James Strecker Reviews the Arts

FRIDAY: Inauspicious beginning to a much-needed sanity break and rest. One hour to Pearson International with half the world on the highway going home on the Friday night of a holiday weekend and half the world going somewhere else. Night descends and the world is made of bright car lights everywhere and the tedious landscape of Mississauga which has expanded much too fast to maintain human scale. One looks out the window at these functional buildings and craves a field of weeds.

Sharing the van is a couple from North Bay who each reminisce about trips to Italy and Ireland. Exploring other countries seems to thrill them. They are now off to London, Paris, and Amsterdam, three days for each city, an impossible task. Almost two hours of waiting in line to check in at Pearson, a practice run for monstrous Heathrow. During the flight, announcements are spoken at a clip that is impossible to follow and hard to hear, yet ironically delivered in both English and then in French. You either want to be understood or you don’t, so why bother to speak, unless for simple pleasure of enjoying words, if you won’t be understood?

SATURDAY: After three hours of sleep it’s now Heathrow and two hours of endless zigzagging in a line that by rough calculation totals a thousand people in it. I pass the two travelers from North Bay several times who, near the end, seem worn. “This will be our last trip,” says he. “Never again,” says she. The pleasant fellow who stamps my passport has been called in from another terminal because the number of arrivals here is so many. I find myself laughing at each absurdity and that’s a good sign.

Three books just published and I am bloody sick of sitting at the computer, ergo London’s somewhat familiar and comforting turf. Too tired for now to do more than eat, so it’s a five-minute walk from my hotel on the Strand to EAT BY CHLOE, a vegan restaurant on Great Russell Street. As initiation into the British landscape I have fish (slab of battered tofu) and hefty chips, which includes squashed peas and tartar sauce. I’m looked after by a very pleasant Jorja, a second-year arts student at ‘uni’ – translation university.

Later, outside Drury Lane Theatre, a young man face to face with a woman shouts so loud that people come running from all directions. She seems embarrassed. One watcher films the whole thing and is physically attacked by he who shouts. Others intervene, a scuffle ensues. Later, on the Strand, crowds of people are all going somewhere.

SUNDAY: A BBC program during which two commentators critically discuss the political context of morning headlines in the British morning press. It’s Theresa May and Boris Johnson now taking over somewhat from the inescapable Trump. What a trivial thing some of humanity can be! On the way to CHLOE for breakfast I pass many homeless, behind Drury Lane Theatre, who sleep bundled in the streets of Conservative London.

My breakfast is the Early Bird at 9 pounds which includes scrambled tofu. The music they play, to my ears, has people fit into technology and be used as components. Some sounds imaginative, some like variety for variety’s sake, but little sounds like a vehicle for genuine human emotion as we find in great popular singers. Here we have mostly clichés that fill in for the human heart.

Down the Strand to ST. MARTIN IN THE FIELDS and, though not a Christian, I ease into the tranquility of an almost empty church. The tall and slightly opaque windows, as high as the walls of this famous church, give much pacifying light of no denomination. I begin a busy week with brief peace.

Into the NATIONAL GALLERY and its exhibition of COURTAULD IMPRESSIONISTS. Gerard who zaps our tickets at the door says, “I hope this thing works………Oh, oh, technology is gone again” but then technology does work again and I get to enter. I then have a seat facing the Bar at the Moulin Rouge and sense a lifetime in the eyes of Suzon, Manet’s model for a painting in which her reflection famously does not line up with her actual body. Her eyes seem intensely soulful, even intensely stoned.

To the left hang two Daumiers, both of Don Quixote with Sancho Panza. In one, Don Q chases after clouds of dust, thinking they are an advancing army, but in truth they are flocks of sheep – a life lesson there. Seurat’s Bathers at Asnieres is a quietly blinding work of inner light and inviting textures, haunting in its brightness. In front of A Young Woman Powdering Herself, a young woman explains the painting in Japanese to her male companion who says “Aaah” several times as he carefully considers brushstrokes.

