A New Rich Reading Experience

My dear friend Ellen, who is as devoted to books as I am, told me I needed to read a novel called The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje.  I'd heard of him mostly because I saw the movie "The English Patient" which was based on one of his novels.  The Cat's Table was great, and I saw in its list of "Also by Michael Ondaatje" a 1982 memoir called Running in the Family.  I double-loved this one, an account of his family background, and his growing up in what was then called Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).  Here are a couple samples of how beautifully he writes:


Many of my relatives owned a horse or two, which languished in comfort for much of the year and got trotted out for the August race meet.  My grandmother's horse, 'Dickman Delight,' refused to step out of the stable if it was at all muddy.  She would bet vast sums on her horse knowing that one day he would surprise everyone and win.  The day this eventually happened, my grandmother was up north.  She received a telegram in the early morning which read: "Rain over Colombo" so she put her money on another horse.  Dickman Delight galloped to victory on dry turf.  Japanese planes had attacked Galle Face Green in Colombo and the telegram should have read: "Raid over Colombo."  Dickman Delight never won again.


Of a visit with his family to Ceylon from his new home in Toronto, after he'd become a successful author, he writes:


We had spent three days in Upton in beautiful tea country with my half-sister, Susan.  On the way back to Colombo we drove through the Kadugannawa Pass and stopped at Kegalle.  The old wooden bridge that only my father drove over without fear ("God loves a drunk," he would say to anyone who sat by him white with terror) had been replaced with a concrete one.


In acknowledging thanks to various people in an Afteward, he writes: While all these names [of the many he thanks] may give an air of authenticity, I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or "gesture."  And if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.


I love his use of "gesture" in this context.


It reminded me of something the great Welsh travel writer, Jan Morris, mentioned about his fellow countrymen:  As a shrewd American once wrote, if truth elsewhere is more or less like a straight line, among the Welsh it is ‘more in the nature of a circle’: to my way of thinking, for I have sufficient Celt in me too, only another way of saying that imagination is as real as reality.”

Ecstasy Ahead

I'll be there an hour and a half early to be sure of a seat.  The world-class Outer Cape Chorale presents two concerts a year.  I wouldn't miss one for much of anything.

Post-concert postscript:  It was awesome!  I sat fourth row back center so I could be amazed watching the dexterity of, say, a violinist's hands (the nearest one was a young and gorgeous Asian woman, Japanese I would guess).

Johannes Brahms

I wasn't familiar with the biography of Brahms.  He began this "Ein Deutsches Requiem" in 1865, the year his mother died.  I copy the following, written by Kathleen Henry, a member of the Chorale, from today's program:


"The German Requiem was radical in 1868 because it did not follow the traditional structure or theme of a requiem Mass; indeed it never mentions Christ, final judgment, or salvation.  In contrast to the text of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, the theme of Brahms' Requiem is a non-dogmatic victory over death, expressing that the transcendence of time is a kind of resurrection offering eternal renewal.  Brahms, a learned religious thinker but an agnostic, used scriptural texts and the music itself to express comfort for those who mourn and inspiration for all mortals.  He said he could have called it, 'The Human Requiem.'

"The first and seventh movements frame the Requiem with the key of F major, and the other movements wander the 'orbit' of F major.  Brahms carries us through the 'flat side' of the tonal field, the sound of mourning, up through the 'sharp side,' where brightness enters the music, only to return us in the seventh movement to the comfort of the home key, F Major, where it all began.

"By ending with the same word, 'selig' ('blessed'), and the same key as he used to begin, Brahms creates a timeless loop where contraries like earthly time and heavenly time are resolved and where the promise of consolation is at once anticipated and fulfilled.  Music, based so thoroughly on time and in time, is yet the artistic medium perhaps most suited to allow us to experience the transcendence of time."

Now, back home after an early dinner of delicious Chicken Gorgonzola at a restaurant up the highway, and with the dog walked, its time to go from Brahms to the Amy Winehouse concert I got from Netflix.  Nothing like radically juxtaposed signals to my soul.

Eye/Ear Treat

I belong to Netflix but don't really care for most movies, so 90% of what I watch is documentaries and concerts (one of Amy Winehouse's concerts, which I've not seen before, is up next on my watch-list.  Below is what I watched tonight after a hard day's work making a garden.  What a treat "Ad Most Beautiful" was.  Great music, sounded almost like Lou Reed ... in fact I thought it mostly was Lou Reed until I reached the credits.

13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests

by Maria Popova

From Nico to Sonic Boom, or what black-and-white silent film has to do with pop art.

In 2008, the Andy Warhol Museum commissioned ex-Luna band members Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, now performing as Dean & Britta, to write and record 13 original scores and classic covers for Warhol’s little-known silent films, black-and-white portraits of cultural icons like Nico,Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Ann Buchannan, Freddy Herko andDennis Hopper, shot between 1964 and 1966. Dean & Britta promptly complied and, for the next 18 months, toured the world, performing the pieces in more than 50 venues, from New York’s Lincoln Center to the Sydney Opera House to a 15th-century cathedral in Paris.

Melancholy and Archives

1 Brondesbury Park; Willesden; London, N.W.6

It was Brondesbury Park, not Brondersbury, Mr. Western Union Man.

In London in 1966, my friend Dennis and I became tenants in a beautiful brick house that had been chopped up into flats.  It was in the Willesden section, not far from an Underground Station.  We came and went anonymously, and usually drunkenly, for weeks, until we were finally confronted on the stairs landing by a couple of ladies who lived in other flats in the house; clearly they could abide no longer not knowing who we were, and of what sort, and so forth.  During our chat with them we learned that we’d been getting ripped off by the landlord, paying more than was fair.  We decided to move.  Then we decided to return to the States.  We casually mentioned to the landlord when he came to collect the weekly rent that we were going to go to Holland for a few days vacation.  His greed-eyes lit up and grew large.  He gave us a bunch of money with which we agreed to bring back to him fine chocolates and cigars from the duty-free shop.



On our last night in the rip-off flat we broke into the electric meter box we’d been dropping shillings into whenever we wanted hot water for tea, or needed to boil a pan of potatoes.  We added all those shillings to our cash-stash.



Then, since we really were going to Holland, and eventually on to Luxembourg for a flight back to the States, we got paranoid that the landlord, upon discovering the destroyed meter, and realizing we'd ripped him off just as he'd ripped us off, would have the police watching for us at Ostend, where we were going to take the ferry to Holland.  We layed low at a friend’s flat in the West End for a week before heading for Ostend.



Obviously, I never did show up for the job at Western Union International Inc.  And I didn't land in Holloway Prison or in Reading Gaol.


But it's really cool that I can go on Google Earth and see a picture of the house we lived in.  Our single-room flat was in the upstairs on the right.


And, never shunning an opportunity for melancholy, I wish Dennis was still alive so he could see this.

In A Class of His or Her Own

My sister in Indiana mailed me this picture.  I think there was some cross-breeding or a mutant gene.