentic over the past twenty years or so, as she has lived in England for much of that time (and lived there for a significant portion of her childhood). But anyway, applause to Scully Anderson for this performance.

Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn in 2005 is surely the ultimate. And I'm pedantic enough that when I use the word "ultimate" I mean it pretty literally. (I'm always annoyed when I see an advertisement for something like "the ultimate PC," something which will be more or less obsolete and certainly surpassed within months.) Not ultimate as in chronologically final, but ultimate in the sense of unsurpassable. I suppose someone someday might prove me wrong, but I just can't imagine a more convincing and effective portrayal of Tulkinghorn, nor one more in keeping with the character as he's portrayed in the book. The Tulkinghorn in 1985, Peter Vaughan, is fine, just not in the same league for mystery, menace, and intelligence.

Anna Maxwell Martin, as Esther Summerson in 2005, also seems more convincing to me than 1985's Suzanne Burden. And so on--as I look over both cast lists, I think 2005 takes first place in most instances. There are a couple of characters who don't seem all that effective in either one. Sir Leicester Dedlok doesn't have the mountainous snobbery and pomposity I imagine, but maybe what I imagine is impossible. Nor does either fully convey to me the noble generosity of his reaction to the family's crisis. I somehow think John Jarndyce should be more colorful than he is portrayed, but again, that may be my misreading, or at least eccentric reading. Slimy little Guppy is good in both. 

Anyone who watches as many British crime dramas as I do will immediately recognize Phil Davis as Smallweed in 2005, also a noticeably superior portrayal to 1985's. He's often played similar characters, irascible, hostile, and creepy.  

I won't bother picking over the choices each version makes in tailoring the narrative for this length and format. I did quarrel with some, but I don't recall thinking that they were unjustifiable. It must be a difficult task.

Here's the, or a, trailer. Not an especially good one, in my opinion. Notice that they say "Charles Dance vs. Lady Dedlok." I didn't realize he was that well known. You can hear the end of one of those BANGs as it begins. 

 

Andrea Schroeder Sings David Bowie's "Heroes"

In German: "Helden."

I never heard of Andrea Schroeder until a few weeks ago when I was looking for cover versions of this famous song. You know it, right? If not, click here.

I was never much of a David Bowie fan. I didn't care for the whole glam rock, sexually androgynous thing, but, more importantly, I just didn't care that much for most of his music. I had a slightly annoying conversation about this on Facebook around the time of Bowie's death. I said more or less what I just said, and several younger people explained to me that it was a generational thing, and I Just Didn't Understand. 

Nonsense. Look, y'all (I said): David Bowie was a bit older than me. It had nothing to with age and everything to do with musical taste. I heard Ziggy Stardust several dozen times while I was working in a record store, and never cared much for it, though I had liked his earlier album, Hunky Dory, quite well. And I never listened to him much after that.

But somehow or other I did hear "Heroes," a basically very simple song which seems to have a mildly addictive effect on a lot of people. And, maybe in part because it's basically simple, yet deeply appealing, it seems to lend itself to some very varied ways of performing it. And maybe also because of the lyric, with its odd combination of defiance and despair. "Yes we're lovers" but "nothing can keep us together." And:

Though nothing will drive them away
We can beat them, just for one day
We can be heroes, just for one day

You can read the English lyrics here.

I like covers of well-known songs which rework them substantially. Or rather I should say they interest me, as of course they're not always successful. This one, I think, works spectacularly well. I like it just as much when I'm not looking at the screen with the beautiful Andrea Schroeder gazing deeply into my soul eyes.

I must definitely hear more of her music. She's German, obviously, and AllMusic doesn't say a word about her, nor does Wikipedia, but her own website has some impressive recommendations. 

My next-favorite cover of "Heroes" is by the metal-ish band Motörhead, and as you might suppose it is night-and-day different. I don't recommend listening to this one immediately after Andrea Schroeder's. If at all. It's hard rock.

