Practical Criticism the Shane MacGowan Way

 Reading an obituary of the Pogues front man Shane MacGowan, who despite everything made it to the age of 65, I learned much of interest – English prep school, followed by Westminster! Who knew? – but what most struck me was the story, told by a former girlfriend, that Shane lost several of his front teeth attempting to eat The Beach Boys Greatest Hits, Volume 3. I'd like to think this was an act of truly practical criticism – that particular LP is not regarded as much of an addition to the Beach Boys oeuvre, and the record company only released it to make up for disappointing sales of the previous album, Friends. However, MacGowan was under the influence of LSD at the time, and that might be sufficient explanation. 
 Eating as practical criticism, though, surely has some possibilities – eating books (or at least taking a few bites) being the obvious example. I can't find, or call to mind, a single case of this happening (anyone?), but I rather wish I'd thought of it in my student days, when it might have enlivened a dreary tutorial. In my library days, I did have a colleague who in meetings had a habit of munching on the minutes (before his leveraged retirement). There are a couple of cases of bibliophagy in the Bible – one, involving a scroll rather than a codex, is in Ezekiel, the other in Revelations, where an angel tells John to eat a 'little book', assuring him that 'it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey' (and so it proved).
  Anyway, I'm looking forward to hearing Fairy Tale of New York – almost the only secular Xmas song that doesn't set my teeth on edge – even more often than usual this Christmas. 

'Not to be here, Not to be anywhere'

 On this day in 1977, Philip Larkin signed off on 'Aubade', reckoned by many (including Frank Wilson Of Books Inq)  to be his last great poem. He had worked on it for some while, and completed it after the death of his mother, probably the most significant woman in his life. 'Aubade' is certainly his bleakest and most direct expression of the timor mortis that haunts so much of his verse, and Larkin himself described it, aptly enough, as his 'in-a-funk-about-death' poem. His particular, horribly acute fear is simply of extinction, of ceasing to exist. As Larkin acknowledges, this is not a rational fear – 'No rational being can fear a thing it will not feel' – but that doesn't make the terror any less real. While some of us might find 'the anaesthetic from which none come round' quite a comforting notion, it clearly scares the living daylights out of Larkin – 'Not to be here, Not to be anywhere'. There is, of course, more to this poem than the poet's death funk: it is exquisitely wrought and framed to perfection, and it ends on one of Larkin's most beautiful stanzas...

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   

Till then I see what’s really always there:   

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   

Making all thought impossible but how   

And where and when I shall myself die.   

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   

—The good not done, the love not given, time   

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because   

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   

That slows each impulse down to indecision.   

Most things may never happen: this one will,   

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without   

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

More Music

 For some reason – I hope simply the sublime beauty of the music – my post of Wilhelm Kempff playing the slow movement of the Hammerklavier – attracted more views than anything I've put up in recent times. So I'll try another piece of sublime music, which I just caught on Radio 3. It's Benjamin Appl singing Schubert's 'Im Abendrot' in an orchestral arrangement by Max Reger. Does it top Fischer-Dieskau or Hans Hotter with Gerald Moore at the piano? Does it matter? It is one of Schubert's most beautiful songs, and that is surely enough.
Unfortunately I cannot lift this version from YouTube, but this link should take you there...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ7MpUNb92s

Under the Lights

 Johnson is sitting, brooding and unimpressed, under his Christmas lights again, and this year I was there to see them being turned on, as our granddaughter was singing carols with her school before the big switch-on. As usual, the sight and sound of children singing the Christmas favourites (especially Little Town of Bethlehem, Silent Night and, yes, Away in a Manger) filled my eyes with tears and my heart with a familiar potent cocktail of love and memories and thankfulness. I managed to maintain my composure, but there will be more to draw the tears and challenge my composure, with Advent a week away... Christmas is for me the most emotionally affecting, and perhaps the most profoundly meaningful, time of the liturgical year. (Just to be clear, I mean Christmas, not Xmas, the consumerist horror show that unfortunately coincides with it.)

