Bit of live blogging..

Dare I say it, but I think the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has a playing style not dissimilar to the Berlin Philharmonic. It's the suppleness of phrasing; the rubato from within the note, rather than between notes; brass that manages to project without blaring; the extreme dynamic range. I'm listening to the Prelude to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. The dynamic range that Barenboim made the strings travel on the first notes. Liszt's Les Preludes was no less impressive, although I think any problems lie with the piece itself: Liszt's orchestral writing has always seemed to me to be too mannered, possessing none of the expressive authenticity of his piano works. Still, you can't help but appreciate the dramatic structure of the work, and whatever programme this tone programme was meant to project did so in fairly vividly coloured writing. Now, I suppose I'd better stop this live blogging and return to the actual concert!

UPDATE: that line in the cellos was UNEARTHLY. More like a quivering of the earth. Some of that incredible playing was actually to be found in the Liszt. Impressively vivid colouring.

FURTHER UPDATE: I daren't turn the volume up during Liebestod. I've a feeling the climax will be unbearable.

What a dip for the entire orchestra that was! But is it not going too fast?

There's a resigned rather than end-of-days feeling to this performance. This is fine; it's one reading amongst many possible others. Perhaps I've not connected because of this live blogging, I don't know. Final chord..

Ravishing playing. There's a stately atmosphere to this event. Dignified. They were making comparisons before between this orchestra and the Simon Bolivar in terms of their founding ethos. I can't imagine this one donning tracksuits for the encore. Mustn't mention politics. Football would bring this in (tracksuits evoke this, of course). Zoe (one of the presenters) made a facile comment on the intonation of the woodwind section. No need. I'd rather have off-kilter intonation than the kind of performance the BBC Scottish Symphony gave last week of the Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which was awful: dour, dull as dishwater, merely going through the motions. You shouldn't do that with any music, least of all The Rite.

OH NO: they're talking about Wagner's anti-Semitism! Zoe gets all diplomatic with a comment on music overcoming prejudice and seeking out 'higher truths'.

I've always found the references to Said, the other founder of the orchestra alongside Barenboim, very sad. Protracted mourning.

Late night Sunday

Two things to be had from those micro-interviews that fill Channel Four ad breaks come from writers Geoff Dyer and Zoe Heller. Dyer observes how being a writer ultimately makes him unemployable in the jobs he did before he was a writer. Heller, on the other hand, has something to say about craft, from a piece of advice from her mother: namely, that reading unadjectival Economist editorials can do good things for the daughter's prose standards. Not that I have it in for adjectival prose, I will certainly be checking out one example this week! And it is unfortunate for me that Dyer's advice holds true in my example: for at the age of thirty (and, it feels, rapidly surging onwards but not necessarily upwards) and after five years of a PhD, the submission of my CV to a potential employer is something to be feared.

Forty years and I have learnt nothing useful, about the people, factories, politics and personalities of Hackney. The name has declined to a brand identity. A chart-topper: worst services, best crime, dump of dumps. A map that is a boast on a public signboard, a borough outline like a parody of England. My ignorance of the area in which I have made my life, watched my children grow up, is shameful. I've walked over much of it, on a daily basis, taken thousands of photographs, kept an 8mm film diary for seven years; what does it amount to? Strategies for avoiding engagement, elective amnesia, dream-paths that keep me submerged in the dream.

Iain Sinclair Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, p.31.

The healthcare whirlwind

Is it the case that those against Obama's healthcare reforms are protecting the interests of their families? If so, then why do they not find the lack of health insurance for 43-5 millions Americans repulsive? Do they not have families too? (Familiesfamiliesfamilies.) As for criticising the NHS on the basis that it's not perfect, well what is perfect? Obviously private health care providers never falter.

At the end of the day those opposed to Obama's reforms are protecting special interests. When the female Joe the Plumber piped up at a town hall meeting to invoke that symbol of all that is evil and threatening (Russia), you begin to understand that many Americans are so afraid of socialism because they lack any knowledge about its central tenets; but actually more than anything they've been fed to the hilt on free market capitalism to such an extent that they're incapable of recognising how they're being shafted by the very private interests they think it's part of their moral crusade to defend. How can you speak of the dissolution of individual rights in the context of a growing socialism when all that capitalism seeks to protect is profit, pure and simple?

