Cultural challenges?

 

 

Well, a second viewing of Aida in the Liceu last night has not changed my opinion of the production – though musically (orchestra, chorus, and soloists) it was as good as my first experience.

     As my second viewing was with friends who were seeing the production for the first time, I kept my negative views to myself until the interval when I was able to add a certain amount of my sored and repressed venom to the general rejection of what the director, Shirin Neshat, had presented.

     The irritation with the front-of-curtain processions, the appearance and inexplicable nature of the veiled characters in black, the one-note moral argument, and the static quality of much of the stage work, all came in for fully justified criticism – while the music producers were as justly lauded.

     This time around I felt much more irritation about the use of film projected onto the blank surfaces of the hollowed out rotating cube that constituted the scenery.  It seemed to me that the director was caught between metaphor and reality and did not give any sort of coherent argument for the differing portrayals of action on stage or indeed on ‘screen’.

     The March of the Zombies, that comprised the last of the front-of-curtain processions before the final scenes, did not provoke the slow handclap and boos that accompanied my first view of this charade, and the conductor was not called on to quell incipient mutiny by the audience with a hard stare.

     Musically this production is redeemed by the quality of the music produced but not justified!

 

 

-o0O0o-

 

 

Our second foray into the music scene is due to be a lunchtime performance in the Palau, but our plans may be derailed by bad weather.  If it is only a spot of rain, then I couldn’t care less, but some of the downpours that we have had recently have been tropical in their intensity, and given the lunatic level of driving normally, I do not want to be on the road in challenging conditions with The Driving Death Cult!  We will see.

 

 

-o0O0o-

 

 

In my Huxley research, the second researcher that I have contacted with a view to looking through the Chatto archives in the University of Reading, has explained that she is fully booked until some time next year; so back to the drawing board.  Though I do have a list of further names of people centred in the area who are contactable, so all is not lost.  Yet.

     The irony of a wide-ranging research project focussing down to a single footnote, which will be used as the basis for an entire research paper, is not lost on me.

     The problem of having a topic so narrow is that the information that is central to my ‘thesis’ and that will be the original element, is contained in an archive that is not readily accessible to me, though it would be just a car drive away were I still living in Cardiff.     

     Well, that is something that I should have thought about when I was doing the original research all those years ago – like half a century ago!  Dear god, it does seem extraordinary writing sentences like that, and even more so when I unearthed my original research and started reading through extensive notes made by someone I barely recognized as myself! 

     I am sure that there is a moral lurking somewhere in those last sentences, but I can’t be bothered to tease it out!

 

 

-o0O0o-

 

 

With all the apocalyptic talk of hurricane-level storms for tomorrow, outside, now, there is bright sunshine and the temperature is a more-than-acceptable 23C.  And we are preparing to go out for a menu del dia – something I feel I deserve given the demands of an evening performance of a Grand Opera last night.

     As I am now used to going to the opera for the Sunday afternoon series (and therefore getting out of the theatre at a reasonable time) it was a shock to the system to find myself hours past my bedtime before head finally hit the pillow.  And, to make matters worse, it took me some time before I finally got off to sleep, so I felt more than justified ignoring the raucous interruption of my reveries by my mobile phone urging me to gird my loins and get to the pool for an early morning swim.

 

 

-o0O0o-

 

 

     Everyone is entitled to a leisurely day from time to time, and this is one of mine.

 

 

 

Paper Rules!

 

My research into Huxley has ground to a halt.  Again.  Or at least part of it.

     We keep hearing about how much information is ‘online’ and has been digitised.  And it is amazing just how much you can find out by using the internet, as you zip around the world visiting institutions and cultural centres and drawing on resources (that are freely available and searchable) that you become complacent and begin to expect ALL information to be available at the tap of a few computer keys.

     But this is an illusion.  In one aspect of my research for example, I can go online and see where in a collection information that I need might be, but the details of that information are only available if I turn up at the library and physically search the archives.

     In some ways of course, this is part of what research is all about, going to a library and actually touching the books, letters and accounts that exist in a mass of documentation, and emerging with the salient information necessary to make your point.

     My problem is the information I require is in a special collection in the University of Reading and not in a library in Barcelona a few km down the road.  Pity.

     There is another solution, and that is to get a researcher who is already in Britain to do some research on your behalf.  I am investigating this option, but there are, as you can imagine, a certain number of practical problems about that.  Still, letters have been sent off and I await developments with interest.

     Nearer to home, tomorrow will take us to Barcelona for to me see (and more importantly listen to) a second performance of Aida.  It will be interesting to see if the two people who will be accompanying me tomorrow share my evaluation of the production.

