Quart into a pint pot

In Search of Beethoven, seen on hard seats in Ross-on-Wye parish church hall, lasts 2 hr 19 min, and covers LvB’s life and fifty of his major works. So, typically, four bars of the Spring Sonata fades to voiceover. But good stuff from the pianists.

Ronald Brautigan. (1) Plays two bars of dense complexity LvB showed to teacher Haydn. “I can’t play that, I just can’t play that.”
(2) “Why is Für Elise so popular?” Plays first line. “It’s not one of his best pieces. You play it two or three times and it gets irritating.”
Emmanuel Ax. (1) “Beethoven is very good at repeating single notes.” Plays same note six times and, lo! the first movement of the Fourth Concerto is triggered in your mind.
(2) Plays a complicated descending cadenza from a middle sonata. “But that wasn’t how Beethoven marked the fingering. It was supposed to be played by the right hand alone. No pianist can do that. Why did he write it that way? Because he could play it with one hand and to get up the noses of those who couldn’t.”
Paul Lewis. Detail in late sonata, possibly Hammerklavier. “Here’s a 27-note (ie, quite short) passage. You might be tempted to play it as a phrase.” Does so; sounds lovely. “But no. Look here on the score. A four-note phrase within those 27 notes.” Plays it; quite different. “It’s meant to hint at fatigue. Very hard to play.”

Barrett Bonden. The movie ends with the Grosse Fuge string quartet. This demanding but deeply satisfying work was the seventh or eighth LP I ever bought. As I played it my brother (a Charlie Parker fan) sat on the stairs and listened. “What was that?” he asked, astonished, afterwards

Novel progress 10/3/10. Ch. 16: 5525 words. Chs. 1 - 15: 67,628 words. Comments: Hatch emerges.

The computer bites back

I went slightly bonkers when computers were introduced (for word processing then for DTP) at my magazine. The benefits were such it is clear I rhapsodised too much about them chez Bonden. Mrs BB avoided the infection and only agreed to receive a laptop some fifteen years later. In the intervening two years she has used it regularly but conservatively.

Those who approve of poetic justice will enjoy hearing the gift has rebounded on me. Take birthday presents. Given our age neither of us hangs about once a need is identified; we go ahead and buy. Marking Mrs BB’s birthday, now only days away, has always been difficult since Hereford is not Regent Street. But the Internet gave me an edge. Not now though. Mrs BB forestalls me by impulse-buying on her own behalf.

Second. Should the laptop go on holiday to the Languedoc villa in June? No, we all agreed; we’ll never be off the damn thing. But time after time last year facts – maddening in their immediacy – needed to be verified, checked or investigated. When my desktop was the only available computer the question didn’t arise. This year the insidious Hewlett Packard may keep me out of the pool.

SONGS OF PRAISE poetry primer
A man that looks on glass/On it may stay his eye
Or if he pleases through it pass/And then the heaven espy.
The exploding metaphor

All may of Thee partake/Nothing could be so mean
Which with this tincture "for thy sake"/Would not grow bright and clean.
Whence came the quotes?

Christian, up and smite them/Counting gain not loss.
Muscular accountancy

Herod then with fear was filled;/“A prince,” he said, “in Jewry!”
All the little boys he killed/At Bethlem (sic) in his fury.
Steady hand on the bathos tiller

Novel progress 6/3/10. Ch. 16: 3422 words. Chs. 1 - 15: 67,628 words. Comments: Hatch starts earning his crust.

All hail Dawkins, Descartes and that lot

This is an attempt to match the more conversational style that Plutarch and Lucy use so well: a structure based on sentences rather than "poetic" clumps of words. Since this approach is still alien I fear I end up with lines that appear tongue-in-cheek. The sonnet, now slightly modified, first appeared on The Crow's blog and is in response to a link where science was being celebrated. Better still it manages to squeak through here by making a distant obeisance to my "mission statement" at the top of the page.

Sonnet – Lead kindly light
I sigh, I pluck the lute, I turn to Keats
The world, my mistress, is too grand for me.
Her essence is a series of defeats
For my blunt intellectuality.
I ache with lust and would grasp more of her
If I could understand her secrecy
But she is power and charm and gold and myrrh
Bound in the maths of atomicity.
I may not love her but at least I flirt
With tiny glimpses of her gorgeousness
The lens of science renders me alert
To here and there within her boundlessness
I’m pandered to by Maxwell, Gauss and Bohr
Whose flashes lit the dark I now abhor.

NOTES:
(1) Atomicity is a made-up word.
(2) Pander has a darker meaning.

