Something Rich and Strange

Shakespeare died 400 years ago this week. His writings, and tendentious fantasies about his life, are being celebrated, especially in Stratford-Upon-Avon. ‘Celebrated’ here means in most cases ‘Made accessible’, and ‘Made accessible’ means in all cases trivialized.

Shakespeare was a Poet and Playwright. You do not alter so much as a punctuation mark in a poet’ work. Plays are to be performed: people who have been bored sick at school when made to read Shakespeare’s plays (I was one such) very often change their minds completely and enthusiastically once they have seen an actual and at least competent performance of one of his plays (The RSC often really screws up I’m afraid, especially in its Stratford productions. Amateur or school productions are often better).

But isn’t the language ‘difficult’? Well, yes, if you’re not used to it. And present mores seem to dictate that if something’s ‘difficult’ then it should be either abolished or simplified. God forbid that anyone should be asked to make the effort of reading, with someone who already knows and understands Shakespeare’s writings, say, one act of a play, or two or three of the sonnets. It might take as long as a couple of hours, but I guarantee — I’ve tried it with several not-very-well-educated young people — that the result would be an ability to understand at sight or hearing most of what Shakespeare wrote.

But you don’t think it’s worth the effort, do you?

 

Google rips off writers

As a professional writer I want as many people as possible to read my stuff, but (except when I myself choose to make something freely available) I do expect to be asked, and even paid, when people want to copy it. Contrary to popular opinion, writers do not live entirely on fresh air.

I am therefore a member of the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society, which supports writers by, among other things, collecting photocopying fees from libraries and universities and sending it on to the writers. Once a year I get a very welcome cheque for somewhere between £50 and £100.

Google, it seems, does not give a nun’s wimple for the rights of authors, though it is happy to make large sums of money out of their work. I thought the following item, from the ALCS’s newsletter, deserved a wider audience, and where better to put it than on a blog that is run by Google?

 

ALCS News Bulletin: April 2016

Google wins book scanning lawsuit

20/04/2016

The US Supreme Court has ruled in favour of Google in a copyright infringement case filed by The Authors Guild that has spanned eleven years.

Millions of books were copied by Google without prior permission as part of a digitisation project that allows small extracts of the works to be viewed online. This led The Authors Guild in the US to file its lawsuit in 2005.

Following the rejection by the courts of a proposed settlement and years of subsequent litigation, in October 2015 the appeals court ruled that Google’s activity fell within the ‘Fair Use’ doctrine prescribed by US copyright law. Given that the case involved copying on a grand scale by a large, commercial organisation, The Authors Guild hoped that the US Supreme Court would review the ruling. However, in its final decision yesterday, the Supreme Court resolved not to review the case.

Google has denied any infringement throughout the case, claiming that its digitisation project fell under ‘fair use’ of protected works and that it served the public interest. The Authors’ Guild has always expressed its concern that Google did not seek prior permission of the authors concerned and has long-argued that the project undermined authors’ ability to make money from their works.

Responding in a statement to the US Supreme Court ruling, The Authors Guild called the decision a “colossal loss” stating that authors should be paid when their work is copied for commercial purposes. The Guild vowed to continue to monitor Google and its library partners to ensure that the fair use terms acknowledged by the decision are not abused.

Mary Rasenberger, Executive Director of The Authors Guild commented: “The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture… Authors are already among the most poorly paid workers in America; if tomorrow’s authors cannot make a living from their work, only the independently wealthy or the subsidized will be able to pursue a career in writing, and America’s intellectual and artistic soul will be impoverished.”

Owen Atkinson, Chief Executive of ALCS, commented on the ruling: “The digital environment provides unprecedented opportunities for accessing published content, creating new value for distributors and consumers. This is a success story written by authors and yet they are fading fast from the narrative. A fairer, more balanced approach is needed, one which recognises that content creators, such as authors, are the only truly irreplaceable link in the digital value chain.”

 

The Logical Mr Carroll

 

Lewis Carroll, real name Charles Dodgson, has several direct or indirect claims to fame or, some would say, notoriety. He is best known now as the author of the ‘Alice’ books, written to entertain Alice Liddell, the little daughter of Henry George Liddell, who was the co-compiler of the still standard huge English dictionary of Ancient Greek (Henry, not Alice. (Duh)). Carroll was a very fine photographer, and many of his photographs are of little girls not wearing very much. In this post-Freudian witch-hunting age this excites great suspicion among the prurient, though I don’t think anyone at the time thought there was anything odd about it. Certainly Carroll himself would have been horrified and disgusted at the suggestion there might have been anything sexual (as of course there was) in his interest. We now know of course — and the really suspect people are those who strenuously deny it — that all human relations have a (perhaps unacknowledged) sexual element.

