Four years ago I wrote about a very interesting collection called Miserere, subtitled "Music For the Holy Week Litugy." It includes the famous "Miserere" by Gregorio Allegri, a setting of Psalm 51:

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.

and a number of other appropriate works.  Here's the link to that post. Earlier today I discovered that the entire recording is now on YouTube. This link is to the first track. I think it will be followed by the others though you may have to use the "Watch On YouTube" button to get them. 

I have a rule to which I stick pretty closely: I don't write about a piece of music until I've heard it three times. That applies whether it's a three-minute pop song or a ninety-minute Mahler symphony (sometime in the next month or two I'm going to say something about his Sixth). After I'd heard this concerto three times I began this post as follows:

"I don't quite know what to say about this concerto. I like it a lot, and in that I seem to be in agreement with a great many people, as Wikipedia says it's frequently performed and recorded, and has been performed 192 times at Carnegie Hall. And yet...I feel that I should like it more. Why? It's the first movement: my head says that I should love it, but my heart doesn't follow along."

But in the process of writing I changed my mind. I kept going back to that first movement to refresh my memory, ended up listening to it twice more, and now I love it. And the whole concerto. 

I can't describe it like the Wikipedia author does:

The first movement opens with the solo piano, playing simple chords in the tonic key before coming to rest on a dominant chord. The orchestra then enters with the same theme, in B major, the major mediant key, which is in a chromatic mediant relationship to the tonic. 

And so on in that vein, and I can't say much more than "ok fine whatever" to most of it. It isn't that I don't understand any of the terms at all--I know what "tonic key" and "dominant chord" mean. But I'm lost at "chromatic mediant relationship." Even if I understand these descriptions, I don't hear them--that is, I don't hear that what was stated in G is restated in B.

Still, I'll risk embarrassment by saying that I'm a little puzzled by that description of the opening. Simple chords? Well, I guess that's right. But what I hear is an energetic and really fairly simple tune presented by the piano alone, so simple that it could almost be called a motif (or in my more familiar vocabulary, a riff or maybe even a lick): only three notes of the scale in a distinctive rhythm: 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 3. (I don't think those accents are really there, but my brain supplies them anyway.) In that respect it made me think of the opening of the Fifth Symphony, the supreme motif in its combination of simplicity and power. Very catchy. 

The orchestra enters and soon gives us a more typical, you might say a more melodious, melody, a lyrical one, and there follows fifteen minutes or so of fascinating and affecting interplay, with that initial rhythm appearing and disappearing throughout. What didn't affect me on those first three hearings somehow blossomed on the next two. It's relatively subdued, by which I mean that it never seems to be striving for passion and grandeur, as Beethoven sometimes seems to be; not that it lacks these, but it's lyrical, in an almost dignified way. And, naturally, continually interesting.

The very brief second movement fascinates me. In fact, on my first couple of hearings I found it far more involving than the first movement. By "very brief" I mean it's a little under five minutes long in the recording I have, the same Alfred Brendel one that I listened to for the first three concertos. (I see that some recordings are around six minutes--I want to hear one of those.) For most of it the piano and the strings (alone, no other instruments) alternate, not playing together at all. The strings play, then stop, and the piano responds. I hear the string part as a sort of doleful march, and didn't know until I read it in the Wikipedia article that it's based on the traditional Dies Irae chant. The piano responds mournfully. It's almost spooky. The strings gradually fade away. The piano sounds more and more as if it's strayed into a Chopin piece, and for a few moments, to my ears, as if it had flashed into a time warp and spent a few bars in 1901. I love this movement but I don't understand what it's doing in this concerto. It's almost desolate.

The second gives way without pause to the third, which is like the final movement of the first three concertos, fast (mostly) and exhilarating. The absence of space between the second and third must signify something, but personally I think I'd like a few moments of reflection between them. 

The Fourth Piano Concerto was written around the same time as the Fourth Symphony, and strikes me as similar in one very broad way: its relative modesty as compared to some of Beethoven's later work. The Fourth Symphony is one of my favorites, so its not surprising that I like this concerto quite a lot. Now on to the 5th, the "Emperor." I heard it a few times, long ago, and don't recall anything about it except an impression that it's *really* Beethoven-ish.

When I wrote about Tallis's Lamentations of Jeremiah a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that the LP I had was a 1969 "rechanneled for stereo" reissue of a recording originally made in 1955. Rechanneling was a gimmick used for a while in the earlier days of stereo, when purchasers paid a significantly higher price for stereo. As I recall, it was 20-25% higher--I think monaural LPs sold for about $4, stereo for $5. 

Audiophiles really hated rechanneled stereo. And maybe not just audiophiles, if by "audiophile" we mean people with exquisitely sensitive hearing who pay extremely close attention to sound reproduction and have extremely high standards. Also, frequently, rather high incomes, as the equipment needed to satisfy those connoisseurs is generally quite expensive. I didn't know much about that debate, but have always had the impression that the techniques used to split a single recorded track into two channels sometimes produced undesirable effects audible to non-obsessive but attentive listeners. 

Out of curiosity, I decided to test that judgment. I mean test it on myself--I'm certainly willing to believe that the problem is real, as it's been well attested to since the '60s. But is it a problem for me? Do I actually hear those effects? And if so how much do they matter?  

The only way to do that, obviously, is to compare two recordings, one mono and the other a rechanneled version of the first. Before the internet, it wouldn't have been practical for me to do that. Not impossible, but not practical--it would have taken too much trouble to locate and purchase the records. But now we have the wonderful web service Discogs, which is not only a vast storehouse of information (discographies), but a marketplace where used record dealers all over the world can sell ti customers all over the world. I was able to identify a 1972 monaural pressing of the Deller/Tallis recording, with at least half a dozen available to buy.

Just for fun, I picked one in mint condition--meaning unopened, still in the shrink wrap. It was only a couple of dollars more than several in near-mint condition, and still under $10, though shipping charges were as much as the purchase itself. (The seller was Satellite Records in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I recommend them. Yes, the shipping charge was high, but not unusual for a single LP, and the record was very well packaged, and arrived more quickly than I expected.)

"Mint" and "Near-Mint," by the way, are official or at least conventional terms, with agreed-upon definitions. Descending from there, you have VG+ (Very Good Plus), VG, G, F(air), P(oor). 

If you looked back at the previous post on this (or have a good memory), you'll notice that the cover of this LP is different. The performance was originally released under the Vanguard label, and issued on that label more than once, then later on the Bach Guild label, which was a Vanguard subsidiary. 

So what about the test? Well, I'll state outright that I don't regard it as conclusive. I did hear a difference, but it was not huge, and I don't have either the sensitive hearing or the vocabulary to describe it in any detail. But for what it's worth, here's my impression.

Most TVs and computer monitors have controls for adjusting brightness, contrast, color, and sometimes more esoteric parameters. Many have presets by which you can choose a predefined  combination of these adjustments meant to be optimal for movies, games, sports, and so forth. When you switch these, you may be startled by a fairly dramatic difference in what you see. You may not be able to pinpoint exactly what's changed, at least if you aren't any more interested than I am in trying to figure it out. You may even have trouble deciding whether it's better than the previous setting. But it's obviously different. 

That's what it was like when I listened to the mono version of this LP after listening to the rechanneled stereo version. I certainly had not been conscious that there was anything wrong with the latter. But the mono version seemed more vivid and more present. This is exactly the opposite of what is supposed to happen with mono and stereo: the whole point of stereo is to use two channels to create an illusion of three-dimensional sound, in which not all the components of the sound reach your ears at exactly the same time. (If you want a good explanation, read the Wikipedia article.) You should, if the recording and the equipment are right, have a sense of the sound being produced by something located in the space between the speakers. At best, you should "see" the performers. It's very pleasing when it works properly.

But, as I said, with these two recordings, it was the mono and not the "stereo" one that seemed more  present. The mono one didn't have the three-dimensional quality of real stereo, but it was...and I'm having trouble describing this...more solid. The pseudo-stereo image was spread around and vague. The mono image was actually more, not less, defined. 

I wonder how many rechanneled-for-stereo LPs I have. As I write this it is crossing my mind to find them and replace them, but I'm not going down that rabbit hole. Almost certainly they are things I've listened to three or four times at most in forty or fifty years.

I can't vouch for the attribution, but there's way too much truth in this. 

Dante's cosmology is intrinsically a stumbling block for the modern reader. Unless some truly astonishing revolution in scientific knowledge takes place, we are, and have been for centuries now, in a position to say that we know that his Ptolemaic system (with Christian modifications) of concentric spheres with earth at the center is incorrect. And so we have to suspend our disbelief. But that's not so very hard to do, because the scheme is straightforward, and, more importantly, it fits what everyone on earth can plainly see. It is not, as ignorant folk of our own time might suppose, something invented to support religious doctrines, but a product of close observation and mathematical skill. Ptolemy was a serious astronomer and mathematician and his system, according to Wikipedia, "included the only mathematically sound geocentric model of the Solar System."

