https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OJB-9B1b0o

Mr Leonard Bernstein’s eloquent disclaimer regarding certain aspects of  Mr Glenn Gould’s interpretation of the Brahms No. 1 Piano Concerto, before a concert in April 1962. He was particularly referring to Gould’s insistence that the entire first movement be played at half the indicated tempo. Gould was no lover of public recitals. He called them ‘the last remaining blood sport’. He gave his last public performance in 1964. He was 31. This perhaps give some indication of why he found it distasteful:

I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity

Here are some pictures of Gould during recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Gould soaking his hands before playing. He began with lukewam water then gradually raised the temperature.

Gould laughing as engineers let him hear how his humming spoiled his recording of the Bach Goldberg Variations– after which he offered to wear a gas mask as a muffle. Gould would not let engineers remove the sound of his voice ‘humming’ in the backgound over fear that doing so would diminish the recording’s quality

Gould eating his lunch (graham crackers & milk cut with bottled spring water) while sitting at the sound engineers table

Oh, and if you’ve made it this far, here are the sounds themselves:

The end of the 1st movement of the Bach Concerto in D Minor

From the 1982 Recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, on which you can clearly hear Gould’s singing/humming:

This first appeared on the TV version of This American Life. Cartoonist Chris Ware teams up with animator, John Kuramoto, to make a cartoon version of a true story about how a bunch of first-graders become warped by pretend-TV.

David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King opens thus:

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-​brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-​print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

(from The Millions)

Contractual wrangling means that the next season of Mad Men probably wont air until 2012 (gasp). In the meantime, here’s a kind of spoof/public service announcement that Vincent Kartheiser and Rich Sommer made, which isn’t exactly funny, but feels right enough.

There’s a new David Foster Wallace story in the latest New Yorker. It begins

Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.

The story has a plain, dry descriptive tone in places, as it lists muscle groups and bones, that then switches to one of direct emotional appeal. After only one reading, I hesistate to draw conclusions, but there was a wonderful openness to the way that the boy’s painful attempt of the impossible is put alongside holy equivalents from history (or ‘facts’ that are presented as such) without any direct linkage. The boy, for some unspecified reason, seems more contained and focusessed than his father who makes a living out of selling motivational material of his own devising. The boy seems to have no capacity for boredom- he pays attention to everything, and functions well socially, but is also wholly detatched. The first line’s mention of the ‘whole person’ can be taken to mean that what the boy’s father, and many of us have, are not ‘ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals’ but something more twisted by doubt and fear. These are what push us through life, not the clear synonyms mentioned.

Right wing of the diptych Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels by Jean Fouquet, c.1450. Wood, 93 x 85 cm Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.

Yukio Mishima once wrote about a picture of St. Sebastian whose ‘only purpose had been to lie in wait for him’. Whilst I disagree with Mr Mishima about many things- for example, the irrelevance of women, the need for emperor worship, the advisability of staging a coup -I did feel ambushed when I saw this on the cover of a book about 15th Century European painting. The angels’ faces are sullen, threatening. I don’t know if the angels are red and blue because they represent different types, or if this is just for visual impact. As for the enthroned Virgin, she is said to be modelled on Agnès Sorel, mistress of Charles VII, who died of mercury poisoning aged 28, and whose cousin took her place after her death.

As for Mr Fouquet (1420–1481), he is thought to have been the inventor of the portrait miniature.

‘Tippoo’s Tiger’ is a life-size tiger of carved and painted wood, seen in the act of devouring a prostrate man in the costume of the 1790s. Concealed in the bodywork is a mechanical pipe-organ with several parts, all operated simultaneously by a crank-handle emerging from the tiger’s shoulder. Inside the tiger and the man are weighted bellows with pipes attached. Turning the handle pumps the bellows and controls the air-flow to simulate the growls of the tiger and cries of the victim.