Lemmy Kilmister, 1945-2015, RIP. One wonders, if one is a Christian, where such an apparently purely heathen soul goes.

A Note On Flannery O'Connor and Race

Having read a bit more about the unpublished Flannery O'Connor work mentioned in this post, I'm getting the impression that much of the discussion about it, and possibly the book itself, are focused on Flannery O'Connor's views on race. 

This interview with the book's editor, Jessica Hooten Wilson, by a couple of slightly obtuse Georgia Public Radio guys, is an instance. I'm sure they're smart guys who went to college and all, but this is the way they see the world:

Orlando Montoya: So I'd like to think that this story would have become Flannery's statement on race, that she might have come down on the right side, and that it would have clarified a lot of our doubts about Flannery and race. But it's also possible that she could have just ended up making some other point.

Peter Biello: Like, well, what other point?

Orlando Montoya: Religious.

Peter Biello: Oh, okay.

Orlando Montoya: A religious point. I mean, her entire body of work is just oozing, as you said, with this Catholic sense of the world. And so there's a reason Catholics just love Flannery. And to me, when I read Flannery and this story's no exception, there's just a lot of judgment, from everyone to everyone. And so that's why I kind of find her kind of difficult. Her pages are just dripping with judgment, this Catholic sense that there's going to be a reckoning and you better be on the right side. And these fragments are no different.

Oh, okay.

They're creatures of their time and culture who don't see their own as clearly as O'Connor did hers. And they are, in a limited way, admirers of her work. At least the one guy understands that the Catholic viewpoint is not just accidental to the stories. But to view the very glancing connection between O'Connor's views on race as more interesting and important than the theological-philosophical foundations of her work is indicative of a very defective understanding of it (and possibly of art in general, but never mind that now).

Moreover, the clear implication here is that the Catholic aspect is something at least mildly negative, which certainly indicates a view of the work that is seriously limited at best. We have to put up with her weird religious obsession, they seem to suggest, but we can hope that she might, in keeping with our expectations of what constitutes progress, have set that stuff aside and talked about what we think is important, i.e. race, come down on "the right side" of the matter, and "clarified a lot of our doubts." (What does that mean, exactly? Remove our doubts, I suppose. "Clarified" could mean either confirmed or contradicted.) And if she didn't? Well, clearly our doubts must remain; Flannery O'Connor is "problematic." 

It's especially wrong-headed, downright ludicrous, for a 21st century progressive to complain of an excess of judgment, when the more zealous among them rarely stop judging everything and everyone in Western civilization, apart from themselves and the present moment, as inadequate if not evil. And let us note, too, that it is often precisely the harsh, stubborn, and ignorant judgmentalism of her characters that is seen to be under the judgment of God.

I sometimes wish I could be transported several hundred years into the future so I could participate in the establishment of the judgement of "history" on our own time. The confidence that we are on its "right side" is probably going to be one of the more risible things about us. Our culture has rightly rejected blatant anti-black racism, but influential sectors of it have embraced a long list of other absurd and harmful views, not least of which is another form of racism, in which white people are considered to be indelibly stamped with something called "whiteness," an ontological stain with which they are born and which can never be erased, and which requires perpetual acts of penance. Penance, not atonement, because atonement is impossible, except perhaps by civilizational suicide. (The parodic resemblance to Christianity has often been noted; it's one of the most visible motifs of post-Christianity.)

I've been annoyed for a long time by the treatment of "racist" as a binary condition rather than a thing, like any other single human vice or virtue, that exists in degrees. If that label can be stuck on a person, it works pretty much like the old death's head symbol for poison: you're either racist or not, poisonous or not, and sensible people will keep away. Real people, real hearts and minds, of course don't function that way. One can have mild and even harmless prejudices against people of another race or culture without being guilty of any serious moral wrong. A few years ago the writer Paul Elie published an article called "How Racist Was Flannery O'Connor?" I didn't read it, though it was recommended to me, because I disliked the "When did you stop beating your wife?" tactic of the title: in a culture where anything and anyone who can be plausibly tagged with the word "racist" is to be condemned without reservation or nuance, it seemed a poisoning of the well. (This tactic has been overused to the point where it may not be effective anymore. I noticed a few years ago that many of the taggers have switched to "white supremacist.")