Jane Avril in the Entrance of the Moulin Rouge shows an unusual tormented expression one doesn’t usually see in Lautrec’s paintings of the dancer. Of Le Loge by Renoir we are told that “the social ritual of theatre fascinated Renoir” – as it does me. The subtle emotional complexity in the woman’s eyes up close solidifies into a more penetrating gaze from afar. There’s more attitude in her, a slight disapproval tinged with sadness.

Cezanne’s Lac d’Anney was called “unsurpassed” by Roger Fry and certainly this exquisite work suggests a go-ahead for cubism and for me it works most hauntingly at ten feet. Why do I feel that I finally see Cezanne’s heart in his works? How was I distracted before? In Two Dancers by Degas, I see two ballerinas made into divine spirits by the footlights. I note that Manet spoke the ooziness of paint as effectively as Van Gogh.

This exhibition is too intense, in a way, since many of the paintings would each take days, a lifetime perhaps, to take in. So now a stroll through the NATIONAL GALLERY and first its Vigee le Brun’s self-portrait, with its very kissable lips and the penetrating insight of her gaze. Watteau’s The Scale of Love seems an old friend, as does Goya’s Dona Isobel. The Venus of Velazquez, my fave nude since high school, has many viewers. Her face in the mirror must be one of world art’s most enticing mysteries. But now I’m too tired to go see the Botticelli -never thought I’d say something as horrifying as that!

I buy an Americano at the National Portrait Gallery’s café from a Rumanian, Ada, a woman with a sexy twinkle in her manner and conversation. I buy a London Sunday Times at Charing Cross Station and during a walk pass Dishroom, a trendy restaurant du jour with a two hour wait for a table and filled with young diners. Off to the often-recommended SAGAR for a vegan Indian thali, with its delicious variety of six individual samplings. The waiter Abdull promises that on my next visit he will look after me in choosing a meal.

Later I walk to CHLOE for a ginger-cayenne drink and chat with waitress Jessica who grew up in Spain. She speaks English, Spanish, and German, is studying graphic design, and, already with two YouTube postings of her singing, is pursuing a career in vocal jazz.

MONDAY: From BBC News I learn that in just ten years we’ve had a “dangerous rise” in global temperatures. A scientist comments, “It’s up to governments what to do…. It’s time for us to decide.” With Trump? May? Yah, sure. Now to Soho to drop off a package and then to another of Happy Cow’s Top Ten Vegan Restaurants in London, TIBITS just off Regent Street. It’s buffet style, pay by weight, and each of my nine samplings is of dining quality, refreshing and tasty.

Next, drop in to the National Portrait Gallery to reconnect with and reconsider portraits I’ve known for decades: the Brontes, Shelley, Jane Austen (said to be a good likeness), a bust of Pope (also said by a contemporary to be lifelike), Shakespeare, and and and. New to me is a life mask of Wordsworth, but not Keats since, long ago, I bought a copy of his mask in the Gallery shop when they were on sale there. A life mask is a thrilling but also an unnerving experience.

New also to these eyes are both a photo and a painting of Elsa Lanchester whose opening scene to Bride of Frankenstein I have enjoyed many times, especially with the hammy contribution of Gavin Gordon as Lord Byron. It’s then off to Colley Cibber, mockingly devastated by Pope in The Dunciad, but here we learn that Cibber too didn’t think much of his poetry.

Night in one of my fave places on the planet, WIGMORE HALL, with its acoustics of graceful resonance and its atmosphere of ease and intimacy. Row A on the side puts me on the aisle and ten feet from the violinists who, to my delighted surprise, descend to occupy the three empty seats beside me when they are not required for a selection by the FREIBURG BAROQUE ORCHESTRA.

Soloist SANDRINE PIAU displays a confident versatility that serves the several texts with an actor’s incisiveness and the music with a soprano voice of subtle variations and thrilling passion. With Lucretia, we are drawn into her human inner frenzy and remain there breathless. Drama seems a second, maybe first, nature to her as an interpretive artist and we are gripped by her artistry.

The Freiburgs are constantly impressive with the worlds they evoke in music. They seem a good vibe band that is surely at one with each composer, always elegant and sometimes elegantly silly. Their runs in the strings mesmerize, as do their cross-weaving textures and assertive shaping of passages. These are musicians who dance in attitude, and some in body, with obvious delight before us. PLAMENA NIKITASSOVA, director and violinist, shows constant delight in the playing of the oboist and the violinist beside her obviously delights in everything, inside her and around her. What a life-celebrating evening!