One of the most irritating reactionaries of the Observer's commentators, Karol Sikora, pipes up today to defend himself against being duped by an American film crew that asked his expert opinion on the NHS and which was subsequently used in one of those hyperbolic, woefully misleading adverts against healthcare reform. Most troubling of all is his comment on the imbalance between those who generate tax and those who need and use the NHS. "Most healthcare costs", he argues, "are spent on retired people, who pay little tax. So the younger working population inevitably have to pay more tax to subsidise the new gerontocracy. We could easily see the NHS budget double over the next decade if we don't do something now. That could be 30p in the pound more in tax for all of us - not just the rich." What I found despicable about these comments was the way in which he invites the younger working population to consider their own money before other people - those in need and who deserve our care and attention. In one small step, the reason for the very existence of the NHS in particular and socialism in general is swept aside on the question of MONEY. And since Sikora is not an economist, why should we believe his economic reasoning? I would rather pay more tax if it meant protecting the 'gerontocracy', as Sikora contemptuously describes it, than paying increasing amount of insurance costs that ultimately benefit private interests. In other words, I do not want the interests of the many to shift towards the interests of the few. In short, the NHS should stay put; the government needs to think long and hard about maintaining it without asking the taxpayer to foot the bill in an unreasonable way.

So when Palinites quiver before the thought of 'death panels' and the government 'pulling the plug on grandma', they should think twice about resisting Obama's healthcare reforms. Commentary by the likes of Sikora only goes to show how quick it is that the needs of a vulnerable group of people can be swept aside when the question of capital is raised.

A Sebald Friday

The August edition of New Directions' e-newsletter mentions Sebald a number of times. New Directions is Sebald's American publishers, so it's not surprising that he should appear every now and then.

Robert Walser's The Tanners is published by them this month in a new translation by Susan Bernofsky, who has just won the 2009 Looren Translation Grant. The Tanners is also, remarkably for a writer as rarefied as Walser, Time Out New York's Read for Summer 2009. And if all this wasn't enough to persuade you to buy this book, the introduction is an essay by Sebald, translated by his former UEA colleague Jo Catling. And as for the 2009 Looren Translation Grant:

[Bernosfky] will spend November at the Looren Translation House in Wernetshausen, Switzerland. She is hard at work on our next Robert Walser project, The Microtexts, a lavishly illustrated, joint publication with the Christine Burgin Gallery.

Of interest to all Sebald fans in reading groups are the reading guides New Directions is offering for free as a service to its community of dedicated readers. You can access them here. They have written notes for The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. Also of note is the fact that the latter text features on a list of essential postmodern reads, drawn up by Carolyn Kellogs of the LA Times. Unsurprisingly, Sebald sits quite comfortably next to Borges and Bolaño. Kellogs' list is annotated, so it's definitely worth checking out for its notes on the perennial debate of all things postmodern and whatnot.

An ancillary though essential item from New Directions' newsletter is its announcement that the Guardian has published a new short story by the Hungarian master of eccentricity, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, whose The Melancholy of Resistance Sebald admired; a quotation from Sebald features on the back cover of the UK edition of that work. Something that I can't imagine Sebald would ever have endorsed, though, is an author's Facebook page. Laszlo Krasznahorkai has his own here, which if you're a fan - of his and of Facebook - you can of course join! Or visit the author's website here.

Note for 'A list'

Where are those diacritical markers?

A list

Max Ernst
Andre Breton
Walter Benjamin
Louis Aragon
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer
Theodor Adorno
Edgar Allan Poe
Charles Baudelaire
Joseph Brodsky
Nadja
Vladimir Nabokov
Anhalter Bahnhof
Passage de l'Opera
A dovecote
Fulguration
Frottage

Fragile concatenations

A lofty word, I know, but it's one that best describes this holding together of loose strands that currently constitutes the condition of whatever it is I'm working on.

Something written down

All I want to do is write a well-structured paper. I have images in my head of what such a paper should look like, with its segments of equal length, cogently argued and sharply entitled; and I see these qualities in the work of others, admiring it at length, converting a potentially dry though eloquently articulated style into something like an art object, marveling at its succinct formulations. But alas, it somehow lies outside my grasp.

