Today’s Beethoven’s birthday, and a great opportunity to forget about the daily grind and be mindful of incredible and beautiful and passionate music that’s resonated for generations–and the person who created it. NAXOS has some nice recordings, if you want to listen to Beethoven online.  I’ve been foisting the famous Furtwangler/Berlin Philharmonic wartime recording of the 9th Symphony on my colleagues today (yes, I’m in a cubicle), plus some Kreisler recordings of the Violin Sonatas, Brendel playing the Piano Concertos, and the soundtrack to Immortal Beloved, (available to borrow from our collection in VHS if you still have one of those), the film about his life starring Gary Oldman. Other videos in our collection include Clockwork Orange which makes famous use of the 9th Symphony, and the DVD of Daniel Barenboim leading the 5th Symphony at the Ramallah Concert in the West Bank–a very moving event.  For pure listening, on the second floor you can find a lot of CDs too. I guess I know all the things everyone knows about Beethoven: his brilliant pianism, his moods and passions, the fact that he became deaf, which we always learn about as children and then kind of take for granted, but on serious reflection is almost incomprehensible considering he was a musician and composer. Anyway, aside from those cliché things, I don’t know that much about him.  Fortunately, there’s a biography and analysis in Oxford Music Online (formerly Grove).  I’m thinking about borrowing Maynard Solomon’s biography from the library, although at 500 pages, it’s kind of a big commitment–luckily there’s a long winter break coming up!

I’m going to cut down on the length for this one, as I realize I have this tendency to write Finnegan’s Wake in blog format. This is simply a list of good Christmas books and Movies that I think every one should check out. I have purposefully made it more obscure than most Christmas lists, which have all the usual books and movies listed on them that you’ve already seen a million times. In terms of books and stories: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens: Enough has already been said about this one. I included it because, although not very unknown, I feel not many people read the original. A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas: Great short story from a guy who was known primarily as a poet; autobiographical sketch is a more accurate word. The Ledge, Lawrence Sargent Hall: This is a very unheardof story that can be found in the massive collection The Best American Short Stories of The Century, edited by John Updike. This is a tragic piece of work, so don’t expect holiday cheer, exactly. The Nutcracker, E.T.A. Hoffman: The original story is fairly interesting. You can see the temptation to make it in to some kind of spectacle like a ballet, for example. Lastly, for the books, is one that I wrote a post about earlier this semester: Sir Gawain and The Green Knight: Only debatably a Christmas story, I suppose. But I consider it one. It’s story is framed by the holiday season, and it’s intense Christianity (okay, Paganism) is the focal reason I would call it ‘christmas-y’ In terms of Movies: Fanny and Alexander, dir: Ingmar Bergman: You may not have heard of this film, and if you have, it’s probably been in a context other than “Christmas Story.” But I do see this as, broadly, a holiday movie, albeit a very unusual one. It’s also very long. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians: I am something of a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I’ll admit it here, but nowhere else. That show’s outrageous send-up of this obscure, horrible movie from the red-scare days of the 50’s is the most lighthearted fun I can think of. Okay everybody, happy holidays.  

In 1984, poets Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes put together a collection of poetry called The Rattle Bag. While not widely known, probably even among poets (what’s left of them), this is one of the more wide-ranging, enthusiastic and purely neat books of poetry to my mind. I don’t claim to be the foremost authority on poetry: I wrote a lot of it in High School, when I studied Creative Writing at Walnut Hill school in Suburban Massachusetts. That is when I was introduced to the book, by way of my teacher, Daniel Bosch. Since High school, I have moved on to other poetic forms and barely written any actual poetry. But I still have The Rattle Bag. I still frequently read it, too, as creased and wrinkled and brown as it’s beginning to look. The main reason for this is that anything can be found inside. This means any sort of poem– anything from ‘As I came in by Fiddich-Side,’ a Scottish medieval ballad, to ‘Mushrooms’ by Hughes’ former wife, Sylvia Plath. It also means any type of sense, and all extremes of emotions. There is the necrophobia of the anonymous Welsh poem “Death.” There is the the childish surrealism of Lewis Carrol’s “The Mad Garnder’s Song.” There is the formal excellence– or chilliness– of Philip Larkin’s poems, such as “Cut Grass.” There is the narcissistic joy of “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” by Frank O’ Hara. And there are the standard poets: Frost, Blake, Thomas. The guys you have to read. Yet with the guys you have to read, you won’t find any of the typical poems that come to mind with them; no “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Frost, or “The Tiger” by Blake. It doesn’t even matter whether or not the poem is written by a master or not. Heaney and Hughes have adopted the unusual but completely just form of organizing the poems alphabetically,  not by author. Due to this organization, the poems have to be read on their own terms, and not on the terms of the poet that wrote them. As a result, a poem called “Legend” by an obscure Australian poet Judith Wright is at least as interesting as Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill.” Interest is precisely what Daniel used to get at in his classes, in terms of what writing should ultimately do. This is the view shared by Heaney and Hughes, I am sure, and the driving force behind the selections in The Rattle Bag. As a closing afterthought, Seamus Heaney has had a relationship to the Boston area for a long time now, ever since he started teaching classes at Harvard part time. I am not sure if he teaches there anymore, but when he did, self-promotion aside, I can only hope that he assigned this weird, sprawling, unceasingly interesting book to his students.