And as clear proof of our total emotional disconnectedness, I move on from writing about the complexities of disaster porn to what I'm going to be doing tonight.
Specifically, I'm going to a great concert in Birmingham's Symphony Hall. It may have the wood and chrome look of a cruise-liner's casino, but it's one of the best venues I've ever been to. Tonight's concert will bring out the hip young gunslingers of contemporary classical: we're getting Thomas Adès conducting his own multimedia collaboration based on the Creation myth, In Seven Days, and Steve Reich's mesmeric, pulsing Music For 18 Musicians.
I can't find any footage of In Seven Days, so here's Adès's Concentric Paths.
I really, really like this desk (in an architecture library, naturally). Given the rate at which I buy books, I could actually build it this afternoon.
Books in today:
Stewart Lee's memoir/exploration of how humour works, How I Escaped My Certain Fate.
Lumsdon's Best Shropshire Walks, which looks a little pedestrian (thankyewverymuch, I'm here all week).
A used copy of Weldon Kees' Collected Poems (I read a couple of them recently after an MA dissertation mentioned them, and was seriously impressed. Like Simon Armitage but American and even less likely to turn up to pre-arranged meetings as he disappeared without trace in 1955).
A secondhand copy of Ben Highmore's Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (or as his publishers have it, ben highmore's cityscapes cultural readings in the material and symbolic city - clearly capitals and punctuation COST MORE).
And a CD of Othmar Schoek's Notturno for string quartet and voice because it's brilliant.
I've just finished Terry Pratchett's latest novel, I Shall Wear Midnight, and I'm hugely impressed. He's got such emotional range, an active liberal political and moral sensibility and a real grasp on the pace of a novel. Now I've moved on to Murray's Skippy Dies - a comic tale of overprivileged Dublin schoolboys towards the tail-end of the ludicrous Celtic Tiger period, with a seriously dark heart - very good indeed (and now being filmed by Neil Jordan). Its accompanied very well by Pärt's Kanon Pokajanen - much less bland than the Symphony 4 which fills the rest of the CD.
Yesterday's music was Maslanka's harmonious Woodwind Quintets. Let's go to the other end of the scale with a massive dollop of Luciano Berio. If you asked someone relatively bright what modern classical sounded like, they'd mutter about screaming and no tunes.
They'd be thinking, I suspect, of Berio, Stockhausen (genius, but barking mad) and perhaps early Turnage. I therefore recommend Berio's Sinfonia and Eindrücke, both of which fulfil these criteria, though the latter is slightly easier on the ear.
The point is that this music is like death metal: it's meant to reproduce the experience of a world without rationality, a world in which one lot of people can put 6 million other people in gas chambers without losing a night's sleep. The harmonies, tunes and neat structures of old classical music, like the poetry and art of the time, just don't tell the truth of the human condition. We had the most advanced technology and skills in every sphere of achievement, and we used them to kill each other on a monumental scale: this is what's meant by modernism. So artists, poets, novelists, sculptors and composers (gradually) stopped writing pretty music for summer afternoons.
Sinfonia isn't directly about the horrors, but it is explicitly about the strange new world we found ourselves in: the text sung is fragments of Claude Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked, a founding text of modern anthropology - and literary criticism - which first proposed structural analysis (of myths, in this case).
Or at least, the good ones did. The second-raters still took commissions for pretty music from cowards. I still listen to plenty of it (Bax, for instance) because there's lots of beauty in the world and I can't spend my entire life contemplating the holocaust (unlike death metal enthusiasts). But there's certainly a need for ugliness and challenge in music. Here's the first movement of Sinfonia and some 'nice' Berio - his Folksong arrangements.
