Ragtime

This news came to me last week, but I thought I'd wait to write here until I could link to a full obituary. I never had Don as a teacher at Germantown Friends, but he was an extremely close friend of my mother's - they met in graduate school at Penn in the 1960s, and it was in fact on Don's urging that my mother applied for a position at GFS, where she proceeded to have a fantastic thirty-plus-year career (my brothers and I all went there basically as scholarship kids on the strength of her position, so we really have a lot to be grateful for!).

I particularly associate Don with the amazing four-hands piano canon that he and my mother worked up from time to time for public appearances (Faure, Poulenc, etc.). Also, ragtime as per below! But he was a very good friend to our family over a huge span of years - I remember him visiting us when we were still living in the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware (mid-1970s) bearing implausible and delightful gifts: Chuckles candy, which we rather despised (especially the liquorice one) but found magically intriguing regardless; Halloween masks (Wonder Woman for me, Spiderman and Batman for my brothers - in those days as you probably know the younguns had a much more modest influx of new things into the home, so this was thrilling); and one Easter, a present that became one of my utter favorites, and is now in the fond possession of my niece GG: a pink plush rabbit, with revolting and yet endearing big pink googly eyes, subsequently known to me as "Mr. Bacon" (the resemblance to the cured meat was unmistakable) and second only to stuffed chimpanzee "Jim" in my youthful affections.

(Unless I am misremembering, it was also Don - who had a huge, eclectic and fairly risque collection of VHS cassettes - who introduced me and my brothers some years after that to the unforgettable Videodrome!)

My classmate Adam Goodheart explains more effectively than I can how meaningful it was when Don came out at the commencement exercises at the Arch Street Meetinghouse in front of students, parents and grandparents (scroll down to the comments): as Adam says, it is easy to forget how homophobic even a liberal east-coast independent school in the 1980s was likely to be, and how taboo it was for teachers or students to reveal that they were gay.

This Youtube snippet gives much of the flavor and appeal of Don's presentation style as well as his piano-playing. He had the longest, most multi-jointed fingers I have ever seen on a pianist!

Catch-up

My mother was commiserating with me on the telephone about my self-proclaimed lack of time this semester for light reading, but I had to allow as how I'd read a few books over the weekend (this was last week), which made her laugh and observe that really if the day comes that I do not have time for light reading, it is only because I am dead! Have spent spare moments and late nights over the past week devouring volumes one through four of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicle. Have just bought the final volume for Kindle (the first four I had to gather through BorrowDirect and library - it is a pity they are not available as an electronic bundle).

Tessa Hadley's LRB piece seems to me right, but perhaps understates the pure enjoyable readability of the novels taken as a sequence: I would compare them slightly unfavorably on the one hand to Sybille Bedford and Rebecca West, and on the other to series-novel geniuses like Susan Howatch (the Church of England books, not the earlier ones which are much less interesting to me) or Dorothy Dunnett, and yet this is really not fair insofar as they are really providing one of the most immersive and enjoyable reading experiences I have had for years.

Good cultural bits: heard a very lovely recital by pianist Simon Mulligan the other day at the Morgan Library (it is not my canon, but I forgot how beautiful the shimmery bits of Ravel are when played really well, and the Schumann fantasies are perfect - capped, enjoyably, by Speckled Hen at the Shakespeare); and my friend Toni Schlesinger's captivating Mystery of Pearl Street at Dixon Place (dinner after with G. - steak frites, deliciously - at Jacques).

Very busy week of work upcoming, but I am thoroughly enjoying this semester: the reading and thinking for my big committee are stimulating (the other demanding committee I'm on, attempting to reconceive the basic science requirement in Columbia's Core, also very interesting), and my solitary seminar is super-fun (Robinson Crusoe last week, Gulliver's Travels this Thursday).

Having a hard time fitting in quite enough exercise, but hoping to do better as the days get warmer and longer (saw asthma doc last week and he is pretty clear, which really I know intuitively, that if you have exercise-induced asthma it is a bad idea to exercise outdoors in temperatures below freezing - I am hoping to have a bit of a run on the indoor track at Chelsea Piers tomorrow afternoon).

"I've been to a lot of chocolate tastings in my life"

Fiona Madducks interviews pianist Matsuko Uchida at the Guardian:

Currently I have four pianos, all Steinways – one I call "the Oldie", who was born in 1962 and I bought in 1982. He is now full of new bits but the body is the same.