In the Purgatorio, Dante has emerged from Hell into the actual physical world that we know. The mountain of Purgatory may not exist, but as an imaginative construct it is placed in the southern hemisphere of this planet, and its position worked out carefully. Dante demonstrates this in the opening of several cantos when he specifies the time of day by means of an elaborate picture of the position of the sun, moon, and planets, including references to various constellations and to Roman mythology. Personally I find most of these maddeningly complex, impossible to follow without help, and tiresome. For instance, Canto II (Longfellow's translation):

Already had the sun the horizon reached
    Whose circle of meridian covers o’er
    Jerusalem with its most lofty point,

And night that opposite to him revolves
    Was issuing forth from Ganges with the Scales
    That fall from out her hand when she exceedeth;

So that the white and the vermilion cheeks
    Of beautiful Aurora, where I was,
    By too great age were changing into orange.

You can get the idea that it's dawn there in Purgatory. But Dante is also informing us that it's sunset at Jerusalem and midnight at the Ganges, where the constellation Libra (the Scales) is visible (just rising, I think). You may not realize, as I would not have without notes, that full understanding of the image requires noting the fact that, as Peter Bondanella says in a note to his edition of the Longfellow translation:

The horizon of a location on earth may be described by a circle that is perpendicular to that point's meridian circle (the meridian circle is a circle passing through the point and the north and south poles).

And of course you need some knowledge of the constellations and their relationship to the seasons--the time is spring, and just past the equinox.

But this and all such constructs in the Purgatorio are astronomically accurate. The obvious conclusion of anyone walking around on the surface of the earth who has not been told otherwise is that the sun, moon, and stars circle the earth. It took a great deal of study and specialized equipment to prove otherwise, and the discovery leaves the accuracy of age-old observation intact as far as it goes. That people who lived before the Copernican revolution did not know that the facts behind the appearance were not as they seemed did not affect their ability to observe intently and accurately, more so than do any of us who aren't astronomers.

Dante's biology, on the other hand, is an altogether different story. In Canto 25 of the Purgatorio, Dante, who is now accompanied not only by Virgil but by another Roman poet, Statius, who was a Christian and, unlike Virgil, is in Purgatory as a pilgrim and not a visitor, asks a question which had also been bothering me: given that the souls in Purgatory do not have physical bodies, how is it that those they have just encountered, who are starving as their penance for gluttony, appear emaciated? For that matter, how does this whole mechanism of meeting and conversing with "souls" work? As part of his answer Statius begins to explain human reproduction:

The perfect blood, which never is drunk up
    Into the thirsty veins, and which remaineth
    Like food that from the table thou removest,

Takes in the heart for all the human members
    Virtue informative, as being that
    Which to be changed to them goes through the veins

Again digest, descends it where ’tis better
    Silent to be than say; and then drops thence
    Upon another’s blood in natural vase.

There one together with the other mingles,
    One to be passive meant, the other active
    By reason of the perfect place it springs from;

And being conjoined, begins to operate,
    Coagulating first, then vivifying
    What for its matter it had made consistent.

There's more. But somewhere in there I stopped reading and said something like "What the hell is he talking about?" As Longfellow's expression is often pretty convoluted, I keep Anthony Esolen's translation at hand while I'm reading. So I turned to it, and then to his note when the poetry proved little more intelligible, and was pleased find that he begins by remarking that this is "No one's  favorite canto." Esolen goes on to give a very sound theological explication and justification for the treatment of the soul-body question in this canto. But it doesn't make the details of the biology any more sound. I called this "Dante's biology," but of course he didn't make it up. It goes back to Aristotle, at least. 

I'm not going to reproduce the lengthy detailed explanation given by either Esolen or Bondanella. You don't care, and neither do I. A brief summary of what I've quoted is: there are different "grades" of blood in the body, and the more pure does not go out to nourish the rest of the body, but in the male is retained and becomes semen, which in the sexual act is mingled with female blood, and the combination turns into a body. 

Eventually the question about the bodies of these shades is answered: "...the intellect imprints the circumambient air with its own form, a body that conforms itself to the intellect's desires and suffering." (Esolen) It's very Thomistic, but Bondanella notes that it was invented by Dante and has no support in Church teaching, but is a necessary device for the whole premise of the poem--that Dante can converse with the souls he encounters. 

Well, it was a question that needed answering, however odd a detour the biology seemed. It didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the Purgatorio, which was greater than on my previous reading. I finished it a few days ago and I think it may prove to be my favorite of the three books. Unless something prevents me from reading at least two cantos per day, I should be able to carry out my plan of reading the Divine Comedy during Lent. 

The misty delicately flowering branch of this album cover is an excellent visual representation of its sound:

Some music forces itself on your attention by volume and busy-ness, and in pop music a steady and very assertive beat. Some does it by quietness and simplicity, causing you to grow quiet and attentive yourself--as if a mockingbird has come and perched on the railing of your porch, and you don't even take a sip of your coffee or turn the page of your book, lest you scare it away. On my first hearing of "Tomorrow," the first song on this album, I found myself similarly stopped cold, hanging on a finger-picked guitar pattern. A simple repeated figure in the bottom strings supports the song, the top strings comparatively faint. A distant electric guitar adds very restrained accents. Then the singer begins:

We drive for the longest time
We don't have a destination

Gradually through the song other sounds emerge and increase. Halfway through, distant backing vocals are added, and the electric guitar steps forth briefly. 

The lyrics introduce an uneasy note: 

Maybe there will come a time
When we can speak about it

Uneasy and mysterious: no more is said about this thing that they--the "we" seems to be two people--are not going to speak about now or anytime soon, possibly ever. Are they a romantic couple, or some other sort of pair? We don't know; we only know that there is some kind of intimacy between them. 

That uneasy note appears often throughout the album. After I'd heard it a couple of times I was sure that many of the songs were hinting at and talking around some really severe trauma. My chief argument for that view was "Song for Susanna":

He took me
Over the line
Locked in the back
Of his truck

But I retreated from that when I noticed on the album's Bandcamp page a note that the song is about the experience of "being an immigrant in the United States." So the journey in the truck was not an abduction, but a clandestine journey across (presumably) the southern border, in the hands of strangers to whom the passenger, severed from her home, is cargo transported for a fee.

Still, there is an awful lot left unsaid in these songs, and I can't shake the feeling that behind that reticence there is something quite painful. Or perhaps not a thing, but several things. "The Waterfront Is Safe" is pretty clearly about some kind of domestic violence situation, though it seems to be someone else's story: it's all "you" and "she," not "I." 

Or maybe I'm way off base, and these are just the ordinary troubles of ordinary life. If so, if the atmosphere here is merely subdued, it is certainly more melancholy or somber than otherwise. It's all very intimate and personal, yet reserved. Shy, even. 

Musically, variations from the basic approach of that first song are pretty slight, but are enough to keep it interesting, at least if you're listening closely. On several tracks a strong but restrained backing vocal is provided by Mark Kozelek, who also produced the album. He is, I'm told, the mastermind of the very widely respected band Red House Painters. (I think "widely respected" tends to suggest that the artist is more admired by critics than by the masses, which is often a good thing.) I've only heard a little of their work but would like to hear more, and of Kozelek's later band or project, Sun Kil Moon. I'll venture a guess that his involvement is indicative of the regard in which Cerbone's music is held by her fellow musicians. 

"Mary's Face" has a touch of percussion: a single heavy drumbeat and another, lighter sound that I can't identify. There's a bass and a decorative banjo. In "You Led Me Down to the Water" the guitar is strummed; it's the most vigorous rhythm on the album. The only other song where the guitar is strummed is the title song.

Offhand I can't think of another artist whose music is as quiet and simple as this. In comparison, a gentle band like the Innocence Mission is like metal. Thinking of the Innocence Mission brings out another comparison: on hearing the first notes of Lisa Cerbone's voice, I immediately thought of Karen Peris's: both have a slightly little-girl quality. Words like "delicate" and "fragile" naturally come to mind, but they're misleading: this kind of delicacy requires strength. And though the singing on this album is restrained, sometimes almost whispery, the voice can be more powerful, as you can hear in this live performance of "Tomorrow," which seems all around somehow tougher than the album version--far from aggressive, but still not quite as retiring.

Most of the songs are at least in part addressed to another person, a "you" who remains somewhat mysterious to the listener, though that person surely knows what the speaker isn't saying. Most mysterious is Natalie, to whom "You Were Wrong About Me" is addressed. Who is Natalie? Friend? Sister (my guess)? Something else? And in what way exactly was she wrong? Maybe it's just me, but I think I hear the rhythm of a familiar childhood taunt in the title, which is also the chorus: "NAH nah NAH nah NAAHna." The next-to-last syllable is longer than the others:  "YOU were WRONG aBOUT me." 

But the "you" is most often someone to whom the speaker is expressing love and gratitude, notably in "You Led Me Down the Water" and "Cold Dark Night," the latter of which carries that suggestion of trauma:

I am so happy
you were here...
Where would I have gone
If not for your quiet kindness
I don’t think I’d survive

But no more is said of that.

Whatever trouble lies behind these lyrics, it has been overcome. Not necessarily defeated, but endured, accepted, and put in its place, as the title song, "We Still Have Sky," which closes the album, says:

We still have sky
The sun, the stars on our side
You know,
You know,
We have it so much better

I find that I've emphasized the lyrics here. They seem to be what really sets the album apart, as it is not unusual or extraordinary in purely musical terms. Someone who doesn't respond to it as I did might say it's a fairly ordinary singer-songwriter, voice-and-guitar work, though it is exceptionally well produced in a minimal, subtle way. But the lyrics make it take hold, which I guess is because they fit the music so well. I don't mean that in the sense of perfect construction; in fact they have a sort of artless quality--they don't rhyme very often and are strung somewhat casually across melody and rhythm. What I mean is: the other day I felt obliged to explain to my wife that I haven't sung "Desolation Row" several times recently because I'm depressed, but because the structure of the song--the surging  quality of the rhythm and the chord changes, the fit of the lyrics to the tune--makes singing it feel very satisfying. These songs are not like that.

