I heard a story many years ago that Mick Jagger objected to the popular impression that he had corrupted the angelic-looking young Marianne Faithfull. He claimed it was the other way around. Whether that story is true or not, she was certainly a very enthusiastic drug user for some large part of her life (at least), and just generally a mess. And as a singer and a person she became something very, very different from the teenager who sang "As Tears Go By" (which as you probably know is a rather uncharacteristic Rolling Stones song).

For years in the 1970s she was apparently lost to heroin, other drugs, and general breakdown. You can read an overview at her Wikipedia entry, and I'm sure there is no lack of obituaries online giving more details. She came back in 1979 with a dark, bitter album called Broken English which I heard once at the time--a friend brought it over, saying "you're not going to believe this"--and never since. For reasons which I don't remember and which now puzzle me, I read her autobiography, Faithfull, when it appeared in the 1990s. Most likely I saw it on the new book shelf at the library and picked it up out of curiosity; I certainly didn't buy it. It is not an enjoyable read. 

She became a sort of cabaret-style singer, with a world-weary decadent vibe and a fondness for German songs by Kurt Weill and others, as on her 1996 (?) album 20th Century Blues, which I like, but not as much as I like Strange Weather, from 1987, which includes several gloomy and sometimes ironic takes on various folk and Tin Pan Alley songs. The title song is by Tom Waits, or rather I should say Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan. Taking out the LP yesterday and listening to it for the first time in some years, I was struck by the names of the other people involved: for instance, the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, a name I probably didn't know at the time but who can now be fairly described as "revered." It was an all-star production--other names are Garth Hudson (also recently deceased) and Mac Rebennack ("Dr. John"). It includes a revisiting of "As Tears Go By." RIP.

1967:

1987:

***

Perhaps it seems a little odd that I've marked Marianne Faithfull's passing but not that of David Lynch, who died a couple of weeks ago and is much more significant to me. That's mainly because there is so much that I might say about Lynch that a quick and brief note seemed impossible. There was a bit of discussion on the occasion in comments on this post from 2022, about the passing of Julee Cruise.

I still have not seen several of Lynch's most famous works, including Blue Velvet, because of their reputed violence and perversity. That doesn't really make sense, because I don't think they're worse than Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, or for that matter Twin Peaks: The Return. The fact that both Lynch and Faithfull were only two  years older than me suggests that if I'm going to watch these others I'd better not keep putting them off. 

But then Twin Peaks--the whole package, including the music--really is David Lynch for me. I can't remember whether I've posted this picture before: in 2019 I actually visited the Double-R Diner in North Bend, Washington. The waterfall (Snoqualmie Falls) and the lodge are not far away. You could call it a pilgrimage, I guess. 

Goodbye, Agent Cooper.

Well, maybe this concerto plan of mine--getting to know the five Beethoven piano concertos--just wasn't a good idea. Or maybe this just isn't the right time for it. It's not you, I say to the second concerto, it's me.

I listened to it once inattentively, then three times attentively, or as attentively as I could. And it just never touched me. There's nothing wrong with it, nothing I dislike; I just fail to respond with anything more than a mild and somewhat detached interest. I heard it in a way similar to the way I have sometimes heard certain progressive rock bands or tracks: it's interesting, it doesn't bore me, but it doesn't really engage me, either. (Sorry, I can't think of an example, but I know it has happened.)

I mentioned when I wrote about the first concerto a  weeks ago that I had heard a little of it on the radio and thought it was Mozart, but with something a bit different about it, and discovered when I checked the radio station's log that it was Beethoven. Now I wonder if I was mistaken about which Beethoven it was, because this one, which was actually composed before #1, seems even more like Mozart than the other. There are a couple of bits in the last movement--I can't tell you exactly where or what they are--that may have been the things that seemed un-Mozartean to me. 

Well. Be that as it may, I am saying farewell to this concerto for the time being. Perhaps I'll run across it sometime in the future and find that I really like it. In some of the progressive rock instances I've mentioned, I later came to like the music quite a lot. So that may happen. But now I'll move on to the third and see what happens.

The first thing that strikes me about this poem is that I don't know how "Arbuthnot" is to be pronounced. ARbuthnot? ArBUTHnot? Is the "not" even fully pronounced or is the "o" sort of squeezed out, swallowed, as if it were "n't"? I do not know, and these things bother me, in this case every time I think about the poem.

But I have carried on reading it in spite of that glitch.

