What I've read, listened to and watched while under house arrest

I am too lazy at the moment to write this post in paragraphs, so it will instead take the form of a list. This suits me well as I am a compulsive list-maker. I love nothing more than to make lists of my favourite novels, sonatas, television programmes, biographies etc. And I am always making lists of ideas -- for stories, essays, works of music. Occasionally the ideas do come to something, but the purpose of the list is to sort trough my wayward thoughts. Yet it is often futile: the act of list-making can instead make the obsessive aspect of my personality more pronounced.

• Beginning with several stories by Sir Walter Scott... First, his short stories: Chronicles of Canongate and the Keepsake Stories. Two Drovers was the best of these. Surgeon's Daughter had an excellent beginning, but Scott's sole attempt at leaving the continent was strangely plain. The Keepsake Stories were an okay diversion, but I doubt I'd ever read them again.
• Rob Roy and The Talisman. Rob Roy is a great novel, the best of Scott. The Talisman I was reading for the second time. It is not quite as profound as Rob Roy but the cantankerous, impassioned King Richard is one of Scott's best creations, and the opening scenes in the desert, then the hermit's cave and the secret monastery -- utter magic! If I had to recommend one Waverley novel to someone, I think the Talisman would be tit. It may not be his best, but it has the virtue of a compelling beginning (Scott can often take some time to get going), an exciting plot, and no Scots dialect.
• Ivanhoe -- I rewatched the extraordinarily good 1997 BBC adaptation, then reread parts of the original novel. The adaptation is of a sort no British television channel does any more: a serious, largely faithful adaptation of a classic novel. No concessions to modern political agendas, no sex scenes, no crude dialogue. It was rather violent, but I'm still a boy at heart, and so I love big, gory battles.
• Bong Joon-ho films. The three I watched keep you glued to the screen, though I can't say I enjoyed Parasite -- I almost want to say I felt worse for watching it -- and I found Snowpiercer confused and ultimately meaningless. Okja was by far the best. It had a virtuous protagonist, unlike the other two films in which not one character was the slightest bit admirable. It is bleak at the end, but also shows heroism: the little girl fails to save all the 'superpigs', but she can save the one superpig she loves. In this era's focus on systemic issues we easily forget that these personal acts of bravery, however small and insignificant they may seem in the Grand Scheme of Things, are the foundations of a healthy, loving civilisation.
• John Christopher's Death of Grass. Wyndham without the cosiness. Even bleaker than Day of the Triffids, Darwinian.
• I began reading Balzac's Father Goriot but my goodness was I bored. For some reason, I have never had any luck with any sort of French literature. I do not think I am prejudiced against the nation. I love its music from Perotin to Messiaen. But its literature has always defeated me. I have made so many abortive attempts: Camus, Hollebecque, Rousseau, Proust, Rabelais, Dumas. I finished Candide, but only because it was so short. I was going to say the only French writer I like is Simon Leys, then I remembered he was from Belgium. I do quite desperately want to try Hugo, but there are still so many unread books on my shelf...
• Rewatched Chernobyl. One of the few great television shows/films about how Communist societies operated. Absolutely frightening. It is amazing to me how even those who were alive during the time of Soviet Communism (not me) have largely forgotten the era. Nazism is still at the forefront of our memories, often the first example people use for comparisons. It's horrors are still vivid. This should, in a just and enlightened society as we aspire to be, be true for Communism too.
• Manzoni's The Betrothed. This is a grand, brilliant, expansive historical novel, up there with Scott. The Italian's consider one of their best literary works and are incredulous that the rest of the world mostly ignores it. I quite agree. It may be, alas, too Christian and too virtuous for modern tastes. One of the great moments in the novel is a Christian conversion. Fundamental to the story is a belief in the importance of marriage and religious commitment. It has many horrors,and it has much evil and much complexity, but goodness, beauty and honesty wins.
• Samuel Johnson's Prayers and Meditations have been a wonderful discovery. As far as I can tell the book hasn't been published in full since the 19th century. They are Johnson's personal prayers and thoughts, on his many vices, his indolence, his failures, his ambition, his old age, his impending death, his wife's death, his deep and occasionally controversial faith (he was an Anglican and so many reading the book thought his prayers for the dead amounted to heresy). I indulgently purchased facsmilies of the original manuscripts published by Yale some decades ago. There is no feeling more exhilarating than leafing through such facsimiles, seeing the author's original handwriting, the way his thoughts are organised, the way these things changed over the years. As an idle soul I share most of Johnson's worries, so beautifully expressed. His prayers and meditations give me great comfort, and encourage me to reform.