But they compel in a different way, and not by the words alone--it's just as much the voice that sings them. I wasn't sure on first hearing that I was going to like the voice, but now I can't imagine the songs in any other. And I can say with something very close to certainty that if you like "Tomorrow" you'll like the whole album

A little background: I had never heard of Lisa Cerbone before I got an email from her announcing the release of this album, but she has been releasing music for some thirty years, five albums since the early 1990s. She has, obviously, never achieved great fame, but has not been entirely ignored, either:  according to her Allmusic biography --proof in itself that she isn't completely unknown--she has had some very appreciative fans who have good reason to be glad she persevered, even though she doesn't make a living at it. She works as an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher at Mt. St. Mary's University and Seminary in Maryland. 

I don't remember where I picked up this odd bit of information, since my acquaintance with mathematics is very slight, but one of the great ones, Carl Friedrich Gauss, had as motto for his published works the Latin phrase pauca sed matura--few but ripe. I suspect that description applies to Lisa Cerbone's recorded work. Certainly, if others are in a class with this one. I'm especially interested in hearing Ordinary Days, which is also a collaboration with Mark Kozolek.

Web site

Bandcamp page (buy the album!)

I've listened to this several times since the beginning of Lent, as it seems appropriate to the season. That, plus a sort of mood that made it seem appealing (and thus hardly penitential), plus a desire to make another attempt at grasping Renaissance polyphony, prompted me to get out this LP, which I've had for many years.

The recording was originally made in the mid-1950s by the Deller Consort, a vocal ensemble led by Alfred Deller, who in my youth (the decade after the '50s) was known as an important proponent of the counter-tenor voice (his own) and of early music. According to Discogs, it's been re-issued a number of times, including several on CD in the '90s, so apparently it still has, or at least thirty years ago still had, admirers.

I am a little ashamed to say that I don't really get Renaissance polyphony, in the same way that I don't entirely get the fugue. It has something to do with my brain's inability to follow, in a sense even to hear, more than two voices, two melody lines, simultaneously. And it has something to do with the basic nature of the music, which is about the interplay of multiple--four or five--melody lines. In the style generally, and in this instance particularly, the movement of these lines results in a very ingenious  and continually shifting interplay of voices and the rhythms of the text (almost by definition, this style is the setting of a text). I don't mean rhythm in the  sense of a beat, but in the way a unit of text--a sentence, say--is woven among the voices, each one proceeding separately from the others, not generally on the same syllable at the same time, or for the same length of time, all coming together on the final syllable of the sentence. 

And I admire it, but am not often touched by it. My basic problem reveals something lacking in my response to music. It's simple: I want a tune, or to start with a tune. I mean of course not just something that is technically a melody, but one that is appealing in itself. And in this kind of music I don't often get it. That coming-together of the voices in a sustained chord is usually the part I most enjoy. 

Here's an interesting video of a performance of the first part (of two) of the piece by the Tallis Scholars, who seem to be widely considered one of the best ensembles working with this music. The video moves through the score with the singers, so you get a visual image of the weaving of the voices. 

Here is the King James version of the text:

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!

She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.

I don't like this performance as much as I do the Deller one, in part because it doesn't seem as balanced among the voices. The lower men's voices are not as prominent, which seems to flatten the piece, even though the Tallis Scholars are a larger ensemble. The small Deller group (five people, one voice per part) makes the music less grand, in a good way--more personal. Something I ran across while looking for information on the work suggested that it may not actually have been intended for formal liturgical use, but for small groups gathered in a home. The writer--and I'm sorry I didn't make a note of his or her name and that of the web site--thought that Tallis, having remained Catholic through the religious revolution of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, might have found the Jeremiah text particularly appropriate for such use.

And I actually prefer the counter-tenor to the women's voices in this piece. Back in the early days when I first bought that LP and first heard the counter-tenor voice, I thought it was more or less a freak and didn't care much for it. Now it seems most appropriate for much of this kind of music. Perhaps that's partly because it makes for a more smoothly blended (and darker) color across the separate threads, reinforcing the perception of every moment of the piece as a unity? At any rate that's the way it seems to work for me in this performance of this piece. 

The Deller recording was monaural, of course, but my LP is one of those "rechanneled for stereo" releases of which there were many after stereo had become the norm and mono was considered obsolete, or at least treated that way by record companies. (Not to mention that for many years there was a price difference--the record company could charge more if they could put the "stereo" label on the jacket). I got the impression at the time that audiophiles hated the "rechanneled" sound, and now I'm curious about the difference. On Discogs I found several inexpensive copies of the original mono release, and I'm actually going to order one, just out of curiosity. 

If you're interested, here's a knowledgeable discussion of rechanneled i.e. fake stereo.

A few years ago I finally read the entire Divine Comedy.

Oops. That was the way I originally started this post. Then I wondered whether "a few" was accurate, and how long it actually had been. And because I had written about it at the time I was able to find the answer. So here's the revised opening:

Nine years ago I finally read the entire Divine Comedy.

It's very hard for me to believe that it's been that long, but here's a post where I asked for recommendations for a translation. I was sure it had been five years at most.

I had previously read only the Inferno, in the translations of John Ciardi and Dorothy Sayers. This more recent time I ended up reading (and buying) Anthony Esolen's translation, which I liked and would recommend. Not only is it a good translation, it has, as one would expect from Esolen, insightful and reliable notes and commentary fully sympathetic to Dante's theology. 

While I was making up my mind about that I checked the local library to see and sample whatever translation or translations they had, and discovered the Inferno in Longfellow's translation, which I had not known existed. I didn't look at it closely, in part because I wanted an edition that included the Italian, as Esolen's and some others do, on facing pages. This I now scoff at--not at the thing, but at the use I made, or was unable to make, of it. What did I think I was going to do with the Italian, of which I don't even know enough to know how to pronounce any words except those that have migrated into English (pizza, cello)? I did have one or two moments when I seemed to catch a glimpse of beauty in the Italian, but mostly I just ignored it. The Italian text served only to double the number of pages required for the poem. 

But anyway: having an inclination to read Dante again, and perhaps as a result of reading several of Longfellow's poems at Poems Ancient and Modern over the past year or so, and thinking that maybe Longfellow's work in general deserves another look (as an undergraduate English major, I was a snob for English literature, and didn't think American lit deserved much attention), I went to the library and checked out the Longfellow Inferno. And now I'm sold on his translation. To jump ahead to my conclusion: I am enjoying this translation as poetry more than I had previous translations.

Or, I should say, on this edition, which is in the Barnes & Noble Classics series. The text is in the public domain, obviously, so in this day of cheap and easy publication anyone can throw the text into a file and publish it, either on paper or in electronic form. But this one is a serious work, with an introduction, extensive notes, and many other useful features by Peter Bondanella, a professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at Indiana University and Julia Conaway Bondanella, professor of Italian at IU. And it's physically well-designed, and a pleasure to read. At first I thought the library's copy was just something they'd had lying around unread for decades, but no: it was first published, as best I can tell, in 2005. 

It's in three volumes, not surprisingly--the poem itself would fit easily into one, but the accompanying material takes up almost as much space as the poem. The volume of Inferno from our library is a hardback, and I hadn't read very far in it before I decided that I wanted to own it. At that point I encountered some confusion. The hardback, which by the way includes only Peter Bondanella as editor, is apparently out of print. I was able to find a copy in good condition at Abebooks, and a copy of Purgatorio on eBay. The bindings are a little different, and Purgatorio also includes Julia Bondanella as co-editor, so I don't know if there was an earlier uniform edition, or there was a subsequent edition which differs slightly. And as for Paradiso, I've so far not been able to find any evidence that it ever existed in hardback. Its paperback edition is the only one I can find at Barnes & Noble, so I'll have to give up and get it when I'm ready for it, which will be in another week or two--I'm currently on Canto X of Purgatorio, reading one to three cantos a day.

Enough of that--what about the translation itself? Why do I prefer it? Why prefer Longfellow's 19th century technique and diction to a capable contemporary one? Well, it has something to do with the way our language has developed over the past 150 years or so. The one word that comes first to mind when I try to describe that change is "lighter," followed by "thinner." Longfellow's English has a weight and substance that contemporary English doesn't. Just as important, obviously, is the fact that Longfellow was an extremely gifted poet (let's set aside whether the adjective "great" is appropriate). Anthony Esolen has written some good poetry, too, but he is not in Longfellow's class. And he doesn't have the same tools.

Here are a couple of comparisons. The two passages describe the same thing: the condition of souls in the outermost circle of the structure of Hell, where those who died innocently but without baptism dwell. (I'll set aside reservations and arguments about the doctrine and its current status.) The first is Dante speaking upon encountering the place. The second is Virgil explaining why he himself must be there. 

Inferno, Canto IV, Esolen:

As far as I could tell from listening, here
    there were no wails, but only sighs, that made
    a trembling in the everlasting air.

They rose from sorrow, without punishment,
    the sorrow of vast throngs of people there,
    of men and women and of infants too.

