Horner's Corner

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19th 1863

I just published a novel about music. Early in the process of writing it, I was warned by a similarly music-obsessive friend that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Since that first somewhat menacing reminder, I’ve heard the line frequently.

At first blush, the claim is a smugly dismissive one: verbal descriptions of music are doomed to be pointlessly, perhaps even ridiculously, inferior to actual music. As a reader, I resisted this idea; it just felt false, though I couldn’t quite say why. But as a writer, this assertion paralyzed me: I didn’t want to waste two or three years trying to produce something that could not be produced. I tried to put aside the line’s foundational snobbery (“My music is too ineffable for your inky art”), and then, reassuringly, it seemed like nothing more than a truism: words are words and music is music. And perfume is perfume; paintings are paintings; facial features are facial features. Yet writers are never counseled against attempting to evoke paintings or smells or faces or feelings or buildings or the nonmelodic sounds of jackhammers, thunder, or snoring. What was so elusive about music that it couldn’t be captured by words?

 Read more by Arthur Phillips at: The Believer – Dancing About Architecture.

‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

George Eliot (from Middlemarch)

photo: Mike Sinclair

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the Senate House of  University College, London. Architect was Charles Holden (1937 ).This Art Deco building is supposed to be the inspiriation for Orwell’s “Ministry of Love” in 1984.

By T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

Published: June 5, 2009

Twenty years ago, John Updike published a memoir, “Self-­Consciousness,” which opens with an extended reminiscence of his hometown. The author has been stranded for the evening while his mother and daughter are at the movies, and he walks the streets of Shillington, Pa., in a light rain, reliving the past in the incantatory detail with which he informed and illuminated his fiction, summoning up the names of departed local merchants, of his teachers and elementary school classmates, recalling the material texture of his childhood right on down to the candies, magazines and coloring books offered for sale at the variety store, recording the essence of his time amongst us. “The street,” he writes, “the house where I had lived, seemed blunt, modest in scale, simple; this deceptive simplicity composed their precious, mystical secret, the conviction of whose existence I had parlayed into a career, a message to sustain a writer book after book.” That message, that testimony of an individual and recollective consciousness as it relives and reviews the matter of a lifetime and grapples with the effects of aging, disease, decline and death, is the focus of Updike’s final collection of new fiction.

Of these 18 stories, all but one (an odd travelogue called “Morocco,” dating from 1979) were published in the last decade, and their themes and situations hark back to the author’s earliest autobiographical fiction, especially the stories set in Olinger, Updike’s fictionalized version of Shillington. The difference here is that the protagonists in this collection are, for the most part, at the end of their lives, and so the news of familial drama and divorce and the cocktail parties, barbecues and casual wooings of quotidian life in suburbia is given retrospectively, wistfully, presented in the larger context as memories of lost moments and lost opportunities. Updike once described himself as “a literary spy within average, public-school, supermarket America.” So he was. And these are his last smuggled dispatches, made all the more poignant for their finality.

Read more via Book Review – ‘My Father’s Tears – And Other Stories,’ by John Updike – Review – NYTimes.com.

The rich brown-umber hue the oaks unfold

When spring’s young sunshine bathes their trunks in gold,

So rich, so beautiful, so past the power

Of words to paint–my heart aches for the dower

The pencil gives to soften and infuse

This brown luxuriance of unfolding hues,

This living luscious tinting woodlands give

Into a landscape that might breathe and live,

And this old gate that claps against the tree

The entrance of spring’s paradise should be–

Yet paint itself with living nature fails:

The sunshine threading through these broken rails

In mellow shades no pencil e’er conveys,

And mind alone feels fancies and portrays.

I like the way the art/nature theme takes on a political, yet still entirely ‘natural’ turn towards the end: Clare is thinking of the enclosures that had driven so many like him from the land – their land. Worth remembering next time you are walking in the countryside and see a ‘private property’ sign blocking off a copse or woodland path.

(Paintings of trees by John Sell Cotman, apart from ‘The Cornfield’ which is by Constable (1826) -immediately below; photograph by  CH)

I recently went to see Twelfth Night. Big deal: Shakespeare’s on in London somewhere every week. I had a ticket as a birthday present, but after a long day at work I just wasn’t much in the mood. Let it wash over you and pretend to be into it I said to myself. Fact was, it wasn’t possible to do that. By Act 1 Scene 2 I was up and paying attention; by the interval my head was spinning

with the images, themes and the language. When it was over I was too awake to sleep when I got back.  It helped that the production was great (Derek Jacobi as Malvolio was particularly memorable). But here’s the good thought: when we see/hear/visit a ‘classic’ it can feel like paying one’s respects to a monument. When the classic comes and twists your melon despite a deep desire for sleep midweek after a long day at work you know the Bard of Avon is as good as they say, if you had any doubt.  I’ve been Shakespeare crazy, all over again, ever since..