• My interest in Patrick O'Brian is fizzling. I enjoy the novels, but as a diversion, sort of like reading Wodehouse -- a sweet which I ingest in small quantities. I have lost even the urge to finish an O'Brian novel, though I do enjoy reacquainting with the characters of Jack Aubrey and especially Stephen Maturin, even if that means just dipping into books. I wanted to be obsessed about these books in the way so many others are, but alas.
• Carl Dreyer's films have been the most important 'lockdown' discovery for me. Four of them are masterpieces -- I'm almost tempted to say they are by themselves the four greatest films of all time: The Passions of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, Ordet and Gertrud. Vampyr is also a great film, but it is a bit too experimental and incoherent to rank with the others. It has some of the greatest moments in cinema but it is not quite the sum of its parts. Most of his earlier films (pre-Joan of Arc) have their merits, but they compare poorly with his later masterpieces. There is a soul, a slowness, a pathos, a sincerity, a silence, quite unlike any other films. It is everywhere: in the script, the way the camera moves, the lighting, the strange way people converse. The film I recommend to begin with is Day of Wrath, about 17th century witch trials. One of the most remarkable things about it is the way that everyone, including the witches, believes in witchcraft. It is not a simple tale of persecutors vs the persecuted.
• I was underwhelmed by Citizen Kane. I still don't know why.
• I tried reading Plato's Republic again. I still have little tolerance for philosophy. I don't dismiss it, I just can't read it. I always end up opening Boswell's Life of Johnson and am happy to find common sense, vividly and memorably conveyed.
• Oh Mozart, how I adore his operas. But I have tried in lockdown to listen seriously to his other works, and find most of his symphonies inferior to many of his contemporaries, ditto his piano sonatas. The only luck I had was with his concerti, which are most certainly great music.
• Anton Reicha is a new discovery for me. I love his wind quintets, but most brilliant of all is his 24 Preludes and Fugues. If you can find a recording, well worth it. The fugue has so much potential as a form but has not been developed in the same way sonatas and symphonies have. We are still too attached to the Bachian model. Reicha offers a fascinating alternative.
• I am listening to more and more Josquin. This is my favourite motet at the moment.
• I listened to all of Arthur Sullivan's operatic version of Ivanhoe. It is, I'm afraid, a failure. But it is a very good failure. It works only if you already know the story of Ivanhoe, and even then some of the best bits of the story are necessarily absent. The music is a bit of a potpourri; sometimes it works, sometimes it feels like there is too much of an affectation. The best music is when he goes for simpler and melodic -- i.e. more like G&S. For 'grand opera', there are better composers. Yet I had a blast listening to it. Sure, it was melodramatic, rather confused, anachronistic, musically inconsistent -- but if you love Ivanhoe, Merry England and Arthur Sullivan, it is one hell of a treat.
• Sofia Gubaidulina is my favourite living composer. I had high hopes for her John Passion, which I thought might be her magnum opus. But I found it drawn out, overly dramatic, more gesture than music, and with few of the really compelling motifs that usually characterise her work. I may be entirely wrong about it -- goodness knows how often a work I thought terrible on first listen I end up loving. What I do like very much is her work 'The Rider on the White Horse' which is adapted from the Passion.
• Grace Davidson's recording of the first book of Dowland songs is mesmerisingly beautiful.
• I am revisiting Buffy for I think the fifth time. There is nothing more comforting resubmerging oneself in old favourites. I am, I'm afraid, one of those insufferable creatures who believes Buffy to be one of the great artistic achievements of the modern era. Not much competition, I confess, but to my mind it is up there with Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, the Waverley novels, and many of the other great fictions which began as entertainment and developed into something so wonderfully profound. The last seriee of Buffy declined a bit in quality, but so do some of the endings of great novels -- the last chapter of Robinson Crusoe comes to mind. Consistency is not, in fact, a mark of greatness -- quite the contrary.