Longfellow:

There, as it seemed to me from listening,
    Were lamentations none, but only sighs,
    That tremble made the everlasting air.

And this arose from sorrow without torment,
    Which the crowds had, that many were and great,
    Of infants and of women and of men.

Purgatorio, Canto VII 25-30--Esolen:

Nothing I did but what I left undone
    condemns me to the losing of that sight
    of the high Sun you yearn for, all unknown

To me until too late. Below here lies
    a place saddened by darkness, not the pain
    of torment, and the souls lament in sighs,

No shrieks of woe.

Longfellow:

I by not doing, not by doing, lost
    The sight of that high sun which thou desirest,
    And which too late by me was recognized.

A place there is below not sad with torments,
    But darkness only, where the lamentations
    Have not the sound of wailing, but are sighs.

One must make up one's own mind, of course, and it's not a question of fact--I think we can assume both translations are faithful, and they certainly match each other--but of taste. To my taste Longfellow has a solid, majestic, even noble quality. Not to say that Esolen lacks those, but they seem to me more present in Longfellow. 

I'll forego a detailed examination of those lines, which after all are only a couple of dozen out of some 14,000. But I notice a couple of instances that might support my point:

"there were no wails, but only sighs"

vs.

"were lamentations none, but only sighs."

Not only does "lamentations" strike me as the more potent word, but the rhythm seems more forceful. This is a somewhat mysterious thing, as both are regular iambic. Part of the effect is that what I've quoted of Esolen there is tetrameter, while Longfellow's is pentameter. Notice that the complete thought or image includes a line break in Esolen's, while Longfellow's is one single strong rhythmic unit, almost hammer-like. In general I find Longfellow's verse to be more rhythmically potent, and even, more generally, more musical.

But this example also points to something which is likely to put off contemporary readers. Notice in the first example that the grammatical unit "there were" in this place is complete in what I quoted from Esolen. But in Longfellow's the two words are not adjacent. Longfellow's syntax is more complex, and this is a mild example. Sometimes it's downright knotty, and often part of the reason for that is his use of inversions and other ways of shuffling the conventional order of words for musical reasons. English is pretty dependent on word order, and often a poet (or translator), at least before the 20th century, changes it around very freely, so that the reader may be presented with a knot that he or she may or may not struggle to untie. I admit that I've several times consulted Esolen's translation to be sure I have correctly understood a passage in Longfellow. 

Here's a simple example, from Canto IX of Purgatorio, which happens to be the one I just read:

So fair a hatchment will not make for her
    The Viper marshalling the Milanese

In other words, "The Viper marshalling the Milanese will not make for her so fair a hatchment." But initially you may, as I did, take "hatchment" for the subject of the verb "make."

And: "hatchment"? It suggests to me a nest full of eggs, or chicks. Or perhaps snakes? This is another difficulty which pops up now and then with Longfellow: he uses a fair number of words which are no longer in common use, some of which are explained in footnotes, some of which I look up, and some of which I guess the meaning from context. "Hatchment," according to Professor(s) Bondanella, here means "ornament."

Here are a few words, previously unknown to me, that I've just recently encountered in Longfellow's translation: "incoronate," "disparts," "relucent," "indurate," "janitor." 

Janitor? That's hardly an unfamiliar word, but I certainly didn't know that it can mean something closer to "gatekeeper," derived, like "January," from the name of Janus, the Roman god who faced in two directions and was associated with (among many other things) gates, doors, and the like. It appears in Canto IX of Purgatorio, in which Dante and Virgil arrive at the entrance to Purgatory proper (after landing on the island and passing through the outskirts, "Antepurgatory"), and are welcomed by an angel. 

Again began the courteous janitor;
    “Come forward then unto these stairs of ours.”

All right, that's enough for a blog post. One last thing: Longfellow began his translation of Dante after suffering a horrendous personal catastrophe: his beloved second wife (married some years after the death of his first) was killed in a household fire which also seriously injured Longfellow and, not surprisingly, permanently devastated him emotionally. You can read about it at Wikipedia.

An 1868 portrait of Longfellow by Julia Margaret Cameron (from Wikimedia Commons)

Frances "Fanny" Appleton Longfellow, drawing by Samuel W. Rowse (Wikimedia Commons)

A friend heard Kenneth Branagh recite this poem in the film Coming Through, which is about D.H. Lawrence's affair with Frieda Weekley, who left her husband for him. The poem is in the dialect of Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, and my friend liked the way it sounded but couldn't understand some of it. So she looked it up online and, having found it, was still puzzled by some of the dialect, and asked me about it. And when I had taken a shot at paraphrasing it in standard modern English, she suggested that I put the result online for the possible benefit of others. So here it is. It will be interesting to see if this post ever gets any hits from search engines. If I can help one fainting literature student to a C-minus....

Here's a link to the poem at Project Gutenberg. It's a conversation between a brother and sister, assuming the word "sister" is meant literally, mainly in the voice of the brother, about an incident at the funeral of "our Ted," who seems to be their brother, though that isn't stated. 

Here's a link to an odd video in which the poem is recited in what I take to be its correct pronunciation by an animated photograph of Lawrence. It seems to be a labor of love on someone's part, and so I'm sorry to say that I find the video vaguely unpleasant, better listened to than watched.

And here's my attempt to lay it out in standard modern English. I'm making some guesses and assumptions: for instance, that the word "plank" means more or less what we mean, though "board" strikes me as more idiomatic for us in the context.  "Slive"--the manner in which the young woman approaches the grave--is defined in several dictionaries as "sneak," but I think "slip" seems more in keeping with the general attitude of the speaker toward the girl. I put it into paragraphs corresponding to the stanzas, with dashes as in the original indicating lines spoken by the sister. I'm not 100% sure that the lines "And him so young..." are meant to be hers, but typographically they seem to be.

***

VIOLETS

Sister, you know while we were on the boards beside the grave, while the coffin was still lying on yellow clay with the white flowers on top of it to keep off a bit of the rain

And the parson was making haste and all the mourners were huddling close together because of the rain, did you happen to notice a young woman away by a headstone, sobbing and sobbing?

--Why would I be looking around, when I was standing on the boards beside the open grave where our Ted was about to be buried?

--And him so young and so suddenly taken while he was being so wicked among pals worse than any name you could think of?

Let that be; there's some of the bad that we like better than the good, and he was one.
--And because I liked him best, yes, better than you, I can't bear to think where he is gone.

I know you liked him better than me. But let me tell you about this girl. When you had gone I stayed behind in the rain and saw what she wearing [or possibly "what she was doing"?].

You should have seen her slip up when we had gone, you should have seen her kneel and look into the wet grave--and her little neck shone so white, and she shook so much, that I almost

started crying myself. She undid her black jacket at the bosom and took from it a double handful of violets, all gathered together blue and white--and warm, for a bit

of the smell came wafting to me. She put her face right into them and cried again, then after a bit dropped them down into the grave. And I came away because of the heavy rain.

***

It's the last sentence, and mainly those last four words, that make the poem. I like it, though the dialect is an obstacle. I didn't know that Lawrence had written in this style. It's from a collection of poetry called Love Poems and Others, published in 1913, quite early in his career, and perhaps warrants further investigation. The whole book is available at the Gutenberg link above.

I'm not a fan of D.H. Lawrence in general. I think I enjoyed, but was not enchanted by, the two novels that I read in a Modern British Fiction course fifty years ago, Sons and Lovers and Women In Love, --or was it The Rainbow? Or maybe both? I can't remember for sure. And all I knew of his poetry was several free verse poems that still make it into anthologies. Or at least did when I was in college, and I didn't especially like them. 

Later on, when I ran across his work or discussions thereof, I was put off by his "dark forces of the blood" mysticism. (I can't remember where I heard that description--it isn't mine, anyway). His attacks on the desiccation of modern Western culture were (are?) accurate enough, but his prescriptions for a cure pretty dodgy. I recall especially a short story in which a European woman--modern, conventional, inhibited, etc.--awaits rather rapturously her sacrifice to an Aztec god, or something of that sort. Or perhaps that was an excerpt from a novel. Anyway, it struck me as sexually perverse, as  had some aspects of the novels, including what struck me as a somewhat homoerotic undertone. All in all, to be blunt, Lawrence strikes me as a man who had, to use a term that used to be relatively obscure slang but has passed into common usage in recent decades, a definite sexual kink. 

Here's a picture of Lawrence and Frieda, who hardly looks the femme fatale. 

And here is what I consider to be one of the very funniest Monty Python skits. Sons and Lovers is largely about a Sensitive Boy with literary talent and ambition, misunderstood and sometimes bullied by his Brutish Father, a coal-miner. It seems extremely likely that Python had it in mind when developing the skit, using an extremely simple and extremely effective twist. 

Well, this is more like it--more what I hoped for from a Beethoven concerto. More like Beethoven, I would even say. I mean, if Beethoven had died in, say, 1802, when he had written only the first two symphonies and the first two piano concertos, he would certainly have been remembered, but he wouldn't be Beethoven, the giant we know. I don't feel that I'm listening to that giant in the first two concertos, but I do in this one, though he's just getting started. The first two seem to me as if they could have been written by Mozart, but not the third. 

I guess, now that I think about it, it's especially the first movement that makes me say that. I think its structure is unusual: there is a long (several minutes) orchestral introduction in which a strong, but not bombastic, theme alternates with a more sweeping, almost pastoral one--a march alternating with a dance, and this introduction closes with something that sounds very much like a finale to me.

