Rhyme does pay

I've just finished a 2 hour seminar on medieval literature: Beowulf to Chaucer. It's all the students get on this period in their time here, which saddens me very much, and inevitably there wasn't much chance to concentrate on anything, so we looked at a little Arthuriana (Layamon and Malory) and a short Anglo-Saxon piece ('The Wife's Lament') and that was it. I regret not putting a slapstick miracle/mystery play on there - that would have lightened the Friday-afternoon feeling.

Nevertheless, we managed, and I got my reward (like the Anglo-Saxons, it's here on earth and not in heaven): Ben (not Cynical Ben) and Hilary gave me a Twelfth Night present of what looks like an excellent book, Andrew Piper's Dreaming in Books: the Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (U of Chicago P, 2009). From a brief perusal of the chapter titles, it looks imaginative and wide-ranging.

Then onwards I trekked to the post room and found two parcels. In one was a cassette tape (!) of Decca [Mitford, agitator, aristocrat and muckraker] and the Dectones with Maya Angelou [famous poet], singing 'Right, Said Fred' and 'One Fish Ball'. Also included is a fluorescent orange 'Don't Forget Your Day Job Records' Kazoo, which will go in the kazoo rack alongside my Nightingales instrument.

In the other parcel was another free book via Librarything's Early Reviewer operation. It's an uncorrected proof copy of Frances Stonor Saunders' The Woman Who Shot Mussolini. The woman in question is the fascinating The Honourable Violet Gibson, Anglo-Irish aristocrat who first became a leftwing Catholic Irish nationalist then a lover of Italy. She shot Musso in the nose, and was confined in an asylum for the rest of her life, without trial or review.

Saunders wrote the rollicking history of knightly psychopaths by tracking the career of British thug Hawkwood, but the first book of hers I read was her brilliant examination of the CIA's cultural activities, Who Paid the Piper?. Highly recommended.

So - nicely set up for a good weekend. Have fun.

Manichaean…

As told by Alex Ross in The New Yorker this month, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was believed to be a Communist by the secret services - leading to spies trying to analyze his music for subversive material.

How very reductive. Like most artistic people of the time, Bernstein was of the left (it was, after all, the period of McCarthy and then Nixon) but the idea that musical notes are politically charged is exactly what the Soviets thought in the very depths of their most Philistine period, the Proletkult (late 1920s-1930s). It's just such a facile argument and shows how plain dumb our superiors were, whichever side they were on. Also, artists just aren't that bright. They have their peculiar skills and are usually happy to side with whoever will let them exercise their talents. Rarely has a composer had the intellectual ability to discuss the dialectic, let alone encode it into his or her music (which doesn't stop people endlessly analyzing Shostakovich's music for anti-Stalinist attitudes).

Bernstein was on Hoover's 'Security Index', a list of 12,000 Americans he thought were so dangerous that they should be arrested in the event of a Soviet invasion. Because fat conductors are always the shock troops of the occupation. I'd love to get a copy of it.

On a more enlightened level, I'd recommend Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders' excellent book on the US secret service's attempts to control the worlds of literature, art and music.

Here's alleged Communist Bernstein conducting alleged anti-Communist Shostakovich's allegedly anti-Communist 5th symphony. Oooh, feel the confusing subversion. After that, the Latvian State Choir singing the Mass that the FBI thought was Communist (like all Catholic masses written by Jewish composers are secretly communist).