There are many more things, but I think the list is long enough for now...

Suicide of a Civilisation

I am constantly astonished by the self-harm modern societies keep inflicting on themselves. Those who rule us -- in most of politics and the media, and in various cultural establishments -- seem to have become bored of their ceaseless metaphorical self-flagellation and have instead decided on a kind of enforced collective seppuku.

We have become a culture that destroys rather than creates. We have a Rousseauian fantasy that if only we can just shed the sins of society we will be purer, freer and happier. We believe that our society -- Western civilisation broadly -- bears a highly disproportionate responsibility for the world's injustice and cruelty. So when we see the most horrific and enthusiastic violence and looting in our own societies, we say we deserve it. We even call this kind of meaningless violence 'protest'. It is a perverted sort of religious morality converted into a secular collective morality: if you beat me, I will stand there and ask for more beatings; if you steal my car, I will go into my house, rip the television off the wall, and offer it to you as well. 

And so when thugs and activists start burning down cities across America, destroying the livelihoods, if not the lives, of every type of American, we consider it progress. We are suicidally mad. I was deeply moved, like many others, watching the black St Louis Police Chief, almost with tears in his eyes, asking incredulously, 'can we make some sense out of this?' 

Why am I, an Englishman, scribbling a blog post about this? Well, inevitably the same madness has spread to here. The great London chamber music venue, Wigmore Hall, is streaming a concert every day from inside an empty hall. I wouldn't miss any of them, so addicted am I not merely to music but to that glorious hall, in which I have spent so many happy consoling evenings. When I tuned in to today's concert, I was firstly greeted by a message on-screen announcing two-minutes of silence 'to voice our support for the end to violence and inequality against black communities'. Quite why they thought this was appropriate or relevant is beyond me. Quite why anyone thinks these 'protests' have all that much to do with George Floyd's brutal death is beyond me. 

The US police force seems to me to be quite a corrupt, militarised and incompetent institution in many places. Ours is not necessarily better, though it's problems are different. Racism does not seem to be the primary problem so much as a general failure to police with proportion and consent. But for all the ills of the police force, this nationwide riot is more dreadful. It is a collective mass orgy of violence parading through American cities. It is the greatest threat to civilisation: barbarism. 

Yet the same people who think a handful of gun-carrying Republican protesting outside a state capitol building -- where no one gets hurt -- is a grave threat to democracy, who think if we don't socially distance many millions will die -- the same people think these riots are progress. No matter how many police are injured, no matter how many people beaten up, how many livelihoods destroyed, how many businesses smashed up, how many missiles thrown, most of those on the left will say this not the fault of the rioters, but of 'us' -- they may even encourage it. 

If these riots were committed by a combination of thugs and right-wing activists with their own grievances, what do you think the response would be? It would be described as terrorism -- and justly so. There does not seem to many of us left who abhor and fear violence, whatever the motive. There are few of us left who understand that destruction in itself does not produce any good, only create new evils. Why would anyone want to show solidarity with these rioters?

Lockdown and now the enthusiastic support for these evil riots. Two of the most blatantly destructive events in my life time. They will be ruinous for many, if not most. Just mad, horrifyingly mad.