Anyway that’s more than enough about that. Carroll / Dodgson lectured at Oxford University in Mathematics and especially in logic. Some of his more elementary work in logic had much of the wit of his stories and verses; here is an example:

 

(a)  All babies are illogical.

(b)  Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.

(c)  Illogical persons are despised.

 

As the subjects of this puzzle are people, we take the universe as the set of all people. We will rewrite each statement in the puzzle as an implication. First we define simpler statements,

 

B : it is a baby		L : it is logical
M : it can manage a crocodile		D : it is despised ,

 

where “it” in this context refers to a general person. Then the three statements can be rephrased as

 

(a)   B → ~L : If it is a baby then it is not logical.

(b)   M → ~D : If it can manage a crocodile then it is not despised.

(c)   ~L → D : If it is not logical then it is despised.

 

Our aim is to use transitive reasoning several times, stringing together a chain of implications using all the given statements. We have an arrow pointing from B to ~L, and likewise an arrow pointing from ~L to D; thus we are able to start with B and arrive at the conclusion D. However, the second statement is still not utilized. But since any implication is equivalent to its contrapositive, we may replace the second statement with its contrapositive D → ~M. Then we get the transitive reasoning chain

B → ~L → D → ~M .

We reason that if B is true, then ~L is true, hence D is true, and therefore ~M is true. Our ultimate conclusion is the statement

B → ~M : If it is a baby then it cannot manage a crocodile .

In ordinary language we would more likely rephrase this answer to the puzzle as

“No baby can manage a crocodile.”

Alternatively, we could write the answer as the contrapositive statement

M → ~B : If it can manage a crocodile then it is not a baby.

The translation into words then would be something like

“Anyone who can manage a crocodile is not a baby.”

 

 

 

This is perhaps his most famous photograph of Alice Liddell.

 

Jacqes Lacan

Today is Lacan's birthday, or would have been had he lived that long. He was born on April the 13th 1901.

The Panama Papers

That’s the catchily alliterative name that has been given to the huge collection of documents (not as a rule in fact in paper form) leaked from a law company in Panama; a company whose registered office is in fact in one of those ex British colonies that have long experience of devious financial dealings.

The papers reveal corruption, money-laundering, the usual trappings of grotesque greed, in ‘high places’. There have been cries of outrage, demonstrations in the streets, calls for enquiries, and resignations of ‘important’ people in all the countries affected.

All but one. In the U.K., which the documents show to be one of the most unscrupulous of all states, there have been nothing but shrugs of indifference. Why? Well, as with so many of the nastier aspects of Britain, it is the legacy of Thatcher and her toadies. Thatcher — and let us not forget that Britain is a fairly democratic country, so Thatcher was in power because the British people wanted her in power — had no real sense of right and wrong. If something was profitable, it was right; the notion that something could be profitable but wrong would have seemed to her a simple logical contradiction; the words ‘Right’ and ‘Profitable’ were virtually synonyms. The only values were monetary ones.

Lots of people have been saying ‘I’ve done nothing wrong’. No, of course they haven’t. “What do you mean, ‘Wrong’? I made a big profit!”

 

 

‘What Are Years?’

I mentioned the other day that among my current bedside books is/are the collected poems of Marianne Moore. I said that she’s supposed to be good, and so I’d persevere with reading one poem a day, but up to now her poems seem to be slight and whimsical; little sketches provoked perhaps by oddities found in her own bedside bookshelf.

But now, suddenly, with the poem ‘What Are Years?’, the title poem of a 1941 collection, she seems at last to be saying (or writing) something worth hearing (or reading). The poem is similar to, but better, less blatant than, Spender’s ‘I think continually of those who were truly great.’

I have not yet read further in this collection, but it’s been worth all the preceding stuff to come at last to this fine poem.

 

 

The Viola

The other day I said some things that might be misinterpreted as derogatory towards that lovely instrument the viola. In many ways the Cinderella among stringed instruments, it has very few well-known solo works in its repertoire: the best known are Berlioz’s ‘Harold in Italy’ and the concerto by William Walton.

