August favourites: coda

That was an interesting month; hard work but enjoyable, and if you’ve read all those posts, you know a lot more about my choices and preferences than you did before (probably). It’s been quite a popular month in terms of visits, comments and likes, which is good. Thank you to everyone who visited, especially if you also commented. However, I also discovered, as I was writing, that not all my chosen subjects lend themselves easily to adequate treatment in a single paragraph or so; perhaps I will return to some topics in greater depth in the coming weeks and months.

Meantime, thank you all for reading and commenting; normal (?) service will now be resumed…

August favourites #31: Donne poem

Another cheat here: I already awarded Donne my favourite love poem award, and here he is again with a category all to himself. He deserves it for the marvellous variety of his poetry: in later life a very religious and holy man, Dean of St Paul’s and so famous for his sermons that apparently people travelled from all over Europe to hear him preach. He wrote some profoundly moving religious poetry, one of which you will encounter in another of these posts. But before his religious days, he was a man of the world writing very secular poetry: the Elegy on His Mistress Going to Bed is a wonderful poem. His philosophical meanderings in A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day take some unpicking, but for sheer cleverness I’ve always admired The Flea. Men have always been trying to persuade women to go to bed with them, with varying degrees of subtlety and success, and that will surely continue, but in Donne’s time it was the mark of any half-decent poet that he could write a poem to persuade a reluctant female. Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress is probably the most famous example of the genre but I think Donne’s poem is wittier, with the would-be lover lecturing the woman, taking her through a series of arguments, and refuting her (unheard) grounds for refusal… and basing it all on a flea, and flea-bites? How romantic! But clever, certainly.

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.

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August favourites #30: Wilfred Owen poem

This one is a bit of a cheat, if you’ve been following this series, as I already named Owen’s poem Disabled as my favourite war poem, and yet I’m about to name another, and different poem by Owen in this post. But hey, it’s my blog so I can do that. And I wrote about it last year, so I shall suggest that you have a read of that post…

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

 

Why this one? Because it shows a different side from the usual Owen, a more thoughtful and a cleverer one, in playing with what would have been a very familiar story to his contemporaries from their Sunday school Bible stories, and making a powerful message out of it.

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.

August favourites #29: SF writer

Somewhere there had to be a space for my all-time favourite science-fiction writer, Philip K Dick. I think I have managed to collect all of his published works but cannot be sure: I need to check this one day. A troubled and tormented mind, with a brilliant imagination, an astonishing range of ideas and a gift for putting the little man, the ordinary person, at the heart of so many of his novels and stories. Picking his best novel is pretty difficult: I hesitate between The Man in the High Castle, an alternative universe plot where the Axis powers won the Second World War and German and Japan occupied the United States between them; a writer in that world imagines an alternative universe in which the Allies won… do you have a headache yet? – and Ubik, which is almost impossible to summarise, except that Ubik is a magic panacaea for almost all ills. Then there is Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? which became the stunning film Blade Runner… In the end I cannot choose from all the literally dozens of novels and stories; I could make a list of the not so good ones, but that’s not what this series is about. So let’s just have Philip Dick as my favourite science fiction writer.

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.

August favourites #28: author

The idea of someone who is widely knowledgeable – a polymath? – is an old one, harder to countenance in these times of so much knowledge and data. It’s been a long time since it was possible for one person to ‘know’ everything that could be known – Isidore of Seville wrote the first encyclopaedia in the seventh century, and Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth is regarded by some as the last person who knew it all. But in our own times, I was always impressed by the Italian writer, critic and philosopher Umberto Eco, who produced novels, art criticism, philosophy, works on linguistics, and – in his own language, and as far as I know, still largely untranslated – regular newspaper columns on an incredible variety of learned and light-hearted topics. The Name of the Rose is probably my all-time favourite novel. I’d really like to have met him, and I don’t say that about a lot of my heroes.

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.

August favourites #27: memoir

I read very little biography, and even less autobiography, and I’m not sure whether this is actually one, or more of a memoir, although, since it covers so much of the writer’s adult life, it feels like an autobiography to me. There are many books detailing many writers’ experiences in the Gulag – the network of forced labour camps that covered various areas of the old Soviet Union and existed for the punishment of a wide range of crimes. From the 1930s onwards, sentences of five to ten years were common, and, depending on where the camp was, survival was often unlikely: conditions in the Arctic Circle, building the White Sea Canal, or out in the mines of the Far East were truly horrendous. Yevgenia Ginsburg’s story (Into The Whirlwind, and Within the Whirlwind) is similar to that of many. She tells it clearly, straightforwardly and in detail; it’s a very moving story, particularly in the humanity she depicts amid all the horrors. It’s long and it’s gruelling; I’ve read it twice, and it’s a tribute to human survival and decency for me. I’m not sure it’s possible for us in the West really to understand why and how such things came to happen…

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.