The truth is that race is just not a very significant aspect of O'Connor's work, which deals above all with universal questions, posed by means of an extraordinary skill in evoking those questions within a very specific, concrete, and limited place, time, and culture. Whatever racism she was personally guilty of is pretty mild stuff (and if you don't think it was mild you've led a sheltered life). She seems to have granted the basic rightness of the civil rights cause, which a serious racist of the time would not have done.

In that interview Jessica Hooten Wilson says, in defense of O'Connor's treatment of black people in her work, that

...she only knew how two Black people would talk when a white woman was in the room...

Well, of course. And she recognized that that was the situation. I think she mentions in one of her letters that she understands that what she sees--what any white person in the segregated South would see--in black people is often a carefully mannered façade, and she didn't feel able to write from within the consciousness on the other side of that façade. Call that an artistic limitation if you want to, but it's not a sin.

Although she was my parents' age, I grew up in the same segregated rural Southern world that she did. I was in high school when the passage of the Civil Rights Act began the process of putting an end to that world. It is a personal and living memory for me, not something I've read about. And I can testify that when she does picture, in her work, black people as seen by white people, the two so near and yet so distant, she is very accurate. Do the people who worry so much about her opinion of black people not notice that she doesn't think very highly of white people either?

Examination of conscience is much more easy, pleasant, and rewarding when the conscience being examined is someone else's. Those who want to put Flannery O'Connor on trial would do better to read, or re-read, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own."

Beethoven's Violin Concerto

I've started to follow through on my idea of listening to the four violin concertos praised by Joseph Joachim, one of the great violinists of the 19th century:

The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's.

To these four I plan to add the Sibelius concerto, which of course came after Joachim's time. I've heard them all at least once,  but I want to get to know them better. And also to see whether I agree with Joachim. 

Mendelssohn I just recently heard (see this post), and that was what led me to this little listening project. I'm taking them in chronological order, so Beethoven is first. My usual procedure in getting to know any piece of music, classical or other, is to listen to it three times within some relatively small span of time--a week or so. In this case I listened to three different recordings: Heifetz and Munch, ca 1960; Christian Ferras and Karajan, 1967; Perlman and Guilini, 1981 (in that order).

In the past I have been less than enthusiastic about this concerto. On the basis of one or two inattentive hearings, I just didn't think it was, for Beethoven, an especially remarkable piece. (I said so to my violinist son, and he was horrified.) Well, that's...in the past. I now consider the first movement to be among my very favorite Beethoven works. As far as I'm concerned it could be a standalone work. It's substantially longer than the other two movements combined, and seems to me complete and satisfying in itself.

The second movement, though comparatively brief, stands with it in quality, and leads directly into the third without a pause. It's there that the concerto as a whole falls down a bit. It's a vigorous "happy ending" to a work which has had a distinctly reflective, if not melancholy, spirit. And to me it's a bit of a letdown, the opposite of its intended effect. This is no doubt in part a result of a sense, which I've mentioned before, of temperamental incompatibility between me and the great composer. It's the energetic Beethoven, who sometimes seems to me a bit unconvincing, a bit overemphatic. For that reason, when (or if) I decide to rank these concertos, I don't think Beethoven's will be at the top.

About the recordings: I don't think anyone could criticize Heifetz's performance except on the grounds that it's too perfect. It seems effortlessly perfect, and for that reason a bit chilly in comparison to others. I didn't think that until I heard Ferras, and was struck by a sense of emotional warmth and depth which I didn't feel in the Heifetz. 