TUESDAY: To handy CHLOE for a get-started vegan burger made with black beans, quinoa, and sweet potato, and it’s good. Again, the music is current, something I’m not. The emotion seems more created than felt, not something that develops in actual lives.
In London, I’ve stayed a number of times at B&Bs on Gower Street in Bloomsbury, and strolled daily through the neighbouring BRITISH MUSEUM on my way somewhere, but this time it’s a twenty-minute walk and then going through a security system that didn’t exist ten years ago.

Immediately to the two attendant Assyrian gods from outside the temple of Nabu, god of writing, from 810-800 B. C. The end of the inscription states, “do not trust in another god,” a kind of ego-tripping monotheism. But eye to eye with the god on the right is powerful stuff for me and feels deep as the earth can go in some kind of connection I feel. Across from my friend stands a ten-foot human headed winged lion from 865-860 B. C. and two protective spirits in relief. one of them eagle-headed. Just before the room of Elgin marbles stands an imposing pair of human headed winged bulls who stood before at the gates of the citadel of the Palace of Sargon in Khorsebad 721-705 B. C. as “magic guardians against misfortune.”

Next a walk around the Elgin theft and I pay attention to a “weary” horse from a chariot of the moon-goddess Selene and its “bulging eyes ad gasping mouth.” But, as in every museum nowadays, it seems that these stunning creations from long ago seem to exist only to be photographed and not experienced. Still, I take in the grand hollowness of this space which holds time at an arm’s length.

On the elevator to the Mesopotamian sculptures, an elderly woman declares, “Gosh, this is confusing, and I’m not even a foreigner.” Now more favorites: the statue of King Idrimi of Alalakh from 1570-1500 B. C., the silver lyre of 2500 B. C. from Ur, whose shape was preserved by pouring plaster into spaces where wood was no more. Next, an Americano from a server in the Great Hall who comes from Puglia where they have “nice weather, nice food, nice girls.” At which he smiles.

How the hell do I get to the reading room? I ask in frustration at the main desk – and the following ensues:
“I’m confused,” says I.
“I’ve been confused all my life,” says he.
“I worked in your reading room years ago on a project and then ten years ago I sat in the room again for old times’ sake.”
“Yes, and then they closed it ten years ago because the director called it dead space, this about a room where Karl Marx had put his gum under the seat.”
“That’s idiotic. The room has such an aura to it.”
“It does indeed, and the new director talks about opening it again…. but not in my lifetime.”
Damn bureaucrats!”
“Agreed.”

I feel a cold coming on, so I walk past my Assyrian god, the one on the right, do eye to eye, and again feel I am being seen in my private existential depth. I’ve twisted my knee by bending down to read the posting about an Assyrian relief, so I slightly limp home all the way through Covent Garden. So, it’s a humus wrap and filtered coffee from Pret a Manger at whose branches two people have died recently by eating unlabeled ingredients to which they were dangerously allergic. Then a shower and a lie down to watch, as it turns out, Mrs. Doubtfire, with the gifted Robin Williams and then a film with Daniel Craig which is utterly stupid but which puts me to sleep. Go Go Go Go has become Stop.

WEDNESDAY: From the BBC, Theresa May has created a Ministry of Suicide Prevention to address the fact of 4500 who kill themselves annually. It’s October 10 and the predicted weather is 23 degrees C. An item about prostate cancer, the “stiff upper lip” attitude of British men who should be “coming forward” if they have symptoms like “blood in pee” or “blood in the poo.” Another item looks at concerns about children’s mental health. Piccadilly station is closed because of a person on the track.

Over to ITV and some talk about a vegan week on British Bake Off. “What’s the point of a vegan cake?” asks the male host. “Give me a beef cake with lots of meat.” I’ve met or seen his asshole kind many times, a Trump or some other grown man who acts assertive with much bluster on some issue and who proves himself a man in his eyes and an asshole in the eyes of others. The UN has recently stated that the consumption of meat contributes significantly to the earth’s increasing crises, but not one of our smugly stupid hosts seems to know that as they talk about nothing.