 

Meanwhile the correct ingredients for a Sangria de Cava continue to be the subject of some considerable discussion, but I think that I have now settled on a recipe that will satisfy.  It remains to be seen if my guests agree with me!

 

Idle hands: active research?

 

 

 

A second day dawns without the car!

     A false alarm with an early morning call from a private number, but my cautious ¡Hola! was enough to make them ring off immediately!  So, a second day without recourse to the gym.  And no, even though I did sleep-rest-in until after my usual rising time of 5.45 am I find that I am now generally incapable of lying-in with any degree of comfort.  So I got up.

     I did make myself a morning cup of tea and prepare my museli and then settled down to read:

 

 

This is a reprint of the tract that Huxley found to act as the basis of Mr Bodiham’s sermon in his first published novel Crome Yellow.  Huxley wrote that he had lifted the inspiration for the sermon that he gave the character from a tract that he found, and I am going to find out just how much was inspiration and how much was straightforward copying. 

     What sparked my interest in this sermon and the Rev E H Horne who wrote it was a footnote inserted into later editions of Crome Yellow that acknowledged the debt that owed to Horne.

     An idle thought about the origin of the footnote grew into a search that has prompted me to try to find out when and why the footnote was added, and to find out a little more about the historical Horne. 

     This has involved contacting a variety of individuals and institutions ranging from the Library of Lambeth Palace to The Bodleian, taking in the British Museum, the British Library, the archive of a foundry, an evangelical library in Catalonia, the university of Reading and various antiquarian booksellers, and others – all of which was possible using my computer and emails.

     I have been astonished at just how helpful people have been and how much time and effort they are prepared to make for a stranger pursuing an odd line of micro-research!

     I have also discovered that there is a limit to what you can actually do in certain circumstances, before you reach a digital paywall and the gates come clanging down. 

     What I should be doing is looking around Castelldefels and Barcelona to find a University with access to various websites that are closed to me, but as a private researcher I do not know how I can gain access.

     One thing that I can do is search through the list of local libraries and find out which ones are open to the general reader.  I remember the revelation while researching the painter Dalmau, to find a wealth of relevant volumes in the art library in MNAC.  There must be other institutions with open access around and I must make a real effort to find them.

     Another quest!

 

It's all in the definition. Possibly.

  

Sometimes you just have to tell yourself that proving a negative is as good as a positive.

     For the best part of a fortnight we (AI & I) [If you say that in a swing rhythm sort of way it does sound like one of those inane choruses in a Eurovision failure) have been working on a piece of micro-research into my long-ignored thesis on Huxley from 50 years ago.

     I have fixated on a footnote, and on the person who is the subject of that footnote.  The relatively famous bit of my literary concern is linked to Huxley’s first (published) novel Crome Yellow.  The footnote mentions someone who as far as I was concerned was lost to history.

     Not lost if you have the will and the time to delve.  Very gradually the character (indeed he was a character in the Peacockian novel that Huxley wrote) began to emerge from the shadows of forgetfulness.

     We knew that he was a Rector, and a Rector of the parish of Garsington at the time of Lady Ottoline Morell and her coterie of the literary and the famous, but everyone else in the novel was much more famous than he, and their reputations have largely survived from the dizzy days of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s – together with representatives from a generation that was somewhat older.  Researching the others was easy – I have books on them.  But the humble Rector was not so easy to ¡find out about.

     So the search began.  American born-again fundamentalist on-line libraries actually had copies of some of the book that the rector had written – apocalyptic consideration of some of the more sensational books of the bible looking forward to The End Days – spiritual catnip to the Evangelical Right Wing of those who call themselves Christians.

     Of course, the tract that I wanted, and which Huxley had allegedly used as the basis for a whole chapter in his novel, was NOT online and so the hunt for a copy somewhere began.

     As we began to draw up some sort of biography for the rector, we discovered that he invented a ‘stay’ for a bell – this stay allowed the bell to be . . . well, I did go into the details of what the thing did and looked up a whole vocabulary of bell ringing to try and understand its function and even when onto the website of an old foundry that had used the damn thing extensively, until another fragment suggested that the guy who invented this device was not the guy that we were researching.  Suddenly a whole fascinating aspect of the rector’s personality was snatched away.

     Such is the state of the information available on line, even though we are now questioning the previous attribution, we are not absolutely sure and so instead of dismissing a week of work, we have put an academic question mark next to it: awaiting further clarification.

     I have now contacted the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth Palace, and Oxfordshire History Archive, a foundry, a bellringers society, and numerous other sources all from the comfort of my computer in Castelldefells.  My questions and requests have been sent to locations in three continents, to booksellers, enthusiasts, and academics.

     Self-indulgence personified!

     And, you never know, there might be some answers.

     Eventually!