corollary

Listening to:

Ella Fitzgerald singing Just squeeze me, on the album Ella Fitzgerald day dream: best of the Duke Ellington songbook. Apparently a recent American TV series about jazz reckoned that Louis Armstrong was jazz’s Bach, and Duke Ellington was its Mozart. I can’t remember who got to be Beethoven. As the account I was reading pointed out, this is a neat metaphor, but it breaks a little when one realises that Louis Armstrong was alive for about two thirds of all of jazz’s history. Bach lived a long time, but he didn’t manage to do quite that well!

A recent movie:

I saw Minority report last night. I was quite impressed. The plotting was pretty good, and the extrapolations built on top of the sci-fi background didn’t seem too ridiculous. Some of the cinematography was quite stunning too. Philip K. Dick wrote the short story that the film is based on, and it’s his title. I haven’t read the story, but in the film, the fact that minority reports are possible isn’t actually that significant (it doesn’t happen at all that we see, though the possibility that it might have does motivate the hero).

Listening to:

Beethoven, 24 Variations, WoO 65. Played by Mikhail Pletnev.

Just read:

Jane Austen, Sense and sensibility.

This is the fifth novel by Jane Austen that I've read. The others I've read are Pride and prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Of the five, I'd probably rank SS last, but it's still a pretty good read. It's just that in comparison to the others, it seems less funny, with less appealing characters. Things aren't helped by the fact that it starts so slowly, and with Marianne Dashwood behaving in such a spoilt and unappealing way. You really wish that her older sister Elinor would tell her to get a grip.

When the focus shifts from Marianne's to Elinor's story, and the two sisters are in happenin' London, things definitely pick up. It's still not hilarious, but it's much more of a page-turner, and the plot continues to twist and turn.

Yes, it's a morality tale, but even the lowest of the low, Willoughby gets a (very atmospheric) redemption scene. If anything, John and Fanny Dashwood are worse because they never come right. Instead, they are always awful: shown up at every turn as mean, ungenerous and selfish. This sounds bad, but Austen's light touch means that you laugh at them because they behave so ridiculously.

This was Austen's first published novel, and perhaps my relative dislike of it is a reflection on her subsequent improvement as her skill developed. I think I should also admit that Austen's pitch was rather queered by the Ang Lee film. Elinor might have come across as a much more interesting person if I hadn't been seeing her as Emma Thompson the whole time. She's middle-aged enough in demeanour and style without having Thompson in my head too.

Granta 76: music (contents)

This is a big fat issue of the literary magazine, with lots of good stuff in it. Particular highlights for me were:

• An excerpt from Janice Galloway's novel, Clara, about the life of Clara Schumann (née Wieck). I'd usually be pretty suspicious of this sort of thing, and demand a proper biography instead, but the two extracts I've read of this book (the other was in a recent issue of the BBC Music Magazine), have been appealing and well-written.

• An account by Alan Rusbridger (editor of the Guardian) of his attempts to learn and play the piano. He writes well about wanting to be able to play things that aren't too difficult, and just occasionally have things sound good. (The extract on the web-site is a good sample.)

• A short story by Julian Barnes about Sibelius and his long silence (a period of about 30 years when he published nothing).
• Ian Jack's biographical essay about Kathleen Ferrier.
• Richard Williams on Frank Sinatra and his hotel the Cal-Neva.
• A depressing but fascinating description of the New Orleans rap scene by Nik Cohn.

To read next:

W. Stanley Moss, Ill met by moonlight.

Listening to:

Telemann, Tafelmusik, the Solo of Production I.

Listening to:

Beethoven, sonata no. 1 in F, op. 5 no. 1 for piano and cello.

Listening to:

Stravinsky, music from the ballet, The Firebird.

Just read:

W. Stanley Moss, Ill met by moonlight.

This is Moss's diary of his WW2 mission to occupied Crete to kidnap Major General Heinrich Kreipe, one of the top military men on the island. Stanley Moss was accompanied by another British SOE operative, and a handful of Cretan accomplices. It's a short and exciting book to read, with a narrative that whizzes along, despite the fact that the heroes spent most of their time hiding in caves and gullies. The whole mission would never have succeeded without the support of the Cretan people, both those that played a direct role in the kidnapping mission, and those that supported them in hiding and avoiding German search parties. Stanley Moss makes this clear, and writes with a definite affection for Crete and its people.

Now reading:

Karen Armstrong, The battle for God.

Listening to:

Handel, sonata in D minor for recorder and continuo.

Listening to:

Mozart, Così fan tutte.

Just read:

Karen Armstrong, The battle for God.

This book describes the evolution of religious fundamentalism in the world's three great monotheistic faiths, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Armstrong starts her story in the 15th century with the unification of Spain in 1492, and the triumph there of Christianity. Armstrong's basic design thereafter is to cycle through the faiths, examining each in turn within chapters that cover successive chronological periods.

Within her coverage of Christianity, Armstrong quickly moves her focus to Protestantism in the US. For Islam, Armstrong splits her coverage in two, dealing with Egypt and Iran. For Judaism, she is not wedded to anywhere in particular until the latter sections of the book, where she turns to Israel. This structure seems reasonable, and I can't think of a better, but it means that readers need to keep all of the four parallel tracks' principal actors in their heads at once. I felt overwhelmed with detail on more than one occasion.

Nonetheless, there's plenty to value in this book. I was particularly impressed with the coverage of early Judaism (exiles in Amsterdam, Messianism in Eastern Europe and the near East), and the Iranian revolution. The latter includes a brief discussion of the difference between the Christian and Islamic conceptions of Satan. According to Armstrong, the Islamic Satan is not the very embodiment of ultimate evil as in Christianity. Instead, he is an evil figure, bound to the material world and incapable of wisdom or good, but still capable of being forgiven by God at the end of time. Thus, calling the US the Great Satan is not quite the insult that Christians might imagine. Armstrong had less that was novel to me to say about modern Jewish and Christian fundamentalism, but was still informative on many levels. For example, I don't think I'd appreciated how secular Zionism was initially, nor that there is still a strong anti-Zionist strand of Jewish fundamentalism.

Philip Pullman, Northern lights.

I found this a very enjoyable fantasy. It's a definite page-turner, with an exciting, fast-moving plot, coupled with many interesting mysteries about the nature of the world that the characters live in. It's the first part of a trilogy, and the two successive parts are on the List, so I'll get to continue with the exciting story soonish. (That "soonish" is a result of the List's rapidly shrinking size, heh.)

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed Northern Lights, but will save more considered reflection until I've finished the whole trilogy. To be going on with, here's a profile of Pullman from the Observer.

To read next:

Jason Elliot, An unexpected light: travels in Afghanistan.

Listening to:

Billie Holiday, Body and soul, on a Verve CD, Billie Holiday sings standards.

Listening to:

Diana Krall, When I look in your eyes.

Listening to:

Telemann, Tafelmusik.

Now reading:

Jason Elliot, An unexpected light: travels in Afghanistan.

Listening to:

Dvorak, string quartet in E flat major, op. 51.