I’m off for breakfast, however, to a vegan paradise on earth, the newly opened CAFÉ FORTY ONE, near the Queensway tube station north of Hyde Park, which advertises itself as “Passionately Vegan” and “London’s first Vegan French Patisserie,” one that offers “a vegan alternative to the British Afternoon Tea tradition.” I’m here finally for a Full English Breakfast” which turns out to be “vegan sausages, roasted portobello mushrooms, baked beans, vegan bacon, sliced avocados, sourdough toast and roasted tomatoes” -and filter coffee over English breakfast tea. I can tell how delicious the food is simply because I have very small bites of it and chew very slowly in hedonistic pleasure with each one.

I have a chat with chef CLARISSE FLON, a woman of warm and spontaneous charm, who became a vegan four years ago because of a chronic digestive illness, plus her investigation of the appalling treatment of animals. I learn much. In France, people are aggressively hostile to vegans and throw rocks at the windows of vegan restaurants and cars with vegan stickers on them. Her staff of five in the kitchen had no training in vegan cuisine – what, no butter or milk in a bechamel sauce??!! -and had to be re- educated. Clarisse is an internationally experienced chef and “qualified in Patisserie with the French National Professional Certificate.” She intends to have a pastry counter in her restaurant because “there are few choices for vegans otherwise.” Her mother still can’t comprehend why Clarisse won’t eat eggs.

I leave the stylishly modern, serene and inviting Café Forty One and head to HMV near Bond Street, which saddens me because I remember many visits to the HMV near Tottenham Court Road which used to have a whole floor devoted to classical music and one devoted to jazz, blues, and world music. This store is a much-reduced and dying operation, alas.

I head to Marks and Spenser to buy some T-shirts and a sweater, am forced because of time to pass on Handel’s house – where he wrote Messiah – and walk to my hotel through Soho, stopping at Pret a Manger for an avocado wrap and coffee. I also stop at Mountain Warehouse for two wicking shirts on sale. I discover I’ve just missed the founder of the chain who had dropped into this store an hour ago with his dog named pooch.

Home/hotel at last and slowed down by the cold, I turn on the TV. Happily, a fave tenor Rolando Villazon is hosting a program on Don Giovanni and, as expected, he speaks with enthusiasm about this great opera and sings with passion. Then it’s a program titled Euclid to Descartes and we are asked – and asked to ask – if mathematics is created or discovered. Two terrific programs. And then I hang a Do Not Disturb sign on my door. But later, while in a deep and needed sleep, I am indeed disturbed – untimely ripped, I call it – from my rest.

THURSDAY: It’s 9:00 a. m. and the hotel’s fire alarm is the loudest and ugliest I have ever heard. So, it’s unintended slo-mo and I get clothes on, grab essentials like wallet and passport, and head down the emergency stairs to the street. As feet touch sidewalk, the alarm, caused by a “panel malfunction” I am told cheerfully, ceases into silence. So back to bed, but the Blue Dahlia is on TV and, with a script by the great Raymond Chandler, must not be missed. It’s followed by an American sci-fi flick from the 50s about plants with intelligence, and we hear about an “intellectual carrot.”

CHRIS MCKINNON, co-owner of Hamilton’s McKinnon Hair Design is in town for an annual London hair show and she invites me for dinner at MILDRED’S in Soho. It’s a delicious vegan meal of Smoked tofu, fennel, apple, white bean sausages and mash, pan-fried hispi cabbage, peas, dill, cider gravy, plus soup, plus dessert. Chris has just spent a month in Quebec as part of an intensive French course, so our appetizer is conversation en francais.

There’s much catching up and then, with my umbrella safely in my hotel room I run like hell through the rain to the Harold Pinter Theatre off Leicester Square. The first play, THE LOVER, is brilliantly realized with John Macmillan and Hayley Squires as husband and wife respectively in wide-eyed and semi-robotic performances that are beautifully eerie. She has a “lover” and he has a “slut” but so much is simultaneously going beneath and even on the surface. I really enjoy these stylish performances, am really taken by them.