Now this is blogging as emotional riffing - an 'emo-riff', if you like. Just let it all pour out. If I imagine myself setting down to write such a paper, I think about how I would first write up a list of notes, which would be tantamount to an argument plan, I suppose. But once I think about this, I fall at even this first hurdle. Fear of commitment? Once it's down, it's down. I've always believed that once it's set in stone there's no turning back. A ridiculous notion, I know, but there it is. There is substantial resistance in me to finishing my work. Interventions from outside or resistances from within - they're all the same.

A thought on the NHS

The American right have some cheek attacking Britain's NHS system. Do they not see the irony of what they say? (Being of/on the right, of course they don't, but that's no excuse.)

All you would have to do is get such horrible people to meet all those Britons who have been given years and years of life through expert operations by NHS surgeons and support staff; or those people who have made repeat visits to the hospital for some reason or other in a single year and have not paid a premium for this care; or those people who receive some of the best specialist care in Europe because the hospital happens to be a research hospital on their doorstep, which is the case for a fair number of places in communities up and down the country. Mistakes happen, things go wrong - is this not the unfortunate business of health care? Do they mean to tell us that private health care never makes mistakes, is never negligent, or manages to protect as many millions of people as Britain's NHS does on limited resources but asking NOTHING in return from their patients?

Obama, you have our support for your magnificent health care plans.

A little reminder

You may visit this page and see that I haven't updated since yesterday. Scroll down for my thoughts on the demise of the Observer. I wrote this on Sunday evening but only got round to editing it last night; but it insists on retaining the date of initial composition, rather than the date when I clicked the magic 'publish' icon.

British transport is only ever worth a rant

Let me tell you that there is so much to the Bring Back British Rail campaign, because after checking Virgin's ticket prices over the past few days, they do not represent value for money.

It's truly sickening. For a start, those Pendolino trains aren't all that: they're claustrophobic, lacking in windows, cramped - not progress. They might work better for the driver, but they don't for the passenger. And the times they promise for services between London and Britain's major cities are vain hopes anyway, because they routinely turn up late and are almost certainly delayed. Value for money they ain't.

The system is set up to alienate those on lower or poor incomes. Virgin makes itself available to people with money. There are cheap tickets, but they ruin your trip to London because they are only available at times which make going out for dinner or going to the theatre or strolling around in daylight when you arrive almost impossible. You lose a day, basically, because you travel and arrive late. So who can tell me that the system is set up for people wishing to part with their well-earned cash on the ever-exorbitant capital?

That's if you intend to travel to London. Travelling to other cities in the north isn't cheap, either, though at least this lets Virgin off because most of the routes are run by other companies. These other routes run by other companies have miserable trains with poor lighting and dirty seating. If you want to travel to Sheffield from Liverpool, by the way, that'll be £29. I'll eat my wage packet if you can get a cheaper ticket in advance. That's a WHOLE DAY'S PAY for someone on an income on, around, or a little above the minimum wage.

What hope do we have? We sit on these trains knowing that the only ones benefitting from our journey are the shareholders of these companies, who almost certainly don't sit on the trains themselves but who without a shadow of a doubt SIT PRETTY.

DUCK FOR COVER!

Observing the situation

Out of the blue, forecasts of the end of The Observer are being made. This is not good news. I reckon it spells disaster for the British Sunday media. The loss of The Observer will leave a media-sized chasm, in addition to the lamentable situation that thousands of loyal and passionate readers will suffer on having no other paper to turn to in its absence for anything like the ethos and quality. No, I'm not being uncritical; it's the truth. Here's what will be left if the worst happens and it goes to the wall:

The Sunday Telegraph
Gothic in attitude as well as typeface, this moribund paper has proved through the weeks and weeks of yet another boring expose on the expenses scandal that it latches on to old forms of reporting but lacks the intellectual weight of the Guardian, which mopped up the mess by forwarding a substantial debate on constitutional reform: 'A New Politics'. I blame the Telegraph for the mess that British politics is in. They might say it was in the public interest to expose the abuse of expenses by MPs, but by doing so right before the European elections, manipulated the political scene to such an extent that we now have two BNP MEPs representing the country. This is what you would at other times call 'setting the agenda', except that in the fickle minds of the British public, this meant they were led hand-in-hand to the polling stations like sheep penned in by a dog otherwise known as the MEDIA. The British public likes to claim it is wise to the machinations of its print and broadcast media, but in fact it had no problem in losing total perspective on a single issue. So most of them voted for the Conservatives, despite the fact that this party was one of the main abusers of the system. The great British public lost all control of memory, too: the content of the Conservatives' expense claims is a timely reminder that this is still the party of privilege.

