Surfing through the television channels recently – as one does – I caught a few minutes of the Classic Brit awards . Violinist Tasmin Little, having received the Critics’ Award, was delivering a rather passionate speech about the importance of what we commonly call “classical music”, and of the dangers of sidelining it, or of trivialising it. [...]
Archive for May, 2011
28 May
Choose your own Desert Island Discs
It’s such a simple idea, but so effective. If you were stranded on a desert island, and had, miraculously, some machine on which to play music, which eight pieces of music would you choose? And which of those eight would you keep if you could keep only one? The answers are so very revealing. Some [...]
28 May
Looking back on “The Brothers Karamazov”
It is now about six months since I finished The Brothers Karamazov, and, although I have read some top drawer stuff since, it continues to haunt my mind. And yet, if someone were to ask me if I liked it, I really wouldn’t know what to answer. Looking back over the posts I put up here [...]
22 May
“The earth does not want to keep secrets”: the writings of Vasily Grossman
It was back in the mid 1990s that I first became aware of the novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. I remember seeing it in a bookshop, and thinking with a smile that only a Russian could write a 900-page novel and call it Life and Fate. There was a quote on the cover [...]
14 May
Is Shakespeare still our contemporary?
The idea of “making allowances” for Shakespeare seems to me some kind of ultimate in benighted presumptuousness. I assume that if we feel something, he felt it too. Shakespeare was certainly learning as he went along, and learning very quickly. But I believe, and thus assume, that he always knew what he was doing. Even [...]
10 May
Shakespeare … git?
I do realise that this blog is called The Argumentative Old Git, and I realise also that I tend to post quite a bit about Shakespeare. But it’s a bit disconcerting all the same to see so many people directed to this blog as a result of searching on the words “Shakespeare” and “git”. What were they looking for, I wonder?
8 May
“A Moon for the Misbegotten” by Eugene O’Neill
Eugene O’Neill was a strange one. Long Day’s Journey into Night strikes me as a supremely great dramatic masterpiece, and continues to affect me profoundly; yet nothing else he has written – not even the undeniably powerful The Iceman Cometh – seems to come close to that achievement. A Moon for the Misbegotten was written [...]
7 May
The three endings of “Great Expectations”
*** Please note: this post inevitably reveals some of the details of the plot of Great Expectations *** Dickens wrote three endings to Great Expectations – the second and third endings identical except for the wording of the final sentence. The second version ends with “I could see the shadow of no parting from her”, [...]
2 May
“This is Illyria, lady”
Captain This is Illyria, lady. VIOLA And what should I do in Illyria? From Twelfth Night, I.ii *** Malvolio is usually played by an actor in late middle age: indeed, the mental picture most of us have of Malvolio is that of a man perhaps in his 50s, declining if not already declined into the [...]