For a naive listener like me who doesn't understand or appreciate much of what's going on technically, a work in sonata form stands or falls on its principal themes--they have to touch me in order for me to find the changes wrought on them interesting. This movement certainly makes the grade in that respect. It's a vigorous and varied piece of music, not on the awe-inspiring level of the works that would come later, but certainly one that I'll want to hear again from time to time. I especially like the way it closes: the cadenza* is pretty close to the end, and is as spectacular as one could wish, closing with quiet trills that fade into equally quiet orchestral stirrings that quickly rise toward a fairly typical movement-closing resolution of loud chords. The transition takes only just over a minute and the effect is striking. Personally I would have preferred the fadeout, but the power chords seem to have been close to obligatory for a century or more.

The cadenza is apparently Beethoven's; the notes on my recording seem to assume so. The pianist, Alfred Brendel, makes these remarks:

In most of his cadenzas, Beethoven the architect turns into a genius running amok; almost all the principles of classical order fall by the wayside.... Breaking away in an alien manner from the style and character of the movement does not bother Beethoven at all, and the most adventurous harmonic detours are made with relish. No other composer has ever hazarded cadenzas of such provoking madness.

And right on, I say.

The second movement is mainly a lovely melody that seems almost hymn-like. The third is high-speed and high-spirited, even light-hearted--not as wildly energetic or as striking as that of the first concerto, but in the same vein. 

No, this concerto did not fly up straightaway into the higher reaches of my musical favorites, but neither will it be checked off and filed away, likely never to be heard again, considering my age.

The recording was from the same 5-CD set as the other two:

I don't have anything to say about the performance, having nothing to compare it to, but I have one complaint about the recording. As you can see from the cover, it's "live" (those quotation marks make it seem as if the term were questionable), recorded in 1983 and issued on CD in 1997. And the record company decided to include the applause at the end of each concerto. It's really loud, and quite intrusive and annoying. 

* In case you don't know the term, a cadenza is a virtuoso section for the concerto's featured instrument alone.

I had planned to go, then decided not to go, then decided to go, then didn't. The reasons wouldn't interest you, but one reason for the shifts was that I wasn't all that enthusiastic about the program. There were two pieces, the first being a Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists, by Philip Glass.

What? Or as some online young people say: wut. Without a question mark. I really like that because  it's utterly expressionless, as if it can't be bothered with more than the bare minimum of effort needed to communicate a combination of incomprehension and indifference in such a way as to suggest that whatever is being responded to is nonsense. Three letters is the bare minimum for representing the sound; four would be far too much trouble.

And that was pretty close to my immediate reaction to the name of the piece. But Phillip Glass is quite a gifted composer, even if one thinks (or suspects) he has written too much that is too similar to other works. I've enjoyed a good bit of his music over the years--I remember especially a performance of his Second Symphony. And rhythm has always been an important element in his music, insistent but constantly shifting. So the day after the concert which I had missed, I looked for the piece on YouTube rather than Idagio, because I was curious as to how the tympani and timpanists would be positioned, and what the two players would look like in action. (I recall it being spelled with a "y," but the title of the Glass piece uses an "i." I don't know why it names the players and not the instruments--you don't say "concerto for pianist.")

And it turned out to be a very enjoyable and interesting work, well worth thirty minutes of my time, and yours I think. And I'm glad I watched it instead of only listening, because there are a lot more drums involved than I realized, and it's a visual spectacle as well as a musical one. There are several performances on YouTube and the drums seemed to be more prominent in the recording in this one.  

I admit that I had moments when I was reminded of a trend among rock bands in the late '60s: the drum solo. Cream's Wheels of Fire album gave over most of an LP side to a fifteen-minute performance of "Toad," most of which was solo drumming, accurately described by the AMG reviewer as "numbing." But the orchestra quickly dispelled that sensation.

The second piece on the program was Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Since it was the only other thing on the program, I assume it was the entire ballet, not a suite taken from it. As far as I can remember I have never heard this work. But my classical music consultant tells me that it's a great work, and sent me a link to this excerpt:

And I'm puzzled, because it seems very familiar. Has it been used in a movie or some other context where I would have heard it, and more than once? 

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. 

I don't listen to the radio very much, but sometimes when I'm making the ten-mile drive into town and don't want to bother picking out music to play from my phone, I press one of three presets on the radio. The three stations are: the one that claims to be "alternative," but doesn't really go very far in that direction; the Classic Raahhhk station; and the local classical+NPR station. It doesn't usually work out very well, partly because I switch away from the first two whenever a commercial or a song I don't like comes on, which is frequently, only to find that the grass is just as brown. And whatever's playing on the classical station is either already in progress or, if I catch the beginning, won't be finished before I get where I'm going. Or maybe I won't get either the beginning or the end. And then after 3pm the annoying ladies of NPR take over.

One day a few weeks ago I jumped to the classical station and found a piano concerto in progress. "That's one of the Mozart concertos," I thought, though I had no idea which one; to tell you the truth, they...well, I'd better not say they all sound the same, but most of them are quite similar, unless you're comparing a very early to a later one. But then it took a turn which of course I can't describe but which seemed rather off the beaten Mozartian path.

I was very curious about its identity, but when I got to where I was going the piece was still in progress. Happily the station posts its log on the web, so when I got back home I was able to find out what it was: Beethoven's first piano concerto.

Well, that was intriguing, and now I wanted to hear the whole thing. Moreover, I decided that the time had come for me to get to know all five of the concertos. I'm not sure I had ever before heard the first three, and it has been many years since I heard the fourth and fifth. I've had for years, but never listened to, a set of the five played by Alfred Brendel with the Chicago Symphony conducted by James Levine. Where it ranks in the opinion of connoisseurs I don't know, but I thought surely it must be at least respectable.

So. I enjoyed this work but it isn't going to be a great favorite. The first movement begins with the martial or processional Beethoven which is the Beethoven I am not very fond of. In general I found the entire first movement continually interesting, especially the exciting cadenza, but not deeply engaging. The second movement is slow and pretty, as expected, but didn't strike me as especially memorable. But the third--oh man. It's a joyful blaze. It has an instantly memorable tune which I sort of want to call a riff, and is almost treated that way, recurring frequently. I don't know how often I'll go back to the entire work, but a few days after hearing the entire work several times I went back and listened to the third movement alone--twice. It's that much fun. 

I also revisited the second movement, and found that hearing it in isolation instead of as a lull after the lengthy and vigorous first made it more appealing. It's really quite beautiful. It was like meeting a quiet and mild-mannered person in a crowd and not getting a very strong impression of...well, I was going to say "him or her," but really in that figure I'm envisioning a woman, if only because the movement is pretty and graceful, and men are not pretty and graceful. So, her--and later on conversing with her alone and finding that she's more charming and interesting than you had thought from that first impression. (I think I've used that analogy before, but I can't remember where. I'll attribute that to old age.) 

But about my initial idea that what I was hearing on the radio was Mozart: I can't figure it out now. I don't know which part of the concerto I heard that day in the truck, but in general it doesn't sound much like Mozart to me, though it was written only four years after Mozart's last piano concerto, #27 (1795 and 1791 respectively). In hope of getting some notion of what I might have been hearing, I listened to #27, and I don't hear much resemblance to the Beethoven. So...I don't know. 

On to the second concerto. Which by the way was written before the first. 

Peter Hitchens, writing in The Lamp a year or two ago, asserts that le Carré was "Britain’s greatest novelist of the late twentieth century." (I would provide a link to the piece, which is a review of a volume of le Carré's letters, but I'm pretty sure it's subscriber-only). I have too little acquaintance with contemporary fiction to have a respectable opinion on the matter, but Hitchens's view strikes me as entirely plausible.

I am, however, qualified to say that le Carré is a very, very good novelist, and one I've admired for a long time. I think my enthusiasm began with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the early 1970s. But I was aware of his reputation before that: my father subscribed to a long-defunct men's magazine called True--or maybe TRUE--and a condensed version of le Carré's first big success, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold appeared there in 1964. I do remember noticing it, but as far as I recall I didn't read it, or if I did sample it I didn't get very far: I was sixteen and mainly read science fiction.

Tinker was a rare experience: an intricate and powerful page-turner of a narrative with subtle and profound exploration of character and theme. Moreover, for me and apparently many thousands of others, the "secret world," as le Carré refers to the people and practices of espionage, is in itself fascinating and even alluring--perhaps not a healthy thing. I read his earlier books, and over the next fifteen or twenty years others that followed Tinker. They were all worth reading, and they all had as both practical and metaphorical foundation the Cold War. With the fall of the Soviet Union there was reason to wonder whether le Carré's work would continue to fascinate.

He continued to publish novels right up until his death in 2020. But the last one I bought, picked up secondhand years after its 1995 publication, was Our Game. And it sat unread on a shelf until a couple of weeks ago, when I found myself looking at that bookcase with an eye toward freeing some space, asking myself if I really needed all those le Carré titles--nine of them--and what the chances were that I would ever re-read any except two or three of them. Specifically, shouldn't I just go ahead and put Our Game in the stack of things to donate to the Friends of the Library? But why not read it first? It's not very long, compared to some of his books.