The Sunday Times
It should convert to the Berliner style, but is unlikely to do this because the Guardian and Observer got there first (even though it did undergo a massive redesign subsequent to theirs). Some of the problems with this paper include: its size (too large and unwieldy); its inconsistency involving jarring juxtapositions of style and content; the overriding bygone era feeling that it is the 'natural paper of educated people' (which is like saying the Conservative Party is the 'natural party of government'). One of the most important sections for me is Culture, which the Sunday Times somehow cheapens with its gaudy aesthetic. This extends to the 'News Review' section, which is difficult to take seriously when they trolley out the likes of Jeremy Clarkson as a main name. The Guardian has a motto that is ripe for critique but which probably fulfills its ideals: 'Living Our Values'. In other words, do not report on something for the sake of being taken seriously by the reading public and which is in any case negated in other sections of the paper. Consistency is not always achieved in the beloved Observer, I'll grant you that (see post below), but despite this, it's the only Sunday publication I can take seriously. And since the traditional, historical demographic of the Sunday Times remains that of the upper middle and upper classes (or those of lower classes, so to speak, who identify with the model of social mobility and thereby with the aspirational - aristocratic - values of the London Times), it thereby follows that reportage and commentary on difficult issues come across as mere window dressing - 'issue pornography', if you will.

The Independent
What did it for me with the Indie was the woeful conversion to the tabloid format. Yet again, the Guardian came up trumps with the very clever, very sophisticated idea of the Berliner. Ever since, every single page of the Indie has been deluged with adverts, and as a consequence what news lies gasping for breath around it appears to be of secondary importance to the car or supermarket plug. However (and it is a big however): the Indie's values are set in stone. It is as consistent and as provocative as you're likely to get. Take, for example, the paper's stance on lesbian and gay rights, which it has supported unflaggingly and with increasing significance over the years. Its team of writers strike out from the main: Johann Hari's unstoppable journalism is a close to persistent dissent in any British media outlet, whereas Howard Jacobson's weekly contributions are unfailingly sharp, witty, perceptive, and delightfully controversial. But I am out of touch with the Indie these days because I believe that of all of the papers, it represents least value for money in terms of quantity. It's those adverts, which, matched with the tabloid format, convinces you that there is not much left by way of actual words. The Indie, it has to be said, might be the Observer reader's only option in Observer-less days.

There is no doubt in mind that Sundays will be a reading desert without the Observer. For me, no other paper can feed my intellectual curiosity and thirst for opinion. What continues to strike me about the Observer is its ability to balance the nature of a Sunday publication with a serious reader's demanding appetites. I know that like with the Guardian, the Observer will never let me down for comprehensive coverage and analysis of the diversity of events streaming in from the world. In sum, it will always satisfy. But there are dissenting voices on the hardened left who see the Observer as a sinking ship and are unwilling to throw out a lifeboat or two. It's the jobs they wish to save more than the publication itself, which they argue is as moribund in much the same way as I believe the Telegraph is. What, you have to ask, is the alternative? What, you have to ask, do they want from a newspaper? Is it surprising that those on the left despair at the lack of loyalty to left-wing issues (and so critique the Observer on the basis of the fact that they are too centre-left)? What would be the point in a free press if all it ever did was confirm your own views? This is different from the desire for a free press to confirm your ideals, which, in the main I think both aforementioned papers succeed in doing for me. The left might be befuddled by the major editorial written by Cameron, or, like me, irritated by commentary by Michael Gove, but is such fundamental openness to the arguments forwarded by others the basis of a free press, not to mention essential to the formation of dissent?

These are pressing times. Sadly, the Observer may not live to tell its own story.

Habitus has a new habitat!