Tipu (Tippoo Sahib to his European contemporaries) was Sultan of Mysore in South India from 1782-99. He was the implacable enemy of the East India Company, a commercial enterprise with its own armies and civil administration, which during the late 18th century was engaged in extending British dominion in India. Tigers and tiger symbols adorned most of his possessions, from his magnificent throne to the uniforms of his guards.His armoury included mortars shaped like sitting tigers, cannon with tiger muzzles, and hand weapons decorated with gold tiger heads, or inlaid in gold with tiger masks formed by an arrangement of Arabic letters meaning The Lion of God is the Conqueror.

The tiger is currently in the V & A in London, and if you don’t think it’s scary enough, listen to them play the organ inside it.

A few obscure Wes Anderson clips, the first from the 1999 MTV Movie Awards, where the Max Fischer players from Rushmore stage some popular films.

This second is a 2004 American Express commercial that’s a homage to Truffaut’s Day for Night. My advice: click on the YouTube bit on the right hand corner of the screen, and it will get bigger.

I used to finish every book I began, no matter how bad it seemed. To stop reading would only compound the sense of failure the book had already inspired. I suppose that the failure, on my part, was in thinking that the book was worth reading in the first place; that a scan of its opening pages had not alerted me to the fact that it was misconceived/ cliched/badly plotted/ pretentious/narrated by a rabid dog that thought it was a hippo. There was also the fear that the book was not to blame, especially if it was part of the canon, or even just well-reviewed. Because we should always acknowledge the possibility that the fault lies with us, not the book (or at least that we share blame). We can ruin good books for ourselves by reading them last thing at night, when we are tired, or on a train where someone is talking too loudly, or simply by reading the book too quickly. And there are definitely great books that are very uneven, that have both wonderful and mediocre sections (e.g. Lanark and Ulyssess), and that the latter must be endured. Even with some of the very worst books, there is the increasingly desperate hope that the last 25 pages, when the spaceship lands, will turn out to be a tour de force that contains ‘some of the finest passages written in the English language since the end of the War’ (or some other hyperbole).

But a few years ago, after 120 pages of Memoirs of a Geisha, I decided to stop. The narrative premise was unconvincing, the writing was leaden, and there were hundreds of  books in my room. For me, this last point has become increasingly crucial. I will only be able to read a small fraction of the books I would like to read, and so to waste time on something that is less than wonderful seems ridiculous.

These days the difficulty is in deciding when to stop. I don’t, for example, read 50 pages and think ‘Shall I continue?’ If something is enjoyable, this question never arises. Usually it takes longer, especially if I think that the fault is partly mine, that I am just being obtuse. In the case of the book I most recently stopped- The Orchard Keeper (1965) by Cormac McCarthy -it was because I had read 5 or 6 other books by the author, and felt that I knew what to expect. This passage was decisive.

The boy followed him for a few paces, then quartered off to the creek again and the man watched him go, his legs disappearing in the mist, then the rest of him, so that he seemed to be gliding away  toward the line of willows marking its course like some nightwraith fleeing the slow reaching dawn until the man wasn’t sure that he had really been there at all. Then he came back with the pole and handed it to him.

Thanks, the man said.

They moved on across the field, through vapors of fog and wisps of light, to the east, looking like the last survivors of Armageddon.

(103-104 UK Picador edition)

Though this probably doesn’t seem bad (especially out of context), after reading 5 or 6 books written in this style, it now seems incredibly overblown, an attempt to make every event in the book into some portentous event. I’ve managed to deal with this kind of thing before, for example in All the Pretty Horses

The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they’d ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.

Why it should be a ‘gorgon’ is beyond me- it doesn’t fit any character’s point of view, not even the authorial voice, with its King James cadences. As a result it seems comical rather than resonant. In terms of the passage from The Orchard Keeper, I could probably have dealt with ‘nightwraith’ on its own, but the subsequent description a paragraph later of them being like ‘survivors of Armageddon’ was too much faux-epic for me.

And the other thing about ceasing to read is that it need not be a judgement on the author- I’ve enjoyed several of McCarthy’s books, and realise  this was his first novel. It’s just that I also have 2666, The Man Without Qualities, The Recognitions, In Search of Lost Time, Wolf Hall, and too many others staring at me from the shelf, and I don’t know what they contain.