Those two were on LPs that I own. For the third listening, I decided to look for recommendations. A while back my friend who's a classical music expert had brought to my attention to the YouTube channel of Dave Hurwitz of Classics Today. He has roughly 1,000,000 videos on YouTube, including a long series on reference recordings: the one, or maybe the few, recordings of some work that he considers to have set the standard. His choice for the Beethoven violin concerto is the 1981 recording by Itzhak Perlman and the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Carlo Giulini. So that's the third one I listened to (via the IDAGIO streaming service), and, "reference" or not, I definitely prefer it to the others. 

I find Hurwitz a little annoying to watch and listen to, but his opinions are worth hearing. Here's the one where he names the Perlman/Guilini performance as his top choice. (There is a grotesque figure of speech at about 6:10. What was he thinking?)

 

Global Catholic Literature Seminar on Flannery O'Connor's Why Do the Heathen Rage?

In case you're interested, this is the next GCL seminar.

I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I didn't even know this book was being released. Moreover, now that I've heard of it and looked around for a bit for information about it, I am not sure I even want to read it. 

Why not? Well, as far as I can tell, it doesn't even rise to the level of "unfinished novel," as the book's cover calls it, but is rather just a parcel of sketches and drafts of scenes. The book's subtitle is more modest: "A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress." The Collected Stories includes a very short one called "Why Do the Heathen Rage?" which seems to be one of these sketches, and it can hardly be called a story at all--some characters are introduced, a stage is set, but that's about all.

Still, my experience with these seminars makes me willing to give it a try. It's not very expensive--$65 before May 10, $75 after. It consists of four 90-minute sessions on consecutive Monday nights beginning June 3. You can register at this link. It isn't mentioned in that announcement, but in the past the cost of these seminars has included a copy of the book or books to be discussed. 

UPDATE: You do get a copy of the book, either paper or electronic, though if you register late electronic may be the only way you can get it in time for the first session. 

Two Novellas by Jon Fosse

Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature. In stating that, I'm supposing that those reading this might not already be aware of it. That supposition in turn is based on another: that there are a considerable number of people like me who read a lot but aren't necessarily aware of who wins the Nobel and other big prizes every year. 

For my part, I just don't give much thought to those prizes, or, as a rule, to the writers who receive them. This is not any sort of contrarian snobbery. I don't look down on them; in fact I feel a vague and slight sense of shame about my ignorance. It's true that I don't assume that Nobel winners are necessarily the best the world has to offer, but neither do I assume that they aren't. Most of them are probably excellent. It's just that for the most part my literary interests don't take me in the direction of contemporary writing. 

Those interests do, however, take me very much in the direction of writing by Catholics, contemporary and otherwise, and that's how Fosse came to my attention: he is a fairly recent Catholic convert, in spite of being Norwegian. I don't really mean for that last bit to be funny. The Nordic countries went thoroughly Protestant as soon as they had a chance, then even further and faster into secularism than the rest of Europe, and Catholics there have been not just scarce but rare. Still, I wouldn't have gotten around to reading Fosse if it hadn't been made convenient by an online seminar produced by the Global Catholic Literature Project of the Collegium Institute of the University of Pennsylvania, in partnership with Dappled Things magazine. I've taken a couple of these and found them interesting and helpful.

Fosse has published an enormous amount and I would have had no idea where to start with his work. The seminar made the choice for me: two novellas, A Shining and Aliss At the Fire. There were four Zoom sessions taking place on four consecutive Monday nights in March, two each for each of the novels.

It was perhaps a mistake to take the seminar, as I was more interested in other writers at the moment--for instance, Dickens--and had other things going on, including a week-long trip that made me miss the last session. So I didn't really give either the works or the seminar itself as much attention as they deserved. Moreover, the works are rather mysterious, and despite the vigorous efforts of the excellent presenters (who, I must say, made me feel rather stupid with the intelligence and depth of their analysis) I still have only a vague idea of their meaning, and even, in Aliss, of what actually happens. Therefore I am not going to attempt to discuss them in much depth, and am writing this post mainly to point them out and suggest that you may want to investigate them yourself.

