Category: Random thoughts

Overheard on the bus, a (true) comment that shows the difference between the English and Spanish shopping cultures. “Well, I don’t like going to the market for my vegetables. They’re never as fresh, are they?”

Because these guys do, too. Oh, and him.

Christian attitude != looking forward to a global holocaust.

On the way to London. People drinking beer on the train is not an uncommon sight. But on the 0844?!

Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)

versus

Mother I’d Like to … (MILF)

In the cultural or academic worlds, ‘relevance’ is surely the most horrendous concept ever invented. Whether it’s people wondering “what’s the point” of studying Anglo-Saxon, or directors sticking cack-handed references to Iraq war into Monteverdi, it’s based on the fundamental principle that there are no eternal verities, and nothing can be interesting or engaging unless it’s about ME ME ME and NOW NOW NOW. Well, bollocks to that.

There are eternal truths in old art and knowledge, as much as there are in modern life, that’s why we still study them. Maybe it involves a bit of thought to get at, and maybe it’s boring for some, but getting at those philosophical truths is how we work out our picture of the world. The end of the cult of relevance is a collection of individual pods, with dribbling morons being read Macbeth but with all the characters speaking modern English, named after the listener and her friends, and with the action taking place in her house.

The cause of this rant is not so much the new production of the hip-hop Così fan Tutte at Glyndebourne, reported here, but the BBC’s reporting of how boring Così is, and how down wit da kidz this new production is. One singer says:

I’ve been in traditional productions of this where the audience frankly was bored stiff. Sometimes I was too. It can be a hard show to enjoy. So why not keep what works and build around it?”

Why not? Boring old Mozart. Keep bits of the music, maybe a couple of the characters, and let’s build something NEW and RELEVANT and BETTER on that tired old classic. C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas Mozart.

Two nice quotes from this week’s New York Review. First, Clive James on Philip Larkin:

Always averse to the requirements of celebrity, he didn’t find out enough about them, and never realised that beyond a certain point of fame you not only don’t have a private life any more, you never had one.

And from the Mughal Emperor Akbar:

The pursuit of reason and rejection of traditionalism are so brilliantly obvious as to be above the need of argument. If traditionalism were proper, the prophets would merely have followed their own elders.