With THE COLLECTION, I have this play embedded in my consciousness for many years, partly because I showed it many times to my college classes. This production, directed by Jamie Lloyd plays to the audience at times, with aggressive attitudes spelled out and David Suchet doing a thespian turn as Harry. It’s overstated in comparison to the film, but quite interesting. Of course, some lines in Pinter can sound deliberately clever, too stagey, and do let us off the hook of facing doubt, at least in this production. But it helps me to see Pinter differently in places. Strangely, Suchet is on the television when I get back to my room all wet.

FRIDAY: A note on spoken English on the BBC: future is few-CHAW, nature is nay-CHAW. And thus informed, I’m off now to CAFÉ FORTY ONE for an actual lunch. My waitress is Sara, a Hungarian studying journalism in London, who brings me a vegan -I remind you – Mushroom Bourgignon Pie and Mash at only, considering the high quality of the food, only 11 pounds 90. Because chef Clarisse is a master of pastry, I next succumb to the Chocolate and Praline Millefeuille with its layers of caramelized puff pastry with chocolate and praline crème patisserie. “If you are a chocolate person, you will love millefeuille,” advises Sara and it turns out to be one of the most stunningly delicious desserts I’ve ever had. I eat it slowly and we talk about veganism and animal rights. Later, I chat with Kata, also from Hungary, who was a history and English teacher and speaks at least five languages.

A brief lie down and it’s off to CUTTY SARK, the clipper ship now on display in Greenwich which once transported the sacred tea to England from the east. I’m here for a gig of MARTIN CARTHY AND JOHN KIRKPATRICK, two cornerstones of English folk music. I first met Martin when he sang for my students at the Sheridan College School of Crafts many years ago and have seen him perform and chatted with him many times since. The songs he sings, many of which I number as favorites, and the unique style of guitar playing that he himself created, mean a great deal to me, in part because they root me to the earth and its people. With John I finally get to tell him how his singing always touches me, always reaches into me.

A chat with Martin brings disturbing news. He had a dislocated shoulder from tripping while taking out the garbage. He says he let out such a loud scream on landing that daughter Eliza – yes, the brilliant singer-fiddler -came running from the third floor. The shock affected Martin’s memory for a time – I guess in the way that our house fire affected mine – and we talk of aging and all its related pleasures.

The gig is pure pleasure and even has lured a couple in the audience to travel from Edinburgh for it. John does most of the hosting, all with reference to the five million tons of Cutty Sark overhead, gives anecdotes about fiddler Dave Swarbrick who inevitably had a “falling out” with whomever he played, adds that Swarbrick’s singing “could be amazing,” and adds that Swarbrick did co-write six or seven songs with Richard Thompson. John proceeds to sing Crazy Man Michael from Fairport Convention days and Martin sings some of his “big ones” such as Prince Heathen, Dominion of the Sword, Maid and the Palmer, and Lovely Joan to which he adds, “I’ve been singing this song for fifty years!” Oh, time!

SATURDAY: To CHLOE for vegan breakfast of pancakes and coffee, and notice that the young noon hour crowd come here as much for communal chat as for food. It’s an alive place. To the NATIONAL GALLERY and so many paintings I’ve loved since my teens. With many visits to London and the National since then, some of these works have been part of my aesthetic and spiritual growth, I suspect. Take the Rembrandt self-portrait, done when he was 63 in the year of his death. I once did a newspaper feature based on his self-portrait at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches and here I am again, talking silently to my friend Rembrandt. It’s not really weird that he is so alive for me. And then to works by Hobemma, Van Dyck, Rubens, Vermeer, Leonardo, Peter de Hooch, Jan Steen, Cranach, Holbein, and, yes, Botticelli at last.

To the WYNDHAM’S THEATRE which actor Paul Eddington once told me that he put into the same category as the Bristol Old Vic for acoustic quality. The matinee is THE HEIGHT OF THE STORM by Florian Zeller and it begins with violin music that is solo and sad. An old man stares out the window as his daughter speaks, unanswered, to him: “You can’t live here on your own” and “With some things, you need to let go.”