You're sounding quite tender about these pianos… They're like human beings – all men. Number 2 is good for practising on. The third I call the Boy from Munich – the kind that would drive a sports car. The fourth is the youngster, just getting nappy trained. I'll probably find somewhere in Europe to house him so I don't always have to transport a piano – which is quite a business.

Was listening among other things in the car to and from Vermont this weekend to Brahms violin sonatas, can't imagine how one would listen to them as a young person (or really at any age) without wanting to play the piano rather than the violin - but car companion pointed out to me that there is almost a coming-out narrative for violists, they have played the violin as a youngster because someone else chose it for them but there is a nascent sense, co-timed with emergence of sexual identity, that it is not quite right in some fundamental way....

(Check out this in some ways more forthcoming interview here.)

Two moons

I think it is now really and truly the end of the semester: I was still finishing up little leftover bits of business this morning, but the way now seems to be clear towards novel revisions...

Read a lovely book the other night, Anna Goldsworthy's Piano Lessons: A Memoir.  It is fantastic, and this copy is now destined for my mother, who will love it at least as much as I did.  It makes me think now that sometime I should teach a seminar on pedagogy that would be constructed around this and other books that shed light on great teaching?  At any rate I will start trying to collect readings around that theme, and suggestions are welcome in comments or by email.

Main fact of last few days is that I have fallen hard into the amazing stream of words that is Haruki Murakami's 1Q84.  It is the perfect novel that I most want to read of all things in the world!  I bought a real copy of the book when it came out, as I figured it was the sort of thing I like to keep on the shelf after I've read it, but the physical book seemed so cumbersome (it is beautifully designed but hard to hold) that it went unread.  So I bought a second copy for Kindle (and IMO this is what publishers should be trying to do, i.e. sell bundled copies in multiple formats) and am completely and passionately smitten by it.  Alternate-universe fiction at its very best: I think it probably gets my vote for favorite novel of the year.

(Oh, yes, I think I read one other novel as well, a good recommendation from Maxine: Jussi Adler-Olson's Mercy a.k.a. - same book - The Keeper of Lost Causes.)

Peek Freans redux

It was clear from the general drift of reviews by James Wood at the New Yorker and Daniel Mendelsohn at the New York Review of Books that readers were not finding Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child an achievement on the order of The Line of Beauty, which is high on my own personal shortlist of novels at the perfect intersection of critical interestingness and passionate reader-love; now that I've read the new novel, I wouldn't say that I agree with all of the specifics of either critic's anatomizing of the book's flaws and failures (Wood is much too harsh on the Jamesian echoes, Mendelson emphasizes The Swimming Pool Library too much at the expense of The Folding Star which I am convinced is Hollinghurst's other masterpiece and the book I must soonest reread, I also don't at all see that it would have been a good idea for Hollinghurst to produce more of 'Cecil Valance''s poetry a-la-Possession), but there's no doubt that it doesn't add up to something especially substantial, as lovely as the bits may be. I enjoyed it a good deal, though, and I may give it a reread in six months or so to see if it shakes out differently for me at that point.

(I was fascinated by the way that in the section titled 'Steady, boys, steady!' the protagonist of Line of Beauty has here been split into two different characters, Peter and Paul; it's something like what Austen does, sequentially, as she rewrites pairs of heroines from Sense and Sensibility to Pride and Prejudice to Mansfield Park.)

Phrases that struck and pleased me:

- of a teacher, doing something at 9.35, "with the recurrent momentary dread and resolve that come with living by a timetable";

- of the same character's playing four-hand piano music with an older female character who is a much better pianist than he is (I love four-hands piano music as it was something my mother played now and again in my childhood, very well, an appealing mini-canon of early twentieth-century stuff):

There was an undeniable intimacy in the four-hand sessions with Corinna. Sharing her piano stool, he had a sense of the complete firmness of her person, her corseted side and hard bust, their hips rolling together as they reached and occasionally crossed on the keyboard. As the secondo player he did all the pedalling, but her legs sometimes jerked against his as if fighting the impulse to pedal herself. The contact was technical, of course, like that in sport, and not to be confused with other kinds of touching. None the less he felt she enjoyed it, she liked the businesslike rigour of its not being sexual as well as the unmentionable fraction by which it was.