To the book, then: the first thing an Anglophone Christian reader notices--the first thing I noticed, anyway--is that the narrator is named Timothy Cranmer. As le Carré's work is often religion-conscious (though not religious in any sense), that choice of last name seems unlikely to be insignificant: Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) was one of the leaders of the English schism under Henry VIII and Edward VI. This Cranmer is a former member of the English espionage establishment, forced into retirement at the end of the Cold War because his career as an anti-Soviet spymaster constitutes a body of knowledge and a set of skills now "surplus to requirements," as the English say, for the role of the secret services in the new order. He is well-situated, having inherited a very nice country house and vineyard, supplemented by a goodly amount of money which we are given to understand is an under-the-table pension, or perhaps a theft, from the service--"the Office," as Cranmer calls it. And though he is surely at least fifty years old he has acquired a young, beautiful lover, Emma, who lives with him. Both she and Cranmer are somewhat familiar types in le Carré's world: the aging or aged and world-weary spy is almost a stock character, and a young, beautiful, and rather lost woman appears often.

Cranmer has spent much of his career "running" a double agent, Lawrence ("Larry") Pettifer. As  all readers of spy fiction know, with double agents there is always uneasiness, at minimum, about who the agent is really working for. Pettifer is a charismatic fellow, and he and Cranmer are close, in an almost romantic sort of way. They have remained close since their release from the Office into the everyday world, to which Pettifer is having trouble adjusting, and Pettifer is a frequent visitor, with obvious designs on Emma.

As the story opens, Emma has recently, and with little explanation, left Cranmer. And now Pettifer has disappeared. On a rainy Sunday night, when Pettifer has not been heard from for over a week, Cranmer receives a visit from two policemen who are pretty sure Cranmer must know something about Pettifer's disappearance, and suspect he may have had some hand in it. The Office is worried, too, and more than worried: Pettifer seems to have been involved with the theft of thirty-seven million pounds from the Russians.

This may all be connected to Ingushetia, which is a very small country in the Caucasus, located between South Ossetia to the west and Chechnya to the east, and the home of the Ingush people. I'm only mildly embarrassed to say that as far as I can recall I had never before heard of it. We all know of Chechnya, thanks to the Boston Marathon bombing and other events newsworthy in the West, and I had at least heard the names of North and South Ossetia. Like those, Ingushetia is part of the northernmost reach of the Islamic lands. With the end of the Soviet Union, and the consequent freedom of ancient enemies to go to war with each other, Ingushetia is (in the novel--I don't know about real life) under attack by Chechnya and Ossetia, with the permission and sometimes assistance of Russia. 

Pettifer's Soviet handler, Konstantin Checheyev (Cranmer's opposite on the Soviet side), who of course believes that Pettifer is his agent spying on the British, is not ethnically Russian, but Ingush. Ingushetia has just recently (the year is 1994) been half-freed from Russian/Soviet control, and Checheyev, like Cranmer and Pettifer, is not sure what he should be doing now. He has long resented a sort of glass ceiling for his ethnicity in the Soviet government, and doesn't think he has much of a place in Russia. And his native land is in trouble. It appears that he may be behind the theft of the thirty-seven million pounds, and that Pettifer is probably involved.

Does Pettifer's disappearance have something to do with the theft, with Checheyev, with the Ingush? Is he alive or dead? If dead, did Cranmer kill him? Cranmer has reason to think he may have--their relationship is difficult. If alive, where is he, and is Emma with him? 

Cranmer needs to know the answers, and in the process of seeking them finds himself pursued by the British police and by the Office. And the story of detective work, spycraft, and intrigue that follows is a good one, but a smaller one than many of his earlier works. It's smaller in word count, and it carries less resonance with the big questions: questions peculiar to our time, to the decayed and corrupt condition of the West, especially of England; to the Cold War and the moral dilemmas and psychological pressures involved in fighting it; and to the broader and more universal philosophical principles to which those point. The Cold War novels treat all those in more depth and with more power than does Our Game. And if le Carré is indeed a major novelist, which I'm inclined to think he is, it is those that most strongly make the case for him. But none of that means that this isn't a good story.

It follows that if you don't know le Carré's work, this is not the best place to start. For that purpose I would suggest either The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The first is shorter, with a sharp dagger of a plot; the second is more expansive and more character-driven. I'm restraining the impulse to say more, in fact to say a great deal, about those and the related books. But aside from the fact that my topic here is only the one book, there's much too much to say in a brief review--there's material for a lengthy article, perhaps even a book, which very likely someone has written. 

What about that Cranmer business that I mentioned? Well, it strikes me that this new Cranmer resembles the old one in that he is in the process of making his exit from an institution which has defined his life and his world. What will become of him? Of it? What will take its place in his life? And what will be his place within that? Old Cranmer died for a new faith (though of course he insisted that it was the old one made pure). What will become of New Cranmer? It would be bad manners for me to say; you'll have to read the book to find out.

And should I keep my copy of Our Game? Well, I probably won't read it again, and I could make use of that shelf space for something more permanent. Probably it should go to the Friends of the Library. It would be a happy find for someone. 

Though this is one of my favorite Christmas works, I hadn't heard it for five or six years. This year I'd been thinking about it, but didn't have a chance to hear it until a couple of days after Christmas, and then I listened to it twice in as many days. As we're still in Christmastide, it's not too late for you to listen to it while it's seasonally appropriate.

It's a glorious work, one I've been fond of since I acquired this recording somewhere ca. 1970. 

It's a setting of mostly medieval, mostly Christmas-themed texts, scored for harp and a small choir. Originally the choir was meant to be for "treble" voices, to be performed by children--a boys' choir, in my recording. It's a glistening sound palette that inevitably, given the subject, sounds wintry. But the mood is far from chilly. Britten also produced a version for mixed choir. I haven't heard it, but would like to.

The choir in this performance consists of boys and girls. They're charming though a little distracting to watch. A group called The Tewkesbury Choral Society has thoughtfully provided an online version of the texts, which really helps a lot. Though they're more or less intelligible to the eye, they're somewhat less so to the ear: you can probably guess what "wolcom yole" means when  you read it (in the context of Christmas), but you might not get it from hearing alone. At least I wouldn't. 

A couple of days ago someone added a comment on an old post in which there was some discussion of the correct pronunciation of "slough." Three possible pronunciations were mentioned there: rhymes with "cow"; sounds like "slew"; rhymes with "puff." Out of curiosity, I did a search for "how do you pronounce slough" and got a series of brief YouTube videos. The first two assert that there are two pronunciations. But they only agree on one of them, the one that rhymes with "cow." I think that's funny. 

Rhymes-with-cow seems to be pretty standard in Britain, no doubt reinforced by its being a place name, denounced in John Betjeman's 1937 poem:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow...

If he thought Slough was bad.... Presumably he was spared the hideous experience of American suburban sprawl. You can read the whole poem at an interesting site called Poetry Atlas, which associates poems with places. Apparently it has a certain notoriety, and its own Wikipedia entry.

According to Google Maps, there doesn't seem to be a place named Slough in the U.S., but there is a Slough Creek in Wyoming. 

Not exactly or only the nativity--the Incarnation, the boldness of it. 

Glorious the sun in mid career;

Glorious th' assembled fires appear;

Glorious the comet's train:

Glorious the trumpet and alarm;

Glorious th' almighty stretch'd-out arm;

Glorious th' enraptur'd main:

 

Glorious the northern lights a-stream;

Glorious the song, when God's the theme;

Glorious the thunder's roar:

Glorious hosanna from the den;

Glorious the catholic amen;

Glorious the martyr's gore:

 

Glorious—more glorious is the crown

Of Him that brought salvation down

By meekness, call'd thy Son;

Thou that stupendous truth believ'd,

And now the matchless deed's achiev'd,

Determin'd, dar'd, and done.

Who? 

If you're asking that question: The Call were a band who were moderately successful in the 1980s. Only moderately successful, but respected by both critics and musicians to a greater degree than their general popularity would indicate. If my memory is correct, which it may not be, I heard of them because there was a brief period in the late '80s when we subscribed to cable TV, and I sometimes watched MTV late at night--a guilty pleasure, because I detested MTV on principle. There I heard a song which became at least a minor hit, "Let the Day Begin." Here's the fuzzy "official video" which must be the one I saw:

I liked the song enough to buy the album, also called Let the Day Begin (1989), which is a bit surprising because I didn't have a lot of "disposable income" at the time. It wasn't a disappointment, even though the cover is a bit off-putting.

As I mentioned a month or two ago, I sometimes knowingly and unapologetically act on prejudice. I realized in my youth that sometimes the cover art of an album had a definite effect on my reaction to the music. The very nicest thing I can say about this cover is that it's dull. The worst...well, it certainly never would have tempted me to buy it. Could someone not have come up with something more imaginative? 

But the music is very good, very straightforward rock: vocals, guitar, bass, drum, keyboards, without instrumental fireworks--no flashy screaming guitar solos, no keyboard acrobatics, no complex vocal spectacles. In fact it's so straightforward that it's hard to describe. It's not heavy, not folky, not bluesy, not goth, not industrial, not punk, not post-punk, not new wave, not indie, not psychedelic, not anything musically that specifically ties it to the 1980s (though maybe the haircuts do) . It's not hard rock, but it rocks hard. It's also really well produced and recorded, with a very big sound.