Jonathan Price is intensely old with simultaneously sharp and hollow eyes that look back in time and into the present. He rails from his own reality and licks his lips slowly like a dry old man. “I’m an old plant in an old pot,” he says, and then “People who try to understand, they are morons.” The audience titters nervously here and there, probably unsure what to feel and what to admit about themselves.

We experience many shifts in time and reality during Zeller’s play Andre’s wife Madeleine has recently died and then is alive before us and not dead for him, perhaps in the past that has happened or perhaps imagined in his mind. We change from past to present and back in split seconds. Now perhaps he is dead and being discussed by wife and daughters. He objects “I am here” and remains unheard, unseen.

“He made me promise to outlive him,” says the wife. There’s talk of “retirement homes, hospital rooms, and all that” and unspoken words in glances about the maybe affair and the maybe child in his past. There’s his diary that tells all and might get published. There’s sibling hostility about him, the father of two daughters who recalls, “a few names, a few faces in the fog here and there.” “Where’s your mother?” he keeps asking.

Back and forth in time. Mother says to elder daughter, “When I need you, I’ll send for you. In the meantime, fuck off!” and the audience applauds. Wife also says, “I prefer it when they’re gone. They have their lives and we have ours, and it’s better if we don’t mix them up. And at the heart of this powerful and profoundly moving play and production, sensitively acted, husband and wife talk about life being ended: “What would I do without you?” he asks. “I’ll always be here, don’t worry,” she responds.

After the no-interval 80-minute performance, I head again the BRITISH MUSEUM to stare once again at the Rosetta Stone, to look up into the eyes of the statue of Ramses II who inspired Shelley to write Ozymandias, and to stand before the statue of the Assyrian god-guard who, over and over for some years, has drawn me back to his presence. I begin to hum in his before, and higher seems more appropriate. I look into his eyes that, unrelentingly, ask what it means to be truly alive.

Saturday night and a wide expanse of seats on the stage of the ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL feels overwhelming, even with the LONDON PHILHARMONIC yet to take their places. The large choir is already seated looking down from above in three rows. Soon conductor Jeremie Rhorer produces an effectively nuanced reading of Poulenc’s STABAT MATER in which delicate spiritual passages feel strangely on equal par with spirit-shaking moments elsewhere. One feels as much a sense of spiritual emergence as development. The richness of the orchestra’s strings is full-bodied and demanding of attention without straining for effect.

And what to make of this: of the eight cellists seated before me, the four women sit with erect spines, while the four men lean forward or slouch in their seats. Trisha, aka she who welcomes us into the hall, suggests it is because the women use Pilates machines. She then continues to welcome audience members as if into her living room.

Now for CARMINA BURANA the Tiffin Boys Choir are plopped into the middle of the adult choir. The cellists, while waiting, have much chatter among them while the violinists seem more obediently- who knows to what? – silent. Orff’s O Fortuna soon blasts me out of any passive mode I had in listening and Rhorer’s take on Orff’s famous work shifts repeatedly and excitedly in its effects: earth gripping, breath holding anticipation as with the “chorus of the maidens, melodic force.

The weight of the piece does not exclude the lyricism of the small female groupings. Baritone Simon Keenlyside, of Don Giovanni fame, now offers plaintive passion in a semi-falsetto and then brings a ringing feet on ground urgency to his singing. There is a cosmic vigour in all this medieval drunkenness, as if it is a universal plan to get pissed, and, appropriately, a thrusting joie de vive throughout in the score. I’m surprised at how familiar I seem to be with Carmina Burana and how thrilling a performance like this one can be.

SUNDAY: Rain. Yuk. But at least I’m not washed out to sea like a man in Bristol during heavy weather there. I walk to Chairing Cross station for the Sunday Times. The underground attendant kills the 2 pound 10 debt on my Oyster card and plugs in 2 pounds 70 for my trip to Heathrow tomorrow. That’s the third time that people of the Tube have been so kind- I didn’t have to pay. Then its Itsu on the Strand for two serviceable i.e. warm soups – one Udon, one Miso.