If you didn’t like The Thin Red Line, Badlands, Days of Heaven, or The New World, judging from this trailer, you won’t like The Tree of Life either.

I happen to like the aforementioned films very much.

This comes out in May.

p.s. If the film runs slow or is pixellated, go here and watch it in HD. Which you probably should do anyway.

Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin is a novel about what it means to love literature. The novel recreates the life of Dostoevsky, focussing mainly on the summer of 1867 when he and his wife Anna visited Baden-Baden. It is also an account of the narrator’s journey to Moscow, during which he visits places Dostoevsky lived and wrote about. The novel switches between these without warning, but the boundaries between these are quickly blurred, not only because the narrator, in the novel’s present, is so preoccupied with Dostoevsky, but also because both are written in the same style. Each paragraph, whether several lines, or five or six pages, is only a single sentence, full of diversions, qualifications, evasions, and digressions. Here is Dostoevsky’s reaction to Christ in the Sepulchre by Holbein the Younger, a painting that ‘was enough to make you lose your very faith’.

He stared at the picture with renewed intensity- and for a few moments it faded, even seemed to dissolve, and in its place there appeared the familiar faces: the red one with the lynx eyes, the squashed one with the protruding eyes, and then the faces of those performing the round-dance, before positioning themselves in a semi-circle at the summit of the mountain, and begining to point their fingers at him, sniggering and winking at each other, making him want to get down from the chair, but the next moment they all disappeared and he saw clearly once again the face and body of the dead Christ and heard the words about loss of faith spoken by someone else- and this idea was to become the focus of the novel, and then there began to emerge from the mist a few still indistinct objects, scenes and images: a gleaming knife- one peasant stabbing another and raising his eyes to the sky with the words: ‘God, forgive me for the sake of Jesus Christ’; then a soldier selling his pewter cross, pretending it is a silver one; words about God uttered by a simple peasant woman as she sees her baby smile for the first time; an exchange of crosses between the two main characters of the novel; then an unusually deserted Summer Garden with storm clouds thickening over the Petersburg side; a knife gleaming again somewhere in a dark corridor in one of the cheap Petersburg hotels near Liteiny Propsect and the quick glance of tiny, fiery murderous eyes, and a knife gleaming again in the darkness as it is driven in beneath the white breast of the proud and fallen woman.

The effect of these single-sentence paragraphs is to trap the reader within the flights of association that Dostoevsky is portrayed as being subject to, many of which revolve around climbing or descending a mountain, at the summit of which is a Crystal Palace (there is an irony here, in that Dostoevsky frequently mocked this image, which appeared in Chernyshevsky’s 1862 novel What is to be done?, as an idealised communal living space– in Notes from Underground it is likened to a ‘chicken coop’).

The book also raises an interesting question as to why the narrator , who is Jewish, should be so interested in a writer was made no secret of his anti-semitism. This is from A Writer’s Diary:

the whole activity of the Jews in these border regions of ours consisted of rendering the native population as much as possible inescapably dependent on them, taking advantage of the local laws. They have always managed to be on friendly terms with those upon whom the people were dependent. Point to any other tribe from among Russian aliens which could rival the Jew by his dreadful influence in this connection! You will find no such tribe. In this respect the Jew preserves all his originality as compared with other Russian aliens, and of course, the reason therefore is that status of status of his, that spirit of which specifically breathes pitilessness for everything that is not Jew, with disrespect for any people and tribe, for every human creature who is not a Jew…

However, it is more in bafflement, than anger, that the narrator considers this question; at no point does the reader get the sense that it impinges on his love for Dostoevsky’s work.

Two excellent, and very different stories, from the New Yorker, one by George Saunders, the other by David Means. I particularly like the way the Saunders story starts in such an unintelligible manner.

“Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.

“What’s in it?” I said.

“Hilarious,” he said.