I don’t know if it was a guilty conscience that prompted me, but today I listened to Mozart’s ‘Sinfonia Concertante’ — actually a concerto for violin and viola, demanding a greater rapport between the two solo instruments than in an extended operatic duet — twice; once after breakfast and once after dinner. I’m afraid that as it was on my watch-sized MP3 player I no longer know whose recording it was, but it was a very good one.

The work shows the viola at its best. I said viola players are odd: perhaps they are, but perhaps their oddity consists in an unfashionable humility; a lack of the desire to be the big solo star; a willingness to co-operate with other players and not try to outshine them. Perhaps it’s viola players who really hold string quartets - the single malts of serious music -  together.

Or perhaps it’s just that the Sinfonia Concertante is one of Mozart’s greatest orchestral works. Anyway, anyone who ever felt or said anything ‘witty’ about the viola (the difference between it and the violin is that it takes slightly longer to burn) should listen — twice a day — to this work.

Cigarettes are Sublime

That’s the title of a book I read a year or two ago; a paean to cigarettes written by someone as a prelude to giving them up. Full of descriptions of the pleasures of smoking and vignettes of well-known literary and artistic smokers, it had of course the opposite effect on me. But following the recent trauma of a haemopneumothorax and the horrific hospital treatment needed, I’m making some effort to reduce my smoking. By dint of giving all my cigarettes to a couple of friends, with instructions to bring me one or two several times a day, I’ve got it down from 25 – 30 a day to 10 – 12. Much of the time it’s a matter of having a cigarette on the desk beside me, and saying to myself ‘No, I won’t smoke it yet; I’ll wait until the next cup of tea or shot of ouzo.’ This ability to defer a pleasure is generally regarded as a sign of maturity, of grown-upness. But I don’t actually rate grown-upness at all highly: I find the spontaneity, the lust for immediate gratification, of the very young far more attractive. Still, so far I’m not doing badly, but then I’m still feeling weak and fragile; I fear it may creep up again when I’m feeling better.

Now seems a good time to express my heartfelt thanks to the many people who have given me the benefit of their advice — usually in the form of a long highly didactic lecture that brooks no interruption — on exactly how to give up smoking. It really is most generous of these people to offer — no, to press upon me — their help, especially as in not one single case did I have to go to the trouble of actually asking for their valuable opinion.

 

 

Wagner Can Damage Your Health

It is usual on April the first to write spoof news reports and I suppose blog entries. But when the president of the United States visits the country where he keeps a special prison for torturing people and berates that country for its human rights record, then a few days later as the president of the only country that has ever actually used nuclear weapons waxes indignant because a small country on the other side of the world seems to want to have such weapons itself, it’s hard to know what is truth and what spoof.

Meanwhile in England a viola player is suing his orchestra because his hearing has been permanently damaged: it seems the conductor had seated the violas too close to the brass for a performance of something by Wagner.

Actually I do sympathise, even though the only times I have ever played in orchestras it has been in the brass section: sometimes on trumpet, sometimes on horn. Horn players can have almost the opposite problem to our violist: the horn has the reputation of being the most difficult of all instruments and certainly if you hear a cracked note from an orchestra it is likely to be the horns. For technical reasons, the same fingering can produce many different notes on the horn, and it’s only by very fine lip and breath control that one can select the right one. If the conductor puts the horns too close to the timpani, the shock-wave from a goodly drum-bash can be picked up by the bell of the horn and be sort of hydraulically concentrated as it travels through the several metres of brass tube to emerge in a puff that can blast the player’s lips right off the mouthpiece. (That is not, by the way, the reason horn players stuff their right hand up the bell.)

Still, viola players are always odd. Look at a photograph of any string quartet: I guarantee that the one who looks weirdest is the violist.

 

 

The First Rule of Surgery

Ask any layperson ‘What must the surgeon be careful to check before he sews the patient up again?’ and you will of course get the reply ‘That he hasn’t left anything inside.’

Yesterday our local doctor cut me open again, because when I was in hospital recently for a minor operation, the surgeon — yes, left something inside. It was only some old stitches but it was enough to cause the wound to suppurate and need urgent medical attention. I was surprised such things could still happen, but the doctor said ‘Oh that’s nothing Simon; the other day a surgeon left his mobile phone inside someone.’