To the NATIONAL GALLERY where I chat with guard Maria who also loves Vigee le Brun and we talk about the artist’s mastery of textures. I am blown away by le Brun’s handling of hair, lace, and feathers and Maria by the artist’s handling of skin. I note Watteau, and Velazquez, and Derain, and Monet, and Van Eyck, and Leonardo, and Holbein, and Cranach…. there isn’t a lifetime long enough to take in and understand the art in this gallery. And before leaving, I’m eye to eye with Rembrandt, his self portrait and age 63, the year of his death. I find myself inwardly talking to him and I find much comfort in that.

An afternoon recital in the Purcell room by pianist ALEXANDER ARDAKOV who, to my ears, is more geared to compositional methods and emphasis on form plus the piano’s expressive and percussive potential than etching human emotion and ethereal subtleties. Still, I’m tuned in, albeit more to Scarlatti’s mind more than the pianist’s heart – and don’t I sound pretentious! Tambourin by Rameau suggests a lightly stepping ballerina, while in Beethoven’s sonata 17 the pianist goes more for effects within a passage than developing an overall argument for the Opus 31 piece. That said, Ardakov offers emphasis that is fresh to my ears as he gives each passage passionate attention. This might not be a recital that I will often recall but, as a result of it, familiar music will now be heard with a more enriched perspective.

For the evening, it’s very compelling readings fresh and imaginative writing by the six MAN-BOOKER FINALISTS with host Damien Barr, again at the Royal Festival Hall. Barr remarks at the outset: “A question sits at the heart of each story – who am I?” Anna Burns reads from Milkman in a delightful Irish accent and notes “there is safety in not getting to the point”. Our host remarks “There are so many words for vagina in this book”

Next, it’s Washington Black by Esi Edugyen from which I note these potent lines: “his usefulness had surely passed” and “That was how it began: me and Kit watching the dead go free” and “A man who has belonged to another learns early to observe a master’s eyes” and “Big Kit determined calmly and with love, to kill herself and me.” The author remarks that she researches before writing a book, but also during its writing.

From Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under we hear: “You forget your name or where the bathroom is” and “Some mornings you know exactly who we are” and “Here where the days are so short, they are barely worth talking about” and “You can hear the water effing along.” During the Q&A we hear “The memories that we have, they’re never entirely ours.”

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner, who sets the book in a women’s prison and has indeed done readings in prisons including some in Scotland, has these lines: “I peek under the sheet and he was the same as me down there” and “Our relationship had a lot of dreams to it like that.” Later she comments, “I never use the term research, I just write the book.” She concludes, “I didn’t learn a body of knowledge to employ it.”

The Overstory by Richard Powers, called “truly epic and operatic” by the host, offers these passages: “She wants to see what uncut forests look like, while there’s something left” and “The mosses are thumbnail forests all their own” and “Death is everywhere, oppressive and glorious” and “…primal terrors that will never be civilized, even when they are paved over” and finally “We’re sorry, we didn’t know how hard it is for you to go back.”

The last book is The Long Take by Robin Robertson which the host calls “a book drenched in film noir” and the author notes how Bunker Hill in LA was gone, so he had to watch 500 films to write the book. From it we hear, “wearing too many clothes, wearing all the clothes” and “as if the whole sky and all the stars had fallen” and “To find a black street trashed and empty and the city gone.” We also hear a ‘sense of urban paranoia and panic.”

Very interesting to watch animated and very physical sign language covering the event. Also, interesting to hear Edugyen comment “All of my novels have been 10-12 drafts, so it takes some years (to write a book). Fave line is from Rachel Kushner who is asked to summarize her book: “If a book could be reduced to two sentences, it would render the book unnecessary.”

MONDAY: At Heathrow, while checking in, I meet Kossar from Glasgow who comments, ‘We don’t get old, we get tired” and advises walking barefoot on the grasses and “touching your forehead to the earth.” I tell her how important the album Handful of Earth by Dick Gaughan, also from Glasgow, is to me and she says, “Glasgow is small and I know him, so I’ll say Hi! For you.” And soon, leaving Britain is much the same as coming to it, cramped and sleepless for seven hours or so, but now I have even more in my past to remember.