Arbuthnot was a well-known figure in the intellectual circles in which Pope moved, and also physician and close personal friend of Pope--see his Wikipedia entry for more information. It was mainly in his capacity as friend and literary sympathizer that Pope addressed this poem to him. I should perhaps emphasize "sympathizer," because the poem is all about Pope, not Arbuthnot, and is basically a 419-line complaint. 

(I just noticed that though the poem is in heroic couplets, 419 is an odd number. Something is wrong here. Is there an unrhymed line in there somewhere? A triple rhyme? Or is the line numbering wrong? That seems unlikely, as I have the poem in an anthology and also in a Best of Pope volume, and the line count is the same in both. Perhaps I'll investigate further. Or perhaps not.)

What is Pope complaining about? Initially, the crowd of litterateurs of the second rank or lower who want something from him--his criticism, which will be followed by requests for his assistance; his influence with publishers or theater managers; sometimes also or instead, his money. 

Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land.

They invade his residence at Twickenham:

All fly to Twit'nam, and in humble strain
Apply to me, to keep them mad or vain.

A long list of the pests, their particular entreaties, and Pope's unhappy and witty responses follows.  Who is worse, the critics who denounce his work, or the poets who want him to read theirs?

A dire dilemma! either way I’m sped,             [i.e. to the grave]
If foes, they write, if friends, they read me dead.
Seized and tied down to judge, how wretched I!
Who can’t be silent, and who will not lie.
To laugh, were want of goodness and of grace,
And to be grave, exceeds all power of face.
I sit with sad civility, I read
With honest anguish, and an aching head;

Less witty and more venomous is what follows: the settling of scores with literary enemies who have injured and insulted him. Some of these are explicitly named, some masked behind a classical reference, like this one:  

Let Sporus tremble—What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass’s milk...?

And that's only the beginning of a dozen or more lines vilifying Sporus. This is pretty harsh, whoever "Sporus" is meant to be, but downright vicious once you've been informed by a footnote that (1) Sporus was a boy, "Nero's favorite sexual partner" and (2) the reference was meant for Lord Hervey, confidante of Queen Caroline. I wonder that some sort of action, legal or other, was not taken against Pope; perhaps because there was too much truth in the characterization? (Here's Lord Hervey's Wikipedia entry, for context if not definite judgment.)

The contemporary non-academic reader--myself, for instance--is probably not very interested in the quarrels themselves, the personalities or the substance. Little of this would be of anything other than historical interest apart from the quality of the writing--the skill and power of expression, the virtuosic handling of the couplet, whether in epigrammatic pairs or sustained thought over a dozen or more lines. Only if one is interested enough in 18th century literature to be interested in Joseph Addison does one care that "Atticus," who gets twenty or so lines of snark for his domination and manipulation of a literary circle which did not include Pope, is Addison, who at one time had been Pope's friend. That information is not required for appreciation of the scorn in which Pope holds a critic who will

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.

"Damn with faint praise," like many trenchant bits from Pope, has passed into broad usage. I find myself doing it more often than I would like, and have been on the unhappy receiving end of it a few times (though as far as I know never from malice, but rather kindness bordering on pity, which may feel worse). 

Pope's work is in many ways not what the average reader of our time would think of as "poetry." There is nothing romantic (in either sense) about it, no reaching for the sublime or transcendent, no metaphysics, no existential angst, no who-am-I-and-what's-it-all-about-anyway--no introspection, really, of the kind and degree that we begin to find in the poetry that came less than fifty years later.

The passions are certainly there, but are straightforward and down-to-earth--exasperation, indignation--directed at straightforward and down-to-earth causes: the passions of a satirist, in short, which Pope was above all else. What we have in him, as in other 18th century writers, is what was known as "wit," which was something deeper than what we now usually mean by the word: not a gift for clever humor, as in "witty," but  rather a combination of sharply intelligent observation with great skill of expression, as Pope himself explained it in "An Essay On Criticism":

True wit is nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd,

And "nature" was not, as we usually mean, the natural non-man-made world--"the environment," but the whole natural order of things, including human nature.

Denunciation of the bad is at least an implicit acknowledgement of the good. But only toward the end of the poem is there a turn toward an explicit defense of it, where Pope defends himself as a friend of virtue, honors his parents, praises Arbuthnot (finally!) and wishes him well--and not too soon, for Arbuthnot died within weeks of the Epistle's publication. 

After all that invective, let's have a touch of the poet's generosity, closing with a brilliant and touching expression of the position, the love, and the duty of child toward elderly parent:

O Friend! may each Domestick Bliss be thine!
Be no unpleasing Melancholy mine:
Me, let the tender Office long engage
To rock the Cradle of reposing Age...

With, I think, a hint of the Resurrection.