 

 

Melanie Klein

Today is Melanie Klein's birthday, or would be were she still alive. (She was born in 1882).
Melanie who? It's possible that the only Melanie you know of is the one who made that wonderful song 'Brand New Key', (You know, the one about bicycles and roller-skates.) Melanie Klein was a psychoanalyst who developed the theories of Freud in her own sometimes rather strange way, with her ideas on 'Projective Identification' (now generally accepted by nearly all psychoanalysts) and the 'Good' and 'Bad' breasts (not quite so generally accepted.) Her great achievement - she shares the honours with Freud's daughter Anna - was to show that, contrary to the beliefs of many in the psychoanalytic movement, even very young disturbed children could be helped by psychoanalysis.

A Book at Bedtime

 

That was the title of a BBC programme on, I think, Radio 3. They had decided that 11 p.m. was the correct bedtime for decent God-fearing people, and so for fifteen minutes each evening someone would read the next chapter of the current book.

For myself, I have deliberately made my bedside bookshelf short, so as to avoid teetering piles of half-read books. Current contents are:

1) ‘Music in the Castle of Heaven’ by John Eliot Gardiner. This has to be the best general overview of Bach’s life and works ever published. Gardiner conducts performances of Bach that are about as ‘authentic’ (given that of course we have no actual contemporary recordings) as they could be, thus enabling us to hear the works with almost the freshness and surprise with which people heard their first performances. Unlike so many ‘serious’ books about music, which proclaim with pride their ‘freedom’ from ‘technical jargon’, this book is not afraid to use some; it assumes the reader has some knowledge of music and wants to learn more.

2) ‘The Motive for Metaphor’ by Henry Seiden. This is a collection of very brief — two or three pages each — essays on individual poems or poets written from the point of view of a psychoanalyst. Ever since Freud himself, psychoanalysts have acknowledged that many of their insights have been anticipated by poetry. It is a much less demanding book than that description might suggest; indeed I’d have preferred something a bit deeper.

3) Η Μενεξεδένια Πολιτεία (The Purple City) by Άγγελος Τερζάκης. A novel, set mostly in Athens, about an unsuccessful lawyer and his family. It was a present from a friend, but recommended by another friend, whose other recommendations I have not usually liked. But reading it is of course good for my Greek, and I am less than half-way through; let us hope it improves.

4) The Summer 2015 issue of ‘In Other Words’, the journal for literary translators. My delay in reading it is not entirely due to it lateness in reaching me; I read the thing more out of duty than for pleasure. An unwieldy parasitic superstructure of ‘theory’ has been erected on top of the real business of literary translation by people who write dull articles and who (most of them) can’t translate for toffee. There is usually little of interest or use to actual translators, but there are sometimes exceptions, not least on the rare occasions they deign to publish something of mine.

5) ‘An Introduction to Music’ by David Boyden. This is the textbook we used when I was training to be a school music teacher. A general history of so-called ‘Classical’ music from the middle ages to the early twentieth century, with some theory and consideration of things like sonata form. Not quite as superficial as the title suggests.

6) Marianne Moore’s Complete Poems. There are about 250 of them and, poetry being the single malt of literature, I am reading them at the rate of just one a day. Eliot thought highly of her, but I find her pretty impenetrable, mainly because her poems seem to rely on special knowledge, usually something she has read. The notes sometimes give details of this reading, but poems really have to grab you before you look at the notes. I shall persevere; she’s supposed to be good and it’s probably my fault I don’t much like her stuff.

7) ‘My Teaching’ by Jacques Lacan, translated into English by David Macey. This is supposed to be Lacan’s most accessible work, which doesn’t bode well for his others. I’m never sure about Lacan: most of the time he seems to be, like so many other 20th century French intellectuals, a pretentious bullshit artist. But reading him one has the suspicion there might be something there. At his best, he seems to be saying opaquely and gnomically (perhaps poetically?) exactly the same things that Freud said with admirable clarity a hundred years ago.

Oh, and then there’s my Kobo, which is an Amazon-free version of the Kindle. I keep putting more and more stuff in it, mostly downloaded free from Project Gutenberg. Among other things I’m reading Rebecca West’s novel ‘The Judge’: her analysis of the thoughts and behaviour of her characters is almost as detailed (and sometimes almost as tedious) as Proust’s.

The Brontë Sisters

I’ve just remembered another anecdote of the Brontë  sisters. It seems two of them were out walking one Spring day during the lambing season, and one remarked to the other ‘Aren’t the little lambs sweet!’ ‘Yes,’ replied the other: ‘especially with mint sauce.’