Meanwhile, I have seen my first snowdrop of the year – of next year, rather (or my last of this year?). This was on Friday, so it would have been the 24th of November, which is ridiculous – especially as I'd seen a Red Admiral, full of vigour, only the day before. This week's cold snap will send the last butterflies into hiding, but won't trouble that precocious snowdrop – and should bring the redwings flying in with it. This late November/ early December cold snap seems to be the one sure thing about the British weather: it happens just about every year, regardless of climate change, global warming or whatever, even if the ensuing winter is mild – but no one seems to have noticed.

 

'The most magnificent monologue'

 Born on this day in 1895 was the German pianist Wilhelm Kempff, one of the great performers of Beethoven and Schubert. Here he is playing the slow movement, Adagio Sostenuto, from Beethoven's monumental Hammerklavier sonata, which Kempff described as 'the most magnificent monologue Beethoven ever wrote'. When he was in Finland, Sibelius asked him to play this movement, and when he had finished Sibelius said, 'You did not play that as a pianist, but rather as a human being.' It is a movement of profound, ethereal beauty. Enjoy...

'Only the next room of the dream'

 In 1961 there was a bit of a scandal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when three of their most prized Etruscan antiquities turned out to be modern fakes. Among them was a fearsome eight-foot-high figure of a warrior (whose armour did not extend to his genitals) that was one of the Met's most popular and striking exhibits. Its exposure as a forgery inspired Howard Nemerov to write this lament: 

To Clio, Muse of History

One more casualty,
One more screen memory penetrated at last
To be destroyed in the endless anamnesis
Always progressing, never arriving at a cure.
My childhood in the glare of that giant form
Corrupts with history, for I too fought in the War.

He, great male beauty
That stood for the sexual thrust of power,
His target eyes inviting the universal victim
To fatal seduction, the crested and greaved 
Survivor long after shield and sword are dust,
Has now become another lie about our life.

Smash the idol, of course.
Bury the pieces deep as the interest of truth
Requires. And you may in time compose the future
Smoothly without him, though it is too late
To disinfect the past of his huge effigy
By any further imposition of your hands.

But tell us no more
Enchantments, Clio. History has given
And taken away; murders become memories,
And memories become the beautiful obligations: 
As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping,
The interpretation is only the next room of the dream.

For I remember how
We children stared, learning from him
Unspeakable things about war that weren't in the books;
And how the Museum store offered for sale
His photographic reproductions in full colour
With the ancient genitals blacked out. 

[I found this in The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems, published in the UK by Rapp & Whiting. A volume in the Poetry USA Series, it looks exactly like a Grove Press Evergreen Original. I don't think I've come across any of this series before.]

Elagabalus Gets Her Pronouns

 I see that the North Hertfordshire Museum has decided, on advice from the historical experts of (ahem) Stonewall and the LGBT wing of Unison, that the emperor Elagabalus was 'transgender' and will be referred to by his 'preferred pronouns' – she, her, etc. – in the museum's extensive display of Elagabalus-related material, i.e. one silver denarius. 
  Elagabalus has come down to posterity as one of the most thoroughly depraved and useless of all the Roman emperors, but as he only ruled for four years, did little of much note, and was assassinated at the age of 18, there really isn't much to go on. The historians, notably Cassius Dio and Herodian, piled in on Elagabalus in grand style, accusing him of all the effeminate depravity to be expected of a product of 'the soft luxury of Asia' (Elagabalus was of Syrian origin), but, like most Roman historians, they were seriously biased and unreliable. This, however, did not stop Gibbon from taking their word for it – and he also drew on the even more unreliable Historia Augusta in forming his damning assessment of Elagabalus. ‘It may seem probable,' he writes, 'that the vices and follies of Elagabalus have been adorned by fancy and blackened by prejudice. Yet, confining ourselves to the public scenes displayed before the Roman people, and attested by grave and contemporary historians, their inexpressible infamy surpasses that of any other age or country.' Well, there you go.
  What is interesting (in a depressing mind of way) about this is that it illustrates how a historical villain can be transformed into a hero/victim (the terms are all but interchangeable) in today's all-embracing binary system of Oppressor/Oppressed. Elagabalus, by being assigned to a gender category unknown to the Romans, becomes one of the Oppressed, is given a protected status, and rewarded with his – sorry, her – preferred pronouns. I'm sure he/she would be very grateful.