Family, Thames

Notebook

The stereotypes of course remained, not only about Gentiles but about Jews. There was a clear pecking order among us “Ostjuden”, Jews from Eastern Europe (who were all of course despised by the cultivated German-speaking Jews of Central Europe). Broadly speaking, Lithuanian and Russian Jews saw themselves as superior, in culture and social standing; Polish (particularly Galician) and Romanian Jews were lowly creatures, to put it politely. This ranking applied both within my parents’ marital antagonism and across their extended families. My mother in moments of anger would remind my father that he was nothing but a Polish Jew. He would then point out that she was Romanian.

Tony Judt, “Thinking the Twentieth Century”.

Thames, evening

Notebook

We all have our professional notion of hell. There is a tale of a writer who died and was allowed to choose between going to heaven or to hell. Cannily, she asked St Peter if she might tour both regions before deciding. Led down into hell, she saw row after row of writers chained to desks, sweat running down their torsos, while demons lashed them with barbed whips. “Dear me, let’s go and look at the other place!” Ascending into heaven, she met with the sight of of row after row of writers chained to desks, running with sweat, and lashed by demons wielding barbed whips. “But this is just as dreadful as hell!” “Oh no it isn’t,” said St Peter. “Here, your work gets published.”

D.J. Enright, “Injury Time: A Memoir”.

Rarity, Thames

George Bernard Shaw revisited

It made quite an impression in the 1890s, but has the play aged well? My review of “Candida” at the Orange Tree:

If this had been Ibsen, heaven knows what might have happened. Would the lovelorn teenage poet who falls for the wife of a clergyman have stormed out to drown himself in a north London duck pond? Quite possibly.

In the world of George Bernard Shaw nothing is quite so serious. Nevertheless, his portrait of a sudden crisis in an apparently serene marriage caused a stir in the 1890s, and his admirers will be grateful to the Orange Tree’s artistic director, Paul Miller, for reviving another of his early works — Candida is the fourth in recent years.

It’s certainly stylishly acted. Simon Daw’s set, studded with Christian-socialist texts (even the floor bears their imprint), makes the most of the intimate, in-the-round space. Still, seeing the cast trying to breathe life into the painfully brittle dialogue is like watching someone performing CPR on a body that has spent far too long in the depths.

Overload

A New Yorker cartoon from the month that Donald Trump was elected. Still true today, unfortunately…

Notebook

How does he do anything? I wondered to myself. What happens when he’s dressing, goes to the lavatory, has a bath? I followed his wife into the kitchen and asked her how, for instance, he managed to dress himself.  “It’s just like the eating,” she explained. “I put his usual clothes out in all the usual places, and he dresses without difficulty, singing to himself. He does everything singing to himself. But if he is interrupted and loses his thread, he comes to a complete stop, doesn’t know his clothes — or his own body. He sings all the time — eating songs, dressing songs, bathing songs, everything. He can’t do anything unless he makes it a song.”

While we were talking my attention was caught by the pictures on the walls.

“Yes,” Mrs P. Said, “he was a gifted painter as well as a singer. The School exhibited his pictures every year.”

I strolled past them curiously – they were in chronological order. All his earlier work was naturalistic and realistic, with vivid mood and atmosphere, but finely detailed and concrete. Then, years later, they became less vivid, less concrete, less realistic and naturalistic; but far more abstract, even geometrical and cubist. Finally, in the last paintings, the canvas became nonsense, or nonsense to me — mere chaotic lines and blotches of paint. I commented on this to Mrs P.

“Ach, you doctors, you’re such philistines!” She exclaimed. “Can you not see artistic development – how he renounced the realism of his earlier years, and advanced into abstract, non-representational art?”

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

 

Marlow Bridge

Long player

He resembles an explorer returning from a lost world. My review of David Hepworth’s hugely enjoyable history of the pop LP.

When reviewers say a book feels twice as long as it actually is, they are not usually being complimentary. In the case of David Hepworth’s paean to the age of vinyl, A Fabulous Creation, I really have come to praise him. It’s years since I came across a chronicle of the pop life containing so many arresting anecdotes that I found myself going back over pages to savour every line, every insight.

If you have read Hepworth’s earlier books, including 1971: Never a Dull Moment, his journey though the year he regards as rock’s annus mirabilis, you will know how entertaining a companion he can be. He is at our side again as he traces the evolution of the LP from Sgt Pepper in 1967 to the advent of the compact disc and MTV in the 1980s.

Hepworth came of age in this era, and so we keep catching glimpses of his younger selves, riffling through the vinyl racks at his favourite shops or watching his friends carrying out that most solemn of ritual: carefully lowering a stylus on to the grooves and waiting for the sounds to emerge from the hi-fi.