 

 

These are the Brontë sisters. I’m pretty sure the one on the left with the weird eyes is Charlotte; not sure of the other two which is Anne and which Emily. The brother Branwell is not present, which is probably just as well by all accounts.

A Terrible Beauty is Born

W.B. Yeats had, unsurprisingly, a complex attitude to the Easter Rising and Irish Nationalism in general. He loved Ireland, but like so many lovers thought that gave him the right to mould her to his heart’s desire.

Of his many poems around the subject, ‘Easter 1916’, whose refrain I quote above, is the best-known and is being bandied about this centenary Easter. Less well-known, except for its final line, is this one:

 

Incidentally the horrors of over-specialization are nicely illustrated by a woman I met who was doing a degree in ‘Colonial Literature’ or some such, with special reference to Chinua Achebe’s novel ‘Things Fall Apart’. She had no idea where Achebe had got his title, and seemed indeed to be rather vague about who Yeats was. (By the way, I have no degree in any kind of literature, and having met people who do have one, I think I prefer to do without.)

POBLACHT NA H EIREANN

POBLACHT NA H EIREANN

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC

TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND

IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.

Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.

We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the last three hundred years they have asserted it to arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.

The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.

Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent National, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.

We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God. Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, in humanity, or rapine. In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.

Signed on Behalf of the Provisional Government

Thomas J. Clarke,
Sean Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh,
P. H. Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt,
James Connolly, Joseph Plunkett

 

A Nation Once Again

It is 100 years since the Easter Rising in Dublin. That was ruthlessly suppressed of course, with hasty trials and many hangings. Among those imprisoned, though he escaped hanging, was Eamon de Valera, who later became Prime Minister of the Irish Republic.

The struggle for a united independent Ireland is not over: the province of Northern Ireland, often incorrectly called Ulster, is still part of the United Kingdom.

 

 

 

 

Καλές Γιορτές

Today Greece celebrates its liberation from Turkish rule.

 

 

The Nobel Prize for Poetry

Winners of this have to wear penguin suits and deliver a long speech to the Swedish Academy; they also have to deliver a shorter speech at, I think, the celebratory dinner. Soon after the Greek poet Odysseus Elytis won, the longer of his speeches appeared in Greek newspapers, and was subsequently translated into English. (Twice; the better of the two translations is by my friend David Connolly, who had the privilege of working with Elytis himself.) But I don’t think the shorter speech has ever been published, at least not in English translation. I have just been translating it for a forthcoming book to be published by Aiora of Athens. Here it is:

 

Your Majesties, Your Highnesses, Gentlemen of the Academy, Ladies and Gentlemen:

The journey of Odysseus — whose name I happen to have been given — never ends, it would seem. And that is fortunate. One of our greatest contemporary poets told us that the deepest meaning of the journey isn’t the arrival in Ithaca, which is a finishing, an end: it’s the journey itself; the adventures and the learning.

Man’s need to discover, to understand, to make myths about all that surpasses Him seems incurable. We all have a thirst for miracles; an urge to believe in miracles; all we have to do is to be ready; to wait. I, in my turn, in devoting more than forty years of my life to poetry, did nothing else. I crossed mythical seas, stopping, and getting to know, so many places.

And, lo and behold, here I am today in Stockholm, my only treasure a few Greek words. Humble words but living, because they are on the lips of a whole people. They are three thousand years old, but as fresh as if just drawn from the sea, from the pebbles and weed of an Aegean shore: from the deep blue and total transparency of the æther. The word ‘Ouranos’ (sky); the word ‘Thalassa’ (sea); the word ‘Helios’ (sun) and the word ‘Eleftheria’ (freedom). I lay them respectfully at your feet. To thank you; to thank the generous people of Sweden and their leading intellectuals who, turning away from majority criteria, show every year that they have that secret ability to renew the Miracle.

Thank you.