Habitus: A Diaspora Journal has a new website and blog both generously featuring a number of articles from past issues. Each edition is based on a city; so far they have explored Budapest, Buenos Aires, Sarajevo, and New Orleans. Forthcoming is an issue on Moscow. But visit their smarter, clearer site and blog to sample essays from such distinguished names as Aleksander Hemon ('Sarajevo is...') and George Szirtes ('My Jewish Budapest').

Food for kiddults

The Observer Magazine carries an article today on food for kids. Helpful, full of great ideas for difficult, faddy, small eaters. Looking at the recipes, you wonder what the Observer thinks about its target audience. Take, for example, a dish titled 'Heirloom tomatoes, burrata and basil salad'. I know it's a left-wing paper, but I couldn't let the word 'heirloom' pass without an ironic smirk. Forgive me for being ignorant, but I don't even know what burrata is. I expect a large amount of parents wouldn't, either, which is precisely why it isn't served up to the great majority of their children. Hey, kids, how about 'Prawn and chorizo non-paella' for tea? I can't help thinking that an attempt to de-complicate paella by having prawns and chorizo as the main ingredients loses the plot. How many kids - across all social classes - are likely to eat chorizo and prawns anyway? Certainly not the working class kind. Most laugh-out-loud kid recipe of the week is a toss-up between 'Salmon saltimbocca' and 'seared scallops'. SEARED SCALLOPS?! They say: "The one downside to the deliciousness of this dish is the priciness of scallops: if your kids love them, it can become an expensive family habit." I say: Who would've thought it?! Expensive though they may be, they are surely only marginally pipped to the post by the star players salmon and prosciutto.

They might be dishes for kids insofar as they are simple and fun to make, but these recipes strike me as being adult food, really. And adult food for moneyed people - or perhaps some would say people who care enough about their food to lash out princely sums of money to obtain it. Given that we're supposed to be tightening our belts and buckling down to strict economising (because we have to, not by choice), it is odd that an ailing newspaper should disregard its wider community of readers in this haute middle class article of 'gastrokidonomy'.

Viva Claudio Abbado!

One of the gems in today's edition of the Guardian is Tom Service's interview with the great Claudio Abbado. It's full of those choice quotations that only great artists can feed, such as the following reading of some lines from Mahler's Second Symphony:

Abbado has talked of the choral finale of the Second Symphony - the "Resurrection", Mahler's coruscating vision of spiritual rebirth - as a metaphor for his own musical experience. Among Mahler's text for that movement are the lines: "What was created, must pass away / what passed away, must rise! / Cease to tremble! / Prepare yourself! / Prepare yourself to live!" Abbado sees this as meaning that music is both destroyed and redeemed by its temporality: it exists and is extinguished in a moment, but has the endless possibility of being created anew in time. But in the context of Abbado's recovery from illness, it's impossible not to hear the personal resonance: it was his own rebirth he was celebrating in those performances, in the company of the players he handpicked to play in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra's first concerts.

It's difficult to imagine the strain such a person is under after an illness like stomach cancer, but it's a testament of Abbado's spiritual strength, and the spiritual strength that music is able to offer people, that survival is long-term option, setting up new orchestras and inviting José Antonio Abreu from Venezeula to set up El Sistema Italy.

One of the things that amuses me is the influence musicians like Abbado have. It's not about power; it's more like some mystical aura transmitted through the musical mind and baton. Boulez, though different in approach to Abbado, seemed to exert the same influence over the French president Georges Pompidou when he consented to returning to France after self-imposed exile, but only on the assurance that the major projects he had in mind would receive unquestioned funding from the French government. It appears Abbado is less influential in Italy - though he can't be blamed for that, given that the odious, sly Berlusconi is in power. But consider the gentleness of Abbado's ultimatum to the mayor of Milan, on the meeting of which he consented to return to the city's prestigious opera house, La Scala:

Astonishingly, he hasn't performed at the world's most famous opera house for 16 years, and has not conducted La Scala's orchestra since he left his post in 1986. Last year, he gave an ultimatum that he would be prepared to conduct in Milan only if the mayor, Letizia Moratti, agreed to plant 90,000 trees in the city. And she did. "I asked her to plant three types of magnolia, and they have started putting them in the centre of the city. But they have put them in pots, which I don't accept. I want them to dig up the pavements and put them in the ground. However, now they are saying they want to plant 500,000 trees in the province of Milan. So I will come."