A Shining is the simpler of the two. It's even, in a sense, straightforward. I'll give you a lengthy quote from the opening which will give you the flavor of it: 

I was taking a drive. It was nice. It felt good to be moving. I didn't know where I was going. I was just driving. Boredom had taken hold of me--usually I was never bored but now I had fallen prey to it. I couldn't think of anything I wanted to do. So I just did something. I got in my car and drove and when I got somewhere I could turn right or left I turned right, and at the next place I could turn right or left I turned left, and so on. I kept driving like that. Eventually I'd driven a long way up a forest road where the ruts gradually got so deep that I felt like the car was getting stuck. I just kept driving, until the car got totally stuck. I tried to reverse but I couldn't, so I stopped the car. I was sitting in the car. Yes, well, now I'm here, I thought, now I'm sitting here, and I felt empty as if the boredom had turned into emptiness. Or maybe into a kind of anxiety, because I felt something like fear as I sat there empty, looking straight ahead as if into a void. Into nothingness. What am I talking about, I thought. There's the forest in front of me, it's just a forest, I thought. All right then, this sudden urge to drive off somewhere had brought me to a forest.

And it goes on like that. There are no paragraph breaks in its 74 pages. The man begins to walk into the forest. Night falls. It's very cold. He walks a long way, and he encounters a mysterious entity, the Shining of the title. He encounters several people, including his parents, and a man in black, as mysterious as the Shining. And there is what I will call a consummation at the end. The novella can be taken as a mystical or theological allegory (a dark wood and all that), but until I've read it again, which I do intend to do, I don't want to say anything more definite.

Publisher: Transit Books

Aliss At the Fire is a bit longer and considerably more complex. And puzzling. And as it happens it occupied the last two sessions of the seminar, when I was distracted for one and absent for the other (though I was able to watch a video of the session later). But I think this much is accurate: the people and events are fixed in place but not in time. The place is an old house near the sea, by (in?) a fjord, and its immediate surroundings. Over this place time is sort of...smeared. The place is inhabited by at least four or five people, all members of one family, going back several generations.

The point of view shifts without notice or acknowledgment. The books opens with an "I" who is watching someone--a woman named Signe--in a room in the house. Almost immediately the point of view shifts to Signe's, in third person: "She watches...she thinks...she sees..." Among the things she sees is her husband, Asle. After a few dozen pages there is a sort of pivot and the point of view becomes Asle's. Signe sees Asle and herself at different points in their life together. Asle sees Signe, his great-great-grandmother, Aliss, and several people from the intervening generations. There have been at least two deaths, untimely and deeply lamented, apparently by drowning in the fjord. The overall effect is of a connection, very deep and very much alive, among the persons along the timeline, as if to demonstrate Faulkner's "the past is never dead; it is not even past."

I don't think the "I" reappears until the last line, and if there is any explanation of him or her I missed it (which is possible). I'm tempted to quote that line. But it would be a species of spoiler, so I won't. 

Browsing through the book just now, I noticed that there seemed to be, typographically, no sentences. The narrative goes on for many pages with no punctuation except commas and question marks, and with paragraphs only used to indicate spoken dialog. I was going to say that there are no periods in the book at all, but there are a few. On page 41, more than a third of the way through the book, Asle is seeing his great-great-grandmother, Aliss, roasting a sheep's head at a fire near the shore.

...she moves the sheep's head back and forth, back and forth in the flames. That's Aliss, he thinks, and he sees it, he knows it. That's Aliss at the fire.

Unless I've missed one, that period after "flames" is the first one in the book. There are a few more in that passage, very very few after. No doubt that means something, but I don't know what.

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Giving these books a little attention for the writing of this post has made me see that they deserve more attention than I gave them during the seminar, and are probably better than I gave them credit for. I plan to re-read them fairly soon.