“Acknowledge,” I said.

Abnesti used his remote. My MobiPak™ whirred. Soon the Interior Garden looked really nice. Everything seemed super-clear.

I said out loud, as I was supposed to, what I was feeling.

“Garden looks nice,” I said. “Super-clear.”

Abnesti said, “Jeff, how about we pep up those language centers?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Drip on?” he said.

“Acknowledge,” I said.

He added some Verbaluce™ to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but saying them better. The garden still looked nice. It was like the bushes were so tight-seeming and the sun made everything stand out? It was like any moment you expected some Victorians to wander in with their cups of tea. It was as if the garden had become a sort of embodiment of the domestic dreams forever intrinsic to human consciousness. It was as if I could suddenly discern, in this contemporary vignette, the ancient corollary through which Plato and some of his contemporaries might have strolled; to wit, I was sensing the eternal in the ephemeral.

This is David Lynch’s film for the Lady Dior Handbag. It was written, directed, shot, and edited by David Lynch,and stars Marion Cotillard and Gong Tao. I will now make 5 announcements.

FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT: THIS IS A LONG COMMERCIAL, RATHER THAN A SHORT FILM, AND SHOULD BE VIEWED ACCORDINGLY. I.E. WITH SOME DEGREE OF LENIENCY GIVEN THE CONSTRAINTS THAT THIS INVOLVES.

SECOND: I STILL FOUND IT WORTHWHILE.

THIRD: I”M FAIRLY SURE LYNCH ONLY DID THIS FOR THE MONEY. BUT EVEN SAINTS HAVE TO EAT/BUY NEW WHITE SHIRTS/OPEN NEW CENTRES FOR TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION.

FOURTH: APOLOGIES FOR IT BEING TWO CLIPS, NOT ONE.

FIFTH: GOOD LUCK.

There’s a half hour interview with W.S. Merwin, U.S. Poet Laureate, at the Kenyon Review.

Here’s a poem of his:

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions 

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Ladies and gentleman, the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, 1434, in the National Gallery, London. It will be too small on your screen; you will need to click on it to see the carvings on the bedposts. The faces had me pretty much hooked, but then I looked in the mirror behind them, and it was like in a film when suddenly the focus of the image deepens and there is too much horizon. And then there is the green of her dress, its tumbled folds, the hat that seems about to swallow his head.

Please note the oranges.

Please enjoy.

David Lynch promoting Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

Considerably more fun than this, where Letterman has clearly not watched Twin Peaks:

A fairly disapproving comment on postmodernism (from Arthur Kroker’s essay in The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics New York, St Martin’s Press, 1986).

We don’t have to wonder; we know just for the “fun of it.” We write just for the fun of it, just as we think, make love, parody and praise… we are having a nice day, maybe a thousand nice days. The postmodern scene is a panic site, just for the fun of it. And beneath the forgetting, there is only the scribbling of another [Georges] Bataille, another vomitting of flavourless blood, another heterogenity of excess to mark the upturned orb of the pineal eye. The solar anus is parodic of postmodernism, but again, just for the fun of it.

I was pretty much with him, until the ‘flavourless blood’. I think it is not entirely irrelevant to mention that Kroker was also one of the editors of the volume in which this appeared.

I was hoping Kroker had coined the term ‘solar anus’ but Bataille beat him to it. Here, in closing, is the sun itself.

From Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, pub. 1904, and still pretty much on the money.

The care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint “like a light cloak, which canbe thrown aside at any moment”. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage… No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.”

David Means has a new collection out. It is called The Spot. It is probably awesome. I came across his previous collection, The Secret Goldfish (a Salinger reference) whilst in a bookstore in Ireland (Rep. of) and decided to check out ‘A visit from Jesus’. It is the only time I have ever stood and read an entire short story in a bookstore, and also the only time my parasympathetic nervous system reacted so strongly to a bunch of marks on a page that I staggered so much I had to grab hold of the shelf to keep balance.

Here’s a recent story of his from  The New Yorker.