August favourites #26: Shakespeare sonnet

73

That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by-and-by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
    This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
    To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

I’ve always really liked this one. Even in my younger years, I could see how the poet had captured the sense of regret and sadness about the inevitability of growing older – one of the tropes of poetry I know, but done better by some than others – and now that I’m moving on in years, it speaks to my condition more clearly still.

In the first quatrain, the developed image is a comparison of the poet with autumn, in the second twilight moving into nightfall, and in the third a fire gradually burning out. All three are powerful images of a gradual yet inevitable ending; all three are addressed to the loved one, who the poet imagines having feelings that are stronger because the object of love will soon be gone. Comforting, sad, predictable in a sense but no less moving because of that.

And when you look at the actual words, the pictures themselves, they are especially effective: you can see the autumn leaves gradually falling, picture the ruins – actually of the monasteries trashed by Henry VIII’s henchmen a few years before – and the absence of birdsong. Night is pictured as a little death, and a foreshadowing of it, and then consider the complex image of the fire, nourishing at the same time as it inevitably consumes and hastens its end…

Although I feel there are poets who are ‘better’ than Shakespeare as a poet, and sometimes his sonnets feel a trifle hackneyed when you casually flick through 154 of them, to attain such a level of mastery consistently is a supreme achievement.

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.

August favourites #25: city

I’ve explored many cities in my time on the planet, and my favourite is definitely Gdansk, in Poland. I was first taken there on my first trip to Poland as a teenager, in the old days of people’s power. It was a beautiful city then, reborn from the ruins of the Second World War, the city which – as Danzig then, a Free City – was the ostensible cause of that war, as Hitler wanted to re-attach is to his reich. A year or so later I encountered it in Gunter Grass’ stunning novel The Tin Drum, which evokes the city in the interwar years as the Nazi threat grew, through a raft of Polish, German, Jewish and Kashubian characters; he did for that city what James Joyce did for Dublin in Ulysses. I’ve been back there several times since that first trip, explored its churches, mediaeval buildings, streets and wonderful waterfront. It even has a Shakespeare Theatre and a Shakespeare festival. What more could an English teacher want?

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.

August favourites #24: French writer

I’m going for a slightly unusual choice here, a writer who is of Lebanese origin, but writes in French and is a member of the Academie Française, Amin Maalouf, whose work I have long enjoyed and admired. With my obsession with the Silk Road, I could not resist a novel called Samarcand, which links Omar Khayyam, Arab astronomy and also the famous poem, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and was then hooked. But my favourite books of his are those set in the Renaissance world, such as Leo the African, which is an imagined account of the life of the real Arab traveller Leo Africanus, expelled from Spain as a child at the time of the Reconquista, captured by Christian pirates and employed by the Pope as a traveller and geographer, whose Description of Africa remained one of the most detailed and trusted accounts of that continent for many years. And then there was Baldassare’s Travels, in search of a mysterious lost book in the seventeenth century, and there’s another which goes back to very early times and tells the story of Mani, a prophet, seer and philosopher who came into conflict with established religion and paid for it with his life, at some time in the second or third century, as I remember.

From his position in one of the more conflict-ridden societies of the current Middle East, Maalouf also has interesting perspectives to offer on current affairs; Les Identités Meurtrieres I have found very insightful into what brings peoples, races and nations into conflict. Maalouf is clearly much better known in the francophone world than ours, and that is our loss.

August favourites #23: reference book

One thing about Bach’s church cantatas is that they are in German; another is that they are full of religious references. Although I can speak German after a fashion, my command of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century theological German is quite limited. Reference books are needed, although the internet is now an absolute gold-mine of interpretations and translations. The first purchase I ever made from Amazon.com, in the days before they took over the world, was made with the help of a colleague who had a US account and could get a book delivered to the UK: a huge tome with interlinear texts and translations, rather after the fashion of a Latin crib from my school years, so that you could follow the German, see it parsed underneath and then read a passable translation of the text. And alongside are all the necessary scriptural passages to go with each cantata. Melvyn Unger’s Handbook to Bach’s Sacred Cantata Texts – clearly a labour of love – is always open next to me when I’m listening seriously.

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.