To pick one adjective as description: it's intense. Most of it is up-tempo and driving, and even the slower songs are passionate. The guy more or less in the center of that picture, Michael Been, seems to have been the source of the passion. He's the vocalist, bass player, and main songwriter. Although his voice is not as striking as, say, Bono's (to pick another band popular at the time) it's very powerful and expressive. 

And, always a major plus for me, even a necessity (with exceptions for a few special cases like the Cocteau Twins), the lyrics are well-crafted and substantial. I saw one of their albums in someone's list of Top 25 Christian albums, which is a bit surprising but not inappropriate, as most of the lyrics deal explicitly or implicitly with matters of spiritual depth and often seem to come from a clearly Christian point of view. The cover of Reconciled (1986) may or may not be intended to suggest the idea of being born again:

Whether or not that's the case, the first track, "Everywhere I Go," certainly seems to be addressed to God, and is very much in the tradition of Christian devotional language:

The back cover is a grim picture of a tornado touching down on a very flat landscape. Perhaps it's Oklahoma, as described in the song "Oklahoma," which is an account of a tornado which becomes a sort of apocalypse in which it seems that "the hearts of many are laid bare."

Tornado hit and the roof gave way
Tornado hit and all we could do was pray
How was I to know what I was to think?
How was I to know what I was to feel?

Been was from Oklahoma and so may have been describing something he actually saw.

I'm discussing these three albums more or less in the order in which I heard them, not the order in which they were released.  The cover of Into the Woods (1987) is so much more attractive than those of the other two that I fully expected it to be my favorite of the three, perhaps fulfilling what seemed to be the promise of the others, with a cohesive work on the Dantean theme suggested by both cover and title.

That turned out not to be the case--at least so far. Overall, I don't find the songs to be quite as appealing as most of those on the other two albums, and the theme suggested by the title is not consistently pursued. But my view of the songs is probably just my personal taste--I can't say they are any less well-crafted--and I like half of them as much as I do anything on the other two. The first track, for instance:

Is that as good as anything U2 ever recorded? I say yes. Another comparison with U2 comes to mind: I think a lot of their music is great, as good as rock music gets, but I've never liked any of their albums in their entirety--they're always a mixed bag for me. But these three by The Call are remarkably consistent; there are, to my taste, no tracks that might as well not be there.

They released several other albums, none of which I've heard, and one of them, Red Moon, is said by the reviewer at AllMusic to be their best. So I'll give that one a listen sometime.

Looking around on the web for information I kept running across descriptions like "underrated," "highly regarded," "critical favorite," and the like, the sort of things people say about bands that deserve more attention than they get. The most emphatic of these is at a site dedicated to the band, which is not shy about saying "THE CALL is possibly the most underrated band in the history of music." Well, I don't know, maybe they are. Anyway, if you've never heard them, and you like the tracks I've posted, it's pretty certain that you won't regret investigating them further.

Michael Been died of a heart attack in 2010. His son, Robert Been, is part of a band called Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, of whose music I've heard enough to want to hear more. Here's a video of BRMC performing "I Don't Wanna." Notice that R. Been is also a singer and bass player. 

Most of the poetry I read is from the 19th and 20th centuries. The tendency of the first is strongly in the direction of passion; of the second, of alienation and obscurity. Both tend to treat the experience of poetry, both as writer and reader, as a somewhat eccentric thing, very much off the track beaten by the society around it. After a certain amount of that, I sometimes have a yen for the solid down-to-earth common (or uncommon) sense of the 18th century, which in general did not go in much for the sublime in poetry. Under that impulse I recently turned to Pope, of whose work I had not, as far as I recall, read a word since around 1972, in a college course in 18th century literature. 

I don't know why I picked An Essay on Man; it may not have been the best choice. It was written later in Pope's career, when he was in his forties--he only lived until his mid-fifties--after the mostly satirical works for which he is best known (I think--at any rate they are the ones I recall being included in high school textbooks). It is a philosophical poem, and I was left somewhat dissatisfied with both aspects. 

The form, standard for the time, is a very strict and demanding one: the heroic couplet, rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines. Little variation in meter is considered acceptable. Rhyme was generally stretched no further than, for instance, "young" and "long" (and perhaps those were closer in pronunciation in Pope's time than in ours). Pope is a virtuoso of the device, which tends to have a playful quality, and so lends itself well to pithy aphoristic capsules of wit--in other words, to epigrams:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.

Some of these, from the Essay and from other works by Pope, have passed into the common vocabulary: "A little learning is a dang'rous thing", from An Essay On Criticism--note the contraction preserving the meter. Someone has probably produced a volume called something like The Quotable Pope.

The form is less suited to sustained thought or narrative, maybe least suited of all to serious abstract philosophizing, which is more or less what this poem is. And it's roughly 1200 lines long. That's 600 rhymes, and I've been told that English is relatively poor in rhymes compared to some other languages; at any rate producing that many of them as part of a sustained discourse would obviously be a difficult feat. The expression here of a complex idea over a dozen (or two or three) couplets often requires a good deal of syntactic contortion and semantic compression, which is to say, sometimes, obscurity, at least for me. Often some observation is followed by multiple complicating illustrations and amplifications, so that more that once I found myself asking "Now, what was the subject of all these predicates?"

Through much of my reading of this work I made the mistake of doing it at bedtime, and sleepiness certainly made any obscurities worse. But sometimes even when I re-read a puzzling passage the next day, with a clearer head, I was still unsure of its meaning. Here's one example:

Abstract what others feel, what others think:
All pleasures sicken, and all glories sink

The second line there is plain enough. But what about the first? The context is an assertion that happiness "subsist[s] not in the good of one, but all," and offers, by way of examples or proofs, persons who seem or wish to be self-sufficient, but are not. Is "abstract" a verb, so that the first line means "set aside what others feel, what others think"? Or is it an adjective: "what others feel, what others think, are abstractions"? Is the general sense that what others think and feel is irrelevant to the personal experience? Perhaps, but I'm still not sure. 

Other obscurities were the effect of references to persons or things or places that were unclear or unknown to me and perhaps to most people in our time. The edition I'm reading, a Best of Pope compiled in 1929 (almost a century ago!), the one I used in that long-ago class, has very few notes. Newer and more accommodating ones undoubtedly exist. 

Nevertheless there are long stretches that are greatly enjoyable in the way I had anticipated: cool, sharp, reasonable and reasoned, and, most essentially, poetically charming. Here's the whole section of which I quoted the beginning above:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

If you didn't enjoy that, don't bother with Pope.

Now, as to the philosophical success or failure of this philosophical work: as its verse exhibits the best of the 18th century style, its philosophy exhibits...well, perhaps not the worst, but certainly a fairly typical and fairly inadequate point of view. The (so-called) Enlightenment was at its height. Metaphysical truth was slighted or dismissed, and religion, where not attacked, as by Voltaire or Hume, was put into the background, as our culture entered the long period in which actual religious belief became an embarrassment and a difficulty, if not an impossibility. (We are still in that period, and perhaps beginning to pass out of it, but that's another topic.) I am not all that widely read, but to the extent that I'm acquainted with some of the major English literary figures of the time, there seems to be a tendency for them to be Christians engaged in a struggle, perhaps unacknowledged, to justify faith to an intellect thoroughly infiltrated, if not dominated, by the skepticism of the age.

Pope, Swift, and Johnson were all believers. Pope was a Catholic, which put him in a pretty difficult position, and might plausibly have led him to be pretty reticent on the subject of religion. But the other two were orthodox (as far as we know) Anglicans, Swift being in fact a clergyman. Yet my (limited) acquaintance with them leaves me thinking that their belief was more a matter of submissive will than of active faith, and that they were not eager to apply reason to it.

In their writings all tended to rely on what seems to me a very 18th century and not all that Christian idea of nature, or rather Nature. For some mysterious reason these lines from a poem by Swift have stuck in my mind since I read them in that class so many years ago:

As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From Nature, I believe 'em true
            --"Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift"

That sense of Nature as the touchstone of all sound knowledge and reason is referred to throughout the Essay on Man. God is not absent from the picture, but is fairly remote--acknowledged and respected, but not much heard from, or spoken to. His revelation is in Nature, and since he orders all things rightly, we must conclude, as Pope tells us, twice (once early in the poem, again near the end), in capital letters: "WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT." (Pope was well-off financially, and one is tempted to say "Sure, that's easy for you to say." But he had severe physical ailments that left him partially disabled from the age of twelve.) 

In principle this might amount to the same thing as trusting that God is in charge and that everything that is and everything that happens is ultimately in accord with his will. In context, and psychologically, it's more stoic than Christian, not too far in spirit from that popular saying of our time, "It is what it is."

There is no room for the Christian understanding of suffering, sacrificial or otherwise, no real sense of the Fall, no need of redemption. Whatever the consciously held beliefs of Pope or the others, the Deist conception of God seems predominant in many of their writings. And it really isn't adequate. So I guess this poem is, after all, precisely the 18th century voice I was seeking: strong in solid down-to-earth common (or uncommon) sense, but not profound. At any rate the Romantics and the Modernists who followed knew something was missing, and went in search of it.  

Johnson had a perhaps more devastating critique: that Pope's philosophizing in An Essay on Man was no more than common sense, common both in the sense that it was plentiful and that it was ordinary. (Johnson was twenty years younger than Pope and outlived him by some forty years. His biography of Pope, from which the paragraphs below were taken, was published long after Pope's death.)