 

International Women’s Day

Was on March the 8th, and I’m afraid I didn’t mark it in any way. Here, to make up for it, is what has long been my favourite passage from Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Jane Eyre’, published in 1847. But first, in case you didn’t know it, the Brontë sisters sent the manuscripts of their first novels to the London publisher John Murray under male pseudonyms, fearing they might be ignored as women. Murray liked what he read and wrote to the sisters asking them to come and see him. At that point they felt they must ‘confess’. To his credit, (and I know a number of things to his eternal discredit), Murray responded that he couldn’t give a nun’s wimple what sex they were, come anyway. And of course he published ‘Jane Eyre’ and, I believe, several other of the Brontë novels. Here, anyway, is that passage from ‘Jane Eyre’:

 

"I tell you I must go!" I retorted, roused to something like passion.  "Do

you think I can stay to become nothing to you?  Do you think I am an

automaton?--a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of

bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my

cup?  Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am

soulless and heartless?  You think wrong!--I have as much soul as

you,--and full as much heart!  And if God had gifted me with some beauty

and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it

is now for me to leave you.  I am not talking to you now through the

medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;--it is my

spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the

grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,--as we are!"

 

 

This is Jane's first meeting with Rochester,
when neither knows who the other is.

Camel-Swallowing and Rising Organs

I was planning to write today about one of my piano teachers, and I shall in a moment, but this morning on both BBC and VOA I heard of an exercise in camel-swallowing that I cannot let pass without comment:

President Obama of the U.S.A. is currently visiting Cuba, where he has had the astounding gall to ask for ‘improvements’ in its human rights record. (I think he means improvements in its human rights, rather than in the record of them, but let that pass; it’s been some time since we have had a literate American president). Now whatever happens elsewhere in Cuba, and certainly I know of writers critical of the government who have been imprisoned, (in America such people are not imprisoned or even tried; they are hounded out of their country and sometimes suffer unfortunate fatal accidents), there is one place in Cuba where people are held without trial in cages whose use in a zoo would be illegal, and subjected relentlessly to torture to extract ‘confessions’. It is called Guantanamo Bay; it is owned by America and the vile people who do the caging and torture are Americans working for the American Government.

——#——

 

I.M. Fred Waterworth

Whenever I have lived in one place for more than a few weeks I have tried to equip myself with a piano and then find a piano teacher. Thus I have had many piano teachers, most of them, frankly, no good as teachers, whatever their abilities as pianists. My present one, here in Greece, is the best ever; a very gifted teacher who begins to understand the quite special difficulties of an older person who knows a great deal about music, but can’t really play much.

Anyway, some of my piano teachers have been retired people living quiet and perhaps lonely lives, so very often we spent more time talking than playing. Or rather, teacher talked and I listened.

Fred Waterworth lived in a flat on the sea-front at Lee-on-Solent, between Portsmouth and Southampton. I say ‘lived’ and ‘I.M.’ because if he’s still alive he would have to be well over 100 years old. Once or twice a week I cycled from the Royal Naval Married Quarters where I was living to his house. Mostly he gazed soulfully out to sea at the window while I played the first movement of Beethoven’s C# minor sonata; the one known (though not by Beethoven) as the ‘Moonlight’. At half-time his wife would bring us tea and biscuits, and Fred would tell me anecdotes of his life. One of his fingers was flattened and spade-like at the tip; Lord knows how he managed to play just one note at a time with it rather than three. He explained it had been crushed under a rifle butt during the First World War, and the surgeon had wanted to cut it off, but he begged them to patch it up as best they could.

He had been a cinema pianist in the silent film days; peering sideways up at the screen and improvising along with the film. Then talkies came in and one might think he was out of a job, but no, like many others, his cinema installed an organ, all bells and whistles and coloured lights, like some nightmare of Scriabin’s, on which Mr Waterworth entertained the audience before the show and during the interval, and of course played the National Anthem (everybody standing at attention) at the end of the evening. This new arrangement left Mr Waterworth free to pop out while the main feature was on and get a jar or two at the adjacent hostelry; he just had to be sure to be back for the national anthem at the end of the film, and he always was.

Now those cinema organs were usually installed in what passed for an orchestra pit, and he actual console would rise on a hydraulic column in front of the screen, organist already playing, as the house-lights came up at the interval. One evening our hero, after perhaps a jar too many, came back in good time, climbed into his organ console, looked up at the screen, saw there was a good half-hour of film left to run, and dozed off. But in doing so he slumped forward onto the knob that set the hydraulics working — just as the film was reaching it climax, the view was obscured by the huge organ console slowly ascending to full height in front of the screen. Boos, jeers, screams, arrival of a furious manager, ‘Fred! Come down at once!’ But Fred was deeply asleep; no-one saw the end of the film.

Fred Waterworth’s career as a cinema organist ended that evening.