- the pastiche bit of Dudley Valance's autobiography that describes his mother's "book tests," spiritualist exercises in the library

- of the callow young aspiring biographer, visiting an editor at the offices of the TLS as the "trolley stacked high with tightly bound bales of newsprint" arrives: "In a moment the plastic tape was snipped, and the top copy plucked up and turned and presented to Paul with a casual flourish: 'For you!' - the new TLS - Friday's TLS, ready two days early, 'hot off the press' someone said, enjoying his reactions, though in fact the paper was cool to the touch, even slightly damp" (and then the last sentences of the chapter, a few paragraphs later: "He kept his copy of the day-after-tomorrow's TLS under his arm, which he wanted very much to be seen with. He didn't think the people in the street here were getting the point of it - but back in the North Reading-Room of the British Library he felt it might stir a good deal of envy and conjecture" - the repetition of the letters TLS is almost like the barouche-landau in Emma)

And finally, because I have had a longstanding obsession with the Peek Freans 'fruit creme' biscuit, a childhood favorite that recently somewhat unfortunately reentered my current realm of preoccupation by way of the ruminations and biscuit-eating practices of Walter on Fringe (I almost bought exactly this box of biscuits in Ottawa a couple weeks ago, only it was not the moment - but I was certainly looking at them longingly! - the name itself is so mouth-alluring and peculiar to the eye, it's definitely part of the charm, though I am not underrating the appeal of the 'creme' and also the tug of the surprisingly chewy fruit jelly in the cookie that is the one I particularly like):

Next morning Paul sat in his hotel room, going over his notes, with a coffee tray beside him: the pitted metal pot with the untouchable handle, the lipsticked cup, the bowl of white sugar in soft paper tubes which he emptied serially into the three strong cupfuls he took, getting quickly excited and overheated. On a plate with a doily were five biscuits, and though he'd only just had breakfast he ate them all, the types so familiar - the Bourbon, the sugared Nice, the rebarbative ginger-nut, popped in whole - that he was touched for a moment by a sense of the inseparable poverty and consistency of English life, as crystallized in the Peek Frean assortment box.

Light reading around the edges: Nina Kiriki Hoffman's A Red Heart of Memories (a Jo Walton recommendation); Elizabeth Haynes's Into the Darkest Corner (very good, very scary) and Thomas Enger's Burned (also very good, I thought - showing slightly the signs of inexperience in the writing, but I will eagerly read subsequent installments in the series); and another crime novel I found somewhat silly, Colin Cotterill's Killed at the Whim of a Hat.

A perfect evening

My brother Michael and my adopted grandfather Gene joined me for the really lovely evening of music that was Nico's "conspiring" with Gotham Chamber Opera at (Le) Poisson Rouge. I really like going to stuff at that place: it is intelligently and comfortably cabaret-style, with lots of bathrooms and food and drink served at the table (the wait staff couldn't circulate so well in this configuration as in some others, so there were delays in table-clearing and follow-up, but nothing to mar the very substantial pleasures of the ear that were on offer). I had in the end bought tickets for all three of us, but the press agent had invited Gene to attend, and had reserved for us what were probably the best seats in the house: we were about ten feet away from the piano, with a very direct view of Nico or whoever else was sitting at the keyboard and performers standing close enough that you could see the amazing vibrations of the glottis (?) that characterize operatic singing.

A couple arias from the Dark Sisters opera (it is the most amazing music, I can hardly wait to hear the whole thing again in November), set into selections of all sorts that highlighted various aspects either of Nico's choral writing or of the singers' strengths: the first bit was Purcell's "Evening Hymn," the last was the evening song from Philip Glass's Satyagraha, a revelation to me (I had never heard it before!). One of the other highlights was a really extraordinary performance of Ravel's sonata for violin and cello by Yuki Lee Numata and Clarice Jensen. I am not a lover of the violin, really, but I was blown away by Numata's performance - she is incredible, definitely a performer to watch for...

(The opera company director Neal Goren accompanied many of the singers, which I think is rightly his prerogative but which caused me to reflect that he played the piano like someone to whom the modern instrument is wholly foreign, he must have trained as an organist rather than a pianist - definitely a thumper rather than a stroker of the ivories - the shortcomings were particularly clear in the aria from Mozart's Il Sogno di Scipione, with terrible approximate bashings-out of notes and wild thumping just behind tempo!... Really in NYC you can almost certainly find on every street corner a superb accompanist who could do a good job with this sort of thing on short notice, but I guess it would give a different character to the evening, so it seems a fair trade-off.)