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Oltrano
Having noticed that James McCourt has written seven books, years after I (and possibly most others?) had assumed he would never be a prolific author; and realizing that, after an Amazon order of three of the newer ones, I now have them all; and starting to think of his career as almost backwards from the…
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Density
With Strauss’ Metamorphosen playing: a long, dense contrapuntal work, complex and final – one of his last. Coward used to complain that critics called his work ‘thin’ – he would make fun of them, as though the adjective was meaningless; but of course in most of his work one can easily understand the criticism –…
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Focused
Fragments of busyness, many of them – as I move through the overlapping needs of our exam period, various scattered administrative tasks, applying for a promotion, applying for a job elsewhere – and move towards research leave. Reading unusually alert books (though still not books about AIDS, which I probably need to be reading right…
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Vexed
Satie’s Vexations is a famous piano piece, posthumously discovered and frequently mentioned, but rarely actually performed. It’s a small piece, less than two minutes long if played slowly – except that, as everyone knows, it has instructions to be played 840 times, thus making it the first example of minimalism. I’ve seen the score, even…
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End of the holidays
And the holidays are now officially, by almost any count, over: 4 am GMT on New Year’s Day. (I suppose we could hold out for January 6, and Twelfth Night/Epiphany, but that’s probably pushing it these days.) Rain, on what has been a surprisingly warm evening here – and a lovely dinner at Beate’s house…
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In the lists
The past couple of weeks, through the holidays but around/after Sandy’s death, have been different than they usually are for me – no travel, not much activity, no real holidays; only a bit of peripheral participation in other people’s holidays (Bennett & Merrie dropping by, Chris Wood’s concert, dinner at blahfeme’s – and tonight New…
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Paul Attinello 