Novel progress 1/3/10. Ch. 16: 2507 words. Chs. 1 - 15: 67,628 words. Comments: Hatch nonplusses Hester.

They never told me this

Old age brings so many predictable changes that much of the experience becomes a cliché. That’s an unexpected change. There are others.

(1) Death. I find myself pondering the form it will take rather than simply averting my eyes. That may change. Question: will dying be a test of atheism?
(2) Clumsiness. But of a special kind. I pick my coffee-mug from the draining rack to dry it. There is a natural trajectory for this which I have never needed to consider. Now, once in fifty times, the mug glances against the mixer-tap spout. The mug has become precious and a bolt of fear passes through my chest.
(3) Irritation. Often related to (2). I place the newspaper half on, half off the coffee table. It slides on to the floor. My brief anger is disproportionate.
(4) Deafness 1. This is predictable and in any case limited to situations with high background levels (for the techies: a poor signal-to-noise ratio). I find I don’t care.
(5) Deafness 2. The sound tracks on American DVDs are blurred: a technical failing quite separate from accent and/or directorial preferences for inarticulacy. Often this turns out to be unimportant.
(6) Keyboard skills. Defects here could be a precursor to Alzheimer. Whole words, sometimes phrases, are missed out as my mind leaps ahead of my fingers. A lifetime’s devotion to revision and improvement solves this for the moment.
(7) Car driving. As far I can tell the skill has not diminished. What has changed is a never-absent fear that it might.
(8) End-of-the-day relaxation. Here the change is one of degree. What was once a mere cessation of labour has turned into sheer voluptuousness, a sensory wallow.
(9) Booze. Ability to withstand hangovers now varies widely.
(10) Vocabulary. Still highish but, as with (7), accompanied by anticipation of the first signs that is on the way down.

Novel progress 26/2/10. Ch. 16: 1447 words. Chs. 1 - 15: 67,628 words. Comments: Hatch opens up like a flower.

Bend the knee to Neil

No picture with this post, but that’s intentional. When the BBC said The History of the World in 100 Objects would be on radio, knee-jerk critics scoffed. “You gotta have telly,” they said. But with the magnificent Neil MacGregor in charge you don’t need pictures. Today it was the Oxus chariot, a model which shows how bigwigs got around the Persian empire, 2500 years ago, in “the Ferrari or Porsche” of its day. Woven into the fifteen-minute broadcast were details of the emperor Cyrus’s enlightened rule (Iran could use him now) and the empire’s astonishing multi-culturalism.

But then both Mrs BB and I believe MacGregor, director of the British Museum, can walk on water. For me he did the impossible. His TV series, Seeing Salvation, drew me into a form of painting (Christian art) I’d regarded as formal, sterile and alien. He’s been offered a knighthood and turned it down, has been approached by New York and turned them down. The Times Online refers to him as Saint Neil but that seriously under-rates him.

NEW SERIES
Hymns Ancient & Modern poetry primer

Who so beset him round/With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound/His strength the more is
The opportunistic rhyme.

Solid joys and lasting pleasures/None but Zion’s children know.
The inept adjective (two of them).

The holly bears a blossom as white as lily flower
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ…
The non-sequitur.

There is a green hill faraway/Without a city wall
The planning application.

With salvation's walls surrounded,
Thou may'st smile at all thy foes.
Is that all?

Novel progress 22/2/10. Ch. 16: 0 words. Chs. 1 - 15: 67,628 words. Comments: Hatch in Arcadia.

Antipathy's more interesting

Sonnet – Could be a pastiche
Don’t tell me of your loves but of your hates,
For love contains such blurry variants
As duty, honour, civilised dictates,
Self-sacrifice, denial, diligence.
Anathema can shine a caring light
Upon the limits of your honesty,
Love goes unquestioned, while your latest spite
Is tested for its authenticity.
Your dislikes tell me most, but note this catch,
I need conciseness, wit and evidence;
A critic lacking surgical despatch
Deserves the rebound of incompetence.
Hate me but do it with sufficient art
And like as not I’ll suffer Cupid’s dart.

RECYCLING - THE MODERN TENDENCY On Wednesday we saw Freddy Kempf play Bach's Goldberg Variations. Hatch, like many engineers, imagines he's a Bach fan. The woman he's dining with thinks his is a shallow attachment:
“Get the complete (Goldberg Variations) and listen to the whole eighty minutes. Listen to the turbulence and the tenderness. Sometimes, it’s more like an opera than a keyboard work. You’ll forget all about that symmetry rubbish; what you’ll remember is the passion.”

Novel progress 21/2/10. Ch. 15: 4936 words (finished but not edited). Chs. 1 - 14: 63,137 words. Comments: Hatch in Arcadia.