The Essay on Man was a work of great labour and long consideration, but certainly not the happiest of Pope’s performances. The subject is perhaps not very proper for poetry, and the poet was not sufficiently master of his subject; metaphysical morality was to him a new study, he was proud of his acquisitions, and, supposing himself master of great secrets, was in haste to teach what he had not learned....

Having exalted himself into the chair of wisdom he tells us much that every man knows, and much that he does not know himself; that we see but little, and that the order of the universe is beyond our comprehension, an opinion not very uncommon; and that there is a chain of subordinate beings “from infinite to nothing,” of which himself and his readers are equally ignorant. But he gives us one comfort which, without his help, he supposes unattainable, in the position “that though we are fools, yet God is wise.”

This Essay affords an egregious instance of the predominance of genius, the dazzling splendour of imagery, and the seductive powers of eloquence. Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised. The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing; and when he meets it in its new array no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse. When these wonder-working sounds sink into sense and the doctrine of the Essay, disrobed of its ornaments, is left to the powers of its naked excellence, what shall we discover? That we are, in comparison with our Creator, very weak and ignorant; that we do not uphold the chain of existence; and that we could not make one another with more skill than we are made. We may learn yet more: that the arts of human life were copied from the instinctive operations of other animals; that if the world be made for man, it may be said that man was made for geese.* To these profound principles of natural knowledge are added some moral instructions equally new: that self-interest well understood will produce social concord; that men are mutual gainers by mutual benefits; that evil is sometimes balanced by good; that human advantages are unstable and fallacious, of uncertain duration and doubtful effect; that our true honour is not to have a great part, but to act it well; that virtue only is our own; and that happiness is always in our power.

Surely a man of no very comprehensive search may venture to say that he has heard all this before, but it was never till now recommended by such a blaze of embellishment or such sweetness of melody.

*From the Essay:

While Man exclaims, "See all things for my use!"
"See man for mine!" replies a pampered goose.

There's a well-turned and playful couplet for you.

One night at least a month ago, perhaps two, I was browsing in my 22,469 mp3 files*, looking for some classical piece to listen to before bed--something no more than fifteen minutes or so in length, and not overly intense or demanding. This album caught my eye: not the image, but the words "solo viola."

The dates on the files tell me that I acquired this album in 2007, probably for next to nothing. But I had never listened to it. I had barely heard of Max Reger, and had only a vague idea that he was an early 20th century composer. But I do like the viola quite a lot, so I gave it a try, half-expecting it to be half-listenable early 20th century hostility to the ear.

What a happy surprise! The first suite is in G minor, with four movements. The first movement is slow and somberly melodic. It immediately put me in mind of Bach's cello suites, and I have no doubt that Reger meant that it should. The second movement begins energetically and tunefully, goes to a section more like the first movement, then back to energetic. This was definitely interesting and not at all inaccessible music. I listened to the whole suite, which is only a dozen or so minutes long. I liked it, and returned to it the following night, and then again, and with every hearing I only liked  it more. 

I went on to the second and third suites, and over a period of weeks I must have listened to all of them at least half a dozen times each. As of this moment I think I like the third one, also in a minor key (E minor) best. But that may change the next time I listen to one of the others.

I don't suppose these suites measure up to Bach's. I don't know that Reger expected them to, though, as I said, he surely must have been inspired by them and intended the association. Perhaps they're not as profound and complex. But they do possess a similar atmosphere. Rather than flail around trying to describe the music, I can offer you the opportunity to hear it for yourself, thanks to YouTube.

The suites are perfect for the sort of occasion on which I first discovered them, a quiet time when you want to hear some music that's interesting and thoughtful but not dramatic and stimulating. Or long. They're like a late-night conversation with a good friend, reflective and unhurried, sometimes lively but not contentious, and not without humor.

For the first several hearings of all three suites, I listened to the recording I have, the Kobayashi one pictured above. It's a strong, even forceful, performance with very clear and close sound. Then I began to wonder about other performances, and thanks to Idagio I had a number of choices--though the suites had been unknown to me, they are well-known and well-regarded enough that there are a fair number of recordings to choose from. I liked this one best. It's more lyrical than Kobayashi's. 

The question now, obviously, is: what other music by Reger would I like? And would I like it as much as I like this? That would be nice.

* Exact count (maintained by the software, Media Center from J. River)

Today, November 22nd, is St. Cecilia's feast day (and also that other day that many of us remember). Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern observes the occasion with Dryden's "Song For St. Cecilia's Day," a wonderful poem which you should read. Read it twice, actually: once slowly and perhaps haltingly for comprehension, making sure you've straightened out the sometimes complex or roundabout syntax, then again with a natural flow. It's not so much about St. Cecilia as a brief history of the cosmos, from birth to death, in terms of music--really. That last line is wonderful.

The poem made me recall that Handel wrote an Ode For St. Cecilia's Day, which I had never heard. Well, now I have, only once, but that was enough to show me that it will be worth getting to know better. Here, plucked from YouTube's initial offerings and without knowledge of the ensemble, is the second movement, containing the first stanza of the poem. The first movement is an instrumental overture. 

I'm downright amazed at the way Joseph Bottum and Sally Thomas keep putting out these wonderful posts at the rate of five a week. The poems are always at least interesting, and the commentaries are both erudite and sensitive. As I think I said last time I mentioned the site, it's a continuing education. You should subscribe, preferably a paid subscription, but you don't have to have that in order to read it. 

I've been putting off writing this post, even more than is accounted for by my normal level of procrastination. The reason, upon examination, was pretty simple: I didn't want to write it. And the reason for that was, similarly, more than is accounted for by my normal laziness: I didn't know what I wanted to say. And the reason for that was that I don't like the book as much as I had hoped and expected and indeed wanted to do, and am reluctant to damn with faint praise the work of a novelist whom I consider to be a great one--or, I have to admit, to put in the work of sorting out the good from the bad, what works and what doesn't work, in the novel.

This is a sequel to The Wild Orchid, in that it's a separate volume, but, as with the three volumes of Kristen Lavransdatter and the four of Olav Audunsson, the two are effectively a single story, the story of the life of Paul Selmer up to a point well into middle age. I wonder why it stopped there, instead of going on until the death of the protagonist, as in the other two novels. And I speculate that perhaps Undset herself may have recognized that the story was not succeeding in the way her massive medieval stories did. 

Paul seems to have been born around 1890. The Wild Orchid ends in 1914, with him in his twenties, recently married, with a baby and a successful business, and the Great War having just broken out. The Burning Bush begins two years later. Norway is not directly involved in the war, but it's having an adverse effect on his business. His marriage, which we could clearly see was going to have problems, is having them. Through the first book he was on an intellectual and spiritual trajectory which was clearly toward the Catholic Church, and I was mildly surprised that he did not get there. Part of the reason was an intense love affair which tended to push everything else, including his career, aside--he had expected to become an academic, but had given that up in part so that he could marry the girl, only to have the relationship end abruptly. 

I say the affair was "intense," but for the most part I didn't really get that sense of it. And that points toward what is, for me, the central problem with the novel (in which I include both volumes): it never really caught fire for me, and one important reason is that Paul always seemed to me a bit of a cold fish. We we are told that he is quite passionate in that first love, but to me he generally seemed a bit detached, a bit overly rational. The reader--this one anyway--seems to be looking at the affair from the middle distance: we see what's going on, but we aren't close to it. We don't really feel what Paul feels. Or at least I didn't. The same is true of the depiction of his marriage, though there is more justification for it there, as he has more or less blundered into marriage to a young woman whom he doesn't really love. And in general his family and other relationships seem marked by a certain coolness and distance. 

He does, fairly early in the second volume, make his way into the Catholic Church. And it becomes the center of his life even as it creates problems for him, especially with his wife and other family members: one in particular, a cousin named Ruth to whom he is close, laments that he seems to be lost to the family. His faith and his determination to live it as thoroughly and honestly as he can never seriously falter; I add "seriously" because he is tested, and given to understand how far short he still falls. 

I'm afraid I'm making this sound more negative than I would like. It is an interesting story, and I did enjoy it. I never had any sensation of having to force myself to continue. The situations that arise toward the end do become quite moving. Certain facts about the events of the first volume are revealed, showing them to have been tragic instead of merely ordinary difficulties and mistakes, and the occasion of vast regret.

But I can't describe this duology or evaluate it without having those two masterpieces standing beside it and making it look comparatively small. While the central drama of Paul's life may not have the tension and impact it should and no doubt was meant to--or that either Kristen's or Olav's have--there is a great deal along the way to interest the philosophically and religiously inclined reader. Much of that involves the fairly frequent more or less abstract discussions of the Catholic faith, and the not at all abstract bearing of that faith on the crisis of modern secular liberal civilization.

And lesser in both number and significance, but still interesting, are glimpses of the way the world looked from Norway in the early 20th century. Here is Paul's wife, on hearing that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was likely to cause a war: "Pooh! They have such heaps of archdukes down there that it can't matter so very much."

[There should be a picture of the book's cover here, but Typepad's image insertion feature isn't working. You can see it at Cluny Media's site.]

---

ADDENDUM, a day later

I've just re-read the chapter in which that "occasion of vast regret" occurs, and I see that I haven't really been fair to Paul, or to the book. It is very powerful, as well as profound. Paul at that point in his life is certainly no stranger to the deepest passions.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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."

"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.

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.