Mahler's hall of mirrors

I've listened to the Kindertotenlieder song 'Oft denk ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen' many times over the years. Earlier this week, a fragment of clarinet solo startled me by, as it were, speaking louder than it was actually playing. Mahler's motivic development shifts melodies around the orchestra repeatedly, passing it through a rainbow of instrumental colourings, pressing an original statement to such an extent that you come to believe it is the first time you've heard that melody. With this clarinet solo, it was if I was hearing it for the first time. Perhaps it had something to do with the specific timbre of the clarinet, for what I felt I was hearing was not Mahler's music, but a fragment of klezmer, echoing from time and place past. It's not the only klezmer colouring in Mahler; the third movement of the First Symphony contains an incredible intervention from Mahler's imagination (and memory), by which he reduces the orchestra in size but expands its character to become a klezmer ensemble. More surprising is the fact that klezmer forms something like the trio section in a form articulating a minor version of 'Frères-Jacques'.

Is there such a thing as a natural postmodernist? I think Mahler could be described as such a composer. Echoing from within memory onto his mammoth scores, military band and klezmer musics jostle in startling kaleidoscopes of memory converted into the grand symphonic tradition of Western music. Except that in Mahler's klezmer realisations, something more rarefied than a mere classically-proportioned melody is to be found. I'd love to write on this at length - what a massive cultural document Mahler's music is! I wonder if Adorno referred to such things in his famous 'physiognomy' of the composer?

Mahler has suddenly matured in my ears and mind in a way that I never expected.

A pencil

An article here from the current TLS determines who the real Raymond Carver is. Carver was a master of the short story form, capable of the kind of concision seen in the work of his fellow American and predecessor, Ernest Hemingway. It seems that Carver's editor was as much responsible for this development of the form as was Carver himself. The question is why this editor was so intent on pruning his author's style, which surely wasn't so baroque in expression before that determined pencil was sharpened, ready to alter the course of literary history.

On form?

I wonder what people thought about the short stories published in last week's Guardian Weekend.

I'm haunted by Julie Myerson's contribution. The catastrophe of the wave felt prescient (climate change, etc.) and apt for the catastrophe engulfing both characters' lives. Its tempo definitely fitted the short story form, whereas I felt not all of the contributions did this, tending to rely on a short exchange over lunch (A M Homes) as a formal expedient; as in, the brevity of a lunch can be neatly articulated in the short story form. Myerson compressed time and nature in one, and the disaster was sharply focused through some choice short story traits. (The garage mechanic's "But you'll have to leave it overnight . . . We're closing in a minute. Because of the mist" is foreboding without being proleptic in a ham-fisted manner. It's also a sheerly elegant plot manoeuvre, framing the impossibility of escape on many levels; physically, psychologically - for all time, as it turns out. It's a very sad short story.)

Other contributions didn't fare so well. William Boyd's glimpse into one person's career struggle amidst the art world was caricatured, although I did like the touch of the jug of fresh orange juice the gallery owner takes with him into the office only to overturn its breakfast status into an early morning tipple with an 'inch of vodka'. This did a neat job of subverting the reader's expectations. Still, it felt caricatured.

Women in crisis was a recurring theme. I don't know whether all writers successfully encapsulated it without the resort to some stereotypes: A M Homes' story about a woman's marital problems had a 'ladies who lunch' frame. The parting gesture of the protagonist tucking into a huge 'discretion-based' chocolate mousse as a suitable solution to her intractable marital problems felt too chick-lit for me, slightly offensive in its gender stereotype of women's insatiable appetite for comfort food when the going gets tough. But like the Boyd, there was another neat touch, in one of those moments that seem inconsequential, merely scene-setting, but which in fact are focalising the narrative's concerns.

Dave Eggers was predictably zany and completely random in a piece that centred round the inadvertent taking of a fork by the protagonist to a wedding. Or was it inadvertent?! Like Myserson, Eggers felt more connected to the technical requirements of the form, such that the fork appeared random but which in fact enabled a compact narrative about its movement in and around the mise-en-scene. Eggers' story reminded me of Beckett, which is a good sign given that the latter was such a master of the short story form.