A must for those who share beds

Routine aids retirement – not just because imagination is at a low ebb (though it is) but because it reduces the quotidian burden: putting on socks, cleaning teeth, checking for vital signs, deciding what to do if vital signs aren’t apparent. Routine is vital in moving from the temptations of the grave to an upright state, underpants in place, ready to face another day. Getting up, in fact.

Technology also plays a part. I rise first and enter the en suite to perform what passes for my ablutions during which I tell myself that old age justifies diminishing standards of hygiene. I note from the dictionary ablution includes the washing of sacred vessels but here this practice has fallen into desuetude. When I re-emerge Mrs BB leaves her place beneath the phospherescent glare of the digital clock that so discombobulated Lucy and we immediately make the bed.

Any spouse who fails to share this ritual is a logistical heretic. Making the bed as a couple takes about 38 seconds, as a singleton it can take five minutes and generates much irritation. Technology contributes in the form of a fitted bottom sheet. Does anyone use unfitted ones? Pure whimsy is the only possible reason. I calculate we have made the bed as a couple 18,185 times and can be considered experts

A duvet would speed things up and we have often used one in hotels. But if we became used to a duvet would we fight for covering? As it is sheets, cellular blankets and coverlet are so generously proportioned this is not necessary. The upholstered bed-head was custom made since furniture shops seem to favour wrought-iron structures similar to farm gates.

Novel progress 18/2/10. Ch. 15: 2346 words. Chs. 1 - 14: 63,137 words. Comments: Hatch dines out but there's more on the menu than he expected.

Technology in the salon

Some months ago I mentioned I faced a passage in the novel where my joint leading character, a 42-year-old physicist turned successful businesswoman, felt the need to change her conservative appearance. I had a generous response including detailed suggestions from Eleanor. Some advice has been adopted and is spread out untidily in the MS. However the hair styling changes come in a comparatively compact passage published here, as a new-shorn lamb, in gratitude for the interest shown,

There remained her hair, easily the most radical change and the least expected. Having experimented with henna, as instructed, and formed a preference for Persian Copper she bit the bullet when picking up Nick from the nursery and asked assorted mothers to recommend Sevenoaks’ best salon. The consensus was for Hair Lines (“shockingly expensive”).

She had imagined something opulent and comforting and got neither. The atmosphere was closer to a pop concert: over-amplified guitars and young women, girls rather, strangely dressed and strangely decorated.

Her own stylist, Kylie, had black hair in broken-glass spikes and was pierced with studs, one apparently penetrating the skull above her left eye. Clare said, “You come well regarded. But can you do anything for me?”

Kylie screamed with laughter revealing a ball of chewing gum nesting on her tongue. “Don’t fancy my spikes, eh? Look, I can style anyone. What did you have in mind?”

Clare explained her henna experiments and was surprised at Kylie’s attentiveness and the way she ran fingers speculatively through her hair. She concluded: “It seemed a suitable colour. Perhaps you could take it from there.”

Kylie said nothing and continued to feel out the contours. Finally she said, “I could do better than that.”

“But would it be… extreme?”

“Nah, not that. See, you think you’ve got a thin face don’t you. Well it’s really oval. Quite pretty once it’s freed up. But I need to streak a mix of colours - ” She raised her hand to forestall Clare’s look of alarm. “ - nothing strong, just subtle highlights. Then I want a line across, to take away the dull old balance. Tell you what: if you don’t like it pay me a pony and no tip. But you’ll like it.”

Trying to remember whether a pony was twenty-five or fifty pounds Clare continued to be struck by Kylie’s confidence, her topological analysis and the way she conveyed – mainly by hand movements – what she intended to do while simultaneously half-proving it to be desirable.

And here it was, a transformation that Clare had covertly inspected many times during the past few days. Multicoloured highlights, running from roots to tips, varying from light brown to dark gold in a narrow spectrum like trapped sedimentary layers in an exposed cliff. A sauce where cream and chili oil had been added and gently stirred, just once. Colours as movement.

But it was a lock of hair taken diagonally across her forehead towards her right ear that disturbed “the dull old balance” and revealed an ellipse rather than a cylinder. Changed a face that was merely adult into an interesting secret.

Habit said it wasn’t her. Reflection told her she was no judge of her own looks. She got out of the Jaguar, facing the sleek yet heartless entrance to Garston’s headquarters. Modernism for modernism’s sake. She was keen to try out the new carapace.

Novel progress 14/2/10. Ch. 15: 617 words. Chs. 1 - 14: 63,137 words. Comments: Hatch, still waiting.